The Human Zoo Of a Writer Uncaged
Ben Dolnick Got the Bug Early, and It Seems to Have Legs

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 9, 2007

Are you the concerned parent of a child who wants to be a novelist? Do you worry that he or she is headed for a life of undercompensated scribbling in an era when digital literacy is the only literacy that counts?

Consider the cautionary tale of former Chevy Chase teenager Ben Dolnick -- now 24 years old and hopelessly hooked on fiction -- and watch for the early warning signs.

For his 13th birthday, young Dolnick's well-meaning parents gave him a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five." Before they could say "So it goes," he'd inhaled every word Vonnegut ever wrote and thrown himself at the mercy of his local independent bookseller to find out whom to read next. (Among the suggestions: Tim O'Brien, Tobias Wolff, Barry Hannah and Ken Kesey, whose "Sometimes a Great Notion" he especially loved.)

In middle school, he demonstrated strong resistance to tasks like mapping the Chesapeake Bay watershed but fell under the sway of a passionate and demanding eighth-grade English teacher. Pretty soon he was showing the teacher stories he'd written on his own.

Beginning high school, he drew a freshman English teacher with whom, to put it mildly, he failed to bond. His adolescent coping strategy -- sulking furiously and refusing to do what he considered mindless work -- earned him a first-quarter F.

A couple of years later, still looking to replace his middle-school mentor, he sought out another teacher with a reputation for enthusiastic rigor and asked him to read a three-page poem. Dolnick knew he'd found his man when the teacher sat right down in the hallway, read the poem attentively, then Xed out the second page.

In college, at Columbia University, Dolnick took a summer job at the children's zoo in Central Park. The plan was to work on "a giant, complicated, brilliant first novel" by night -- but the giant, complicated novel went nowhere. He started taking detailed notes on the zoo animals, using index cards he could stuff into pockets if his boss walked by.

By then, of course, it was far too late for warning signs.

Vintage published Dolnick's novel "Zoology" in May as a paperback original.

Perhaps it's time to note that his parents, Lynn and Ed Dolnick, aren't really fretting about their son's choice of vocation. They were grateful to those teachers he connected with at Georgetown Day School, just as they were grateful when his Vonnegut obsession came along.

It helped snap him out of "a long stretch when he was one of those kids who was very bright and not very engaged," his father says. "Good for you, Kurt!"

"The least surprising thing on earth is that he continued writing," says John Burghardt, the teacher who critiqued Dolnick's poem in the hallway. "He found in Vonnegut a model of how to live."

"Zoology" is a traditional coming-of-age narrative, written in the first person, that bears little relation to Vonnegut's alternative universes.

Henry Elinsky has dropped out of American University while still a freshman and gone to work, for lack of better ideas, at his old school, Somerset Elementary. "It was like working in a Museum of Me," he observes. "I'd gotten lost in my life, I kept thinking, and now here -- like someone lost in the woods -- I'd walked right back to where I'd started."

His older brother invites him to share a New York apartment and helps him get a job at the children's zoo. Lonely and insecure, he bonds with a goat named Newman, who introduces himself by lifting Henry's glasses off his face. Before long, he's trying to bond with a babysitter named Margaret, whom he encounters, together with her hyperactive charge, at the apartment pool.

The Margaret-Henry meeting echoes the immortal poolside introduction in Philip Roth's "Goodbye, Columbus," in which Brenda Patimkin asks Neil Klugman to hold her glasses so she can dive.

She had her left leg crossed over her right, and she looked like she was waiting for someone to fit a slipper onto her little curved foot. Her hair looked like it would weigh five pounds by itself. When she talked I thought she was going to tell me to stop looking at her, but instead she said, "Would it be all right if you watched him for a minute?"

Reviews have been favorable. "Dolnick is a talented writer whose understated style is a pleasure to read," said the Boston Globe. The novel's appeal "is in the narrator's voice," said the Los Angeles Times.

"Henry spoke to a lot of the insecurities we think we're rid of," says Jennifer Jackson, the 28-year-old editor who bought "Zoology" for Vintage. Jackson found the "schlubby, uncomfortable" narrator so convincing, in fact, that as her first meeting with the author approached, "I was totally expecting Henry to walk through the door."

That didn't happen.

True, Dolnick could pass for 18 or even younger. But over breakfast in Woodley Park -- he's down from Brooklyn for a reading at Politics and Prose, the bookstore where he got those post-Vonnegut recommendations -- he dispels any notion that he's written fictionalized autobiography.

For one thing, unlike Henry, he's got the love thing figured out: He's engaged to a historic preservation specialist he met at Columbia.

For another, he betrays no hint of Henry's anxiety or difficulty asserting himself as he talks about books, writers, writing and, for a change of pace, the curse of being a basketball fan in a town with a pathetic team.

"It allowed me to grow up completely without home-team loyalties," he says, putting the best face on a grim situation. "The notion of liking the Wizards is foreign to me."

Another fact of Dolnick's life, growing up, was that he had role models and connections in the writing business. His father, a science reporter turned writer of nonfiction books, showed him that you could "spend your day doing assignments that you make up." An uncle, Arthur Golden, wrote the best-selling "Memoirs of a Geisha." And Dolnick's biologist mother, a cousin of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., sits on the Times board.

This last connection provoked a bit of snarky commentary (at Gawker.com, followed by the New York Post) when Dolnick published a Times op-ed about his summer at the zoo. He says he's done his best to shrug it off, "because insanity lies in that direction."

"The hard part is getting a book published at Vintage," says his agent, Sara Crowe, not getting an op-ed accepted. Dolnick says he didn't mention family ties when he was shopping the novel because he didn't want them to be the reason someone bought it.

He started writing "Zoology" his senior year at Columbia, at a time when he'd stopped taking writing classes and didn't always have "a short story due a week from Tuesday." The notion that turned into Henry came not from his observations of 18-year-olds but from his fascination with a middle-aged security guard.

"He was a short guy with glasses and he was always trying to carry on conversations past the point people wanted them to end," Dolnick says. "There was just sort of a sad, funny desperation to him. And I, for some reason, spent a lot of time imagining: What would this guy have been like at 18? How did he end up like that?"

This curiosity illustrates one of the most striking things about Dolnick as a writer: Praised for his ability to evoke the self-conscious flailings of people close to his own age, he is an acute observer of his elders as well.

You might infer from the subtle portrait of tensions in Henry's parents' marriage, for instance, that Dolnick is himself a child of divorce. Not so. He just watched people he knew go through it.

"When we were in middle school or in high school," he says, "the thing that would cast a sudden alarming shadow over someone was: Well, Jesus, their parents are getting divorced." A friend or acquaintance might head off to school from a seemingly normal household and come home to find it blown apart. "It was so intense and interesting."

Needing an income after graduation, Dolnick found work with a Manhattan-based tutoring company. The woman who ran it, he says, "would call me on a Monday afternoon and say, 'Okay, we need an Aeschylus paper on East 79th Street. Go.' " The next day "it would be, 'Okay, we've got a pre-algebra crisis in Brooklyn.' "

He wrote by day, tutored by night -- and always, always kept reading.

A few of the names that ricochet through Dolnick's conversation are Mark Twain, George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Franzen, Roth ("He's one of my heroes"), Anton Chekhov, Nicholson Baker, Raymond Carver, William Trevor and Virginia Woolf ("It's just that voice"). But again and again he comes back to Canadian short story master Alice Munro.

"I completely love Alice Munro," he says, and he marvels at the technical skills through which she achieves emotional effects: "At transitions, she's better than anybody else, and at filling in back stories. Her dialogue is perfect; her endings . . ."

Does he know anyone else in their 20s who's so into her? "A couple of women," he says, smiling, "but no men."

Dolnick says he feels "a weird kinship, across generations and across centuries occasionally," with fellow writers. That doesn't mean he wants to commune with live ones in workshops or cafes.

"I have a misanthropic streak," he says. "I feel much closer to my bookshelf."

Right now, he is plugging away on what he hopes will evolve into a second novel. And he's thinking long-term about his writing career.

Twenty-four is young to publish a book, he knows. This makes him think about the relationship of youth and age in basketball -- about how, in the NBA, "the exciting thing is always over the horizon." Never mind that flashy rookie point guard. Five years from now he'll be a washed-up mid-career guy and the word on the street will be, "Oh, you haven't seen anything until you've seen this 15-year-old, he's in Coney Island now but omigod . . ."

That's not the game Ben Dolnick wants to play.

A lucky writer, he read somewhere, "has his readership and his talent grow at the same rate." He's more interested in getting steadily better than in making an immediate splash.

"I just want the freedom to stab away at this," the not-so-flashy rookie scribbler says.