Cara Hoffman and So Much Pretty

Cara Hoffman’s new book, So Much Pretty, will be published shortly. She has a blog  now too, which is in my links. I’ve known Cara for a long time. If you want to know about her, read her first Blog post. She is an old autodidactical pal, sure, but she has also been a supportive reader for about 12 years. Relationships with other writers are rare for me. I’ve always known more musicians and painters. Novelists are even rarer. Cara introduced me to Eric Maroney, another novelist, and for a while we ate lunch together and talked shop. Now we don’t do that, but Eric and Cara are, along with Stacey, the people I show my drafts to, my most trusted readers. Cara has a cruel, but empathetic, intelligence. How is this possible? It’s the same way with cops, doctors and nurses. It is the mindset of war. When you stare long enough at the human beast you cannot help but love it, even while your eyes don’t flinch from the horror. Her first book, Nike, is a cool, existential look at down and out travelers in Greece. I read the book in its earliest incarnations. I’ve traveled a lot, and in Greece. She nails the details of this hidden world of drifters with credit cards, of mercenaries, hippies and prep school brats moving from one dingy traveler’s hostel to another, in minimal prose with carbon steel teeth. I haven’t read her new novel, but I know what it’s about, and it’s about a world she knows as intimately as she does Athens. It is not so much her success that thrills me (though of course it does), but that she has never deviated from an intense pursuit of the novel. For as long as I’ve known her this has been her purpose. I started out as a mentor of sorts, but for a long time now the relationship has been reversed. So this is my way of thanking her, and referring my readers to a compelling, frightening, and savagely funny writer who writes relentless prose. After all, she is a woman of the anarchist left whose literary hero at one time was Ferdinand Celine.