The first great, humbling confession that must be made by everyone who thinks about books is that we have no idea where books spring from. We may pretend from time to time that we have a notion of the mechanisms of creation, but most literary criticism and biography are like a careful ornithological description of an eagle that never mentions that the bird can fly. Bad, derivative art may have explicable origins (it’s bad art because it has explicable origins), but in the act of creating any real, substantial thing — from God’s Fiat Lux all the way down to the invention of a good advertising slogan — the one great inexplicability is that the created thing comes to exist at all.
A small literary press in Minnesota has just brought out an extraordinarily literate first novel, The Apprentice (Graywolf, 248 pages, $ 22.95), by Lewis Libby, a 46-year-old lawyer and former official in the State and Defense departments under Presidents Reagan and Bush. There is no reason, of course, that a Washington lawyer shouldn’t produce this kind of book, but then there is no reason that he should. And somehow, thanks to our conventional images of writers as brooding Byronic outsiders or New England spinsters, Libby’s background makes it seem even more inexplicable than usual to have while reading his elegant and delicate little book that sudden recognition of a real creation — like the shock of reality when the eagle suddenly spreads its wings.
