Something From the Outside Coming In

In 1993, Keith Waldrop published his first and only novel, Light While There Is Light. The book, which New York Review Books will reissue in May with an introduction by Ben Lerner, features a narrator named Keith Waldrop, photos of Waldrop’s family of origin, and countless autobiographical anecdotes. The jacket copy calls it a “fictional memoir,” but Waldrop maintained it was a novel: “the fiction of a family that happens to resemble my family to the point that I have used some real names” but also includes “characters and details from elsewhere or nowhere.” Though he wrote more than twenty poetry collections and translated far more, Waldrop’s novel, such as it was, remained his personal favorite among his books. Lifting details from his own experience, he wrote, had allowed him “to concentrate on formal aspects” of the writing, rather than on primarily thematic or narrative ones.