They wait like pilgrims, queuing silently, bearing volumes for inscription and awaiting a chance to touch the hem of his garment.
They're not Franciscans approaching Assisi but earnest readers rushing bookstores and cultural temples for word -- wisdom, solace, salvation? -- from on high. Or turning on the TV, opening a newspaper, for insight from their favorite authors.
But what if the creator won't come down from the mountain, won't comment on the reasons for his creation? What if he won't publish his new work (like J.D. Salinger), won't allow himself to be photographed (like Thomas Pynchon), won't make public appearances (like Cormac McCarthy) or won't write at all despite early success (like Harper Lee)?
That's the case with the reclusive writers, a small but mythically resonant category made up mostly of successful, staggeringly prestigious figures whose refusal to play the publicity game, or to appear to swim in the same water as their readers, can signify everything -- or nothing at all.
"When a writer doesn't show his face," Don DeLillo wrote portentously in his 1991 novel, "Mao II," "he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear."
God's -- or at least Pynchon's -- heir apparent may be Denis Johnson, an esteemed if not widely known poet and novelist who lives in northern Idaho and whose new novel, "Tree of Smoke," is one of the season's most eagerly awaited. For "Tree of Smoke," set largely in 1960s Southeast Asia and a work on which Johnson has been toiling for more than 20 years, he will offer no press or public appearances.
Previous books, such as his 1992 "Jesus' Son," which exists at the place where drug-induced hallucination becomes genuine religious vision, generated such heat that he'll always have a dedicated readership.
Johnson is in the softer end of the reclusive-writer type -- he home schools his kids and lives far from a big city and doesn't promote his novels. But he did a few readings and interviews, in which he projected a mellow intelligence, when his plays debuted a few years back. Since then, virtually nothing.
Eccentric writers, of course, are not the only ones to detach: Other famous shut-ins include the late Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett, film director Terrence Malick, actress Greta Garbo, cult pianist Glenn Gould, anonymous rock band the Residents and, of course, the Unabomber. But because an author really only produces words -- unlike, say, an actor, whose image is always before us -- and since we often look to the novelist as akin to a guru, the disappearance often seems more violent, abrupt.
