Creative Writing Program | Joseph Skibell

Joseph Skibell's second novel, The English Disease, is scheduled for publication from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill on May 23, 2003.

Listen to an interview with Joseph Skibell about The English Disease

An excerpt from The English Disease:

"What woman?" I say on the drive home. My voice, stilted and artificial, rings hollowly inside the car.

"Near the eggnog bowl. You know: with the hair." Isabelle's voice is equally numb. In fact, we sound like two acting students on the first day of class, our efforts to speak naturally in a scene naturally sabotaging the effect.

"With the hair?" I say, hoping to sound completely befuddled.

"She's attractive, isn't she?" Isabelle asks with a counterfeit nonchalance.

"Gitl, you mean?" I say, as though I could barely place her.

"Is that her name?" Isabelle says, alert to this new datum.

"You find her attractive?" I say, attempting surreptitiously to damage Isabelle's confidence in her own subjectivity, perhaps even causing her to believe that it is she who, in finding Gitl attractive, has displaced her unconscious homoerotic feelings for her onto me.

"Didn't you think so?" Easily she avoids the snare.

"Well, it's very subjective -- " I allow my voice to trail off as though I had more pressing things to consider.

"All that hair," she sighs, breaking the silence.

"It's a little much." I nod in agreement, as she drives carefully through the snow, listening to a tape her sister sent: Elvis Costello and the Chieftans singing about a television set that blows up when the Christmas tree lights are plugged in.

"She's new to your department, isn't she?"

"Gitl, you mean?"

"Or isn't that her name?"

"She played in the Israeli Philharmonic. Trombone, I think. Under Zubin Mehta. At least I think that's what she said."

"That's what you were talking about?"

"Oh, she went on and on. I could hardly get away."

"Hm," Isabelle says, trying to sound, if not bored, then at least uninterested, the gentle interrogation we both know she is conducting inexpertly concealing and revealing itself, and forcing me into this absurd stance of self-parodic befuddlement, my shabby theatricals revealing, as I intend them to conceal, the attraction I'm feeling towards Gitl Finkelstein.

The buildings and the streets are covered in frazzling Christmas lights. Long lines of cars back up along Lamar, waiting to turn onto 38½ Street where the residents have decked every square inch of their houses and lawns and even the trees that form a canopy over the street with long strings of lights, the wild, lustrous chaos of it all reminding me (quite privately) of Gitl Finkelstein's hair.

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