E WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF A REMARKABLE CONVERSATION that veered from motorcycles to square dancing, from Carl Jung to Marcel Proust, when his wife politely interrupted and set before us a plate of madeleines she had just that afternoon procured from a French. It was June 2008, and I was at the writer’s home in Wonewoc, in the “Driftless” region of Wisconsin, to talk about his fourth novel, , set to be released that autumn by Milkweed Editions, thirty-three years after the publication of his previous novel, . I had arrived that morning to discuss not only his triumphant new book, but also the events of those intervening years during which, as I wrote in the resulting profile for this magazine, “a horrifying motorcycle accident broke his back, paralyzed him from the sternum down, threw his marriage into a tailspin from which it would not recover, and all but erased his name from contemporary literature for the next three decades, his books quietly falling out of print, forgotten.”
