Patrick Rothfuss may be the most talented fantasist of his generation, which is why it baffles me that he does not write any more than he already has. With the exception of two novels in his Kingkiller Chronicles series, I haven’t encountered any more pieces in Rothfuss’s paper trail, which is strange to me, because in the past, I discovered my favorite writers through a series of chance encounters. A recommendation here, a pair of short stories there: fleeting impressions that created a piecemeal portrait of an author, and before long, I wanted to see the whole face. (I discovered Ian McDonald this way: “Tonight We Fly,” an innocuous short story in Masked, an equally unassuming collection of short stories about superheroes. It was so breathtaking that I had to read more of Ian’s work, which led me inevitably to his “River of Gods,” and then “Brasyl,” and so on.)

Sometimes it happens in reverse; I’ll pick up one book entirely by felicitous accident and find myself entranced, and then voraciously devour everything else this author’s ever written. Roger Zelazny did that to me. After Lord of Light, I just had to read his short story collections. Neil Gaiman did that with American Gods, after which followed an overnight, cover-to-cover reading of Smoke and Mirrors. Ray Bradbury, too, although here we have an author of towering creativity, industrious to the point of psychosis, so that embarking on a journey to read All Things Bradbury is a year-long marathon.

I digress, but actually, if it seems odd that I’m talking about Pat Rothfuss in the same couple of breaths as Zelazny and Gaiman, it shouldn’t. I honestly believe Rothfuss is a once-in-a-generation voice in a genre that defines itself by mass produced repetition. His style is pure. He doesn’t slip into Tolkien’s well-worn shoes like so many other authors, and yet he writes with the same ear for poetry, the same love of mellisonant language. His reach is wide. He’ll borrow from Peter S. Beagle and Joss Whedon, from graphic novels and children’s stories. And yet he never feels like a post-modern author writing the fantasy-pastiche; there is nothing self-conscious about his influences. His writing is sincere. His voice is pure. Which is why it baffles me that he feels like he has to apologize for “The Slow Regard of Silent Things,” his first major publication since the “Wise Man’s Fear.”

Apology is the wrong choice of words here, because I don’t think Rothfuss is ashamed of Auri and Slow Regard. He loves Auri, and maybe he’s afraid we won’t understand what it’s like for an author to truly love a character, and to explore that character’s story in his own, deeply personal way, so that the style and prose of Slow Regard belongs as much to Auri as it does Rothfuss. Slow Regard begins with a tentative apology and ends with a retrospective apology: this is not the next chapter in Kvothe’s saga, and for that, Rothfuss is sorry; also, the story you’ve just read doesn’t conform to the stylistic and narratological conventions of a proper, decent story with stuff like, you know, a plot and dialogue, and for that he’s also sorry.

Slow Regard has Rothfuss’s own tenuous insecurity as its bookends. And there’s something breathtakingly endearing about that kind of honesty from an author. I think there is a tendency to look at authors as a class of people somehow detached from the experiences of everyday life, as if professional authors live their whole lives in this numinous creative aether, because they get to wake up every morning and dream for a living, and therefore they don’t suffer from the same anxieties and insecurities symptomatic of those of us who, you know, have to live down here underneath the clouds. And a lot of authors go through a great deal of trouble to conceal their own ragged humanity, and live out their own celebrity image so that they become characters in the story of their own lives. Rothfuss doesn’t seem to have any interest in the fiction of being an author; I think he just wants to tell the stories that live in his heart, and there’s a place in his heart for Auri, and it’s a place that’s broken here or there, but holds itself up by the architecture of its own love.

Much like Auri herself–broken, but not shattered; her pain is implicit in her life, as if the way she tries so hard to brighten her own little corner of the world can hide the persistent reminder that she’s completely alone there, alone in a way that a girl of her age never should be alone. The genius of Slow Regard is in Rothfuss’s total devotion to his main character. The narrative voice is Auri’s voice, but in the third person, so that the effect is one of deep personal intimacy between the reader and the character, and yet a strange alienation, as if we can never truly get inside Auri’s head, never really *be* there with her, because we’ll always be outsiders in her world.

Slow Regard is heartbreaking. It hurts in ways that literature rarely does. The book is seven days (more or less) in Auri’s world, down in the Underthing where she lives alone. There aren’t any characters in Slow Regard–just objects, and places, and inanimate things made animate by the light of Auri’s own precocious imagination. There is no dialogue, just implicit conversations between Auri and the things that share her home with her: the slivers of soap, the bottle of perfume, the stone stairs, the faded mirrors. And then there are chapters in which nothing happens, because she has no reason to get up in the morning, and nowhere to go.

I don’t recall ever feeling more powerless, as a reader. Reading Slow Regard, I never felt like I was by Auri’s side, living her life vicariously through her eyes. I felt like a ghost. I felt like a Silent Thing haunting her home, watching her proceed through her life, blithely unaware of her own loneliness. I understood things Auri didn’t understand. I understood that her rigid need for order in her life was probably a form of PTSD, a way to block out pain. I understood that a girl with no friends would eventually make friends with the walls and the trees. And I understood how terribly important it was for a girl to have her own soap, if she ever wanted to feel like a princess.

That’s why Rothfuss never has to apologize to me for twelve pages of Auri doing nothing but preparing soap. It’s why he never has to apologize for an entire chapter consisting of just one sentence. It’s why he never has to apologize for a story one third the size of a proper novel, with no clear plot, no characters and no dialogue. Rothfuss shares Slow Regard the way we share confessions, with trepidation and a looming uncertainty. Auri’s story is an expression of vulnerability–Auri’s vulnerability, and the author’s own vulnerability. Writing a story like this is a tremendous risk to an author with hordes of impatient fans gnashing our teeth for the next installment in a series that has us thoroughly enchanted, but I’m glad he took that risk.

Auri deserved her own story, and Rothfuss deserves his fans. We know a fine story when we read it, even if it doesn’t have a word of dialogue. We know, because that’s how we found him in the first place.