At some point during that time, I think I mentioned what I was trying to do to Dave Eggers. When the present editors of McSweeney's wanted to include a fragment of a novel in their "head," they came looking for me. I was a little hesitant, no more convinced than ever that anyone ought actually to read Fountain City. But in the end I decided that the annotations defaced the thing sufficiently to prevent anyone from thinking that I offered it with any kind of warranty of quality.

In your introduction you note that you've disproved or disregarded every conclusion you'd hoped to reach with the wreck of Fountain City. Then you come to Lesson 5: Marry a strong, talented, vocal, articulate and above all persuasive reader. Not everyone can marry Ayelet Waldman, however. So what is the average schlub, toiling away at his/her novel, to learn from your mistakes?

I figure Ayelet can't be the only strong, talented, etc., reader in the world! And marriage is not even required, though it does engender a certain sense of obligation in the potential reader. I don't think there's a substitute for an acute, articulate, trustworthy reader who's in it for the long haul. Of course you can learn from your mistakes; what else are you going to during all that dead time between making them?

Can you see yourself writing a novel inspired by this particular vision of a novel that never was? Or a novel about the novel that might have been?

The novel inspired by a "vision of a novel that never was" was Wonder Boys. And pretty much every book since has been been inspired by a vision of something that never was—the Golem of Prague, a Yiddish-speaking Jewish home in Alaska.

The world of Fountain City seems so close to your heart. Washington and Columbia/Huxley, Maryland; places and worlds that might have been that never were; dislocation and a search for a vanished home.

I am wracked at least once a day, for at least one second, with an overwhelming sense of loss and longing for the vanished Maryland utopia in which, in my imagination, I grew up. It never was, either; utopia, I mean. Not really. Only in my mind.

Related question: architectural plans, architectural models, model building, and model-smashing by Japanese monsters (via Toho Studios) weave their way through Fountain City and its notes. Seems like you've got tropes enough for some novel, if not this one. Have you thought of reassembling those pieces into something else?

The rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, complete with model, eventually found its way into The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Also it flits through Wonder Boys, I recently discovered. And the great Toho novel, though at times Thomas Pynchon has flirted with it, has yet to be written.