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I'm not writing. Just a few years ago, four or five if I want to be near exact, in what I like to call my Jesus freak phase, I told myself that procrastination was a sin. This didn't make me stop procrastinating or even curtailing it much, but it did create a tremendous guilt complex, which among other things made me procrastinate even more.

Until last November's election I often wrote about how I was still waiting for the 21st century to start. That so much of what we were going through; far right politics, homophobia and sexism, basic ignorance and prejudice were such twentieth century problems that I was depressed that we had dragged them into the 21st. I kept waiting for new politics, new thinking, hell a new cut of jeans, anything that said categorically that we had set off a new explosion, and were not coasting on the last century's fallout.

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I don't always agree with Michiko Kakutani, but I think she nails exactly what goes wrong when writers tackle the unthinkable, in today's review of Jonathan Littel's The Kindly Ones, the Nazi novel that was a sensation in France, given its first person narrative of an unrepentant Officer:

Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page-long novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade, or by the warped narrator of Bret Easton Ellis's "American Psycho," after repeated viewings of "The Night Porter" and "The Damned."

Whereas the philosopher Theodor Adorno warned, not long after the war, of the dangers of making art out of the Holocaust ("through aesthetic principles or stylization," he contended, "the unimaginable ordeal" is "transfigured and stripped of some of its horror and with this, injustice is already done to the victims"), whereas George Steiner once wrote of Auschwitz that "in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent," we have now reached the point where a 900-plus page portrait of a psychopathic Nazi, dwelling in histrionic detail on the barbarities of the camps, should be acclaimed by Le Monde as "a staggering triumph."

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The Penguin employee book club read The Book of Night Women by Marlon James and submitted these questions to the author. The resulting Q&A is here:

1. You bring these characters and this time period to such vivid life. What kind of research did this novel involve? What resources did you have available?

I was already familiar with quite a bit about slavery, having studied it from high school days. It's the defining event in Caribbean history so you can't escape it even if you want to. Whether you're in history, cultural studies, music or economics, Slavery is the diaspora's Genesis chapter. So much of the history of slavery I already knew, but I still did a ton of research. History can be good at the what, when, where and even how, but not so much with the why. So I read slave narratives, master narratives, ship logs, tax records, pretty much everything. Histories of Fashion, costume archives, even weather patterns in the eighteenth century. The trick with research though is to not get so consumed with it that it becomes another form of procrastination. I had the first draft done before I did most of the research. As for resources, Jamaica does have an abundance of it, especially about slavery, but thank God for the internet or this novel would have taken twice as long.

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I'm thinking about getting into some trouble tonight. The fate of all authors might hang in the balance. I'm reading "Revenge of the Nerds" a funny and bittersweet article in the March/April Issue of Poets and Writers; about how today's (meaning my) generation of writers can be such wusses sometimes. How we lack the sturm und drang of the mighty men and women of the past; writers that doth bestride the world like colossuses or Colossi, if we want to get technical. Or at least get trashed and laid an awful lot. Writers seemed even more fascinating since they were rarely as Dorian grey hot as rock stars but were even more drunken and disorderly.

But Amy Shearn, who wrote the article, has a point. I think. Most of the writers interviewed said that they were simply too busy writing to get on with any debauchery. Others said that unlike their forebears, they couldn't depend on writing alone for a living so had to teach in places where scandals weren't looked upon with "you remember when" nostalgia (No this doesn't mean you, Bennington). Are we just wimpier? When Norman Mailer traded barbs with Gore Vidal, you knew that sooner or later somebody was going to punch somebody. Compare that to our own recent feuds, like Dale Peck Vs Rick Moody, which came across like two nerds trying to pull out their battered copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to slap each other with it.

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Marlon James is our guest blogger during the week of February 23th. If you have any questions for Marlon James, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is some more information about The Book of Night Women:

(Read an excerpt from The Book of Night Women and watch the trailer for the book)

The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel, a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they-and she-will come to both revere and fear.

The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings and desires and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman in Jamaica, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link.