Now that Addled,my "golf" novel, is safely in print and it’s too late for second thoughts on the part of Little, Brown, it is time to admit the truth: I have never played golf. Oh yes, maybe a few giddy rounds of miniature golf in my wild youth, playing with a truncated club in one hand and a cocktail in the other, blithely aiming the ball between the spread legs of a giant, plaster dinosaur, but that’s as close I have ever gotten to the Royal and Ancient game. So what gives me the right, you ask, to write about golf? No right, but necessity. Addled came to me a few years ago as I drove past a golf course, upon which strolled hundreds of Canada Geese. "They must be someone’s headache," I thought to myself, and indeed, they turned out to be a huge mess of a problem. The conflict between geese and golfers made for a perfect human-against-nature story, but the clincher was, to make it work, the action had to take place on a golf course. So I had to learn golf.

God forbid, though, I should pick up a club. No, I am a writer, so I picked up a book. First came the golf novels, most of which seemed aimed at the sort of reader who actually knew the game. I was by no means swept away in the drama of a single deciding putt, but I received a golfer’s education nonetheless. I learned to cock my wrists early in the backswing. I learned that I should have my spikes custom made by Silvano Lattanzi, and, with crib notes from my periodontist, I have attained a tenuous grasp of the handicap system. I have even learned to speak like a toddler again, freely spouting words like mashie, birdie, baffy, gimmie, mulligan, niblick and bogey. I love that this kindergarten slang is used in deadly earnest by executives at play, men and women for whom the structure of the game allows them to relax and be silly, safe within the boundaries of the rules. No one works this dichotomy better than P.G. Wodehouse, the author of Golf Without Tears. His Oldest Member taught me how to "see" golfers ("the man wielded his mid-iron like one killing snakes") and approximate distance ("the church that stands a full spoon shot from the clubhouse"), and best of all, I learned that golfers were allowed to laugh at themselves. The problem with an education through fiction though, is that you never know if the writer is telling the truth. Are a golf course’s 18 holes designed to go with the 18 shots in a bottle of whiskey? Really?

So I moved on to nonfiction golf and was almost thrown off my imaginary game by the USGA Rules, a book written in a strange Orwellian tongue, as if it had something desperate to hide. A Canada Goose, for instance, is not a "bird," but an "outside agency." The sentences are so gnomic that it is no wonder that every Club needs a Rules Committee to interpret the sacred text. What could "all golfers are responsible for the eventuality of their golf shot" possibly mean? I persevered past this assault of incomprehensible grammar and was rewarded with John Updike’s Golf Dreams, a collection of stories and reviews, which led me to Golf in the Kingdom, a memoir/fantasy written by Michael Murphy, who started the Esalen Institute, the fountainhead of the human potential movement. But before there was Esalen, there was golf, and it was through this book I discovered the ugly secret that the game’s ritual and arcane language was meant to obfuscate: Golf feeds and transcends the basic killer instincts of the human soul, and the course is the ground upon which the bloody hunt is replicated. But instead of mortal prey, you stalk a little white ball. You play against yourself, you keep your own score. Done right, you learn not to carry around the past shot or worry about the future one. Just be here now and play the ball.

We could all use golf lessons like these, but that’s no reason to pick up a club and start swinging. The answer to life, as always, is to pick up a book and just start reading.