Thomasmullen.net RSS Feed

The Con Man Who Also Published Novels

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 15:40:52 EST

Hey y'all.

Been a long time. Sorry about that.

Why so long? Partly because I've been writing other things, including this magazine feature. It's the amazingly true story about a novelist who also happened to be a con man.

Hope you enjoy it. Thanks to the fine people at Atlanta Magazine for providing guidance to myself, a fiction guy wading into nonfictional waters ("what do you mean I can't just make it up?").

I've been on the blog less, so if you're dying to know what I'm up to on a near daily basis, check out my Facebook page or Twitter feed.

Go To Post

Townsend Prize, HuffPo rant, a piece of the moon, and other stuff from April

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:57:46 EST

There are several problems with a writer having a blog. One is that the writer by definition is probably supposed to be writing something else right now. The other is that the line between posting something of genuine interest to readers and something that is cravenly self-promotional is a hard one to spot, and constantly moving, and perhaps even imaginary.

Also there's the irony that, when a lot of blog-worthy things are going on, that's a sign that I'm busy, and therefore having trouble making time to blog about those things that I've been busy with.

Hence my relative lack of blogging lately.

But, I'm back. Last week was a bit of a whirlwind, but a good and productive one, so I'm posting a few links below. If they seem annoyingly self-promotional, and if they seem to be coming from Thomas Mullen the brand rather than Thomas Mullen the writer, or even Thomas Mullen the person, my apologies. I do hope instead that the below is genuinely interesting.

1. Thursday night I was thrilled to learn that my second novel was named the winner of the Townsend Prize, which is awarded to the best work of book-length fiction by a Georgia author over the preceding two years. Past winners have included Ha Jin and Alice Walker, so it's wonderful company to be included in. Also, last year's winner was some book called The Help, so I have dramatically brought down the average sales figures of past winners. Oh well.

To see the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story, click here.

It was a fun evening, at which I got to meet the other nine nominees (a few of whom I'd already met, including one whos literally my neighbor), as well as other writers, professors, booksellers, readers, and other assorted book people.

One of the cool things about being in Atlanta is that, while it's a major city with various dynamic things going on, it's unpretentious and laid back enough for writers to meet up randomly, have coffee, chat, etc. I've met a ton of other writers in my three years here and look forward to a long literary future in the ATL.

2. In less warm and sunny news: Discouraged and dismayed by the recent Department of Justice settlement with publishers over e-book prices, and just overall frazzled by the state of publishing in general, and the strange netherworld in which writers like myself find ourselves as we try to reach an audience and possibly be paid for our work at a time when Amazon and Apple are themselves minting money, I wrote a satirical op-ed piece. In it, I offer to turn myself in to the DOJ for the crime of writing for profit.

It was published in the Huffington Post, and has been reposted and tweeted a fair amount, for whatever that's worth.

If you're wondering whether I am aware of the irony of writing such an article and posting it on the Huffington Post, a web-only venue that does not pay its writers: yes, I am so aware. And deeper into the rabbit hole we go...

3. Last Tuesday I tripped down memory lane, sort of, by visiting Central Catholic High School to give a reading and meet with students. The 1,000-students-strong school and many parents had read my first novel, The Last Town on Earth. A number of colleges and universities have done this with their freshmen classes, but to my knowledge this was the first time an entire high school has tackled it this way.

As a Catholic high school alum myself, and someone who went to college in Ohio, it was a surprisingly nostalgic experience. Oh, and I got to add an awesome Toledo Mud Hens T-shirt to my now fairly extensive collection of minor league T's and hats. Score!

The other cool thing about CCHS: one of their alumns is NASA's Gene Krantz--Ed Harris played him, and won the Oscar for it, in Apollo 13. Krantz is a generous alum, and he donated to the school an actual piece of the moon. It's on display in a special "moon room" in their library, complete with blown-up B/W shots of the NASA control room and one of Krantz's senior year astronomy papers (grade: 97).

For a photo of the moon, which I orbited around, check out my Facebook fan page here.

4. I was very excited to learn that I'll have a short story in the next edition of the Grantland Quarterly. The lovechild of ESPN and McSweeney's, Grantland's web site offers excellent longform journalism about sports and culture, sometimes offered not by traditional journalists but by novelists like Dave Eggers, Colson Whitehead, and John Brandon. They also publish a McSweeneys-ish quarterly book-type thingy, containing some of the best columns from the preceding few months, plus a few extras. My story will be one of the extras. Look for "The Art of a Basketball" in Vol. 3 in June, and/or order a subscription to the quarterly here.

As always, thanks for reading!

Go To Post

The Exciting Life of the Writer: One Sample Day

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:47:54 EST

Hi, Internet! Been a while.

This is my first blog post in about four months. I blame publication/publicity burnout. When my third book, The Revisionists, came out at the end of September, I was writing a lot of online essays and interviews and other random things for many other Web sites. This took a while, plus, honestly, one only has so much to say about oneself. I ran out of enthusiasm for Facebook and tweets and blogs and whatnot. Burnout caused me to turn my back on the blog for a month, which became two, and then three, etc.

Ok. I'm back now. I even have a twitter feed, if y'all are interested: check out @mullenwrites.

(There have been some bloggable things of late, interviews and reviews, including a talk I gave on NPR that guest-stars a certain recently retired Georgia-based rock band, so I'll put those links up soon. Promise.)

I've decided to kickstart the blog because, though most days in a writer's life just aren't all that interesting to recap, yesterday qualifies. A lot of people ask me what it is I do, how I do it, when I do what, etc, and the answer is usually so dull I feel compelled to make things up. Oz didn't seem so powerful when people peered behind his curtain, after all. I don't want to pierce your illusions by telling you, "well, I sit in a chair and stare at a screen and daydream, and some of these daydreams cause my fingers to twitch, striking the keys, and then at 4:00 I have a thousand words, on a good day." It would be more fascinating if I also fought bulls or hunted rhinos like Hemingway, or something.

BUT, back to yesterday.

The day began with the aforementioned sitting/staring/daydreaming/typing. Working on some freelance assignments, as well as an original screenplay. I've dabbled in screenplays before but this is the first time I've tried an original idea that is extremely close to completion, so that's exciting. And it's fun to write in such a new form, in a very visual medium. No telling if it's any good, but we shall see.

Then I drove to Atlanta's KIPP Charter School as part of their Writing Tutors program. Writer-types like me are paired with 5th-7th graders, who are trying to write a 3-5 page historical fiction story. My 5th grade student is crafting a dazzling, riveting tale set at Jacob's Pharmacy, the birthplace of Coca-Cola in downtown Atlanta. I don't want to give much away, but I will mention that aliens are going to invade the Pharmacy during our young hero's school field trip, and the aliens (who hate Coke) will arrive in a space ship emblazoned with a Pepsi logo. I'm not making this up. Serious battling is going to go down. The "historical" aspect of this story might have been slightly lost on my student, who, when reminded of this requirement, decided maybe we could set it in the 1990s. He's going to write a draft this weekend. I'm dying to see it.

Oh, and I found out that his mother went to the Rhode Island high school that was rivals with my RI high school. Small world.

Then, after our hero (me) swiftly raced home to pick up one of his sons from school, and quickly started cooking a dinner he himself would not have time to eat, and his awesome and awe-inspiring wife arrived home with Son #2, I changed into slightly-more-presentable-attire-than usual and got back in my car (lots of driving here in Atlanta) to race to Midtown to attend a book club of attorneys who had just read my new book.

I've done a lot of book club visits, but only one for my new book, and that was with my mother-in-law and her friends. Never done one with all lawyers. I've done all-students, all-teachers, all-retirees, all-public-health-workers, and even all-inmates-of-a-women's-correctional-facility, but this would be something new. Last night's was held at The Lawyer's Club of Atlanta (I swiped a nice cocktail napkin), a snazzy space on the 38th floor of one of ATL's signature skyscrapers, though I can't remember its name. (It's the pointy reddish one.) The fact that one of The Revisionists' main characters is an attorney, and there's some legal intrigue in the book, made me wonder if they'd nail me for getting some key legal issue wrong.

Luckily, they didn't. Everyone was friendly, even the ones who admitted they hadn't read it yet but came because this was the first time an author had crashed their proceedings. I sat beside a judge. A few folks were wearing "I voted!" stickers with GA peaches. Occasional political remarks were made, but not too many. Debate broke out as to whether in fact my main character was a shizophrenic living in a created mental universe to hide from his difficult reality, leading to debate as to whether I myself as a writer am schitzophrenic, hiding in my invented fictional worlds (my verdict: maybe). The board room in which we met had a fabulous view of the city, but I sat with my back to it.

And then, to top things off, I had dinner with Jimi Hendrix. (!!!) His health wasn't very good -- he had an oxygen tank with tubes leading into his right nostril, which he tried to conceal with some interestingly placed dreadlocks. And he coughed a lot. Still, it was great to talk to him and hear his take on contemporary bands like The Black Keys.

Actually, I dreamt that last part. Honestly, I did. But I felt the need to include it here because, a few hours agao while I was in fact dreaming, I even thought to myself, "wow, this is so amazing, a day that included tutoring a middle schooler about a space/soda story and then meeting a book club of lawyers is now ending with dinner beside Jimi freakin' Hendrix -- I have GOT to put this in my blog." So I am. Even though it didn't actually happen.

There you have it, a day in the life. Today, however, looks to be less interesting. But I started by writing a blog post, and in fact am typing it right now, like literally now, and you're reading it. Thanks! But I should go to work now.

Even though I'm already here.

Go To Post

My take on the whole Q.R. Markham plagiarism thing

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:29:00 EST

For those of you not in the know, the scenario is thus: a new spy novel called Assassin of Secrets was published two weeks ago, and less than a week later the publisher pulled it from the market upon realizing that large swaths of the book were stolen, verbatim, from earlier works. The plagiarized texts ranged from Ian Fleming's classic James Bond novels and newer spy thrillers to nonfiction books about the intelligence industry, like James Bamford's tomes about the National Security Agency.

A few things to note: Markham and I have the same publisher and, in fact, the very same editor. I feel badly for my editor, not only because he's had to deal with this mess but also because some people will doubtless use this as yet another example of the inferiority of "traditional, legacy" publishers in a digital world, evidence that the gatekeepers of the publishing world are incompetent, etc etc.

Here's the deal: if you really want to pull one over on an editor, it isn't that hard. Editors have only so much time, and they spend that time doing things other than, say, Googling random phrases of a manuscript to see if they turn up any matches. We should not expect editors or publishers to play the role of high school English teachers looking for cheaters, mainly because we should not expect writers to act like 13 year-olds.

Another thing: Any writer with a "traditional, legacy" publisher signs these boring, analog things called legal contracts. The contract explains your royalty rate, what will happen if someone sues you for libel, what happens when your book is remaindered, and other fascinating tidbits of Inside Publishing. There also is a clause in which you, the writer, do solemnly swear that the work is entirely yours and does not contain passages taken from other writers.

If a writer wants to pull a fast one, fine, but you're breaking your contract. You're being a fraud. It's clear that there was some weird element of performance art with Markham, who published under an alias and even used stolen lines in his interviews. Perhaps he was intending to make some grand statement about influence and appropriation, or the art of fiction and lying, or sneaky spies, or whatever. I'm just not all that impressed. Congrats, you got your name in lights for a brief moment, and you fooled people who trusted you. Hats off, old man.

Another random thing: My editor had asked me, a few months ago, if I would read Markham's book and, if I liked it, if I might contribute a blurb. (Like "an amazing work from a writer to watch," a line which someone once wrote about a first novel and which countless blurbers have appropriated.) I've actually never given a blurb, and I wasn't sure the book would be my thing, but I said I'd take a look. I read the first chapter, didn't like it. I read a few more, as a favor to my editor, hoping it would get better. It didn't. After maybe 50 pages, I gave up, and sent my editor my regrets.

Of course, now it's coming to light that the book was not so much a cohesive novel as a series of stolen lines, woven together into something approximating a narrative. Maybe this is why I didn't like it, though I'd be lying if I said I felt there was something suspicious afoot.

A few of the stories about Markham have playfully noted that Publishers Weekly and Kirkus gave the book starred reviews, delighting in the fact that the publishing empire (whatever that is) could be so easily fooled. Others have wondered how the editor could have failed to notice the thefts, as if he should have possessed instant recall of spy thrillers he might have read as a teenager (which is when I myself last read a few Ian Fleming books).

No doubt some voices are already calling Markham a genius, a sly jester whose theft (and whose very brief period of Getting Away With It) exposed the flaws of big publishing and shined a spotlight on the notoriously muddy concept of artistic inspiration. We all borrow from each other, such voices say, and we all rip each other off. Right?

Yawn. I think it just proves that if someone in today's world wants to get a lot of attention for something other than hard work or artistic prowess, it isn't all that difficult. The rest of us will trudge along using our own words, thanks.

Go To Post

Send Me A Question on Goodreads!

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:38:37 EST

Hey folks-

Goodreads.com has set up an author interview page for readers to post questions to yours truly. Have any questions on the writing process, or where I get my ideas, or why I do what I do? Or what the deal is with a certain mysterious character in my new book, or anything at all about the previous two? Don't be shy. Go to this page and post a question for me. I've been posting answers all week, and I'll answer any new ones on Monday.

And would someone please tell the sun to come back to Atlanta? Some of us are much, much better writers when it's sunny out. Thanks.

Go To Post

CNN.com interview

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:21:43 EST

Maybe it's not the same as being interviewed on the air by Wolf Blitzer, but there's a new interview with yours truly now online at CNN.com.

Crazy month, as I'm off to talk to a college tomorrow about my first novel, which was assigned to their freshmen. Glad to hear that people are still reading it! I need to take off my Revisionists hat and put on my trusty old Last Town on Earth hat...

Go To Post

Links to Stories and Interviews on The Revisionists' publication

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:28:57 EST

Today's blog post is just a couple quick links to other sites that have posted new content about The Revisionists, which is now available at bookstores (yes, they exist) and various e-forms, or so I'm told.

For a new interview of yours truly by my friend and fellow novelist Jon Fasman (The Geographer's Library and The Dispossessed City), click here.

For an wonderful review of the book written by novelist Michael Koryta (So Cold The River and The Ridge), click here.

More soon!

Go To Post

Eavesdrop on the Characters from The Revisionists

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:48:25 EST

Next Wednesday is officially the publication date for The Revisionists, though I hear that Amazon is already shipping it and some brick-and-mortar stores are already putting it on their shelves and tables. That gives you a hint into the oddity of the publication business. (Reviews are coming out too, including this one from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which calls the book "superb.")

Lots of new essays, posts, and random info will be appearing on my site over the next few weeks, and on the site of my publisher, Mulholland Books, so please check in regularly.

Already new to my site, if you click on the BOOKS link and then click on the new book (or just click here), you'll find a new author interview, touching on the various subjects of The Revisionists.

Now, I realize there may be some readers of my earlier two books who, upon hearing that the new one has a time traveler in it, get a bit turned off. Or they hear it called an espionage thriller and wonder if it's their thing. Trust me, it's not as odd as it sounds. Or maybe it is, but in a good way.

I thought that a better way of describing the book, rather than trying to figure out which genre to put it in or which adjective best fits, would be to simply let some of the characters speak for themselves. After all, especially in a book about post-9/11 paranoia about government surveillance and ubiquitous threats, what better way to learn about the characters than by eavesdropping on them?

So, read below (or click on this link) to hear from the characters in their own words:

Eavesdrop on the Characters from The Revisionists

Introducing the major players of The Revisionists, in their own words:

Republicans believe that the scariest thing in the world is an all-powerful, unfettered government crushing their freedom. Right? And Democrats believe that the scariest thing in the world is a group of all-powerful, unfettered corporations crushing their rights. What they don't want to admit is that the corporations and our government are completely intertwined: the modern corporatist state. (p. 206)

--T.J., bike messenger by day, freelance political activist and troublemaker by night. Lives with the constant awareness that he's being watched by powerful forces. Is right about that.

Here was what none of these peace activists wanted to admit, the thing they were simply too blind or angry or spoiled to realize: this life was the best it could possibly be. There were flaws, yes, and the world might not work for everyone all of the time, and innocent people occasionally suffered due to the callousness of fate or their fellow citizens, but what were the alternatives? What utopia were people like T.J. dreaming of when they railed against the minor problems of capitalism and democracy? Had they taken a look at the world around them? Didn't they realize how much better this was than any other country, any other system, any other way of life? Had they failed to notice that every time some mad dreamer took the reins of a country by revolution and promised his people a paradise on earth, he delivered the opposite?

What these loony activists didn't realize was that if they lived in almost any other country, they already would have been arrested, tortured, and discarded. (p. 279)

--LEO, former CIA agent, now monitoring peace activists and hackers for an "entrepreneurial intelligence contractor." Hates his job.

She remembered when she was younger, all the collegiate energy, the anger at the rotten world, the desire to remake it. Even the smallest decision--going vegetarian (for one year) to save a few hundred animals or boycotting clothing chains that used sweatshops--seemed to carry enormous moral weight. Years later, she still considered herself a politically engaged citizen, but full-grown adults who even mentioned sweatshops tended to sound like teenagers chanting slogans at a rock concert, and people who didn't eat meat were a bitch to plan around at dinner parties. Bringing up the plight of the oppressed sounded ridiculous when buying five-hundred-thousand-dollar row houses in what had recently been dilapidated neighborhoods.

Modern living made you choose between your morality and your desire to fit in, to not be a freak. But what if the freaks were right? (p.77)

--TASHA, corporate attorney, dealing with the loss of her brother in Iraq. Recently leaked sensitive documents about a war contractor to the press. About to get in a lot of trouble.

We help people filter information. Anyone can tap a phone, track an e-mail, but who can keep up with all that information? How do you differentiate the important shit from the unimportant shit without having ten thousand bored-to-tears analysts combing through meaningless babble, half ready to shoot themselves? When Orwell invented Big Brother, he must have imagined the guy was an amazingly fast reader with infinite patience. But he's not. My company invents the tools to filter things out, make it all intelligible, actionable. (p. 342)

--SENTRICK, former high-ranking officer with the National Security Agency, now head of a vaguely defined company called Enhanced Awareness.

Jakarta was my home. I grew up there. It felt safe to me, until one day it wasn't. That's the funny thing. Everyone knew we lived under a horrible tyrant--you weren't supposed to talk about it, but people would say things when they felt they could trust you. But then when the horrible tyrant finally stepped down, look what we did to each other. The riots. The burning. My mother. Maybe all those students and protesters were wrong. Maybe it was good to live under a dictator.

So now I work in Washington. I'm learning that everywhere is just as bad as everywhere else. My employer hates me just because I'm not Korean. In North Korea they hated her just because her husband said something good about South Korea, or something. And here in America they'll hate me because I'm not American. (p. 247)

--SARI, abused servant for shady foreign diplomats. Needs to escape, but they took her passport and she doesn't speak English. Working with Leo on a dangerous escape plan.

I protect the Events.

That's the most succinct way of putting it, and that's how my superiors at the Department first explained it to me. I used to know as little about these particular Events as anyone else did, but now I'm an expert on this era. I know why these people are fighting each other, why they hate those they hate, what they most fear. At least, that's what they told me in Training. Don't be intimidated, they said. You will know these people better than they know themselves. After all, how much do we truly know about what we're doing, and why, as we're actually doing it? It's only later, as we're looking back, that events fall into easily definable categories. Motive, desire, bias. Happenstance, randomness, intent. Cause and effect, ends and means. One thing this job has taught me is that when people are caught in the maddening swirl of time, they do what they need to do and invent their reasoning afterward. They exculpate themselves, claim they had no choice. They throw their hands up to the heavens or shrug that Events simply were what they were. They used to call it fate, or God, or Allah, though of course such talk is illegal now.

Now. I barely know what the word means anymore. (p. 6)

--ZED, time traveler, officer for the Department of Historical Integrity. Currently working in present-day Washington to ensure that a horrible disaster unfolds as dictated by history, in order to protect his perfect future society. Patiently watching all of the above characters. Hates his job.

Go To Post

How To Not Be Considered Spam

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:50:29 EST

I feel terrible about this, but I just realized that people who have been sending me emails via my web site (to say nice things to me about my book or to ask if I am in fact the same Thomas Mullen that they grew up with in Rhode Island) have not been getting replies from me, all due to an overactive Spam filter.

So: if you have sent me an email over the last 6 months or so, and I never responded, please don't hate me! (Unless you already hated me, and your email was expressly designed to describe your hatred, in which case, you may skip the rest of this, and also, why are you reading my blog?) Write me back, and this time I promise to reply!

I really do reply to every email that I actually receive. (How do you email me? See that small, envelope-shaped icon in the upper-right hand corner? Click on it! And fill out the info, and write your message. I'll read it! I promise! Unless, see below.)

It turns out that my Gmail account was placing in my Spam folder a lot of emails that weren't Spam but were in fact very kind emails from readers. I don't know why this is. These particular emails had nothing Spammish about them, yet Google considered them spam, and quarantined them accordingly. I just realized it this week, when I thought to myself, "hey, I haven't received any emails from my web site in a while," and then I went digging into the Spam folder, and there mixed among the actual Spam were some real emails from real people who wanted to talk literature. I feel badly that they were sitting there, unresponded to and forlorn among the Viagra ads and weird Cyrillic messages, but even worse is the fact that any month-old emails in that folder are autodeleted. Which means that, over the 6 or so months since I switched to Gmail, there have no doubt been other real emails that were misplaced in the Spam folder, and I never got them, and then they got deleted.

So, again, if you wrote me once and I never responded, it's not because I'm a jerk or too busy. I am indeed busy, though not a jerk, and despite my busyness I do find the time to write back. So write me again, and I'll reply. Really.

BUT, to make sure your message isn't wrongfully put in the Spam folder, please follow these handy email-writing tips:

-Do not mention any of your favorite pharmaceuticals and the wonders that they've worked for your sex life. Such messages will certainly be considered Spam.

-Try not to write your email using Cyrillic characters. Google seems to have a strong anti-Cyrillic bias. I myself don't share this -- I think the Cyrllians are a fine people, and their nation a just one -- but that' s just how it is.

-Avoiding use words such as "nude" or "lusty" or "hot Asian chicks" anywhere in your message. I know this is difficult, as my novels are chock full of them, but still, they do tend to set off the Spam guards.

-Keep your comments to my books, or books in general, and leave out anything about the foreign bank that contains hundreds of thousands of dollars and can be accessed if only I could wire you a few hundred first. Oddly, these too are considered Spam.

-Do not write to me about YouTube and the horrible things you've allegedly seen me doing on YouTube. It just isn't true, and is considered Spam.

Thanks, and sorry again, and I look forward to reading your emails!

*This message brought to you by The Revisionists, an amazing novel that actually comes out next week. More info and blatant self-promotion to come!

Go To Post

Anatomy of a Tree Removal

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:43:08 EST

I'm sitting here in my home office, trying to write, and watching the tree-removal men slowly cut up and remove a dead oak from my front yard. Very sad day -- mine is one of five newish houses on this block, and apparently the construction of the new houses killed the roots of some of the great oaks and elms that line our street. As a result, this one block has lost at least half a dozen big, big trees in the past two years. Most neighborhoods here have a great Southern canopy of leaves in the spring and summer and fall, but ours is slowly being denuded. We've planted a few new trees since moving here, but by the time they're big enough to shade me I'll be a very, very old man.

Also thinking: Wow, I wish I'd kept my sons home from school so they could watch this. A wood-chipping truck, a elevated-lift crane, a skid steer, and chainsaws! My one-year-old especially would be in toddler heaven right now.

And: in this age of ascendant e-books, I can't help wondering how much pulp this one dead tree has in it, and how many pages of an actual real non-electronic book that equates to. How many pages have I written while under the shadow of this particular tree in the last three years? Will reading e-books actually save trees, or just kill West Virginia mountains, since e-book readers aren't exactly solar powered?

And: How cool must it feel to be fifty feet high, in a small bucket lift, wielding a chainsaw? Or how terrifying?

(On cue, here comes one of my neighbors with his two-year-old son to watch as the remainder of the now branchless tree is slowly lopped off.)

And: wow, I hope none of that lands on my house. I trust that these guys know what they're doing. They're insured. I'm insured. It's all good, right?

And while on the subject of dead trees: Just yesterday I received my box of hardcovers of The Revisionists! It's a real book, and it's officially coming out in less than two weeks! I've had some softcover, non-proofed galleys for a few months now, but nothing beats seeing the real hardcover. (Sorry to sound old-school and pro-real-book, but there, I've revealed my partisan preference.) I'm very excited to share The Revisionists with the world, and I'm glad that it's already receiving some good reviews, with rumors of more to follow. On the week of publication, my publisher's web site, mulhollandbooks.com, will post daily interviews, reviews, and essays by or about myself and the book, so be sure to check there starting Monday, Sept. 26. Good stuff coming soon.

I just realized that the second-to-last chapter of the book has a character contemplating an oak tree in her own front yard. I was unaware of that significance a few minutes ago, honestly.

Sawdust is now thick in the air outside my window. The tree is about three-quarters the height it was when I started this. Being a tree-removal-expert still appears exceedingly dangerous, but so far they're all still alive.

Go To Post

Bookzilla, Library Journal stars, and other random thoughts

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:42:44 EST

--Why do I find it so much harder to write on rainy days than on sunny days? I know I've blogged about this before, but since today is the first rainy weekday in roughly six months here in Atlanta, I find myself having trouble once again to motivate. Okay. I can do it. Just one more cup of coffee, then I'll do it. Really. (Proof, if I needed it, that I would not be a very productive Seattle writer, much as I love that city.)

--Had a blast at the sixth annual Decatur Book Festival, which is the third one I've given a talk at and the fourth I've attended. In addition to my own events (and big thanks for everyone who came, and especially to everyone who bought an advance copy of the hardcover, which otherwise doesn't go on sale until Sept. 29!), I got to see a talk by George Pelecanos, who writes great D.C.-based crime novels and should have a place in writer heaven for his work on The Wire alone, and one by Tom Perotta, whose The Leftovers sounds amazing. And then at the author party I got to shake hands with Mr. Perotta and tell him how much I dug Little Children, and in particular its perfect first line ("The young mothers were telling each other how tired they were"), and I also met many other wonderful writerly types, and catch up with some others I already know but don't see nearly enough. Ah, book festivals, where the scurrily introverted pointyheaded folk come out and play. Gotta love 'em.

--My son was not nearly as wowed by the giant, inflatable "Bookzilla" monster over Decatur Square as I had expected him to be, though.

--Library Journal has given The Revisionists a starred review! It calls it "an outstanding dystopic novel." It also says: "This is either a novel about a horrifying future in which dissent is crushed before it starts and history is altered to fit the present, or an equally horrific present in which corporate interests and lawmakers collude and the apparatus of enforcement is progressively outsourced. Maybe it's about both."

--Note to self: Next year, bring son to DragonCon, which happens at the same time as the Book Festival, a few miles away. If it's anything like ComicCon, with Stormtroopers and Boba Fetts galore, he'll be amazed.

--Can't tell if I really want to see the upcoming movie Contagion or if I really don't. If someone had to go make a film about a virus epidemic, I could have recommended that they option a certain first novel set in 1918...

--Didn't get nearly enough done today. Hence this meandering, aimless blog post at 4 PM. Note to sun: Come back. Drought, shmought. My trees will survive without more rain, really. I need your inspiration.

Go To Post

Book Publication, Readings, and Festivals on the Horizon

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:59:52 EST

Hey, y'all. Suddenly it's almost September, which means we're less than a month away from the publication of The Revisionists! The book officially hits the stores and cyberspace on Sept. 28. Those of you in the Atlanta area will have a chance to get a hardcover earlier, too: this weekend I'll be reading at the super-awesome Decatur Book Festival, and there will be early copies available for purchase. I'm up on Saturday at noon, so come by, say hi, and be the first to get a hardcover of the new book!

I'll be hitting a few other festivals in the coming weeks and months as well, and a couple of colleges. September 20 will have me reading at the University of South Carolina at Aiken for their Freshmen Reads, and I'll also be visiting Regis University in Denver on Oct. 4. I'll be at the Southern Independent Booksellers Association's annual trade show in Charleston on Sept. 17. And a few more festivals on the horizon: the Texas Book Festival the weekend of Oct. 22 in Austin, the Dahlonega Book Festival here in Georgia on Nov. 12, and some time next spring I'm off to Arizona for the Tuscon Book Festival and U. Arizona.

If you live near any of the above, please come by and say Hi!

Go To Post

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and the Whole Southern Novel Thing

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 08:31:46 EST

I haven't posted an old-fashioned book review here in a while, but I just finished a novel that merits an online shout-out. Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is the early breakaway candidate for Best Book I'll Read This Year. I haven't been reading as many novels as I'd like lately -- there are many months in which I read only nonfiction, as research for whatever project I'm working on -- so it's been a while since I found myself anxiously awaiting the next free moment I'd have to crack a novel open and see what would happen next.

Franklin, like another writer I know (um, me), wrote two historical novels before breaking the mold with a contemporary third novel. For that reason alone I was curious to see how he handled it. (I haven't read his other books, but will remedy that shortly.) The characters in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter are rich and real and flawed, the dialogue is perfect, and the plot is extremely well executed, so much so that some critics or lit-fiction writers might fret that it's too interesting to be literary fiction (they would be wrong).

I'll keep my plot recap simple: It's the story of two middle-aged men, one white and one black, who were briefly friends in high school until one of them was implicated in the disappearance of a girl they knew. The girl was never found, so the suspect was never jailed and instead has lived his life as a local outcast. Now, many years later, another girl has vanished, and the estranged friends find themselves confronting their pasts, as well as dealing with the new crime.

Boiled down that way it can sound like any number of crime novels, and in a way it echoes Mystic River (whose author, Dennis Lehane, offers a blurb on the back cover). But the book soars far higher than either crime novel or literary fiction standards thanks to fine writing and a perfectly calibrated balance between plot, character development, and setting.

Part of what impressed me is that its plot is deceptively simple, yet the layers of each character are slowly peeled back to reveal more wrinkles and folds and intricacies than the reader would have expected. I found myself thinking of Go Tell it on the Mountain, another Southern-flavored work that had the same effect on me. (Yes, that's high praise indeed.) The fact that this is all accomplished in less than 300 pages is something that makes me exceedingly envious.

Franklin steeps us in the history of a small Mississippi town and the major characters, artfully dangling just enough strings for the reader to pull on, making us anxious to turn the pages. He should teach a class on this. (Actually, he probably does: he teaches writing at Ole Miss.)

In addition to being a fantastic read, the book made me think all the more about what I term "The Southern novel thing." When I first moved from DC down here to Atlanta, I was immediately confronted with a dilemma I hadn't anticipated: whether I've suddenly become a "Southern writer" because of my zip code, or would I only be called that if my next book was set in a small Georgian town and featured hound dogs on porches and the occasional run-in with a poisonous snake. And, would I even want to be called a Southern writer, since that's a term often deployed disparagingly by the sorts of Northeasterners who would never, say, refer to Richard Russo as a "Maine writer" or Philip Roth as a "Jersey writer."

Tom Bell, one of the founders of the awesome Decatur Book Festival, told me that when he launched the festival and asked NY publishers to send writers to it, the publishers at first only figured he was interested in that same kind of stereotypical, bourbon and hound dogs and hot summer nights kind of small town hokey fiction. (Which in some ways seems as much a temporal stereotype as a regional one -- do they think that people south of the Mason-Dixon line still live in the 1960s? Have they actually been to Atlanta?)

Enough ranting. What I'm trying to get at is that Franklin has written a book that would indeed fit comfortably in a professor's course on Southern Fiction. It has the kudzu-choked setting, it has the great themes of race and class and redemption and crime and punishment. It even has a poisonous snake, and a very mean dog. And young boys toting firearms. But Franklin isn't blindly following stereotypes, he's capturing the vibrant modern world as he sees it: DirectTV dishes on doublewides, office workers nodding their heads to gospel music on their iPod earbuds, and small-town sheriffs wearing T-shirts that extol the virtues of using firearms.

It all works, perfectly, and makes me that much more excited to dig my own hands into the fertile territory I now call home. (OK, true, Atlanta is a far cry from Southern Mississippi. But you get my point.) That alone makes me hugely grateful to have read this book. Whether I file it alongside Ron Rash in my library's unofficial Southern authors section, or alongside Lehane and Richard Price in my unofficial literary crime section, or on my wife's bedside table in the Future Book Club Picks section (her club actually did pick it next), it's a book I'm sure I'll turn to again.

Go To Post

How To Escape Desert Islands

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:56:32 EST

Here's a kind of random interview of yours truly that my UK publisher just posted to its Web site. Items discussed include Atlanta traffic, Indiana Jones (man, I just keep bringing him up), and being marooned on an island with one book.

Positive blog reviews of The Revisionists have been popping up, which is great. Although also slightly weird: bloggers, remember that the book doesn't come out for another month and a half! Kindly hold back the effusive, gushing praise until the book is actually, you know, available to be purchased by curious readers. Thanks!

Go To Post

On Risk

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:58:35 EST

A while ago, a friend of mine made a comment about one of his formerly favorite bands, and it's stuck in my head for a while now. Honestly, it's been so long that I can't even remember which band he was talking about, but the bottom line is that he had previously worshipped the ground they played on, but then he got their new album and he really, really hated it. Sucked just wasn't a strong enough word. He thought of a lot of other ones. He went yet further, stating that the new album was so incredibly bad (so unforgivably bad) "that it makes me reassess their earlier work." In other words, he was realizing that maybe those earlier albums, which he had once gone on and on to me about, and which had been the very soundtrack of his life for a few years, were actually bad, simply because their new one was bad.

Huh?

This was maybe a year after my first novel had been published, an experience which forever changes the way one feels about book reviews, movie reviews, the online reviews of kitchen products, blogger posts about that one restaurant with the one waitress who was a total bitch that night because she forgot to put my salad dressing on the side, etc. So maybe I was feeling a tad over-vulnerable, and over-defensive about artists being knocked, and over-protective of my friend's formerly favorite band. (Whom I'd never really dug much, actually.)

But I started thinking: Even if the new album is the worst album my friend had ever heard, and even if he felt a sense of profound, even personal disappointment (as if he was let down not by some musicians he'd never met but by one of his own friends, or as if he'd been cheated on by his girlfriend), why does that have to alter his feelings about their earlier albums, which he'd always loved? Those albums haven't changed. They're still awesome (or at least, as awesome as he'd always thought of them as being). Why does he feel the sudden need to "reassess" them?

Because here's the thing: I think we want to think of our favorite bands, and writers, and directors, and atheletes, as perfect. Or at least damn close. I still remember when I was in high school and I was in a big, big U2 phase, I liked them so much that I'd blow $12 on a UK import of one of their singles, just so I could get the one or two rare B-sides that came with it. These were tracks that they hadn't put on their album, or released in the US, but still I had to have them. And I listened to them, and ... they weren't very good. (Some of the rare U2 songs in that era, actually, were great. But others were B-sides for a reason.) And I found my opinion of the cherished U2 lowering a bit. OK, they were still great, but it's not like every time they plugged in their instruments they created perfection. Some of their songs were just ok. The lads were smart enough to keep those songs off their albums and use them as B-side fodder, yes, but still. Those songs were proof to me that the band wasn't perfect. Which, you know, sucked to discover.

So it's all the worse when your favorite writer/artist/director/quarterback tosses out a bad follow-up album/novel/movie/playoff game. (I will not speak of the Patriots' last few postseason performances here.) It proves to us that they are human. They make mistakes. But does it mean that their earlier successes weren't actually successes at all? Just because they aren't successful all the time?

The reason, I would submit, that a work of art succeeds is because the artist takes risks. My friend dug that band's first two albums because he'd never heard anything like it; they melded various sounds together in a new way, they took their listeners to a bold new place. I feel the same way when I crack open a great novel by a writer I've never read before, or an amazing film. We want our artists to take risks, to tread on new ground, to avoid playing it safe. We hate it when someone plays it safe and writes the same damn book over and over, or records the same album three times. Where's the sense of adventure, we ask? It all feels too ho-hum. We want another bold leap forward.

But risks, by their very definition, are incredibly likely to fail. Sometimes when the artist takes another risk, it works yet again (wow! even better than their first!) but sometimes, yikes, it's a risk that just doesn't pay off. It doesn't mean their earlier work was worse than we realized. It just means that the odds got them this time, and that our romanticized version of the artist as perfect is being replaced by this unfortunate glimpse into the sausage-making process of art, which ain't always pretty.

Am I thinking of this now because I'm about to publish a book that takes a lot of risks? That is in many ways quite different from my first two? That combines various elements that aren't normally placed in the same narrative? Perhaps. Of course, I happen to love the darn thing, and I think it's a lot closer to perfect than sausage. (Though I do like sausage.) No doubt someone else might feel differently, and they'll be so enraged by the new risks that they'll think maybe my first two books weren't as good as they thought. (Well, maybe they weren't.) But it's my job to test out that tightrope, so I'll continue to do so, one imperfect step at a time, hoping as usual that someone's holding the net.

Go To Post

Off to Comic Con!

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:23:29 EST

I've been to book festivals and arts festivals, a pumpkin festival, a convention for physical therapists, a conference for managed care companies at which Bill Clinton was the keynote speaker (and I overslept and missed his talk -- it was in Vegas), and even a North Carolina hog festival. Never been to a comic book convention, though, but soon I'll get to cross that off my list.

Yep, I'm headed to Comic Con in San Diego! Excited, overwhelmed, confused, wary, armed with my camera and some kryptonite. I'll be part of a panel on dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction, along with authors of books about flesh-eating viruses and robot revolutions. Should be a riot. While there I hope to see a presentation about Star Wars Legos (my son is addicted to the things), hear from genre-bending authors like Lev Grossman (just finished his book The Magicians) and Paul Malmont (see my interview with the pulp aficionado here), catch a talk by visionary director Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth is I think one of the greatest works of art to appear in the last decade, in any medium or genre), see grown men and women dressed up like Storm Troopers and X-Men, maybe buy some toys for my kids, and just overall learn more about the crazy and shockingly profitable intersection of comics, film, graphic novels, and books. I should have much to report in a few days...

Go To Post

What "Iron Chef" Taught Me About Writing

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:08:09 EST

A few years ago I found myself flipping through a book about Iron Chef -- the early Japanese version of the show, which I used to watch with my wife and some friends about ten years ago (not the newer, less goofy American one with Alton Brown). The book had an interview with one of the chefs, Morimoto, the Japanese wizard behind the restaurant Nobu. He made an interesting comment about cooking that applies equally well to writing, and I think about it until this day.

For those of you not in the know: Iron Chef is a kitschy cooking face-off in which the contestant (a top-notch cook at some big-time restaurant) challenges one of the show's four "iron chefs" to see "whose cuisine reigns supreme." The show's host, a very scary Japanese man with an Elvis hairdo and a Sergeant Pepper wardrobe, chooses a special "mystery ingredient" for the day (could be rice, or sea urchin roe, or conger eel -- did I mention the show was Japanese?), and then the contestant and the iron chef race to prepare six or seven different meals containing that ingredient. Three celebrity judges (the American version of the show, interestingly, often featured one of my favorite writers, Jay McInerney, as a judge) then rate the dishes based on three scores: presentation, taste, and originality.

In the interview I read, Morimoto noted that although he loved being on the show, he found it incredibly stressful. We're judged based on both originality and taste, he said, but it's so hard to make something that's both amazingly original and yummy. People have been eating for millions of years, and the reason we've come to eat certain things together (like pork chops and apple sauce, or steak and potatoes) is that they taste good together. The reason we don't throw hugely disparate ingredients together (chocolate and fish sauce! steak tartare and burnt caramel!) is that it would taste really, really bad. On the show, Morimoto was always trying to be original and push the envelope by conceiving weird and unheard-of combinations, but finding such alchemies that also happened to be delicious was tough. Get too creative and it could be gross; aim too relentlessly at the taste buds and it might seem unoriginal. How do you find that balance?

I think about this a lot. Many of my favorite books, films, albums, and TV shows succeed so well because they combine odd elements in a unque way. Yiddish Policeman's Union told a tale that was equal parts hardboiled noir, Jewish identity narrative, and speculative history; The Wire combined novelistic scope with crime stories with soap operatic storylines with big-picture political scope; Odelay found the common ground between folk, hip-hop, rock, and pop. And I love books that do new things with narrative and style and voice, that tell a story in a way you've never seen before.

As a writer, I want to capture this level of fun and play, the zaniness of combining ingredients that aren't supposed to go together. But there's a certain boiling point beyond which the originality metabolizes but the taste begins to suffer. Because if you push the experimenting too far, you wind up with a nasty entree that makes you want to vomit. We've all read books or seen films that took their little experiments too far, that strayed so outside the established norm of story that you couldn't follow the plot (or, the opposite, there was no plot), or whose experimentation felt forced or simply wrong in an indefinable, gut-level way. Which is the risk you take when you, say, add a dash of pepper to your ice cream, or add a time traveler to a book about the politics of post-9/11 America (as my forthcoming book The Revisionists does).

So, when I'm devising my stories and working out the kinks, I try to push boundaries and do new things, I try to have fun and show my readers something they've never seen before, but I always try to remember to step back and ask myself, "Does it still taste good?"

Go To Post

The Novel vs. The Short Story vs. The Novel-As-Story-Collection

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:38:43 EST

I just finished reading the reigning champion of literary fiction, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Good Squad, which cleaned up with the recent Pulitizer Prize and National Book Critic Circle Award and pretty much every newspaper's Best Of the Year list. Egan had been on my own to-read list for years, embarrassingly, but I'm glad I finally got around to reading her: she's clearly brilliant, with a restless sort of narrative eye that wants to take in everything in this crazy world of ours. As a commentator of contemporary life, she reminded me a lot of Franzen, one of my favorite writers.

(I should also note that about ten years ago I wrote a never-to-be-published novel about a rock band, and among my rejections from editors were comments along the lines of "books about rock music don't sell." So it's good to see another literary novelist doing something artistic and new and fun with this concept, and seeing it work, and, yes, seeing it sell.)

The more complicated issue is how Goon Squad brings up the question of what exactly makes something a novel. It says "a novel" right there on the cover, that weird two-word designation that publishers decided to put on all novels a few years ago. (Why do they do this??? It's not like movie credits say "INCEPTION: A FILM.") Yet this particular "novel" is really 13 somewhat related short stories. We start out with the story of a music mogul and his young assistant, then we get a decades-earlier story from the perspective of a young girl whose group of punk friends included that future-mogul, then a story about an older man who seduced that young girl's best friend, etc. It's not so much a Russian nesting doll effect as a social networking, outwardly spiraling effect (which nicely ties in with her discussions of social networking in a few of the stories). Sometimes this works beautifully, creating weird links and casting unexpected shadows on earlier tales. But sometimes it feels forced, like Egan had a random story that she really liked but that had nothing to do with this book, so she decided to say that one of the background characters in the otherwise unrelated Story X is actually the boss of the main character's brother from Story Y, justifying Story X's inclusion.

So, the question: what makes a novel a novel, and not a collection of short stories? And does it matter?

Goon Squad seems part of a trend, as a number of recent books take this somewhat-related-stories-as-novel structure. One of my favorite books from last year, Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, also appears to be a novel but feels more like a collection of stories, each written about a different employee of a newspaper in Rome. David Mitchell's wonderful Black Swan Green is an autobiographical coming-of-age "novel" (supposedly) about a boy, but each chapter occurs in a different month of the boy's life and is a perfect stand-alone story as opposed to an open-ended, plot-line-dangling chapter.

Maybe this form of novel-writing is a result of the increasing MFA-ization of literature. More and more writers are coming out of grad programs, where they're taught more about short-story writing than novel writing (due to the fact that you can't exactly write a novel in time for next week's workshop). If they can find cool ways of turning their stories into bold new forms of novels, as I feel Rachman did, then more power to them. The novel is a breathing, living thing, and it's exciting to see it do new tricks. When proven short story master Junot Diaz tried his hand at writing a novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it didn't have the typical flow of a novel; chapters came from different characters and in different timelines, giving it a slightly disjointed effect, but still it worked as a novel, as there were enough linking threads and a commonality of voice to tie it all together. The result was a novel unlike any I'd read before, in a good way. It was a novel written in a, er, novel way.

But the mere fact that Goon Squad ran the critical and awards table (as Oscar Wao did) makes me worry sometimes that the novel as traditionally written is being unfairly knocked by the literati. It's been interesting to note the high percentage of short story collections reviewed by the The New York Times Book Review of late, as if mere novels aren't as worthy of critical attention. And a few years ago, when Granta issued its Twenty Best Young Novelist list, I couldn't help noticing that many of the "novelists" they'd chosen were people who actually hadn't written any novels. Many had a short story collection or two to their credit, but no novel. The clear assumption is that if someone can write a great story collection, then surely they can write a great novel. Stories are displays of artistry, requiring pointillistic brilliance, but novels are closer to hackwork, a brute exercise in endurance.

As someone who writes novels, I find this not a little insulting. I realize that story writers are ostracized by their lack of sales, so I don't want to rain on the one parade they get to enjoy. And short fiction is exciting: it allows for experimentation, for trying new things, for the wonders of impatiently jumping between tenses or characters or styles from page to page. Its limited space is particularly conducive to insightful pieces surgically picking at a character's, or a single scene's, emotional state. When story writers try novels, sometimes we get the best of both worlds: inventive tales that work on a micro level and from the 10,000-foot perspective. But sometimes we wind up with long-form stretches of internality whose lack of movement bores, whose navel-gazing feels narcissistic and self-important. As does the sometimes incoherent leaping from style to style, as if the author feels that a novel is only good if it has seven different writing styles and perspectives, or as if s/he feels that they'll only be considered an Important Writer if they can check so many boxes off of their Creativity Checklist ("and then in chapter five I'll write from the perspective of the family dog! and then in the next chapter from the perspective of a dead relative of their neighbor who they talked to in chapter 1! and then the next chapter will be written as an Excel spreadsheet!").

(And in fairness I should admit that my aforementioned, unpublished rock novel did exactly this: told a story from about 12 perspectives, in different styles and tones and tenses. No Excel or canines, but there was a chapter written as a Rolling Stone review, and one as a Web chat, etc. Forgive me: I was 25 and was way, way too into David Foster Wallace at the time.)

Reading Goon Squad, I found myself thinking of another story-collection-as-novel, Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot. I loved her Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, and I did mostly like her second as well, but I thought it highlighted some of the problems in this form. The Wonder Spot was a series of short stories about a young protagonist; one story was her as a young girl, then another was her as a working professional, etc. This revealed some surprising narrative choices. Early in one story we learn that the character's beloved father died recently, but we never actually saw what happened or learned any of the details -- the death apparently happened in the blank space between stories. But the father was a big part of her life, we were told earlier, so why did we skip over his death like that? We got an entire story about her dating one random ex-boyfriend, but nothing about this major life event. I had the uncomfortable sense that Bank wasn't sure how to write such a wrenching scene, so instead she skipped ahead to some other, more story-izable aspect of her character's life. The stories in the book were all well done, but it felt to me like she'd cheated.

This is the problem I sometimes have with the story-as-novel. While it plays to the strengths of short stories (close-up introspection, a careful scrutinization of our daily lives and habits, the ability to try on different voices and styles), it ignores some of the aspects of novel-writing that too many writers assume are easy and therefore unimportant: the careful sustaining of a larger narrative, the interplay of interlocking storylines, the steady accretion of suspense, and a consistency of style and tone not just for each individual character but for the novel as a whole. My friend the novelist and critic (and football fan) Charles McNair calls this "the blocking and tackling of writing." Sure, maybe it looks cooler and is more fun to throw up 50-yard bombs on every play, but in order to win you need to do the heavy hitting, too. Just because that seems less glorious doesn't make it less important, and it certainly doesn't make it easier, though many critics mistakenly assume it is.

It reminds me of a great piece by David Denby in The New Yorker a few years ago, about the new trend of films that played their narrative out of order or jumped between multiple, initially unrelated storylines. It started with Pulp Fiction and continued with Memento and seemed to be hitting some crazy peak in 2007 (when he wrote the article) with Babel and Syriana. He praises this form of overly complex, disruptive narrative while also pulling back and saying, hey guys, let's not forget that straightforward, chronological storytelling is a powerful, wonderful way to create art, and it's lasted for generations for a good reason: because it works. Jumbling your narrative and rearranging the timeline of a film doesn't inherently make it more artistic, it just makes it more complicated. Which is sort of how I feel when I read some of these stories-as-novels.

I'm coming off harder on Egan's book than I mean to -- I very much enjoyed it, and I think she worked some awesome tricks, and, again, I am deeply impressed by the way she came up with something new to say about the rock industry, about the dreamers who suffer for their art. (And, yes, I admit it: I thought her PowerPoint chapter was awesome.) Her book just got me to thinking about some of the novel/story tensions that already had been bothering me lately. Maybe the problem is that we novel writers aren't doing enough to further the art form and push the boundaries, and we need the story writers (who are skilled by necessity at experimentation) to point the way. Or maybe the tastemasters armed with their MFAs and their New York Times book reviews are too quick to assume that straightforward narrative is dry and old-hat, and too quick to assume that it's easy. Or, more likely, I'm thinking about this too much and just need to put my head down and finish my next novel. Unless I get some crazy short story ideas first...

Go To Post

Crossing Genre Borders And Getting Past Literary Customs Officers

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:21:15 EST

I'm nearly a month late on this one, as school break and kid illnesses and a beach trip have thrown off the schedule, but I've been meaning to write about this great story in the Wall Street Journal about the trend of "literary" authors writing "high-concept" novels.

The story's author notes that this summer and fall a number of literary authors will be publishing novels that deal with the supernatural or other elements that are normally consigned to the genre shelves. Colson Whitehead will publish a zombie novel, Tom Perotta will publish a book about the aftermath of the Rapture, Lev Grossman is publishing his sequel to The Magicians, and British author Glen Duncan is starting a series about a werewolf. She writes:

"The explosion of fantasy titles from mainstream authors is eroding decades-old divisions in the publishing industry. ... A new era of experimentation is sweeping literary circles."

Mark me as firmly in favor of this. I've always been a reader of literary fiction and the classics, and I used to have that requisite snobbery, thinking of myself as someone who didn't read thrillers and didn't read sci-fi and didn't read spy novels. But a few years back I realized that most of my favorite recent novels were books that combined a certain literary aesthetic with the plot structure of noir or mysteries, or with the more imaginative elements of sci-fi or fantasy. I'm talking books by Michael Chabon, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy. People who realize that the ability to write well and insightfully is key, but who also understand that without a good story, it's so much frilly air. Books whose plots are as powerful as their prose, by writers who realize that narrative is every bit as important as (and every bit as difficult to do right, if not harder than) character and the careful deployment of a really cool metaphor.

So I guess I'm now part of a trend. My last book had noir elements and magical realism, and my new one, The Revisionists, is a sort of literary spy novel with a time traveler set in contemporary D.C. I didn't realize I was part of the zeitgeist -- I just thought they were cool stories -- but hey, it's nice to be not alone on this adventure.
(And it's also worth noting that this isn't exactly a brand-new trend. It seems every few years there's another story about this. Lev Grossman himself wrote this story two years ago, again for the WSJ.)

Despite these occasional stories, the bias against genre-breaking novels is still strong among certain circles of academics and book critics. Just a week ago, in Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review of Monica Ali's new novel about Princess Diana, she writes that, for a Booker-nominated, highly praised writer like Ali, a princess novel "seems like an awfully high-concept, low-brow endeavor." The implication being that it's unbecoming for serious authors to write "high-concept" books; such writers should instead focus on quiet, internal, borderline inert fiction. I haven't read Ali's new book and don't honestly plan to, but I resent the way Kakutani thumbs her nose at anything high-concept, as if taking risks and daring to chart new horizons is somehow unartistic and unworthy. (Whitehead's new book I'm particularly psyched about -- I loved his first, The Intuitionist, a noirish racial allegory, but his subsequent books, to me, have felt very well written but lacking in narrative strength. I think zombies might be exactly what he's needed to get that mojo back.)

Look, I'm not saying I dislike a good work of realist contemporary fiction: my bookshelves are bursting with them. But I am saying that such fiction is not, and never has been, inherently better or more artistic or more moving or more encapsulating of human nature than a less realistic novel featuring a cyborg, or a bank robber, or even (yes, it's possible!) a vampire. Ultimately, it's not the subject matter that matters, it's the execution. A great writer should be able to make you care just as much about a hardboiled detective as you'd care about a lonely overeducated housewife in suburban New York.

Like any trend, this is likely a pendulum swinging thing, and I'm sure it will again seem uncool to write anything that crosses genre lines -- well, it already is to Kakutani, but a time will no doubt come when most other people too get sick of it. The question is, will that be in five years, or fifty, or 100? Maybe the realistic stranglehold on literary fiction, which started cutting off the more imaginative plot arteries early in the previous century, will stay loose for another generation or two. I'm sure we won't all be writing about the fantastic and the bizarre and the noir, but perhaps enough of us will so that such stories will be considered respectable rather than slumming. Maybe the slums are where the action is--and the emotions, and the poignant moments, and the sobering insights, and the artistry.

Go To Post

Is This Post "Readable?"

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 11:59:34 EST

I've seen a number of hilarious yet sad lists of book reviewer cliches (like "a writer to watch" or "beautiful, spare prose") kicking around the Net lately. Google "book review cliches" and you'll see a bunch -- there's even a Bingo board of cliches, so you and friends with way too much time on their hands can play over Sunday brunch while reading the Books section of the paper (assuming you still get the paper, and assuming your paper still has a Books section, which are both pretty dangerous assumptions to make these days).

The book reviewer word that breaks my heart is "readable." I can't believe someone would use this word to describe a book, one they actually enjoyed and think that you will too. It's intended as a compliment, but in fact it indicts the rest of contemporary literature. Because the simple fact that they're saying "hey, this book is great because it's readable" is to imply that other books aren't readable.

Let's ponder that one for a moment. Other books aren't readable? Literally? Or even figuratively? I'm not sure which is more depressing: 1) the fact that this might actually be true, that too many writers are opting for overly dense or academic or show-offy writing styles, afraid that accessibility is the mark of a hack, or 2) the fact that readers think it's true, that they aren't trying hard enough to embrace new styles and will instead conclude that anything a little weird or different is in fact "unreadable."

No one (least of all a critic) would ever describe a film as "watchable," or a paining as "viewable," or a restaurant's cuisine as "edible." In all of these art forms, those adjectives are assumed as the most basic requirement for audience participation. Of course the movie is watchable -- why else would the critic even write about it? Why else would the film have even been made? Yet in contemporary literature, our standards have fallen so low, and our expectations of even the existence of an audience are so sketchy and vague, that a book simply being able to be read is a distinction worthy of pointing out in a review.

If I ever tell you, "Hey, check out my new book, it's really readable!" please, please talk me down from whatever ledge I'm lingering on, and remind me that it's all going to be okay.

Go To Post