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Jay MacDonald

Fiction

Ron McLarty

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Should Stephen King ever need a place to crash in Manhattan, the welcome sign is permanently affixed to Ron McLarty's door. It was, after all, King's out-of-the-blue September 2003 Entertainment Weekly column that alerted the publishing industry to McLarty's big-hearted American road-trip of a novel, The Memory of Running, an audiobook original that the Master of Horror proclaimed the best book you can't read. No sooner had King made his impassioned plea for somebody to print this book, comparing its 279-pound boy-man hero Smithson Smithy Ide to the likes of Yossarian, Holden and Huck, than the thunderstruck McLarty found himself in a bidding war that would ultimately exceed seven figures. He's still pinching himself.

"During the auction for the book, I asked these editors and publishers that I could never get to, who represented this great iron wall that I could never climb over, you're paying me this money because Stephen King liked the book? And they said, no, but we wouldn't have read it if Stephen King hadn't liked it, especially at your age."

OK, so most first novelists usually make their debut well before their 56th birthday. In McLarty's case, the reward has been well worth the wait: he signed a $2 million, two-book deal for The Memory of Running and Art in America, and Warner Bros. paid $1 million for the film rights to Running, for which McLarty also wrote the screenplay.

It's been a windfall of artistic validation for a guy better known for narrating best-selling novels than writing them. A veteran character actor (Judge Wright on "Law and Order," Dr. Jacob Talley on "Sex and the City" and Frank Belson on "Spenser for Hire"), McLarty broke into Recorded Books narration in the 1990s as the favored voice of Danielle Steel. Over the years, he has recorded more than 100 audio titles for such authors as Richard Russo, Elmore Leonard and Scott Turow.

In his off hours—and they are many, even for a successful actor—McLarty would hole up in his "pit of despair" basement office in Montclair, New Jersey, and write plays, 44 to date, of which 10 have been expanded into novels. It is a way for an insomniac to make purposeful use of enforced wakefulness, and for an actor to weather the relentless rejection that comes with his craft.

"In acting, you have to audition; you're looking for them to give you permission to do what you do. But I didn't need that for writing," he says. "I'm sure it would have been great to have a book contract, but I could take this pen and feel its importance in my hand and observe people and always have these themes in my head and not feel pressured to get permission to do it, I could just do it. It's just been sort of a writer's life for me—without anything like income getting in the way."

The Memory of Running, the third of his 10 novels, tells the story of Smithy Ide, a 43-year-old Vietnam vet and supervisor at a Rhode Island toy factory who spends his days doing quality control on combat action figures and his nights consuming huge quantities of pretzels and Narragansett beer. When his parents die in a car crash just as news arrives that his schizophrenic sister Bethany has passed away on the streets of Los Angeles, Smithy saddles up his childhood Raleigh bicycle and embarks on a cross-country quest to claim his sister's body. Next-door neighbor Norma, an embittered paraplegic who has always carried a torch for Smithy, cheers him on with strained, touching long-distance calls.

"I wrote The Memory of Running as a play when my mother and father were actually killed in a car accident up in Maine. My mother lived six weeks and my father lived 10 days after the accident. And in this odd way that I work, I read the play about three months later and I thought, you know, it's too big for a play, it has so much more in it. But because I wrote it as dialogue, I had the voices of Smithy and Norma and Bethany in my head." Smithy's redemption ride is peopled with realistic characters that surprise, baffle, seduce and repel our wanderer-on-wheels at every turn. McLarty says he had to kill all hopes of ever publishing before he found the part of himself that brought Smithy to life.

"The first two novels I wrote to wow everybody; I thought I would get a million dollars and everyone would think I was great. On this third one, I said, you know, nobody's going to publish my stuff; I'm going to write this for myself, to sort of explain the world to myself. I think when you do that, you get out of your own way; you're not telling a story to try to impress anyone, you're just telling a story."

" Bittersweet" doesn't begin to describe McLarty's last two years. In 2002, he lost Diane, his wife of 32 years, to lung cancer; McLarty and his three grown sons spread her ashes in a Colorado stream. On New Year's Day 2004, he married fellow New York stage actor Kate Skinner, sold his Montclair home and moved into her Manhattan apartment.

When we spoke by phone, McLarty was between sessions, recording yet another audiobook. What's a winner of life's biggest lottery still doing punching a clock? "I just did an episode of 'Law and Order' and my friends all asked me why," he says, chuckling. "I said, you know, if I was 26 or 36, I would have already constructed a life as a writer. But my life has been constructed around finding the time to work and getting around in the world through acting. I'm an actor because I love being an actor. I took this summer off and really thought about whether I wanted to be an actor, and I do. I want to be both. I need it. One feeds the other. It isn't really work." 

Jay MacDonald once repaired and rented bikes in Key West.

 

Should Stephen King ever need a place to crash in Manhattan, the welcome sign is permanently affixed to Ron McLarty's door. It was, after all, King's out-of-the-blue September 2003 Entertainment Weekly column that alerted the publishing industry to McLarty's big-hearted American road-trip of a novel, The Memory of Running, an audiobook original that the Master […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Stella Rimington

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Perhaps like me, you've always wondered: do spies read spy novels? The answer in Stella Rimington's case is an enthusiastic yes. "Oh, very much," insists the first female director general of Britain's MI5 intelligence agency. "I am an avid thriller reader and always have been. That is rather odd actually, that somebody relaxes by reading fictional stories about their own profession, but indeed I do and always have."

Rimington was a diplomatic housewife living in India in 1965 when she was offered a part-time clerical position by the MI5 operative in New Delhi. "I was reading Kipling's Kim at the time and I somehow imagined that it was really going to be rather like the 'great game' that Kipling writes about," she says. "But it turned out not to be like that at all."

Upon her return to London, Rimington joined MI5 full time as an intelligence officer and became successively the director of its countersubversion, counter espionage and counterterrorism branches. In 1992, she became the first woman chief of MI5; more significantly for Rimington, she was also the first director general whose identity was announced publicly, effectively blowing her 25-year cover.

"The press, particularly the tabloids, went mad," she says. "I knew beforehand and wondered whether it was the right thing to do at the time because I knew it was going to have a dramatic effect on me, particularly on my family. We had been protected by anonymity until then; the neighbors didn't know what I did and didn't care frankly. The press very easily found out where we lived and all of a sudden there they were, camped outside the house. We had to sell the house and move eventually, and effectively live covertly. That was a pretty upsetting start to my time as director general."

Rimington held that post until 1996, opening opportunities for women in actual intelligence gathering as opposed to the traditional administrative and clerical roles as characterized by Miss Moneypenny in the Ian Fleming novels. Speaking of Bond, James Bond, Rimington was the model for the first female M, played in the movies by Judi Dench. In reality, MI5 counters domestic threats, similar to our FBI without the police powers; Bond and M would have worked with the more swaggering MI6 foreign service, the equivalent of our CIA.

Rimington followed her distinguished 30-year intelligence career with a tell-some memoir, Open Secrets, that raised plenty of eyebrows at Thames House. Her first novel, At Risk, launches a planned series featuring MI5 intelligence officer Liz Carlyle, a thoroughly modern version of Dame Rimington in her salad days.

In At Risk, Carlyle heads up the search for an "invisible," the agency's worst nightmare, a British native whose ability to cross borders without detection is being used to stage an attack by an Afghan terrorist. Bruno Mackay, a swashbuckling MI6 operative, has just returned from Islamabad to help hunt down the terrorist. Charles Wetherby, Liz's taciturn boss, keeps a watchful eye over his talented young fledgling.

The terrorist has his own reasons for the target he has chosen; the author skillfully parses out this backstory to slowly tighten the tension as Liz works against time to figure out who is likely to end up on the receiving end of a backpack filled with C4 explosives. The invisible, too, has her own reasons for converting to Islam and becoming a Child of Heaven; the question is, can ideology alone overcome her upbringing?

We are immediately drawn to Liz, a focused, serious young career woman intent on using her analytical gifts to both further her career and fend off the testosterone-fueled cowboys like Mackay who would lead her astray in true Bond fashion. Deftly plotted, realistic in dialogue and detail, At Risk is a first-rate thriller with plenty to say about the strengths and weaknesses of the men and women on the front lines of the war on terror. It's also the first spy thriller in recent memory in which nobody goes to bed with anybody except the terrorists. Rimington builds a lovely verisimilitude between the two women antagonists, both struggling to fit into very different male-dominated worlds.

"They are two women who are in a sense fighting against themselves really; one has decided to break with her background and gone over to the other side, and the other one, Liz, is part of the established world but she's constantly asking herself if that's what she wants to do. So I think we've got that divine discontent that women often have that comes with trying to do two things at once and be perfect at everything. Working women, and particularly working mothers, find themselves trying to balance and always being dissatisfied that they haven't done it properly."

The days of Moneypenny are well over at MI5, which currently has a female director general. Rimington says queen and crown are better for it.

"I think women go about these sorts of things in a different way. That is why I think it is so important that women are involved in intelligence work. It adds a diversity to the whole. I don't think women are better at intelligence work than men, but they're different, and when you put the two together, you get a good mix."

But Rimington has no immediate plans to put the genders together in quite the James Bond sense.

"I think one of the difficulties with thrillers is, if you get too involved with the sex side of it, then it tends to take away from the excitement of the plot. We'll have to see; that's something I'm thinking about." 

 

Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

Perhaps like me, you've always wondered: do spies read spy novels? The answer in Stella Rimington's case is an enthusiastic yes. "Oh, very much," insists the first female director general of Britain's MI5 intelligence agency. "I am an avid thriller reader and always have been. That is rather odd actually, that somebody relaxes by reading […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Daniel Silva

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Israeli spy Gabriel Allon returns in Daniel Silva’s latest Daniel Silva watched the televised images of Yasir Arafat’s chaotic funeral last fall from several different viewpoints. As a former Middle East correspondent for United Press International, Silva had covered the bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict firsthand. Later, as a news producer for CNN’s Washington bureau, he had witnessed the false spring of the Oslo peace accords between Arafat and the newly elected Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin. Arafat’s grizzled countenance loomed large over events in the Middle East when Silva met his wife of 17 years, NBC correspondent Jamie Gangel, during a typical liquid press debriefing at the Diplomat Hotel in Bahrain. But what was doubtless foremost in Silva’s mind as the central Palestinian figure of our time was laid to unrest was the fact that he had just completed a thorough and scathing indictment of Arafat in his eighth novel, Prince of Fire.

“I was very much an Oslo person,” Silva admits by phone from his home office in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. “I had placed faith in hindsight, perhaps too much faith in the ability of Yasir Arafat. I believed Yasir Arafat wanted peace at the time of Oslo. I do not believe that now, and that is reflected in the novel.” Prince of Fire once again wrests from retirement Gabriel Allon, world-renowned art restorer and former Israeli spy whose three most recent outings (The English Assassin, The Confessor and A Death in Vienna) form what Silva calls an “accidental trilogy” concerning the unfinished business of the Holocaust. Allon, who turned his back on “the Office” after his son died and his wife was horribly injured, is here drawn back into the game when his dossier is found in the home of a suspect in a series of anti-Semitic terrorist bombings.

Allon’s mission takes him from Cairo to London, the French Riviera to the Jezreel Valley as he races to outwit a master terrorist, raised from childhood by Arafat himself, before he strikes at the heart of a major European city. There was, in fact, such a boy, Black September’s Ali Hassan Salameh, architect of the Munich Olympics massacre, who was killed in Beirut by Israeli intelligence in 1979.

Silva knew exactly where he would set his thrillers: “I’ve always been interested in the birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli wars and the history of the Holocaust and watching these two peoples in this terrible death struggle. It’s been a lifelong passion of mine,” he admits.

But he never envisioned Allon as a series character when he introduced him in The Kill Artist (2000). In fact, when his publisher (Putnam) suggested the idea, he tried to talk them out of it.

“I said, that’s crazy, I can’t make him into a continuing character, the world is so anti-Israel, no one wants to read about this Israeli continuing character. Come on, it’s just not going to work. And they said, just write it.” Silva prefers the British spy school of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and John Le CarrŽ. “I don’t really read contemporaries,” he admits. “When I read, I read the great dead.” And Allon reflects this: his character is deeply divided, left-brain, right-brain, passionate about restoring the beauty of art masters, dispassionate about the killing that needs to be done if his young homeland is to survive. Silva prefers the battle of intellects to the spilling of blood. Suffice to say, Allon and George Smiley would have much to chat about.

“Yes, throughout the series, he hasn’t killed a lot of people; a lot of it is more referred to. He doesn’t do a lot of blood work in these novels, by choice. I learned quickly that bang-bang and twisty thriller plots just aren’t enough; I needed to do more in order to keep myself satisfied as a writer.” After four straight Gabriel Allon novels, Silva admits it’s time for a vacation from his art restorer. “I could use a little break from him,” he says. “I would like to explore some other sorts of material. I have a lot of respect for the character and the characters around him, particularly [master spy] Ari Shamron, and I’m reluctant to let it just go on and on and run the risk of the character becoming stale. My intention is to take a break for a book or two and then see what happens.” Working within the context of a young nation like Israel has forced Silva to reach some hard personal conclusions about the ongoing conflict. Did bringing Arafat into his fiction present difficulties? “Yes. Had Yasir Arafat accepted the deal that was offered to him at Camp David, this book would never have been written. I had to look hard at the evidence and spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I came to the conclusion that Yasir Arafat in word and deed and in the way he gave money to families who produced suicide bombers and the way he used the state media of the Palestinian authority had a direct hand in terrorism against Israel during the quote-unquote peace process, and that he viewed the peace process as part of the phased strategy of destroying the state of Israel. That is my personal conclusion, that he was not serious about reaching a peace settlement with the Israelis.” In Silva’s view, the Middle East struggle may be “a problem without a solution.” This melancholy assessment permeates Prince of Fire. But the author has no doubts about the bloody legacy of Yasir Arafat.

“I personally believe that Yasir Arafat and his terrorist organization, Black September, showed the bin Ladens of the world the way. These guys were the ones who perfected the high-profile international spectacular like Munich and the airline hijackings and all the rest. I’m afraid this is Yasir Arafat’s legacy: he and his guys were fantastic terrorists.” Jay MacDonald writes from Mississippi.

Israeli spy Gabriel Allon returns in Daniel Silva’s latest Daniel Silva watched the televised images of Yasir Arafat’s chaotic funeral last fall from several different viewpoints. As a former Middle East correspondent for United Press International, Silva had covered the bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict firsthand. Later, as a news producer for CNN’s Washington bureau, he had […]
FictionDebut Fiction

Joshilyn Jackson

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Southern heroines rarely leap off the page as full of life and trouble as Arlene Fleet, the headstrong protagonist and erstwhile alter ego of young Atlanta writer Joshilyn Jackson, whose marvelous debut, gods in Alabama, is fixing to slap some sense into modern Southern fiction. Before we've even finished the first page of this most unladylike romp through the Southern gothic hymnal, we learn that Arlene left podunk Possett, Alabama, a dozen years earlier after secretly murdering the high-school quarterback and kicking his body deep into the kudzu. What's more, we're already inexplicably cheering her on. Shouldn't someone at least ask, Lord, what's gotten into that girl?

Well, the Lord truly works in mysterious ways in Arlene's case. When she headed to Chicago for college, she made a pact with the Man Upstairs: in exchange for keeping Jim Beverly's body from the light of day, she vowed to neither lie, engage in sex outside of marriage, nor return to Possett, which she calls "the fourth rack of hell." But when Jim's old girlfriend Rose Mae Lolly shows up in Chicago looking for answers, Arlene figures all bets are off and reluctantly returns to Possett, where she reunites with her loving, racist Aunt Florence and introduces everyone to her very black, very Yankee boyfriend Burr.

'Sweet Home Alabama' meets 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' as Arlene stumbles toward a redemption that even Rhett and Scarlett would never have imagined.

Sweet Home Alabama meets Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as Arlene stumbles toward a redemption that even Rhett and Scarlett would never have imagined. Foulmouthed and hilariously frank, gods in Alabama is just the shot of sour to counter the diabetic-coma-inducing sweetness that seems to have overtaken Southern literature lately. Seekers of nostalgia should try the next book on the left.

It is both surprising and charming to find that Jackson, a happily married 30-something mother of two, still fumbles the one question she'll face ad nauseum this year.

"The first thing my editor asked was, so, how much of you is in Arlene? REALLY NOT A LOT!" she recalls by phone from Atlanta, with extended laughter. "Sure, OK, for the record, if we're doing bedpost notches, Arlene wins hands-down, she wins on an Olympic level, I'm pleased to say. She lives a lot more intensely than I do, and I hope, Lord, that I make better choices. I love Arlene. I think she has a good heart and she's funny and she's smart. I wouldn't want to be her, but I'd hang out with her."

In fact, Jackson was something of the anti-Arlene in high school, being raised, as she puts it, "by a tribe of wild fundamentalists."

"I was the nicest girl. I was a missionary, I went to Guyana with my church group and I dated nice boys. I was good; I shone with the white light of goodness," she says. "Now college was a different story. If I hit an Arlene phase, it was in college."

Jackson caught the theater bug and pursued it, first at the University of West Florida, then at other Southern campuses. "If there was a college in the Southeast, honey, I stopped there," she says. "It was a checkered career path." She ultimately dropped out to pursue acting. She worked in regional repertory and dinner theater before returning to Georgia State, where she graduated with honors in English.

Jackson fell in love with her best friend Scott, a fellow theater major, and followed him to Chicago, where he worked in trade show production. Six years later, the couple returned to the Atlanta area, where they live now and are raising their seven-year-old son and two-year-old daughter.

According to Jackson, Arlene and Burr first appeared as minor characters in a short story eight years ago. The author loved the dynamic between the two and used it to explore modern relationships in gods in Alabama. Burr's low-key love for his high-strung Southern belle helps endear them both to readers.

"I had a few Jane Austen moments; like Emma, I'm writing a heroine that nobody but me will love. But you know why I think Arlene is eventually a sympathetic character? I think a lot of it is Burr. She's a consummate bull****-er and she chooses to love the one guy who always sees through her. I think that says a lot about her, that she wants to be seen through; she wants honesty, she wants goodness, she's yearning for goodness. I think that ultimately makes her a really likable person, because we all do crappy things. It's the people who keep trying to choose what is right that you like. We all screw up."

The mixed-race couple enabled Jackson to explore racial friction in the New South. Her conclusion: get over it. "When you're dealing with racism in the South, my tolerance policy is, if you're 80 years old and you're a racist, what are you gonna do? OK, I'm sorry. And then the younger you get, the less tolerant I am about it, to where if you're my age or younger, I can't stomach it. It's like, what's wrong with you? I grew up like you grew up. This is not mandatory at this point."

As for the, uh, forthright language in her debut, Jackson credits a novelist friend's outraged voice mail with convincing her to push the envelope and unleash her inner Arlene.

"The biggest problem I had with that book was cowardice. The first draft, I had made some choices, I had backed away from some things that I thought were maybe too graphic or too explicit; 'unladylike' is a good word. And I remember I came home and there was this message on my machine, yelling at me: 'This is almost such a good book! You coward! Get them fornicating! Quit being such a lady! You must not be so afraid!' And I knew she was right. Arlene's looking for redemption, and the farther away you go, the more you have to say about getting back to where you want to be. If you get redeemed for stealing a piece of penny candy, it doesn't really mean very much."

The next time a little sin is required for the sake of literature, rest assured: in the words of the late, great Tammy Wynette, this good girl is gonna go bad.

Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

 

 

Southern heroines rarely leap off the page as full of life and trouble as Arlene Fleet, the headstrong protagonist and erstwhile alter ego of young Atlanta writer Joshilyn Jackson, whose marvelous debut, gods in Alabama, is fixing to slap some sense into modern Southern fiction.
FictionWorld Fiction

Philip Caputo

Interview by Jay MacDonald

The ghosts of literary heavyweights are never far from the page in Philip Caputo’s unflinching, dust-swept African odyssey, Acts of Faith. This cautionary tale about a modern-day group of well-intentioned pilots, missionaries and dreamers who attempt to alleviate the suffering in war-torn Sudan covers all the morally rocky ground we love in Melville and Conrad. Three very different love-in-the-trenches subplots recall the shell-shocked assignations of Hemingway. And the brutally honest, two-fisted prose reminds us yet again why Caputo, along with Jim Harrison and Peter Matthiessen, may be the last of the big cats in our literary jungle.

A decade after his 1965 tour of duty with the first Marine combat unit to fight in Vietnam, a shattered Caputo pieced his life back together by writing A Rumor of War, which became a definitive book of that divisive conflict. As a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, he covered the Kent State shootings and shared a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on election fraud. His fascination with Africa began in the mid-1970s with a trip by foot and camel across the deserts of Sudan and Eritrea that served as a backdrop for his first novel, Horn of Africa (1980).

Acts of Faith was inspired by Caputo’s return to sub-Saharan Africa in 2000 and 2001 on assignment with National Geographic Adventure magazine. In the course of his reporting, he flew into Somalia with bush pilots whose cargo didn’t strictly comply with the UN manifest.

“Everything is flown around in those places: dope, food, guns,” he says by phone from his winter home in Patagonia, Arizona. “Some of the Russian Antonov pilots would fly UN food drops over Sudan, then on leave they would sometimes drop over to the other side and fly Antonov bombers for the Sudanese air force and drop bombs on the same people they were helping.” Acts of Faith centers on Knight Air, an independent airlift operation that flies UN-sponsored relief missions from the Kenyan border town of Lokichokio into the Nuba Mountains, an oil-rich Sudan region at war with the Muslim-controlled government in Khartoum. Douglas Braithwaite, a dispassionate American, and Wesley Dare, a freewheeling good ol’ Texan, run Knight Air with the help of Fitzhugh Martin, a biracial Kenyan soccer star, and Mary English, their young Canadian co-pilot. In the Nuba Mountains, Michael Goraende commands the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army while American missionary Quinette Hardin immerses herself in tribal customs in order to save souls. The Nuba badly needs the airlifts but not the air raids from Khartoum that its new airstrip might bring.

Romance develops between Wesley and Mary, Fitzhugh and Diana, and Michael and Quinette as Khartoum closes in on the humanitarian groups it suspects are smuggling arms to the rebels. Who will escape the approaching cataclysm, and how, occupies much of the third act. Like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, everyone here is spiritually up a river without a paddle.

Caputo admits that the adventurous spirit that prevents him from plotting his novels beforehand sometimes prolongs the writing process as well. He was forced to scrap early work on Acts of Faith after trying in vain to ignite a love interest between Douglas and Quinette (“I wasn’t very fond of him; he’s just not a warm character.”) Then there was the ending; both his wife and editor counseled him against his admittedly bleak finale. “I had originally had the book ending in an almost Shakespearean bloodbath,” he chuckles. At 63, Caputo has reached an uneasy truce with danger. When Men’s Journal approached him to take an embedded position with the 1st Marine Reconnaissance Battalion to cover the invasion of Iraq, he declined. Nor was he tempted to hunt Osama bin Laden in the Afghan mountains. “I said, I don’t know that a 61-year-old guy should be running around with these 20-year-old recon guys,” he recalls. “I had been in Afghanistan years ago with the mujahideen when they were fighting the Russians and I remembered how awful that country was. If it had kind of taxed me when I was 38, what’s it going to do to me now?” Caputo instead threw himself into 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings (Chamberlain Brothers) which elicited mixed feelings about the anti-war years.

“I had covered the Days of Rage the year before in Chicago, and I remember the protesters chanting. What do we want? Revolution! When do we want it? Now!’ like a football cheer. And a year later, to be standing at that parking lot in Kent, Ohio, looking down on all of this blood that was still fresh and staining the asphalt, I thought, well, kids, this is what a revolution looks like.” Surprisingly, the terrain that Caputo would most like to be able to tackle in fiction is everyday life.

“I read a lot of fiction that you would think somebody like me would not read, like Alice Munro and John Updike and John Cheever, and I’ve always felt this longing to be able to write about very ordinary situations in this wonderfully extraordinary way, but I can’t do it [laughs]. I suppose it would be as if Alice Munro were to say, I think I’ll write a war novel. Who knows, maybe it would be wonderful, but I doubt it.” While his days on the front lines may be over, Caputo is reconciled to the fact that his work will always arise in some way from life on the edge. “There is something about out-of-the-way places and exotic locales and these kind of extreme, more difficult or dangerous situations that have kind of drawn me. I guess they reveal things about people that are not generally revealed in more ordinary circumstances. At my age, I’ve realized that that’s my fate, my destiny so to speak, as a writer.” Jay MacDonald writes for a living in the wilds of Mississippi.

The ghosts of literary heavyweights are never far from the page in Philip Caputo’s unflinching, dust-swept African odyssey, Acts of Faith. This cautionary tale about a modern-day group of well-intentioned pilots, missionaries and dreamers who attempt to alleviate the suffering in war-torn Sudan covers all the morally rocky ground we love in Melville and Conrad. […]
Fiction

Nick Hornby

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Do you suffer from CCR? Nick Hornby has for years.

Its symptoms include an inability to purge the opening guitar riffs to "Born on the Bayou" and "Fortunate Son" from your head, an irrational fondness for swamp-growled vocals and an involuntary humming of "Bad Moon Rising" with every full moon. Granted, living with CCR—Creedence Clearwater Revival—isn't all that debilitating. Still, when music is as much a part of your life as it is Hornby's, it's best to watch what you listen to, lest more malignant maladies such as Nellymylitis or Coldplay Syndrome get a foothold.

CCR is one of the running jokes in A Long Way Down, Hornby's fourth and most ambitious novel about four very different characters who happen to meet one New Year's Eve up on the roof of Toppers' House, a London apartment building favored for suicides. Standing in line to end it all are Martin, a washed-up morning talk show host whose star plummeted after a fling with an underage girl; Jess, the punk daughter of a government official; Maureen, a single mom chained 24/7 to the care of her severely disabled adult son; and JJ, the CCR-suffering American in London who's lost his band, his girl and his way.

Because each character narrates in turn the odd story of their unlikely friendship, their safe passage through this dark night of the soul and the days that follow is foreseen from the beginning. Along the way, however, we come to know and sympathize with them as they weigh the pros and cons of soldiering on or taking that long last step.

Considering life's biggest questions with great humor is Hornby's A-game. Although dark in subject, A Long Way Down is also downright hilarious and generous of spirit as these troubled souls work their way toward a tenuous truce with their respective demons.

"When I started the book, I could imagine this conversation where they would basically be saying in a rueful way, let's give it another six months," Hornby says by phone from London. "It seemed in lots of ways like a wonderful metaphor for how we all live, without articulating it. We sort of do get by on the basis of, let's give it another six months. There are lots of things that we're presented with that, if we'd known about them in advance, we would have run a mile, but in fact rather remarkably we absorb them into our lives and carry on anyway."

Hornby's own struggles have never been far from the surface of his novels. His 1995 debut, High Fidelity, featured a young man torn between his passions (chiefly rock music and Arsenal soccer) and the tedium of adulthood. His 1998 follow-up, About a Boy, was inspired by the life-altering birth of his first child Danny, who suffers from autism. His third novel, How to Be Good (2002), came out of the breakup of his marriage to Danny's mother. He and his ex still live close to one another in Highbury and trade off nights with Danny, now 12, whose disorder causes frequent sleep interruptions. Hornby donated proceeds from his 2001 literary anthology, Speaking with the Angel, to TreeHouse, a school for autism that Danny attends.

If you sense a certain melancholy undertone in Hornby's otherwise comic novels, it likely stems from his experiences with Danny.

"Yeah, I guess that's probably true," Hornby says. "I think that, as life gets on, it gets more complicated anyway, so I suspect that if it hadn't been Danny, it would have been something else, if you know what I mean, because you start to see that life can be hard for people."

There are pieces of Hornby in each of the four troubled souls who populate A Long Way Down. Through Martin, he explores the hollowness of celebrity; with Jess, he punches holes in the pomposity of the upper crust; in Maureen, he shares the emotional roller coaster of caring for a disabled son. But it's more than rock 'n' roll that ties the New Yorker pop music critic to the American rocker JJ. "With JJ, it's not really the music, it was the fear of never fulfilling my potential, which was with me when I was his age," he says. "I wanted to write about that fear of frustration."

Hornby looks on his present good fortune with humility and gratitude. Had he not broken through to fiction, he "might have remained a journalist on the sidelines or worse, a high school English teacher. I taught for two years in my mid-20s and I think the horror of that experience stays with me every single writing day," he laughs.

Instead, he's a best-selling author, respected music critic and a dad whose demeanor falls somewhere between his two onscreen personas, John Cusack in the film version of High Fidelity and Hugh Grant in About a Boy. "I think my natural personality is to be very gloomy and then make jokes about it," he admits. Though he's pleased with the movie versions of his novels, he has no interest in adapting his own work.

"I've spent three years on a book and then somebody asks you to write it again except leave everything out, it just seems like such an unattractive offer to me," he admits. He's currently at work co-writing an original screenplay with Oscar-winner Emma Thompson (Sense and Sensibility).

Whether his characters are at the end of their adolescence, the end of their marriage or the end of their rope, Hornby treats them all with the one quality he finds essential, in life and in art: mercy.

"I can't do that thing of crushing the reader; I mean, as a reader, I don't want to be crushed. And so many writers seem to think it's their personal duty to strangle all hope and life out of the person who's spending time with them. As I've gotten older, I've more and more come to value art that doesn't do that, whether it's music or cinema or books. I want some mercy."

Jay MacDonald leads a CCR support group in Oxford, Mississippi.

 

Do you suffer from CCR? Nick Hornby has for years. Its symptoms include an inability to purge the opening guitar riffs to "Born on the Bayou" and "Fortunate Son" from your head, an irrational fondness for swamp-growled vocals and an involuntary humming of "Bad Moon Rising" with every full moon. Granted, living with CCR—Creedence Clearwater […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Andrew Vachss

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Andrew Vachss believes there are two versions of the truth in America: what people believe, and what really happened. If you are comfortable with the mainstream version of post-World War II American history, which would have us believe that such tragic events as the murder of Emmett Till and the assassination of John F. Kennedy were the isolated acts of madmen, you may not feel the need for further enlightenment. But if, like Vachss, you’ve experienced a growing suspicion that you have been, and continue to be, spoon-fed a version of the truth fashioned by powerful unseen forces, you’ve probably wondered: is it just me, or is something not quite right here? If you know Vachss (his name rhymes with fax) from his gritty mystery series featuring the enigmatic Zen avenger Burke (Flood, Shella, Down Here, etc.), you know he’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. As a former federal investigator, social services caseworker, director of a maximum-security prison for young offenders and labor organizer, the 62-year-old lawyer has dedicated his life to protecting the powerless, particularly minorities, migrant workers and young people, from the powerful, particularly sexual predators and brain-dead bureaucracies.

In his new novel Two Trains Running, Vachss takes a break from Burke to re-imagine a two-week period in the pivitol year 1959, when, in his estimation, America headed down the wrong track. This isn’t the textbook version of what went down; instead, it’s filled with the kind of speculative alternatives that your uncles may have pondered over beverages on the back porch. It took years to write and a lifetime to wonder about: I’m not saying I have all the answers, Vachss admits by phone from his home in Manhattan, but through my life experiences, I have a lot of questions. The setting: Locke City, a fictional Midwestern mill town under the thumb of longtime boss Royal Beaumont and his gang of mountain men. The times are a-changin’ most disagreeably for old Roy: his hegemony is threatened on all sides by rival Irish and Italian mobs, youth gangs and neo-Nazis preparing for the coming race war. To defend his fiefdom, Beaumont summons Walker Dett, a chillingly efficient killer for hire whose presence in town threatens to ignite a bloodbath of epic proportions.

The historical setting was no accident. I think 1959 was the fulcrum on which everything turned. It was the first time that an election (Kennedy over Nixon) was actually hand delivered. People who were liberals and Democrats kind of wink-wink at that because their guy won, but that’s not the way to do it. It was just as we were leaving the glory days of Eisenhower, just as we were approaching Vietnam and the civil rights explosions, just as England was divesting itself of its empire. I knew this was the fulcrum. The aptly titled Two Trains Running enables Vachss to explore the many dichotomies in America, particularly families (clans, interest groups, security agencies, etc.) that continue to undermine our personal freedoms. Any similarity to the present is strictly intentional. You have a clannishness where obedience to the clan is the highest value, Vachss says. There are people now where, literally, if you question something, you’re told that’s treasonous or that’s disloyal which is antithetical to Americanism, which is all about questioning authority and holding authority accountable. Certain historical mysteries still vex Vachss. Did the FBI foment racial unrest for its own purposes in the 1950s and ’60s? Did the government intentionally spare Al Capone in order to avoid further mythologizing him? Was John Dillinger’s death faked? Did the two men who murdered Emmett Till act alone? If you look around in the headlines over the last year, look at how many cases from that era are all of a sudden being reopened: Emmett Till; Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman; there was a civil rights murder in Tallahassee, Florida, that’s been reopened; there’s one outside of Atlanta. What I really want to do with the book so badly is to have people take another look a harder look rather than just accept what they’ve been told. Vachss found an ingenious technique to embed his suspicions right into the narrative by breaking the book into bite-size chapters, each with a date and military time code. Gradually, the reader comes to wonder who is keeping these detailed logs and why.

The standard third-person narrator wouldn’t work because that narrator is omniscient; that narrator just knows too much. I needed a technique where the reader could actually be the surveyor of what was going on and by listening and watching, learn as opposed to tuning in to someone’s thoughts, he says.

As its title implies, Two Trains Running operates on two separate tracks: I wrote a real fast mover so you can pick this up and read it like a movie and it flies by real quick, lots of action, lots of intrigue. But there’s an undercurrent that it’s my goal to get you to look at. If I succeeded, it’s a book that people will read more than once. The setting may be pre-Starbucks and cell phones, but the commentary is aimed at the state of the nation today. Despite his righteous anger, could Vachss actually be an optimist? You know what? I actually am. But it’s the long-term optimism of someone who says three, four generations from now we might be OK. It’s not like I’m optimistic for the immediate future. Clearly, unless something is done, the Supreme Court is going to shift. Clearly, if that’s done, personal freedoms are going to erode while religious peculiarities are going to be exalted. That’s a frightening thought. We’re like this old horse that knows the way home but it’s not in a hurry. We’re going to get there but boy, it’s not a straight line. Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.

Andrew Vachss believes there are two versions of the truth in America: what people believe, and what really happened. If you are comfortable with the mainstream version of post-World War II American history, which would have us believe that such tragic events as the murder of Emmett Till and the assassination of John F. Kennedy […]
Fiction

Terry McMillan

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Contrary to what her readers insist upon believing, Terry McMillan is not perpetually holed up in some swank Jamaican love crib dreaming up novels while dreadlocked Rasta cabana boys cater to her every whim. If you want to know the truth, this Stella got her groove back years ago and went on with her life in much the same way the rest of us have, ferrying her son Solomon to endless youth soccer matches and worrying about the state of the world.

"I guess everyone was thinking that I was this hotshot jet-setter, this famous author whose books had been turned into films, oh jeepers creepers, and here I am getting up in the morning, taking my kid to school and picking up other kids and I’m at soccer practice twice a week. This is how a jet-set best-selling author lives," she says by phone from her home in the San Francisco Bay area.

McMillan understands how you might have gotten the wrong impression. Although she has only written six novels, two of them, Waiting to Exhale (1992) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), were made into hugely successful motion pictures that perfectly captured the loneliness and longing of the successful African-American woman. Now 53 and going through a messy divorce, McMillan has naturally moved on, even if the quintessential chick flicks her books inspired have trapped her in the curious time warp of their ongoing popularity.

"Waiting to Exhale alone, that was 13 years ago! I mean, my goodness, I was in my 30s and the concerns I had then . . . I mean, those women make me sick! They seem like such whiners, except for one, she says. But the thing was, at that time, there were so many women that I knew, myself included, who looked up and realized, gee whiz, what happened to those husbands we were supposed to be getting? Not only husbands, we didn’t even have dates! Back then, it was kind of important because we were in it, but then it kind of came and went. But they don’t let you forget! My goodness!"

In her new novel, The Interruption of Everything, McMillan meets midlife head-on with the same frank and funny honesty she previously brought to courtship, love and marriage. Marilyn Grimes, 44, wife and mother of three, is a restless empty nester dissatisfied with her suburban California life. She suspects her husband Leon, a drab workaholic engineer, of having an affair; his midlife crisis seems to have come with a new motorcycle instead of a convertible. Her Bible-misquoting, live-in mother-in-law Arthurine and geriatric poodle companion Snuffy are driving her crazy, her own mother Lovey is showing early signs of dementia, and her adopted sister Joy, a drug addict, can’t cope alone raising two kids in Fresno.

It’s a lot to carry for this sandwiched superwoman. What interrupts everything are the initial oh-no symptoms of menopause, followed quickly by news from her doctor that she’s pregnant. When Arthurine begins dating, Joy hits the skids and Leon announces he’s going to Costa Rica to get his groove back, Marilyn learns to exhale and let life help her for a change.

By turns touching and hilarious, The Interruption of Everything is a Left Coast Diary of a Mad Housewife for the baby boom generation.

McMillan didn’t experience a change of life pregnancy, but she certainly remembers when menopause came knocking eight years ago.

"I had gotten food poisoning, it was really, really hot, and a girlfriend of mine said, Terry, I don’t think it’s just food poisoning. It seemed like my vocabulary, I was swearing a lot more to compensate for words I couldn’t remember. I was thinking, wait a minute now, am I old enough for this to be happening? Apparently she was right," she says.

Much of McMillan’s work springs from her own life and her close-knit circle of family and friends who help each other through. " I don’t apologize for that," she admits. "In some ways, critics often want you to. I’m not trying to be Toni Morrison or Katherine Anne Porter or Virginia Woolf. I’m not trying to do anything except tell stories." Perhaps. But beneath the witty repartee and touching moments, McMillan’s stories simmer with a righteous anger at the state of the world today.

"I would say that I write out of frustration. If I were a witch, I would twitch my nose and fix it all and make things easier for all of us. That’s what’s underneath it," she says. Does she agree with Bill Cosby that the black middle class should do more to combat the problems that still plague the African-American community? "He’s probably fed up, she says. I mean, his kid was killed, murdered on the side of a freeway in Los Angeles. Never mind who did it, that’s neither here nor there, but in watching what has happened and not happened to African-American kids, at some point somebody has to be held accountable and responsible for some of this stuff. That’s where he’s coming from as an elder; he’s been watching. I agree with him, if you want to know the truth."

Like the strong, independent women in her novels, McMillan has been one tough but tender mother to Solomon, now a student-athlete at Stanford.

"I told my son growing up, Solomon, when you grow up, mom doesn’t care, it’s OK if you like boys or if you like girls. I don’t care what color they are. But the bottom line is, just don’t let them be dumb. That is my only criteria. If you bring a dumb one in, I’m not going to be as friendly. I’m serious. I said, I don’t think we’re the royal family and we don’t want to mix up the genes, but my goodness, you want something to be able to talk about."

Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

 

Contrary to what her readers insist upon believing, Terry McMillan is not perpetually holed up in some swank Jamaican love crib dreaming up novels while dreadlocked Rasta cabana boys cater to her every whim. If you want to know the truth, this Stella got her groove back years ago and went on with her life […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Robert Hicks

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Some of the best books find their author instead of the other way around. It's as if certain stories, so compelling and brimming with appeal, lie in wait for a writer with the proper voice, temperament and personal experience to come along and bring them to life. Think Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Or Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie. Add to these Robert Hicks' The Widow of the South, a Civil War page-turner that comes out of left field from a Nashville music publisher who couldn't say no to the truth.

The Widow of the South is a fictional account of a real-life figure: Carrie McGavock, whose Tennessee home at Carnton Plantation was commandeered into a field hospital during the bloody Battle of Franklin on Nov. 30, 1864, that left 9,000 dead, 7,000 of them Confederate soldiers. McGavock became an angel of mercy for the wounded that day, but it was only the beginning of her extraordinary tale.

Two years later, when a neighbor prepared to plow up a field that contained the remains of 1,500 Confederate soldiers, an outraged McGavock and her husband John dug up the bodies and re-interred them in their backyard, creating the only privately owned Confederate cemetery. Carrie carefully arranged and recorded the name and regiment of each soldier in her book of the dead, and walked daily among her memories. She was well known as the Widow of the South until her death in 1905, but largely forgotten afterward.

The McGavock family moved on, and the subsequent owners eventually deeded the dilapidated house and cemetery to the Daughters of the Confederacy. The Carnton estate likely would have remained a little-known footnote in Civil War history, had its aging directors not coaxed Hicks, a Franklin resident, into serving on their board in 1987.

"I had to dress in a coat and tie and sit in these board meetings where they talked about buying staples for the stapler or if the director could possibly do what their mama did and fold the corner of the paper over and tear it," Hicks recalls. "But I was falling in love with the place."

Though he didn't know it at the time, Hicks was uniquely qualified to be the unlikely caretaker-designate of Carrie McGavock's strange garden. A son of the South, he spent summers in nearby Hicksville, now an incorporated suburb of Jackson, Tennessee, that bore the family name. His father, who at 46 reinvented himself and went from rags to riches as a cofounder of the Culligan company, used to drive Robert and his brother on road trips through Dixie just to catalog all the towns whose welcome sign included the watchwords, Where the Old South Lives. En route, he would recall similar drives with his own father, who experienced the Civil War as a boy.

"My grandfather would describe fields with all their layering of history," Hicks says. "Yes, this is a cotton field right now, but this is actually where Grant's army came across on their way to Shiloh. He could remember when the Union army came to the house and took all the horses including his pony, and he came out with a little penknife to try to saw the rope off his pony. The union officer gave him back his pony."

Following college in Nashville, Hicks did graduate study in philosophy in Lausanne, Switzerland. Upon his return to Music City, a friend advised him over beers to consider music publishing. "I said, really? What do they do? And he said, I don't know but I think you'd be good at it." He was. In fact, he was already a big fan of country music, a rarity among young people in the late '70s, even in Nashville. He remembers the night in the alley behind the Ryman Auditorium when he found his calling.

"It was Lynn Anderson who made me fall in love with country music. She was there in the alley, beating the tar out of her husband Glenn, and he was beating her back. I think infidelity was one of the themes. And this kid sticks his head out the back door and says, Miss Anderson, you're on in five minutes. And they both stopped, she turned to Glenn and said, help me with my makeup, and 15 minutes later she was on the stage singing 'I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.' I said, you know what? I like these people."

The more Hicks learned about Carrie McGavock, the more he wanted to help lift Carnton out of the waste bin of history. He brought in top experts on period paint, furniture plans, wallpaper and mid-19th-century gardening to restore the home to its glory. By 1996, it dawned on him that all the work would be in vain without an endowment to sustain the home. He had already put what little he knew of McGavock's life into a pamphlet. To share her story with the world would take filling in the blanks with a novel. Hicks limbered up to write The Widow of the South not with Faulkner, but with Pasternak and Tolstoy.

"My first step was to read every Russian novel. It seemed like Russian novels were always about the people Dr. Zhivago, War and Peace. It was always about how these people were tossed about," he says. "What I strive for is about transformation: how people are transformed by each other, by circumstances, by loss or gain." If early buzz pans out, The Widow of the South could do for Carnton what Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did for Savannah. However it fares, Hicks believes the story of Carrie McGavock will live on.

"I am a Southerner and there is always that sense of responsibility," Hicks says. "I don't know if I was destined to do this book but I think that somebody was destined to do it."

 

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.

Some of the best books find their author instead of the other way around. It's as if certain stories, so compelling and brimming with appeal, lie in wait for a writer with the proper voice, temperament and personal experience to come along and bring them to life. Think Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's […]
Children's & YA

Christopher Paolini

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Like Saphira, the gem-scaled, fire-breathing, starter-home-sized dragon of his Inheritance fantasy series, teen publishing phenom Christopher Paolini is exceptionally bright, well spoken, irrepressibly optimistic and possessed of a quick wit that is swift to strike any hint of self-importance from his conversation. Not since Stephen King has the publishing world seen a wunderkind of his like, a rabid reader who, thanks in part to enlightened homeschooling in the idyllic setting of Paradise Valley, Montana, took up writing only after blazing through every fantasy novel in his local library. His journey from rural obscurity to cult hero is every bit as fantastic as the imaginary world of Alagaesia he creates.

"If I wrote a book where what's happened to me happened to a character, no one would believe it," Paolini says by phone. "People would literally say, where's the downside? Where's the conflict? There's nothing bad happening in this story! Fortunately, I've had my parents here to help not only keep the home environment safe and sheltered but also help deal with all the publicity and attention that comes with it."

Put yourself in Christopher's sneakers: he receives his high school degree at 15, passes on college to write his debut, Eragon, and at 18, self-publishes it through his parents' small publishing company. After promoting it at Northwest book fairs, Paolini suddenly receives a magical call from publishing house Knopf, whose best-selling novelist Carl Hiaasen had stumbled upon the book during a fly-fishing trip to Montana and loved it. Faster than you can say "Ahgrat ukmar" (that's Urgal for "It is done"), Eragon is hotter than dragon's breath; it sells 1.5 million copies in North America alone and remains on the New York Times bestseller list for 85 weeks. The film version, starring Djimon Hounsou, John Malkovich and Jeremy Irons, is being shot on location in Budapest for release in 2006.

Knopf has just published Eldest, book two in the Inheritance trilogy, with an announced first printing of 1 million copies, a stratospheric number for a "children's" book. This fall, Paolini, 21, and his 19-year-old sister Angela hit the book-tour road to adventure on their first trip to Europe. Angela, an aspiring screenwriter ("She's actually smarter than me," Paolini humbly allows), helped him invent languages for the dwarves, elves and beast-like Urgals from Old Norse and Teutonic sources. He thanked her by creating a character in her honor, Angela the Herbalist.

Eldest continues the saga of Eragon, a peasant boy whose life is changed forever when he discovers a lost and coveted sapphire-blue dragon egg. In book one, he raised the highly intelligent hatchling, named her Saphira, and began his apprenticeship under the ancient sage Brom to become a Dragon Rider after the forces of evil King Galbatorix destroyed his home and killed his uncle. In Eldest, Eragon travels with major elf babe Arya to Ellesmera, land of the elves, to continue his training as a Dragon Rider, hone his magical skills and overcome his resistance to fighting. Paolini expands the narrative to include Eragon's cousin Roran, whose fiancée Katrina has been nabbed by the evil Galbatorix.

Paolini saves a couple of key revelations until the end of the book, including the appearance of the menacing red dragon on the book's cover and a big surprise concerning Eragon's family tree (hint: it's reflected in the book's title.)

Will Arya continue to spurn Eragon's romantic intentions? Will Roran be reunited with his beloved Katrina? Will the Varden overthrow the brutal Galbatorix? Book three, as yet unnamed, will have all the answers, Paolini assures us.

"That's actually one of the things that truly bugs me as a reader, the fact that so many series drag on and on without achieving a true end. You can't have a good story without a good end," he says.

Like Eragon, Paolini is learning by doing. Editing, a chore he dreads like a Shade (Eragon's very bad adversary), has gone "from intense to more intense" with the second book. "I didn't make the same mistakes as I made in Eragon; I made entirely new mistakes," he admits.

Sudden success has turned Paolini's fantasies into reality. He is routinely mobbed by hundreds of fans at book signings. "You would not believe the things I've signed, pretty much every outer article of clothing you can imagine—coats, hats, socks, shoes," he says. He's been able to meet his literary heroes, including Cornelia Funke (Dragon Rider) and Bruce Coville (Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher). And of course he's been able to continue writing without financial concerns.

So what about his social life?

Christopher cracks up. "What was that phrase you used? Social life? No, the way my life tends to run is, I'm either sitting in my room writing or I'm out on a book tour."

So there's no real-life Arya in his life?

"Well, it is epic fantasy!" he chuckles. "My love interest? Just as writers can write about murder without being a murderer, I'm writing about romance without being a great . . . well, I'm a romantic in the traditional sense, but I'm writing about this without much personal experience. One of the disadvantages of writing a series like this at my age is that it really requires your complete focus. You can't spend too much time going out to bars and whatnot, not that I would want to in any case."

If age has its advantages for a writer, sometimes youth holds the trump card. "I never imagined being a writer. I always imagined myself off fighting monsters with a sword or something. But I can't complain about the results. At least I'm young enough that the odds are I'll be able to finish it before I die."

Jay MacDonald does what he can from rural Mississippi to save the universe.

Like Saphira, the gem-scaled, fire-breathing, starter-home-sized dragon of his Inheritance fantasy series, teen publishing phenom Christopher Paolini is exceptionally bright, well spoken, irrepressibly optimistic and possessed of a quick wit that is swift to strike any hint of self-importance from his conversation. Not since Stephen King has the publishing world seen a wunderkind of his […]
Social Science

John Berendt

Interview by Jay MacDonald

John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels bears a striking resemblance to a certain 1994 nonfiction debut you might have heard of: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Writing about Venice this time around, Berendt reprises so many elements from his runaway bestseller which sold 2.5 million hardcover copies and spent a record four years on the New York Times bestseller list that one might suspect him of pandering to his worldwide following. Of course, had the author truly intended to cash in on his success, he certainly wouldn't have waited a decade to do so; instead, we would have been inundated long ago with the likes of Dawn at a Strip Club on Bourbon Street, Snack Time at the Varsity Drive-In in Atlanta and Twilight at a Convenience Store in Paramus.

Easygoing and gregarious during a conversation from his home in Manhattan, Berendt fills us in on the decade it took him to steep in the atmosphere of Venice and commit what he'd learned to paper. The steeping took more than four years living in Venice 30 percent of the time; the writing dragged on for another five.

"I have to experience them," he admits of his favored locales. "It's not that I'm slow-witted, although maybe I am, but it takes me a while to get into it, to understand the contours of the story and to feel what is to be felt. Then again, when I write, I am a torturously slow writer. What I do is I write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and I don't move on to the next paragraph until I'm reasonably happy with the first one, then when I reach the end of a chapter, I go back and look at the whole thing over again." After completing his media tours for Midnight, an afterglow that lasted two full years, Berendt set about in earnest to find a worthy follow-up project. "I looked at a couple of stories that didn't pan out, so I backed up a little bit and said, let's look at the elements that worked in the first book: number one, remarkable characters; number two: a marvelous sense of place. Savannah was this wonderful, magical place, and I thought, what other place is so terrific? And I thought immediately of Venice." Over the years, Berendt had become quite familiar with Venice. What he could not have foreseen was that three days before his arrival, the famed Fenice (feh-NEE-chay) Opera House would burn to the ground, providing the third element in the equation a true-life mystery to drive the narrative.

Just as Midnight involved the interplay of zany Savannah locals set against the backdrop of a scandalous midnight shooting and subsequent trial, The City of Falling Angels explores equally colorful Venetians as they react to the loss and rebuilding of the city's last opera house, and a trial of the torch men that could only happen in Italy. From the opening line ("Everyone in Venice is acting"), it's clear that Berendt, like Shakespeare, views the world as a stage. The cavalcade of characters that pour forth from these pages is truly impressive Ezra Pound's mistress Olga; the Rat Man who shreds plastic into his bait to simulate the flavor of fast food; special-ops pigeon exterminators; a sleepwalker who dresses in uniforms; a master glassblower who takes inspiration from the Fenice blaze; and sordid and sundry expats who love a place they'll never call home. Life's rich pageant, served with prosciutto, formaggio e prosecco.

If at times these characters seem tangential to the plot, it's by design. As in Midnight, the slow workings of the wheels of justice ultimately give way to the far more interesting eccentricities of the bit players.

"I wasn't really writing about Venice so much as the people who live there," Berendt says. "Maybe it has reached the point where you can't make too many new observations about Venice, but people never wear out; there are always new people, new characters, new stories. I knew I was going to have a fresh look at Venice." Berendt, a cum laude Harvard graduate, already had a successful career behind him as an editor with Esquire and New York magazine when he jumped into book-length nonfiction with Midnight. "I noticed that all my magazine pieces were thrown away in a month or two because that's what you do with magazines, so I've got nothing to show for this. That was really my motivation for writing the book; I wanted to have a calling card when I meet somebody," he recalls.

Throughout the '60s and '70s, he worked with the best of the New Journalists Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Gay Talese and learned from them how to use fiction techniques to create hyper-real nonfiction. "I really just thought that's the only way to write nonfiction," he says. "Whenever I've written nonfiction, I've taken that approach because it came naturally to me." Given that Berendt's favorite fiction writers included Southern literary heroes Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, it was perhaps preordained that this Syracuse, New York, native would craft the bona fide Southern classic of New Journalism in Midnight.

Berendt is well prepared to parry the inevitable question he'll be peppered with as he circles the globe to promote his second book: when will we see a third? "I say to readers, you've got a lot of other things that you should be reading. I'll bring out a book when I'm ready. You don't really need my book, but if you're going to read my next book, I would think you would want it to be the best I can do, so you're just going to have to wait." Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

 

John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels bears a striking resemblance to a certain 1994 nonfiction debut you might have heard of: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Writing about Venice this time around, Berendt reprises so many elements from his runaway bestseller which sold 2.5 million hardcover copies and spent a record […]
Fiction

The Gospel according to Anne Rice

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Anne Rice has spent the past three decades making us believe in the supernatural. Whether she was writing about the vampire Lestat in her 1976 debut Interview with the Vampire, the Mayfair family of witches in The Witching Hour or the X-rated adventures of a libidinous Sleeping Beauty under her nom de erotica A.N. Roquelaure, Rice’s great gift has always been to combine extensive research with an effusive, lyrical prose style to engage us in the human drama of her not-altogether-human collection of souls. But even Rice’s loyal legion of fans may not be prepared for the dramatic sea change her life and work have taken since she embarked on the greatest challenge of her career: a series on the life of Jesus Christ told in his own words.

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is the first installment in a three- or four-part Gospel according to Anne, a labor of love from a reborn Roman Catholic whose return to the church in the mid-1990s brought her personal and career quests to this ancient intersection. While the very idea of an Anne Rice book on Christ may cause whiplash in some readers, it seems a perfectly natural next step to Rice. As she writes in her revealing author’s note: “After all, is Christ Our Lord not the ultimate supernatural hero, the ultimate outsider, the ultimate immortal of all time?” Although Rice is regarded as a shrewd marketer whose book signings once resembled an all-ghouls revue, she was already deeply immersed in the extensive research for this new direction long before Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ or Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code tapped into the public zeitgeist.

“It’s been a gradual life-changing event,” Rice admits by phone from her new home in La Jolla, California. “But the quest for meaning, for trying to find God and wanting to go back to God, I think that runs through all my work from the very beginning.”

In Christ the Lord, a seven-year-old Jesus becomes conscious that he is profoundly different from other boys. He has already experienced the curious sensation of turning clay birds into real ones and reviving the dead. As his family makes its way back from Alexandria to Nazareth, he gathers tidbits of detail about his miraculous birth, which caused great suspicion among the neighbors and placed him on King Herod’s list of undesirables.

Rice credits the Gospel scholarship of John A.T. Robinson, Martin Hengel, N.T. Wright and others with helping her remove the distance between Mary, Joseph and Jesus and what would no doubt have been their large extended family of nomadic carpenters and craftsmen. Within this realistic social setting, we come to know Mary as a distant ancestor of modern soccer moms who are both fiercely protective and a little afraid of their enormous responsibility. Joseph, the patient surrogate father, tries in vain to shelter Jesus from Mary’s brother Cleopas, who is prone to ramble on irresponsibly in his old age. Jesus, meanwhile, slowly grows to understand the terrible beauty of his mission on earth.

Readers may find themselves flipping to the cover to make sure they’re reading an Anne Rice novel; the language here is as spare and unadorned as the biblical landscape it describes. Jesus narrates in the simple, declarative sentences of the four Gospels, which served as the blueprint for the author’s choices.

“I wanted it to sound natural; I didn’t want it to be stilted and pious and remote,” says Rice. “I think we’ve read the story to the point that we don’t feel it. I thought, let me see if I can really, really make people feel it. Let me feel it; let me feel what this was like.”

Rice, who was raised in a strict New Orleans Catholic household, abandoned her faith in 1960 as a college student at Texas Women’s University. “I came of age on that campus and I wanted to read Kierkegaard and Sartre and Camus and all the forbidden texts. I wanted so badly to know what this is all about, and I left, I broke, I lost the faith,” she recalls. “It was a serious, serious emotional and moral crisis.”

Two years later, she met Stan Rice, an atheist poet and painter who shared Anne’s love of art and philosophy. They lived in San Francisco during the ’60s, suffered the loss of their first child (that tragedy informed Interview with the Vampire), and ultimately settled in New Orleans’ Garden District. Rice says her husband understood her return to the church, “but I think he was somewhat mystified.” The couple renewed their marriage vows in St. Mary’s Assumption Church, her childhood parish church. Stan died suddenly of a brain tumor in 2002.

Those who believe in providence may find some in recent events surrounding Anne Rice. Last March, on the very day she handed in her manuscript, Rice left New Orleans and moved to La Jolla, two hours from the home of her novelist son Christopher. “I don’t know to this moment why I got such an overwhelming urge to disrupt everything and go out west,” she says.

Equally fortuitous, Stan’s 300 paintings representing a lifetime of work had been relocated from New Orleans to Dallas, his hometown, just two weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck. “I think if we had lost Stan’s paintings, I would have gone out of my mind,” she says.

With her next installment in the life of Christ well underway, would she ever consider revisiting the vampires that made her a worldwide celebrity?

“I don’t think in the same way, no. I think that once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point.”

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Mississippi.

 

Anne Rice has spent the past three decades making us believe in the supernatural. Whether she was writing about the vampire Lestat in her 1976 debut Interview with the Vampire, the Mayfair family of witches in The Witching Hour or the X-rated adventures of a libidinous Sleeping Beauty under her nom de erotica A.N. Roquelaure, […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Jesse Kellerman

Interview by Jay MacDonald

That the name Jesse Kellerman should suddenly appear on mystery bookshelves seems unsurprising if not preordained. As the sole son and eldest of four children of best-selling novelists Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, 27-year-old Jesse has the pedigree, the academic credentials (B.S. from Harvard, M.F.A. from Brandeis) and the winning combination of self-confidence and self-deprecating humor not only to create memorable fiction in his own right, but also to handle with ease the lofty expectations that come from being one of "those" Kellermans.

"I’ve been fielding that question since I was five," he chuckles by phone from the Manhattan home he shares with wife Gabriella, a third-year medical student at Mount Sinai Hospital. "It’s going to take some time for me to establish who I am. This is something I realized a long, long time ago as unavoidable. I can either accept that this is my birthright or not, but to not accept it is kind of raging against the dying of the light."

Jesse’s mystery debut, Sunstroke, is a quirky noir tale in the Jim Thompson tradition about Gloria Mendez, a middle-aged Los Angeles secretary who has grown dependent over the years on her secret unrequited love for her older boss, Carl, a congenial if clueless toy importer. When Carl fails to return from one of his usual Mexican vacations (authorities claim he died in a fiery car crash), Gloria reluctantly heads south to retrieve his body. In the process, she encounters a handsome young Mexican claiming to be Carl’s son who offers a dramatically different version of her boss’ life. The more she learns about his secret past, the less she trusts Carl, his son or the official version of his death.

While Kellerman adheres to most noir conventions, his kinetic narrative voice separates Sunstroke from the pack. His omniscient storyteller is a sardonic, wisecracking mischief-maker whose droll asides lend real snap and menace to the proceedings, giving the book a playfulness similar to The Usual Suspects or Pulp Fiction.

"To me, drama without comedy is just dead and soulless, and comedy without any sense of gravitas is just idiotic," he says. "So when I’m writing more serious stuff, the way I avoid melodrama is by making sure that my sense of humor comes through."

One might expect the natural heir to the Kellerman franchise to be an avid mystery fan, right? Not quite. Though he admires a handful of mystery writers ("My parents, Elmore Leonard, Ruth Rendell, Jim Thompson"), he rarely reads crime fiction. Instead, Jesse aspires to become that rarest of rare birds, a popular literary writer in the vein of his top five: Vladimir Nabokov, David Mamet, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and John Fowles. In fact, writing crime fiction was not Plan A or even Plan B. He entered Harvard as a film and photography major, then switched to psychology, his father’s discipline, to broaden his experience.

"It’s very important to know other things besides what you write about, otherwise you don’t have anything to say," he says. "We’re living in a solipsistic age, an age of specialization, and making an effort to learn things outside yourself is fast disappearing. It’s hard to get people to listen to and think about things that are not in their immediate environment. That’s scary, to me anyway. The great thing about psychology is that it has something to say about everything, especially the arts. You learn a little bit of everything in that field."

His sophomore year, he waded into playwriting. Although Harvard does not have a theater department per se, its affiliation with the American Repertory Theater proved fruitful; Kellerman won the 2003 Princess Grace Award as the country’s most promising playwright and had his plays produced throughout the United States and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Unfortunately, he also discovered a limitation of the stage: "You can’t make a career in it. It’s really sad to say but nobody makes a living as a playwright," he says.

Novels seemed like a natural next step. After attempting a grand historical novel set 100 years ago in his native Los Angeles (short version: 21 encouraging rejections), Jesse decided to flesh out a true story that his mother-in-law once told him from her days as a lawyer in the Bay Area.

"The message that gets hammered over and over into budding playwrights is structure and story construction and how to unfold things sequentially. That’s actually why I decided to do this as a crime novel, because crime novels have a built-in beginning and end, mystery and solution. It was for the sake of keeping me on track," he says. Whether Jesse will develop a mystery series similar to his mother’s 15-book Pete Decker/Rina Lazarus series or his father’s 19-book Alex Delaware series remains to be seen.

"I’m really resistant to attempts to categorize myself," he says. "I find so many kinds of books interesting, and for that reason, at age 27, I’m not willing to say, here’s what I’m going to do for 50 years. Doesn’t the average American change careers like 12 times or something over their life? This is the great century of indecision, and I at least reserve the right to change genres a couple times. I fully intend to explore other arenas, much to the consternation of everybody in publishing. The writers that I admire tend to be the people who defy categorization."

Whatever course his muse may take him, Jesse is certain that family revelry, not rivalry, will follow.

"I feel like what’s going to happen—and I’m prepared for it—is that there will inevitably be comparisons either in one direction or another: in genetic degradation, Kellerman fails to live up to his parents, or, as I’m sure my parents are waiting to hear, Kellerman surpasses his parents! We’re just laughing about it. They’re certainly not threatened by me. And if I were threatened by them, I would have been a lawyer."

Jay MacDonald writes from Oxford, Mississippi.

 

That the name Jesse Kellerman should suddenly appear on mystery bookshelves seems unsurprising if not preordained. As the sole son and eldest of four children of best-selling novelists Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, 27-year-old Jesse has the pedigree, the academic credentials (B.S. from Harvard, M.F.A. from Brandeis) and the winning combination of self-confidence and self-deprecating humor […]

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