Taking a (First) Novel Approach
-- 8/7/00
New writers of fiction discuss the creation of their forthcoming debuts
 | Among this season's fiction debutants--
titles from Bantam, Crown, Plume and Warner |
Nomi Eve, The Family Orchard Nuala O'Faolain, My Dream of You David Searcy, Ordinary Horror Alan Bennett, The Clothes They Stood Up In Lily Prior, La Cucina Alev Lytle Croutier, The Palace of Tears Vincent Panella, Cutter's Island Amram Ducovny, Coney Ivonne Lamazares, The Sugar Island Stephanie Gertler, Jimmy's Girl Amy Gutman, Equivocal Death Suzanne Glass, TheInterpreter
Nomi Eve
The Family Orchard
Knopf (Oct.)
It's hard to know what to congratulate Nomi Eve on first: the publication of her novel, a multigenerational history based on her family; the impending birth of her first child (due next month); or her new home in Brookline, Mass.
While things are looking good for the 31-year-old novelist, the seven preceding years, when Eve was writing The Family Orchard and trying to make ends meet, weren't always easy. She supported herself with a variety of jobs, including making cappuccinos at a Barnes & Noble in Philadelphia and writing reviews for Publishers Weekly. She also relied on her extended family to put her up as she researched the book both here and in Jerusalem, where much of it is set.
Eve, who grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia and spent her summers in Israel, says that when she was 16, "I thought my father was nuts. He would come home from work and lay out these big family trees on our dining room table and work on them. Then, when I was 22 or 23, I realized his family history was a way in to tell the story I was trying to write."
As a result, she ended up using selections from her father's notebooks covering hundreds of years of family history--verbatim in some instances, in others significantly altered. Her father's contributions, "My Father Writes," are juxtaposed with her own fictional ones, "I Write." Nineteenth-century etchings, which Eve collected from travelogues of the Holy Land, further round out the book.
Part of the reason it took Eve so many years to complete The Family Orchard is that "I write 100 pages before I write one page that anyone sees." The other is what she refers to as it's the book's "idiosyncratic structure. I didn't write it in order. Not only did I jump around between chapters but within chapters. Sometimes I'd work on part 8 or part 2 or part 4, but I could feel the wholeness of it all."
Eve no longer worries about how her family will react to their story being told in fictional form, although she did when the first chapter was excerpted in Glitter Train Stories five years ago. "I was mortified," she recalls, "that my father would see that I had turned his great-great-grandmother into a sex maniac." To her relief, he and the rest of her family have been "incredibly generous and happy about it all."
As for what is real in the book, Eve responds, "Many of the metaphors. There really was a double tree in our orchard, and yet a lot of details along the way are made up and not historically accurate. My goal is to conjure up images."
--Judith Rosen
Sales Tips:"We're just thrilled with this book," enthuses Knopf publicity director Nicholas Latimer. "The last book I felt this way about was Memoirs of a Geisha." Even with the baby, Eve plans to do a 12-city tour, including a stop at the Miami Book Festival. Her husband, mother and cousin have all agreed to help with what they've jokingly dubbed Baby Book Tour 2000. In addition, Knopf will be advertising in newspapers on the East Coast and in San Francisco to support its 100,000-copy first printing.
Nuala O'Faolain
My Dream of You
Riverhead (Feb.)
For someone who confides, "I never set out to write a book," Nuala O'Faolain seems to be making a career of it. When a small Irish press was planning to collect the opinion columns she wrote for the Irish Times, she decided that they needed an introduction. "Then I realized," she says, "these opinions came from my life." The result was the bestselling autobiography, Are You Somebody? (Holt, 1998). "Nobody knew I was doing it, and my Irish publisher nearly collapsed when I showed up with all these words," she says. But they published it anyway, and it went on to become an international bestseller.
After that O'Faolain decided to keep on writing. "There's no deadline as motivating as middle age," she remarks in the refreshingly direct way that made her memoir so popular. "I have loads of ideas in my head that I could only work out as fiction. In Ireland, everybody's so pessimistic. They say, 'Oh, no, you can't do that. If you could, you would have.' So I took a leave of absence from my job and took a room in New York. I couldn't bring my dog, so I got a cat out of a shelter, and I wrote My Dream of You."
In it, O'Faolain weaves together a contemporary love story with a historical one. Set during the Irish Potato Famine, it describes the affair between the wife of a British landowner and an Irish groom, and her subsequent divorce. In the modern half, a 50-year-old woman returns to Ireland for the first time in many years to try to come to terms with her yearning for the salvation she believes can come only from passionate love.
On its most basic level, explains O'Faolain, "The book is about all the things that accumulate in your life and either build up your strength, or destroy it. It's about passion, its pain and its consolation." But writing it was not always easy. "I found journalism extremely difficult to get past," she says, "trying to take an imaginative thing seriously. I'd never written as much as one line of fiction in my life. I spent 20 years as a journalist trying to get the facts."
When she writes fiction, she tells PW, "I'm not interested in art so much as communication. I want to tell a good story. I want people to say, 'Boy, I enjoyed that.' I meet too many young writers who are hung up on art. If I can give pleasure to readers, that's what I want to do." Her other goal is to educate readers about the Famine and its devastating effects. "I genuinely hope that people will learn something," she says.
O'Faolain, who is little given to bragging, will commit only to being "modestly proud of this book." Whether her readers agree, O'Faolain has no regrets. " I've had a most amazing year, and I learned to swim at the age of 50 plus."
--Judith Rosen
Sales Tips:According to Riverhead's co-editorial director Julie Grau, "Nuala set out to write, in her words, 'a ripping great read,' and it's all that and so much more. It bears the hallmarks of her memoir, which was lauded for its wisdom and honesty. I think she will go on, and should go on, to write more novels." Riverhead is backing O'Faoloain's first fiction with an initial print run of 100,000 copies and an author tour. Foreign rights have been sold to six countries.
David Searcy
Ordinary Horror
Viking (Jan.)
David Searcy remembers the exact moment that the idea for his first novel was sparked. "In 1982 I saw this half-page ad in one of those Sunday supplement magazines advertising a peculiar plant that would discourage burrowing rodents in your garden." The 53-year-old Texan adds with relish, "Obviously, it was a natural for some kind of creepy story."
Well dug into a project at the time ("an interminable, self-indulgent, unpublishable nine-year-long essay"), Searcy temporarily set the idea aside. When he finally returned to it in 1989, "it just came forth, like telling a story to my kids at bedtime." Still, Ordinary Horror, which relates what happens when an elderly suburban widower sends away for "Gopherbane" to rid his garden of a burrowing pest, took him four years to write, and even longer to sell. "I have a big file of rejections from various agencies," Searcy admits. He finally got a break when p t and friend Gerald Burns recommended him to Erik Rieselbach, p try editor for Grand Street magazine. "He had read some of the aforementioned essay in another literary journ al, and liked it--God bless him--so I sent him what I had of Ordinary Horror," Searcy recalls. With the added encouragement of Esther Allen, then managing editor of the magazine, an excerpt was printed in 1993 and piqued the interest of several editors and agents.
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Ultimately, however, nothing panned out. Discouraged, he decided to turn his attention to a second novel, Last Things, which was excerpted in Grand Street in 1995 and was almost sold to editor Rebecca Kurson at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Later, Kurson left FSG to join Liza Dawson Associates as an agent and brought Searcy along as a client. In December of last year she sold Ordinary Horror to Michael Millman at Viking.
Searcy, a self-described "late bloomer," started writing in high school ("no prodigy here, I'm afraid, just fake Dylan Thomas p try"), and at Southern Methodist University, he caught the attention of the late Burns, who introduced him to the work of such writers as William Stafford, Theodore R thke and Sylvia Plath, whom he calls "without question the single greatest influence on my writing."
Though he published a few things in various literary magazines, including Southwest Review, "at some point I just sort of stopped writing, and throughout the '70s fell into a long period of drink and relaxation," Searcy says. He stopped drinking in 1980. He's held a variety of jobs over the years ("I'm a bum, actually"), from working for small newspapers in East Texas to designing brochures and battery labels for Interstate Batteries, a company owned by his father (to whom he has dedicated Ordinary Horror).
Now, Searcy writes full-time while caring for his two teenage daughters (he also has a 21-year-old son). And if success was a long time coming, it's just that much sweeter. "It's been a ride, but it's been fun," he says.
--Heather Vogel Frederick
Sales Tips:"I hate to pigeonhole this book," says Viking executive editor Michael Millman, cautiously describing it as "in the gothic vein." He recalls how it came his way after a serendipitous conversation with Esther Allen veered off onto the subject of H.P. Lovecraft. "Esther said, 'Oh, if you're interested in Lovecraft, I've got this wonderful writer I know about.' " When Searcy's manuscript arrived, Millman "read it straight through until 4 a.m." he says. "This is amazing stuff." Comparing Searcy to Shirley Jackson and Flannery O'Connor, he adds, "It's certainly not genre horror, it's literature."
Alan Bennett
The Clothes They Stood Up In
Random House (Jan.)
Who was the last chap to follow up a bestselling debut novel with one more of his SRO stage works? That was last year's coup by Alan Bennett, whose successful 1998 novel, The Clothes They Stood Up In, preceded 1999's hit play, The Lady in the Van, with Maggie Smith in yet another star turn. A Londoner, Bennett is known over here for co-founding the Beyond the Fringe revue in 1960 (at the age of 26; it debuted on Broadway in 1962) and for such screenplays as Prick Up Your Ears and The Madness of King George, which was based on his own play and was nominated for a 1994 Academy Award.
"I'd had this story in mind for ages," says Bennett. "I'd wanted to write it as a play, and I still do. But I couldn't. I decided to write it down as prose as a way to find out what happens." What happens is that Mr. and Mrs. Ransome arrive home from the opera to find that their London home has been robbed and every single thing is missing, even the casserole warming in the oven. Just who are they without possessions? But then, as they begin to cope with a drastically pared-down life, all their trappings are astonishingly returned--with dire consequences.
When Bennett began writing, he initially thought the story would consist of considerable dialogue. "It turned out to have much more description than I'd expected," he muses. "If I may say so, my strength is in dialogue. But there's something about writing prose. Sometimes, especially with television or films, what you see is not what you write. There's a transformation between page and presentation. The joy of prose is that what you write down is what the reader gets. There's no actor to interpose an ego between you and the audience."
Whether working on a stage piece or a narrative, Bennett first writes what he wants, just as he wants to. "My way is to write a script and then give it to a director to see if it will work," he says. "If I were to take an advance, the thing would turn into just a job, and I wouldn't like that. But I have to work. I'm miserable if I don't. I'm always casting about for something to do."
Bennett maintains an array of folders containing ideas that he's had, some that haven't panned out, rather like The Clothes They Stood Up In. "I hadn't planned any more fiction, but now that I've done it once... I've got so many things that have not progressed. It's tempting to go back and think of doing more."
--Robert Dahlin
Sales Tips: The Clothes They Stood Up In is a brief 128 pages, and Random House is distinguishing it as a "short fable" and a fast read to be devoured in one sitting. "It really caught the imagination of British readers, selling 190,000 copies," says senior editor Courtney Hodell. "It's one of those books you glance into and are then riveted by. You realize that change can be waiting for you any day." Pointing to Bennett's stylish prose, she says that the book will appeal to the intellectually curious and to readers with a sense of wit.
Lily Prior
La Cucina
HarperCollins (Jan.)
Food and sex--an irresistible literary combination, as British writer Lily Prior proves again with her story of Rosa Fiore, a spinster librarian living in Palermo, who encounters a mysterious stranger, l'Inglese. As a young girl, Rosa fled her family's Sicilian country estate when her first love, a neighbor boy with Mafia ties, was murdered. In Palermo, Rosa finds an outlet for her thwarted sensuality in concocting delectable dishes in her rented kitchen. Some 25 years pass, until the day that the handsome l'Inglese appears at the library to research Sicilian cuisine. Rosa seizes the opportunity to offer private lessons, and soon a grand passion is kindled--until, one day, l'Inglese vanishes, and Rosa realizes it is time to confront her past.
More playful than Puzo-esque, La Cucina is an unabashed celebration of the delights of the Sicilian countryside and cuisine. "When people read the novel, I want them to smell the herbs and the bread baking, and hear the pigs grunting--I want to appeal to all the senses," says the 33-year-old Prior, an employee of the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace and a former English teacher and human resources manager. The book's myriad mouth-watering descriptions of Rosa's creations are all based on real recipes--like her heroine, Prior is a dedicated amateur chef.
Researching La Cucina's scrupulously authentic settings required several trips to Sicily, a task Prior relished. "I think I must have been Italian in a previous life," she says. "I just love the whole countryside, the culture and the way of life. And then with Sicily, you also have the whole Mafia thing, which is fascinating." Italy's charms are not the only excuse that Prior seizes to venture off the British isle. "I absolutely adore traveling--I can't get enough of it," she says. "Travel is what feeds my imagination." Her husband, Christopher, who works for the British government, serves as her enthusiastic road and kitchen companion--the couple are known among their friends for their feasts.
Prior's literary ambitions date from childhood. "Even when I was really tiny, I used to keep books of observations, where I'd write down things about people--and I still do," she reports. After college, she wrote steadily, "although I wasn't thinking to get published." A turning point was the death of her mother three years ago. "She was also a writer in her spare time," says Prior. "She had just retired from work and started writing her big novel, when suddenly she died of a heart attack. It made me realize the truth of the old cliche, that life is short, and I wanted to take my writing seriously. So in the months after my mother's death, La Cucina was born. It's really for her--in fact, it's dedicated to her."
The novel was written over the course of a year, and then Prior mailed three sample chapters to New York agent Jean Naggar, whom she had read about. Naggar sold the manuscript to HarperCollins within two months. "I love the United States, and I'm really proud to be published there first," says Prior, who hops the pond regularly (the book will be published in Britain next year). "I think La Cucina has elements in it that will appeal to American readers, such as the Italian connection. And food, of course."
--Mallay Charters
Sales Tips: La Cucina was recently optioned by Miramax Films, and will be a BOMC selection; foreign rights have been sold in Holland and Spain. Editor Julia Serebrinsky, who compares the novel to Like Water for Chocolate and Valerie Martin's Italian Fever, reports that reading it "is like taking a weekend trip to Italy--except you don't feel tired afterward."
Alev Lytle Croutier
The Palace of Tears
Delacorte (Nov.)
When screenwriter Alev Lytle Croutier (Tell Me a Riddle) sat down to write her first novel, "it just poured out of me," she says, "like a feature-length film. Without even intending it, it came out like that because I've written so many screenplays. Technically, it is a 120-page script, a minute of film for each page. At the end of 30 pages, you complete the first act, and a plot point occurs; the second act ends at page 90."
Croutier, who founded and ran the small press Mercury House for eight years and now splits her time between Paris and San Francisco, is just completing an international book tour for The Palace of Tears, which came out earlier this summer in Europe and South America. In Greece alone it sold 5000 copies in its first month. Written in English, the novel tells the fictionalized story of how the Turkish-born writer's great-great grandparents--a Frenchman and a Turkish woman--met.
Set at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal, it traces the French vintner Casimir de Chateauneuf's journey to the Orient in search of a woman with mismatched eyes. He has never met her, but has fallen in love with her portrait. While Casimir dreams of her, she dreams of him.
Writing The Palace of Tears, says Croutier, "took me to playing with Eastern and Western traditions. I was influenced by 19th-century travel fiction, especially French travelers who went to the Near East." She read Kipling, Coleridge, Shelley and George Eliot.
Fiction may seem like a departure for Croutier, given the success of her first two books of nonfiction, Harem: The World Behind the Veil, which has been translated into 17 languages, and Taking the Waters. However, the author regards the change as kismet. Back in the early '90s, when she was doing interviews for Harem, "People would say, 'You're a closet fiction writer,' " she recalls. She heeded their words and started writing a novel abouta Turkish silk-making family, only to abandon it and then take it up again recently. Seven Houses will be published in Europe next year, but has not yet been signed for U.S. release.
Having spent her early years doing film work in Asia, Japan and China, Croutier finds that "life takes us to unplanned places. With fiction, I really found my form. It feels like my element." Advance readers such as Isabel Allende agree. She likens the novel to Alessandro Baricco's Silk and One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. "Croutier," Allende notes, "has a voice of her own, soft and p tic, like music in a Turkish garden."
As for what's next, Croutier has already begun researching a third novel set in Istanbul and Paris during the final days of the Ottoman Empire, but she is open to writing in other forms. Like people, she believes that "books have their own fate."
--Judith Rosen
Sales Tips:When Croutier's editor, Kathleen Jayes, first read the manuscript, she was struck by Croutier's use of language. "Alev's prose is gorgeous," she remarks. "It completely transported me to another time." To promote the book, which will appear in a small format for a hardcover, 5"x71/2" Delacorte will run ads in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Although publicity plans are still being finalized, Croutier will definitely make bookstore appearances in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Vincent Panella
Cutter's Island
Academy Chicago (Sept.)
Although Vincent Panella has written five other novels, Cutter's Island: Caesar in Captivity, his fictionalized telling of a true but little-known event--the abduction of 23-year-old Julius Caesar--is the first to reach publication. In 1979, Doubleday released his only other published work, The Other Side: Growing Up Italian in America. "I did keep at it," says Panella, a graduate of the writers' workshop at the University of Iowa and now a 60-year-old writing instructor at the University of Vermont Law School. Citing a lifelong love of ancient history, he discloses, "I keep copies of Homer and Herodotus at my bedside. I came across the story of Caesar's kidnapping by pirates in Plutarch's Lives, and I felt a strange compulsion to tell the story. Most people think of Julius Caesar only as an old man, as someone stabbed 23 times, with a red bloodstain on his toga."
Anita Miller, president and editorial director of Academy Chicago Publishers, acquired Cutter's Island. "When I looked at the first page, it rang of authenticity," she recalls. "The prose has a sort of classic, p tic quality. It is like an epic p m. There is a great complexity to the characters, which d sn't always happen in historical fiction."
Panella lauds his hero's writing. "Caesar was the Hemingway of his time," he notes. "He wrote a clean, simple Latin." Yet Panella made no attempt to emulate that style. "I thought about what sounded like his voice to me, a voice kind of in my own idiom." After testing other techniques, he settled upon a literary device similar to diary entries to unfold the story of Caesar's confinement and revenge. "Plutarch devotes between 300 and 400 words to the kidnapping," Panella estimates. "It's a sketchy account. I kept to the historical part," then elaborated and fabricated.
Miller points out that Cutter, the (entirely fictional) pirate chief who captures young Caesar, is an ex-gladiator. Alluding to the current blockbuster film, The Gladiator, she mentions, "We're not going to say the situation is similar, but it's something people are going to think about."
Panella, however, says, "On a scale between Gladiator and Gibbon, I'm closer to Gibbon. The book is more refined than the movie, but it d s reflect the violence of the times. It was a bloody period." And Cutter has a bloodthirsty side. Originally from what is now Turkey, he was sold into slavery and forced into combat in the Coliseum, where he lost a hand. "That is all my invention," Panella says. "Cutter is small and vicious, with an enduring hatred of Romans. He is the polar opposite of Caesar, and they develop a love/hate relationship."
Regarding the creative process, Panella tells PW, "I am my reader. I throw away what I wouldn't read. What separates writers is what they throw away. Danielle Steel would keep something I wouldn't."
--Charles Hix
Sales Tips:Editor Miller says, "Cutter's Island is like Memoirs of Hadrian [by Marguerite Yourcenar] with a touch of The Gladiator." The publisher intends to promote the novel heavily, and is mailing 1500 bound galleys "to everyone" to get positive buzz going. In Panella words, "It's for people who are interested in history, but there's also news value. It's a story most people don't know about." To handsell, use the hook that Cutter's Island belongs to a rare species--quick-moving yet literary historical fiction.
Amram Ducovny
Coney
Overlook (Sept.)
About 10 years ago, after writing a travel piece about Coney Island in the 1930s, Amram Ducovny found the perfect setting for the novel he'd always dreamed of writing, which is a coming-of-age tale centered on an enterprising 15-year-old named Harry Catzker. "I wanted to write about three disparate communities that lived together in Coney Island at that time and how they interacted. One was the Yiddish intellectuals; two was the freaks who worked in the sideshows; and three was the gangster element, which has always been in Coney Island."
"On another level, the novel begins in January and ends in September. I conceived of it as the world coming to full term in 1939, and giving birth to a world that is completely different from what was before."
The 72-year-old author, who has written several nonfiction books and a Broadway play, found fiction writing a bit of a challenge. "I had to break some habits--such as being a slave to facts and generally reigning in my imagination. After a while, that was liberating, because I was the encyclopedia and I was the dictionary, rather than any outside entity."
Ducovny isn't surprised that his last name brings to mind his son, X-Files actor David Duchovny. But he is unwilling to take advantage of the family connection to promote his first novel. There's no mention of it on his book jacket or in his author bio. "I'm proud of him and I'm very happy for him, but somehow, I don't think it would be appropriate to use his name."
As to the different spellings--he dropped the "h"--Ducovny explains, "It was a reaction after the army. I got too tired of spending time between the molars of army first sergeants, when they would mispronounce it"--he then demonstrates a garbled, guttural mouthful--"and I'd raise my hand and say, 'Yo, I'm here.' "
Ducovny, retired, now lives in France. "I find the environment absolutely wonderful for writing. I walk out in the streets; the architecture really feeds me. It's really a treat for the eyes." As for his language fluency, the author comments, "I speak what I call a 'personal French.' I understand what I'm saying, but I don't understand if the French understand what I'm saying."
As for his next writing project, Ducovny's editor surprised him with an idea when she finished reading his book. "Tracy Carns wondered what happened to Harry after the book ended. It d s end with many questions about the kid, but for me, it was a done thing. I thought about it and thought about it, and thought about it some more. It hadn't occurred to me to write a sequel, but now I'm halfway through a first draft, which picks up one second after Coney ends."
--Hilary S. Kayle
Sales Tips:Publishing director Tracy Carns feels Ducovny's work is reminiscent of Isaac Bashevis Singer and E.L. Doctorow in its depiction of old New York and the immigrant experience: "Amram Ducovny evokes an incredible atmosphere of Coney Island in the '30s. It is also a tragicomic novel with a dark side." Although the association with his famous son isn't being ignored, Carns believes, "The book has great integrity and stands on its own. We're really optimistic about it. The first printing is 30,000, which, for a literary novel from a small house, is rather large."
Ivonne Lamazares
The Sugar Island
Houghton Mifflin (Sept.)
Lamazares, a Cuban-American who came to this country via Spain at the age of 14, was drawn to write about a Cuban teenager who felt conflicted about leaving her homeland. "What propelled me to write this novel was this exodus that has been going on from Cuba for 40 years. There were all these people leaving on rafts, on any floating device that they could find, many of them drowning in the attempt. I did not leave Cuba this way, so it just completely fascinated me. And then, as I began writing, I zer d in specifically on the consciousness of a child, and what a child would feel who is old enough to understand the risk and the danger. What would it be like being told by a parent, 'We're doing this'? The conflict just developed from there."
Around the time that the Elian Gonzales story was at its most controversial, her editor, Janet Silver, was talking up the book at sales conference. Lamazares realizes that the headlines about Elian's controversial journey to the U.S. will draw people to make comparisons with her novel. "My book is about people who are deciding to leave Cuba on a raft. But it d s not explore the Elian situation in any way, so comparisons would be misleading. Yet his story gives the reader a certain context. I think it will be good for my book in the sense that people are aware that this happened."
The focal point of Lamazares's novel is the contentious relationship between 14-year-old Tanya and her mother, a former rebel who later becomes obsessed with leaving Cuba. The author's mother died from bone cancer when Lamazares was three, which compelled her to examine a conflicted mother-daughter relationship. "I suppose it interested me because it's an elusive thing in my life in that I have not had a mother. And it was important for me in some way to explore that kind of relationship, to explore the feelings."
Lamazares now lives in South Miami with her husband, the p t Steve Kronen, and her daughter. The young girl who learned English by singing along with top-40 songs now teaches literature at Miami-Dade Community College. The completion of her first novel has given her closure about her childhood home. "I was trying to explore some of the feelings that I had growing up in Cuba in the late '60s and early '70s--not necessarily the events that happened to me, but just some of the realities that I observed. I had a lot of memories and I wanted somehow to draw on those for the story. And for the first time, I'm thinking that I want to visit Cuba, and that's new. I guess I'm done with the past, and now I'm curious about the present."
--Hilary S. Kayle
Sales Tips:Early literary praise from Russell Banks, Mary Morris and Bob Shacochis bolsters Silver's contention that Lamazares is "a really extraordinary new young voice in Latino fiction. Comparisons with Julia Alvarez or Cristina Garcia are inevitable, but I wouldn't ghettoize her in that way. She's a writer with a very unique voice, not only because of where she comes from, but also because she speaks so eloquently and powerfully, with such a spare style." Foreign rights have already been sold in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.
Stephanie Gertler
Jimmy's Girl
Dutton (Feb.)
"I've never met anybody who d sn't remember their first love," says Stephanie Gertler, who tapped into those universal memories for her first novel. Alternately told from a woman's and a man's perspective, Jimmy's Girl traces the bittersweet reunion of a couple, now in their 40s, who pledged eternal love as teenagers, but eventually went their separate ways when the romance soured.
"As the years go by and you're married with children, that 'what if?' is a question that always looms over you," Gertler explains. "You romanticize and fantasize, and remember that feeling when your heart opened up for the first time."
A columnist for the Stamford (Conn.) Advocate who also has an essay in August's Family Circle magazine, Gertler is no stranger to the printed word. She majored in journalism and minored in English at NYU, and in the decades since has worked for numerous newspapers and magazines. About three years ago, she approached Marcy Posner of the William Morris Agency with a collection of her newspaper columns, to see if they might warrant a book. "Marcy said, 'These are great, but no one knows who you are. Why don't you write a novel?' I said, 'I can't write a novel!'"
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But that's exactly what Gertler went home and did, working between midnight and 4 a.m. for 15 months, the only time she could squeeze out of a day filled with deadlines and family demands (she's the mother of three teenagers). As part of her research for Jimmy's Girl, whose flashback sequences take place during the '60s, Gertler says she played a lot of music from the era and called friends from high school, both men and women. "I wanted to jog their memories a bit, but they ended up jogging mine," she says. "Everything came back to me--right down to the Dr. Scholl's sandals I used to wear!"
Citing such favorite authors as Anne Frank, Anna Quindlen, Sue Miller and Jodi Picoult ("Harvesting the Heart is one of the best books I've ever read"), Gertler says she also recalls what a local octogenarian once told her during an interview, when he said, "The best stories are big stories about little people."
"I think that's why all these writers have had such an influence on me," she notes. "We all have a common denominator--we all have the need to tell our stories honestly, and write from what we know." When she finished Jimmy's Girl, Gertler approached Posner again, who took her on as a client and quickly sold the book to Dutton.
"I'm still pinching myself," Gertler says, admitting that she finds the prospect of publication "a little scary." Unlike a magazine article, which is "so clearly nonfiction," or even her first-person column ("very open and honest"), somehow publishing a novel "is different," she says. "You're just a little more out there. But like with first love, it's a good kind of scary."
--Heather Vogel Frederick
Sales Tips:"Stephanie is a real talent," says Dutton president Carole Baron. "This could be just another high-concept book about somebody going back to find their first love, but because of the intelligence that drives it and because she's such a good storyteller, it should appeal to a wide audience." In fact, says Baron, as she was telling one of her salespeople about the book, "all of a sudden he launched into a story about his first girlfriend when he was 17. So we've come up with a contest asking our salespeople to e-mail us their first love story. The winner gets a romantic dinner for two"--she pauses for a second, then adds with a laugh, "preferably with their current spouse."
Amy Gutman
Equivocal Death
Little, Brown (Jan.)
The prestigious law firm portrayed by Amy Gutman in her thriller Equivocal Death may be more L.A. Law than The Practice, but the murder of a partner differentiates it from either show. So d s Gutman's sympathetic protagonist, Kate Paine, a 20-something Harvard grad whose reaction to her exalted law environment is as much bafflement as it is awe. How can a job be so exciting, Kate wonders, and yet exact such a high price from a person's soul?
Gutman, a Harvard Law School grad herself, delivers her novel with the authority of one who has been there--"minus the violent death scenarios," she says. She put in hard time at the very sort of white-sh law firm she writes about. "If you had asked me if I would go to a big prominent law firm in New York to practice law, I wouldn't have guessed that I'd make that choice," says Gutman, who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side and gives her age as "older than Ally McBeal but younger than Caroline Kennedy." A native of Indiana, Gutman had taken time off after graduating from college (also Harvard) to live in the South and practice journalism. "I did not have a clear sense of what I'd write in fiction," she says. "Newspaper reporting worked for me." After a two-year stint covering the education beat in Tennessee and Mississippi, Gutman went back to law school, emerging at the end with a plum of a job offer by a giant New York firm. She only lasted a couple of years, however. "Big law firms are really suited for some people. The trick is knowing if it's you," she says. "There were these incredibly talented people at this firm and it was clear how many options they had, but those screws would come down and people wouldn't perceive options. I am hoping my book will provide a perspective on that."
Gutman moved to a more intimate law boutique, where she was immediately sucked in by an engrossing new case, a lawsuit concerning the authorship of the musical Rent. She stayed until the trial was over and her client, the family of author Jonathan Larson, had won. Meanwhile, she says, reading through Larson's notes was inspiring, and fueled her determination to write the novel that had by then been percolating in her head for several years.
"I read a lot of thrillers while I was practicing law," she says. "I felt like it was a really good fit. And the potential to make money was there. That was important to me." Mary Higgins Clark was a big influence. "I use the multiple viewpoint structure that she uses." Gutman considers her book not just a classic thriller, but also a coming-of-age story. "The book started with a metaphor," she explains. "Murder as a metaphor for a way of life that's not an authentic way of life. So many people are so invested in an institution or a job or other people their life isn't meaningful in the way it should be. Some people who aren't happy with their choices or where they are in their lives can use the book to learn from. And certainly to be entertained by."
--Suzanne Mantell
Sales Tips:Little, Brown is pitching Gutman as a "female Grisham," says editor Judy Clain. The house bought Equivocal Death at auction "for not a huge sum," but has moved the title to the front of its list on the strength of major in-house support. "It's become a very big book for us," she says. "Airports are ordering copies. All signs are of having it work in a really big way. Amy is a wonderful storyteller, and she knows how to get you to want to turn the page. She's got a real heart, and her character has a real soul."
Suzanne Glass
TheInterpreter
Steerforth (Feb.)
To say that words are Suzanne Glass's life is not an overstatement. The London-based, Edinburgh-born novelist and freelance journalist speaks seven languages, and worked for five years as a simultaneous interpreter. "Words were always my thing," says the 37-year-old Glass. "I started talking when I was seven months old. My mother thought she had given birth to an alien."
The interpreter in Glass's first novel is Dominique Green, a young Brit working at a medical conference in New York City who overhears news of a breakthrough AIDS treatment. For interpreters, the confidentiality of what they translate is as sacred as "a nun's marriage to Jesus"; however, Dominique's closest friend, Mischa, is dying from the disease. As Dominique wrestles with what to do, she meets--and falls in love with--Nicholas Manzini, a medical researcher, an event that will have life-changing repercussions for them both.
Glass, whose lyrical voice alternates between the viewpoints of the two lovers in her book, garnered kudos for her gripping story and gritty portrayal of the interpreting profession's pressures when the novel was published last year by Random House U.K. Glass reports that her own experience of the interpreting world was "not dissimilar" to Dominique's--"all the incidents were fabricated, but the stresses of being an interpreter, the mental gymnastics involved, were drawn from life."
"And to answer your next question," she continues with a chuckle, "No, the book is not an autobiography, though there are autobiographical elements--the professional, not the personal ones."
Glass switched from interpreting to journalism after taking a broadcasting course at London's City University. She has worked as a journalist for the past seven years, and regularly contributes a lifestyle column to the Financial Times. She hatched the plot for The Interpreter three years ago, on a stroll through the park "on a freezing winter's morning" with her father. "By the time we'd walked around the park a couple of times, we had written the story out loud," she recalls.
At the time, Glass didn't do more than write the first chapter; then she "stuck it in a drawer, and got on with my life." A chance remark to a magazine editor, however, resulted in a mention of the work in progress in an article's contributor's note, which in turn elicited a letter of interest from London agent A.P. Watt. "I literally stood and breathed down her neck while she read the chapter," recalls Glass of her first meeting with her future agent. When the agent expressed enthusiasm, Glass dashed off six more chapters, and landed a two-book deal in the subsequent auction. "It was like a fairy tale," she says of her serendipitous launch.
The Interpreter was published by McArthur and Company in Canada in the spring of 2000, and will be published in Germany in 2001. Glass is at work on a second novel, set in Chicago, which she characterizes as "a love story between two artists." So what, if anything, d s Glass miss about being an interpreter? "I miss juggling words like balls, because it's a very different skill from the skill of being a writer--and I sometimes miss the adrenaline rush. I don't miss the stress."
--Mallay Charters
Sales Tips:"The real focus of our marketing campaign is to try to get advance word of mouth through the booksellers," says Steerforth publisher Chip Fleischer. A thousand reader's copies will be available through the Publishers Group West sales force at the regional trade shows and through the ABA's Booksense program, and Glass will sign books at NEBA.
Civil War Redux  | Wartime settings,
from S&S and Broadway |
As the Civil War draws to a close, an escaped slave who has become a hero in the Northern army returns to his home plantation to free his family in Allen B. Ballard's Where I'm Bound (Simon & Schuster, Oct.). "I teach the Civil War at a graduate level," says Ballard, whose classroom is at SUNY-Albany. "I started thinking about this novel six or seven years back, but I was galvanized three years ago when Shelby Foote gave a talk here at the university that included remarks about General Forrest." A Confederate officer, Forrest captured a Mississippi fort where black Union soldiers were murdered in cold blood after the surrender. Ballard chose as his hero a real black soldier, a scout for a Northern regiment in Mississippi.
After having published two nonfiction titles, The Education of Black Folk and One More Day's Journey, Ballard admits that the novel was a bit more difficult. "But I enjoyed writing it because I like to preach," he jokes. "With fiction, it's different because you're not explaining things to people, you're making them feel." A fan of action fiction, C.S. Forester and Louis L'Amour, Ballard feels that interest in the Civil War remains high "because it's alive. This whole flag controversy [in S.C.] is part of it. I hope when people finish my book, they'll have a better sense of how African-Americans feel about the war and why black people still get angry about that flag."
About seven years ago, Chris Adrian started a novel about a man playing a doctor on a soap opera. Now a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a medical resident in Virginia, Adrian morphed the book over the years into Gob's Grief (Broadway, Jan.). A son of 19th-century feminist Virginia Woodhull, the titular hero studies medicine in New York City and attempts to invent a machine that will bring his brother, killed in the Civil War, back to life. "I threw out what I was writing several times," says Adrian. "The only thing remaining the same is the title." He's not a Civil War buff, but after his attention had been drawn to Woodhull, he immersed himself in historical research, spending days on end at the Library of Congress and on southern battlefields. "It's either completely historically accurate or it's ridiculously made-up," says Adrian. "Some people believe they're in touch with the dead." In the first of the book's three sections, Walt Whitman thinks he hears the voice of the boy with whom he fell in love. But d s Gob's invention perform as intended? "There is a machine," says Adrian, "but I won't tell you if it works or not."
--Robert Dahlin
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Presidential Politics  | | D.C. doings, from Acropolis and Pocket |
I came across The Incumbent about a year ago," says Pocket Books senior editor George Lucas of this September hardcover. "It struck me that the timing was good." Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory, who covered the 1996 presidential campaign, the later fund- raising scandals and that small matter involving Monica Lewinsky, now imagines an assassination attempt on a president running for reelection. After being caught in the crossfire, journalist Jack Flynn tries to find out why.
"I read a lot of thrillers," says Lucas, "but in the end, so many don't pay off. This has a great ending. The central character is a journalist not unlike Brian. He has a wry sensibility and an interesting back-story. You're on his side." As for the villains, Lucas says, "There are a lot of suspects: the president's own party, the opposing party, right-wing militias. The president is a John McCain sort of figure. He's a Republican, but he causes a ruckus when he announces that he's pro-choice." McGrory has said that his own favorite writers include Nelson DeMille, Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. "As a newspaper reporter, you are wedded to facts, usually presented in something of a time rush," he remarks. "I wanted to explore fiction, to create my own characters and scenarios and have the luxury of time."
Arthur D. Robbins conjures up newspaper reporter Jeremiah Greenfield in the satirically edged Greenfield for President (Acropolis Books, Sept.). A practicing New York psychologist with doctorates in both psychology and French and Romance philology, Robbins says, "I was in a debilitating marriage for 16 years, and when I left, I had to decide how to reconstitute myself. I thought, why not write a novel?" Having dabbled with fiction on and off for years, Robbins was riveted by events a decade ago. "A certain president was presiding over an invasion of Iraq, and those senseless deaths were very upsetting to me," he says. Giving the novel its contours, Jeremiah Greenfield, a natural liar who grabs fame by giving readers what they want to hear, is offered a candidacy by CRAP--the Committee to Resurrect the American Presidency. "There's a lot of humor in the book," says Robbins, "but it also deals with very serious subjects. I call myself a democrat, with a small d. The book's issue is about our democracy, how it is and isn't working. These candidates today are all promoted and staged, and we, the voters, are supposed to take them seriously." As Greenfield sees the light and begins telling the truth, Robbins even suggests a new path for democracy. He concludes, "The campaign slogan is: 'No More Lies.'"
--Robert Dahlin
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Crossing the Border  | | Two auspicious Canadian debuts |
Our neighbor to the north is generous with its exports. Among the latest are a pair of debuting novelists recently published to rousing success up there, Bonnie Burnard and Elizabeth Hay. The former is the author of A Good House (Holt, Sept.), which PW in a starred review called "a deeply moving story of the truths of family life." The latter gives us A Student of Weather (Counterpoint, Feb.), of which, in a starred review, Quill & Quire stated, "it's nearly impossible not to gobble the book whole, even when you want to savour every bite."
"A Good House is a traditional multifamily story," says Holt executive editor Jennifer Barth. "It's a book about real life, about decency and human dignity." Beginning in 1949 in Ontario, the narrative follows three generations of the Chambers family over half a century, as history and personal decisions shape their destiny in unanticipated ways. "It's the antithesis of what's happening in a lot of fiction today," says Barth. "It's not about a dysfunctional family."
The Chamberses are not of interest only to Canadians, she says, adding, "This could be a novel set anywhere." Barth remarks that readers who appreciate the work of Alice Munro and Michael Cunningham will be drawn to A Good House. "It sold over 50,000 copies in Canada," she notes. "People were buying two and three copies to give to members of their own families." As if that weren't enough, A Good House won the 1999 Giller Prize, Canada's prestigious literary award.
Since A Student of Weather was published in Canada in April, it has gone through three printings, reports Dawn Seferian, Counterpoint senior editor. It begins in 1938 Saskatchewan, when a disarming young man appears out of a blizzard and becomes a fatal factor in the troubled relationship between two sisters. The atmosphere is also strained by their struggle with the Great Depression while living on a farm with their widowed father. As in A Good House, the decades pass, and the girls' lives play out as dramatic events unfold. Betrayals, suicide, car accidents and the abandonment of a child all figure in the plot that moves from Saskatchewan to Ottawa and then to New York City in the 1970s. Hay, incidentally, was born in Ontario, worked as a journalist in Canada and Mexico, and taught writing for several years at New York University before moving back to Canada. "Elizabeth is such a good writer," declares Seferian. "I'm a sucker for stories about the Dustbowl and about a rivalry like this between sisters." Gauging the market, she says, "We're trying to target readers who like Alice Munro. A Student of Weather also has an affinity with the work of Margot Livsey and even Annie Proulx."
--Robert Dahlin
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