When it comes to the writing process, Peter Cameron is quick to admit, often, he doesn't have a clue. "I'm a very instinctual writer," he says from his clean and cozy West Village apartment in Manhattan. To hear him tell it, his short stories and novels come to him much in the way spirits visit a medium: they're channeled.
His fourth novel to emerge from the subconscious, City of Your Final Destination (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is the tale of a flighty yet appealing 28-year-old graduate student, Omar Razaghi, seeking to write the biography of deceased author Jules Gund. Gund's surviving family—an epigram-spouting brother, a steely widow and the lonely former mistress idling away in Uruguay—won't authorize it. So Omar flies to South American to appeal to them, and as in all of Cameron's fiction, things don't quite turn out as the protagonist plans. Ostensibly an exploration of biography, the novel is actually a funny, intelligent and forgiving look at human relations and their requisite failings.
But one question: why Uruguay?
"It's completely irrational," he says about setting his book in a country he had never visited, much less knew anything about. "I just had this vision of all these people sitting in this room and for some reason I knew it was in Uruguay."
For Cameron, 42, whose books include three story collections—One Way or Another (Harper & Row, 1986), Far-Flung (HarperCollins, 1991), The Half You Don't Know (Penguin Plume, 1997)—and three novels—Leap Year (Harper & Row, 1990), The Weekend (FSG, 1994), Andorra (FSG, 1997)—his fiction usually begins with a specific vision and intellectual conceit that, somehow, after much toil and torment, morph into a narrative. "A lot of my books start out with ambitious intellectual ideas," he says. "This book was going to be about exploring biography. I sort of envisioned that you would see a lot of scenes from Jules Gund's life and how people talked about it and how they got depicted in the biography. Then, as I started writing, that became less interesting than the characters."
Cameron says his approach to fiction often leaves him stranded midway. Guidance eventually comes from his cast, who steer the narrative. But with City of Your Final Destination, the characters weren't talking and indecision held sway. "This is the only book which I abandoned half way through," he says. "I was about to give my advance back and my agent said, 'Don't. Put your ears in a sack and just wait six months and see what happens.' "
He did. And half a year later, his characters, resurrected, finally led Cameron to the story's end.
"I always write more than ends up in my books just trying to figure out what they're about," he says. "The scary thing is that when FSG bought it it a more complicated book. So I felt compelled to make that work longer than I would have if I hadn't already sold it. And then I realized I couldn't. Basically, I had to do what I wanted."
Of course, his agent, Irene Skolnick, and editor, John Glusman, couldn't have been wholly unprepared. Cameron's last novel, Andorra, also set in a country the author knew nothing about, originally involved a prisoner who takes a writing correspondence course, but evolved into a mystery about an American man who moves to the small European republic and meets a series of strange and intriguing people. Yet it seems whatever his book's plots, Cameron's ability to capture the shifting, unpredictable emotions of eccentric, affecting characters is what most attracts readers to his work.
Cameron's talents were first apparent in the 1980s, when he began publishing as a short story writer. The winner of three O. Henry Awards, he was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, under literary editor Linda Asher, and numerous other literary magazines. In 1988, he began a year-long stint churning out serial fiction about Manhattan's romantically impaired for the now defunct '80s weekly, 7 Days, edited by Adam Moss and literary editor Pat Towers, which culminated in his giddy first novel, Leap Year. That was followed by the more serious-minded The Weekend, about two couples of different sexual orientations at the dawn of AIDS, and Andorra, his stylized fantasy of sexual sublimation.
City of Your Final Destination is similar to Cameron's past novels with its baroque characters and astute, frequently comic take on human foibles. One of the more noticeable differences, however, is the inferred blissful conclusion. "My first inclination was not to write a happy ending because that's more with my temperament and writing," he admits. "But then, just as I couldn't resist setting it in Uruguay, I felt like the book needed to end as it did."
Less surprisingly, the temperamentally pessimistic Cameron has only happy things to say about his relationship with FSG, which remained committed to City of Your Final Destination (with an announced first printing of 25,000), despite being completed two years past its initial due date. "John Glusman is wonderful to work with," Cameron says. "When I was still struggling to make the book work in the original way, he tried to help. And when I realized that there was another kind of book that I wanted to write, he didn't make me think that I should be doing something else."
As for the setting of his next book, Cameron has yet to hear his guiding voices, although it will probably be somewhere he's never been. "It helps me to set books in exotic places," he says. "Then I'm not constrained by what I know and I like using my imagination. Writing for me is such an escape. It's much nicer to be living in New York City and writing a book that's set in Uruguay. Then I have these two worlds I'm living in. I mean, what's the fun if you don't have that other place to visit."
