Earlier this fall, Adam Haslett confessed at the NEIBA trade show that he hadn't been able to work up a few short sentences for an elevator pitch to describe his debut novel, Union Atlantic (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, Feb.), which takes its name from a fictional megabank that's too big to fail. His 2002 short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here (also Doubleday/Talese), offered sensitive portraits of people navigating daily life, frequently under the burden of depression or loss, and was a finalist for both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award.
Fast forward, and Haslett, 38, admits over lunch at a bistro near his Brooklyn digs to still not having a short handle for the novel, which tackles large themes like banking, militarism, and environmentalism following 9/11.
“It's a book about the moral climate in America over the last decade,” he begins, then trails off. “My other strategy is to begin describing the characters,” which is the same technique he uses in his writing: “I like to put a character into a place where they contemplate something,” Haslett says. “That's how I get a sense of them.” In Union Atlantic that meant creating stories for Charlotte, a retired school teacher, whose dogs speak to her in the words of Cotton Mather and Malcolm X; an angry young banker, Doug, who builds a McMansion next door to Charlotte's falling-down home, on tree-covered land originally deeded to the town by her father but then sold to Doug; Charlotte's brother, Henry, who heads the New York Federal Reserve; a gay high school senior, Nate, who has a crush on Doug; and Jeffrey Holland, Doug's boss at Union Atlantic.
Haslett's approach adds layers of meaning to a book that reads on its most basic level as a “ripped-from-the-headlines” tale of the banking crisis. Haslett shows how finance is interconnected with the military by bookending the story with a prologue set during the first Gulf War, when the guided missile cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes shot down a civilian Iranian airliner, and a final chapter that takes place during the current Iraq conflict. Much of the action concerns Doug's efforts to bend the rules, in the Gulf, at Union Atlantic, and in the building of his home, which leads to a legal battle with Charlotte that pulls all the elements of the book together. Rather than a case of old money (Charlotte) versus new (Doug), Haslett describes the situation as “a kind of male anger, and [a] liberalist view that is being crushed. Consciously or unconsciously, I wanted to dramatize that conflict in one fight over one piece of land.” It's a piece of land he knows well: Charlotte's house is based on the house Haslett grew up in, and the story is set in the fictional town of Finden, Mass., a hybrid of Wellesley and Kingston, where he and his family lived.
Despite glowing advance blurbs from writers like Malcolm Gladwell and foreign sales to 10 publishers, Haslett says he worries “people will think I whipped out a novel about the banks and the Fed. It could be seen as taking advantage.” In fact, the book took a long time to write, in large part because, he says, “I was teaching myself how to write a novel. The long form intimidated me. There's a certain hubris in writing something so long.”
Haslett began with a character sketch of Henry a decade ago, while at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He put it aside for five years, graduated from Iowa and then Yale Law School, which he attended in case creative writing didn't work out. He clerked during summers but never took the bar. A Norman Mailer quote was the original inspiration for the book: “We have a lot of fiction about the underdog and the alienated, but we have fewer fictional representations of the powerful.” A friend gave Haslett a copy of William Greider's 1987 bestseller, The Secrets of the Temple, and reading it cemented his decision to write about the powerful rather than the Willy Lomans of this world. But Haslett says he also wanted to create a story with the scope of a 19th-century novel. As to his prescience in choosing to write about banking, he responds, “When I finished the draft of the book and saw the headlines about the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I had an out-of-body experience. It was like being both scooped and validated by events.”
For the past six months, Haslett's been working on essays for magazines. There's a short story about to be published, and he's playing with characters that could become a novel. As for that elevator speech, he may need to perfect it soon. Doubleday is planning to send him on a 12-city tour, up from the seven cities announced earlier in the year.
