What inspires an author to write a certain type of fiction? Emily St. John Mandel (one of Patrick’s favorite authors with a podcast to prove it, and author of Last Night in Montreal) is back at Vroman’s this Thursday, May 6th, with her new book, The Singer’s Gun. The LA Times gave it an excellent review, and of course goodreads is loving it. The book is on shelves today, and in celebration, Emily has graciously taken the time to write an untitled piece you will only find on the Vroman’s blog. The subject was noir, and the loose topic was ‘why do you write it?’ She very conveniently provided me with a post in two parts, so to heighten the suspense (and anticipation for the event!), you only get the first part today. Keep your eyes peeled for part two…

Untitled

Emily St. John Mandel

1.

I have a weakness for noir. This is probably apparent to anyone who’s read my work—one of the major characters in my first novel, Last Night in Montreal, is a private detective; the title of my second novel, The Singer’s Gun, refers to a Beretta stolen from a lounge singer. I like fedoras and fast writing, books driven in equal measure by plot and sheer atmosphere.

There’s something about California that’s oddly conducive to the genre. It’s partly the staggering beauty of the landscape; all beautiful landscapes suggest vaguely sinister undercurrents, to me at least, and I think that part of the appeal of noir lies in the tension between beauty and brutality. What I find in any discussion of California noir is that all roads lead to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and I’ve spent a great deal of time in the landscape of that film; my father grew up in a town just north of Los Angeles, a district of orange and lemon orchards and backroom deals for water rights.

My father’s hometown has appeared in countless movies. The chances are good that you’ve seen it on TV. The town’s appeal as a film set is understandable; it’s beautiful, a few bright streets surrounded by orange orchards and hills, and it has the kind of classic 1920s-era Main Street that can stand in for any Main Street, in any idyllic small town, in any climate where palm trees grow. I was last there a decade ago, visiting my father—he’d moved back temporarily to look after my grandmother—and the place was changing so rapidly that he said he hardly recognized it. The region was awash in drugs. There were rumors of small planes flying in laden with narcotics to a local private airstrip; rumors of gangs fighting over the territory. The local teenagers were addicted to unsettling substances. Even the landscape was changing: the orange orchards were dying, allowed to go unwatered after the land was bought by developers. It was easy to come away with the impression that this town with the movie-set streets was slipping—turning into its own dark shadow, a kind of inversion of itself.

A set-up for a noir film or novel if ever there was one. But most of Chinatown takes place in Los Angeles, and I’ve always been drawn most strongly to cities, both in life and in fiction. I’m attracted to the literature of hotels and blind alleyways, nightclubs and urban corruption. “It is not a fragrant world,” Raymond Chandler wrote in a 1944 essay for The Atlantic Monthly, “but it is the world you live in.”

I recently started working on a novel about an Iranian-American family living in Southern California. Come to think of it, they have a lot in common with my own family: middle class, suburban, struggling with issues of identity and assimilation. But, you know – with a few laughs thrown in.

It’s a bit of a pipe dream, of course – with little formal training and few signs that I have enough talent to pull it off, the chances of my authoring the Next Great American Novel are slim to none. But, rather than worry about the poor odds any writer has of getting published, or even about my specific weaknesses as a writer (and, believe me, I have many), I’ve spent most of my time lately worrying about market saturation.

In other words, what I’m worried about more than anything is this: does anyone really want to read yet another book about Iranians?

I blame Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, the book that started the whole Iranian memoir-and-novel trend. Thanks to Nafisi, every book club-attending soccer mom in America woke up one morning in 2003 and decided that my peeps were absolutely fascinating.

There must have been Iranian-American authors before Reading Lolita, but I’d certainly never heard of any. Publishers clearly weren’t hip to the sales potential of these books – or perhaps the market just wasn’t ready for them in those pre-Axis of Evil days. I do  remember one really lovely memoir called To See and See Again by a young writer named Tara Bahrampour. It pre-dated Nafisi’s book by a few years – and got no attention whatsoever. I only heard about it myself because my great-aunt happened to know one of the author’s distant relatives.

Nowadays, however, you can hardly walk into a bookstore without seeing at least one memoir or novel by an Iranian-American. And I’ve noticed that these books have a few things in common, namely:

1. They’re mostly set during the late 70s and early 80s, around the time of the Islamic Revolution;

2. They often have words like saffron or pomegranate in the title;

3. They have jacket copy that describes them as being “heart-breaking” stories of “survival,” or else “moving” tales about the “endurance” of the “human spirit”; and

4. They are extremely likely to be Recommended for Book Clubs.

I’ve read a lot of these books, and many of them were good. The Septembers of Shiraz, for instance, was just lovely. But, despite this – or perhaps because of this – I am reluctant to give the world yet another story about Iranians. I mean, the American public has a short attention span – Iranians are hot right now, but I can’t help wondering when the trend is going to die out. Next year, there may well be another trendy nationality: Iraqis, maybe. Or Tibetans. Or…I don’t know – the Bhutanese? Anything is possible.

This is why, while being “brown” seems like a big boon for a writer at this particular juncture, I think it’s probably a double-edged sword. I mean, I can’t help but notice that white authors don’t have to think about this. I mean, I don’t see Marilynne Robinson worrying that no one will want to read yet another book about Midwestern WASPs. But, despite our best intentions, I think most of us have a unconscious assumption that one ethnic/immigrant experience is basically the same as another. I mean, imagine if a new novel were published about the Dominican-American experience. Everyone would immediately compare it to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. What if there were three or four such novels? Or ten? Or twelve? At some point, publishers, and perhaps readers, would start to feel that there were too many books about being Dominican. But could you imagine that kind of thinking ever being applied to books written by white guys? Of course not.

Depressed by thoughts like these, I spent a few months earlier this year toying with the idea of writing something completely different – something that had nothing to do with Iran or Iranians. Sadly, though, I found that I don’t have much to say about anything else. The only other kind of novel I could see myself writing would be a work of “chick lit” about a twenty-something in the throes of an existential crisis – and I think most of you will agree that the world needs another work of “chick lit” even less than it needs another novel about Iranians.

So I’m going ahead with my original idea. Besides, on the bright side, there is this: a year or two from now, when I’ve finished the manuscript and have started racking up rejections from agents and editors, I can be like one of those underachieving white kids who blames affirmative action (rather than their bad grades or low SAT scores) for the fact that they didn’t get into an Ivy League school.

“It’s not that I can’t write,” I’ll say to my mother when she asks why my novel isn’t being published. “I’m a victim of discrimination.”

In other words, I’ll be able to tell myself that it’s not really my fault – it’s Azar Nafisi’s.

I am delighted and terrified to contribute to the Vroman’s blog.  I’m not someone to whom this form comes naturally – my first impulses are generally the small fish one chucks back into the stream with the admonition to mature, pronto.  But I thought this might be a chance to throw back a certain curtain and show off some gears and levers that I haven’t exposed before.

When I was a little kid, about seven or eight years old, I read Dick Cavett’s autobiography four times, and — I’m sorry, does that require some explanation?  Well…I liked Dick Cavett.  He seemed smart.  Anyway, I recall him describing his work habits: he would start typing something, drop his white-out under the desk accidentally, find a magazine from 1963 and six hours later realize he’d been reading articles on snowshoes instead of working.

I thought this sounded grand, apparently, as it’s exactly how I work now, except for “magazines” substitute “internet,” a word far more seductive and dangerous.  I was made for the tangent.  Would I rather work or look at 6000 photographs of cats sitting in sinks?

http://www.catsinsinks.com/

I mean, no contest, right?  This is why I don’t have a website.  Rather: as the guy who loves websites, I would want my website to provide news updated from the biochip in my forehead, a twitter stream that roars entirely in epigrams, a gallery of myself and my many friends and enemies clinking flutes of prosecco, a constantly updated bibliography (such as the latest bit of adequacy: http://tinyurl.com/oxsjhg), links to people with whom I have started feuds, a forum to keep those feuds going, flash graphics showing me triumphing over enemies and various haircuts, invitations to many parties I would have to throw, clips of said parties and the feuds they enflamed on YouTube, research reference photographs, contests, games involving funny hats, and massages and free balloons for everyone who might visit.

The upshot is that this is my actual website:

http://glendavidgold.com/

This took forever to design.  Really.  I sweated that “us.”  As if there were a small squad of young, earnest people wearing t-shirts with post-post ironic phrases and non-ironic images of cats in sinks, sitting around a large oak table with laptops humming, listening to their iPods, ready to direct the incoming emails to the proper apparachniks.   Also, you’ll note that the background is white.  I thought that was classy.

If I didn’t have the website I do, if I did put any time in on it, if I goofed off — self-promoted?  networked? communicated with people who were interested in my work? put my lips to the screen like a squirrel looking for syrup? — on the net, I wouldn’t have written Sunnyside.

The problem for me is that the net is a great democracy.  Everything is equally important, and soon I can’t tell if looking at the detailed breakdown of a medieval crossbow, upon which part of my novel hinges, is more or less interesting than a naked, out of shape guy haltingly playing “Major Tom” on the guitar.  Here, you decide:

a) Crossbow: http://www.thebeckoning.com/medieval/crossbow/xbow-def.html

b) Naked guy (warning, not work safe.  Really, really.):  http://tinyurl.com/annpya

So, I’m betting you like myself are more compelled by that naked guy.  God bless him.  I have no idea why he thought it was a good idea to put his flesh up there for all the world to see and to judge him while he wrestled aloud with abilities that though heartfelt were arguably just beyond the tips of his fingers.

Which leads me to why I don’t blog.  I love bloggers.  But for me, the first draft I write is for myself and the subsequent drafts are my attempt to invite the world in.  Revision is my friend, and, if you like my work, it’s yours, too.  At best my early thoughts are perhaps 35% good and 30% stupid and 35% boring.  Which I originally typed as “bloring,” which might be more accurate.

But.

Sunnyside, my novel, is a big book that takes a ton of narrative chances.  It’s about, among other things, artistic intent (in this case Chaplin’s) and how it can get derailed.  There were times where I wasn’t juggling 100 balls in the air — I was juggling none.  There was a strange absence when I sat down to write, a loneliness that bugged me.  In August 2007 I was deep, deep into my manuscript and I needed the feeling of communicating to the outside world.  Transitional objects, teddy bears, things invested with manna fascinate me, and my blog became my transitional object.  Here is my first month of posting, which I meant from the bottom of my heart:

http://glendavidgold.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

By September it looked like this:

http://glendavidgold.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

I think I told two or three people that the posts existed.  A handful of other people seem to have stumbled there themselves.

It’s a page count, of course.  Blogging was keeping me honest.  And it gave me a goal.  Finish the damned thing.  Which I did right here:

http://glendavidgold.blogspot.com/2007/11/1282_08.html

(As you can see, I had sold out and added visual aids by then.)

I started editing down (which led to cryptic notations indication what page I had read to, what page I had edited to, and how long the manuscript was).  I was also leaving myself notes so that I would later remember and understand what had once been bothering me.

http://glendavidgold.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

I was wrestling darkly with what it meant to edit something.  Every day brought a new challenge, and having it memorialized in that in-between place where readers who knew about the blog (I think 12 people seem to have known about it) could see the progress meant something to me like tossing salt over my shoulder.  Mostly it was for me a diary I didn’t mind sharing, about a book no one had seen, which rendered things like this opaque:

http://glendavidgold.blogspot.com/2008/01/1144_27.html

Sort of.  It turns out that there was just enough inference in there that even if people didn’t know the book I was referring to, my shouts were in a common language.  A couple of people figured it out quickly and kept me posted in response.  It was a nice communal hiding place.

And a hiding place no longer.  I figure now that the book is unveiled, if you actually read Sunnyside (my vote?  Yes.  Yes, you should) and you’re interested in process, check out the blog and see what it was like to write.  I have spoken against “director’s cuts” of novels, so you will never see Tatiana the Witch whom I refer to early on, nor the benshi, but you’ll see signs of mourning upon their excision.

I realize something now: I kept rereading Dick Cavett because I wanted to know what it was like when he was under the desk, not making stuff up, but in that place between dreaming and writing, perhaps wasting time, perhaps letting things stew.  Of course that wasn’t there in print.  But now it is, sort of, for me.

So there you go.  I genuinely don’t know if it’s helpful to see my own process questions laid out like that, but I hope it is.  Even Dick Cavett has a blog now.  Maybe someday he’ll spill.