The Elegant Variation

APRIL 29, 2003 - FEBRUARY 21, 2007

There's a Microsoft Word file on my laptop dated April 29, 2003, which contains the first thoughts on my novel.  What's striking is that when I went back, three years later, upon completion of the draft, the book I'd written was very much the book I'd envisioned.  My conception appears to have been pretty clear from the outset.

Regular TEV readers have been following the progress of the book.  First came the "rough first", the draft that carried me across the finish line for the first time.  Then came the "show people" draft and, finally, the submission draft.

The submission draft found a home last Wednesday, when Bloomsbury bought my novel.

There were notable steps along the way which, being an oddly superstitious creature, I kept to myself.  But events basically unfolded thus:

Early in November I began soliciting agents.  I made a fast and strong connection with Simon Lipskar of Writers House who loved the book.  More importantly, though, he clearly got the book - I could tell that we were talking about the same work, that he saw it the way I did.  And his passion for the book and his confidence seemed boundless.  I flew back to NY to meet him in person, and we were off to the races.

He requested two very minor changes, which I pulled together during the Christmas holidays.  The book went out on January 15.  Things happened all during the subsequent period (about which I'll remain maddeningly discreet) and last Wednesday, Simon called to tell me we'd gotten the offer, which we accepted joyfully. 

I couldn't be happier about being published by Bloomsbury, a great, literary house that's published the likes of William Boyd, David Leavitt, Alan Hollinghurst and even John Banville.  (His non-fiction Prague Pictures was for Bloomsbury.)

To answer some anticipated questions:

Q: What's it called?
A: HARRY, REVISED

Q: What's it about?
A: Here's what Bloomsbury's release says, which is much better than anything I could come up with:

Harry, Revised is the hilarious and tender story of Harry Rent, a guilt-ridden, down-on-his-luck widower, who tries to reinvent himself following his wife’s untimely death. His emotional journey takes him from his own solipsistic and outrageously misdirected fantasies about an obsidian-haired, twenty-two-year-old waitress at his local greasy spoon, to the tenuous beginnings of an actual, personal transformation. At once deeply moving and darkly comedic, Harry, Revised is an extraordinary novel about the measure of a man's worth by a wonderful, emerging talent.

Q: When is it coming out?
A:  They're showing a Winter 2008 publication date.

Q: Will you keep blogging?
A: Of course.

Q: So you didn't start you blog just to sell your book?
A:  No.  When I started the book, I had no reason to think it wouldn't be yet another 50-page false start.

Q: Did having a blog make it easier for you?
A:  It's undeniable that the blog helped but only in getting me over the threshold and perhaps moving me into a higher place on the list.  But both Simon's decision to represent the work and Bloomsbury's decision to publish the book really appear to have been based purely on the merits of the work.

Q:  Are you going to stop being critical now that you're part of the "establishment"?
A:  Fuck, no.

Honestly, I'm still a bit numb but I can't think of a better way to go off into a new marriage.  I'm sure there will be plenty more to say as the book moves through the process toward publication but for now, I wanted to celebrate with all of you. 

TEV GUEST REVIEW: FINN

Finn
By Jon Clinch
Random House
287 pp
$23.95

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR HUCKLEBERRY?*
BY JIM RULAND

When I was in the seventh grade, St. James’s drama department put on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and I was cast as Alfred Temple, Tom’s competitor for the attention of Becky Thatcher. Tom and Alfred come to blows over her affections and on opening night, Tom tackled me and pinned me to the stage. The violence of Tom’s rough attack caught me off-guard. Needless to say, it hadn’t gone quite like that during rehearsals.

On the second night, I punched Tom Sawyer in the face, and it was on. Alfred Temple, it should be noted, was a teacher’s pet and I was costumed as a cross between Alfalfa and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Alfred is not supposed to know how to throw an uppercut and Tom was pretty irate. On the third and final night of the run, Tom Sawyer and I stole the show with a full-on Jerry Springer-style battle royal. Technically, Tom won, but only because I let him, and only because I had to.

The show, after all, must go on, and on it goes in Jon Clinch’s debut novel Finn, a compelling retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point-of-view of Pap, Huck’s alcoholic father. At the heart of the novel is the unsolved mystery that Twain left behind for his readers to mull over: How did Pap come to be shot in a room filled with weird paraphernalia? (Clue: Alfred Temple didn’t do it.)

Although Finn’s fate is known from the onset (he dead) and the plot is defined by the parameters established in Twain’s novels, there is a score of delicious twists and turns that a clumsy summary would risk ruining. Suffice to say, the biggest revelation in Clinch’s novel is the writing, which is as muscular and deliberate as the act of poling a skiff upriver.

With prose that is reminiscent of Faulkner’s early Yoknapatawpha novels, Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee novels (particularly Child of God), and of course, Twain, Finn gives us an honest-to-God yarn that’s as pleasing to puzzle over as it is to read. Finn lives in a falling down house by the river and with Clinch’s lush descriptions one can almost smell the gutted cat fish and river rot. There's something magnificently voyeuristic about Finn's crimes happening in plain sight of anyone who happens to be taking the air on an upper deck of a riverboat as it chugs up the Mississippi.

From Twain’s novels we know that Finn is a violent, bigoted drunk and Clinch endeavors to explain how he got that way. There’s no question that Finn is as vile a villain that ever skulked on two legs, but once we meet his father we can’t help but look at him with a glimmering—however faint—of sympathy.

One of the paradoxical aspects of Finn’s personality is that early on he manages to escape the yoke of his father's seething hatred and sets out on a path that is, in its own way, wiser and more compassionate than the road taken by his father. Ultimately, however, Finn repudiates this way of knowing the world and is revealed to be very much his father's son – to the peril of everyone he comes into contact with, and none more so than Huckleberry, the most cherished outsider in American letters.

QUIZTUNES WITH JON CLINCH:

TEV: What was the greatest challenge to re-imagining characters that you inherited as opposed to invented?
CLINCH: The challenge came in imagining a history for characters whom we think we already know and love -- when in fact we don't really know them at all. The Widow Douglas, for example. She's a two-dimensional figure, if that, in Twain's novels. But I wanted to understand her better in order to understand her involvement with Huck (and his mother). So it was important to imagine her in her loneliness, her long widowhood, her own painful childlessness.

Finn himself was of course the greatest example of this challenge. We know from Twain that he's a drunk and a child abuser and a bigot -- but why? As I set out to understand how he ended up dead in that floating house, I also set out to determine how he became the memorable monster that Twain gave us. That process took me back into Finn's youth and his family background, and his story unfurled from there.

TEV: You’ve obviously done a lot of research for this novel about a whole host of subjects: Twain, slavery, life on the Mississippi, etc. What was the most startling discovery?
CLINCH: The biggest revelation was at the heart of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn itself, and Twain left it there for all of us to see: How fragile Huck's existence was, out there in a world that cared almost nothing for him. I remembered this sense of constant peril from my first childhood reading of the book -- the sense that Huck was living on the margins of an adult world almost completely indifferent to him. And in Finn I found myself giving full voice to the dark side of that dark world.

TEV: Finn has a curious relationship with alcohol. He is like Faulkner’s young Ike McCaslin or Joe Christmas. The alcohol doesn’t mellow Finn: it focuses his rage.
CLINCH: Oh, he's a mean drunk all right. But only, I think, because he's mean to begin with. Your choice of the word "focus" is a good one. Finn has a few good qualities, but none of them is at all assisted by his addiction to alcohol.

TEV: Finn is a wonderful scoundrel. The line that resonates for me pertains to his self-awareness, something that common criminals lack and great villains require, a certain willfulness that draws them over to the dark side, along with an astonishing lack of remorse. While giving "full voice to the dark side of the dark world" did you ever wonder if readers, especially Twain enthusiasts, would be able to handle it?
CLINCH: I didn't fear how Twainians might respond to the dark side of Finn -- and in fact it seems from what I've heard so far that the better a reader knows Twain's Pap, the less surprised he is by mine. I think that fans of Twain, then, will by and large believe that I've been abundantly fair to my source materials on that count. Where they may feel differently, though, is in my exploration of the forces that made Finn so tormented. In my reading, his bigotry comes from a conflict between handed-down racism and an impulse toward love -- of a sort -- toward a black woman. Which is certainly credible, but has the side effect of giving us a bi-racial Huck. By doing that to America's favorite white kid, I may have sinned in some eyes. But either way, it's certainly not a failure of courage.

TEV: What are you working on now? Is the Twain oeuvre a universe you'd like to continue exploring?
CLINCH: My new project is a little too rough to talk about yet. There's surely room for more exploration of Twain's world, but I think I'll set that aside for now.

*A Huckleberry can be red or blue. According to Wikipedia, “The 'garden huckleberry' is not considered to be a true huckleberry but a member of the nightshade family.”

L.A. EVENT - SEVERANCE

Check out an innovative adaptation of the critically acclaimed work Severance: Stories by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler ... It runs March 2nd–March 31st Thursdays–Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2pm at The McCadden Place Theatre 1157 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood

There's a special Pay-What-You-Can preview March 1st and a special discount for TEV readers - simply use code 005 for $10 off via the web link below.

Tickets $30 at the door
For tickets call (323) 960-4484 or visit www.plays411.com/severance

"Modern literature comes to life on stage as two local theatre companies prepare to launch Severance, a world premiere adaptation of Severance: Stories, a collection of shorts by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler.

Butler, whose background is largely based in theatre, will be in Los Angeles March 8th–11th to attend the performance and to participate in press events, book signings and a one night only post-show discussion on Friday March 9th. “It is exciting to see my work taken one step further, used as a jumping off point to inspire an entirely new work of art,” said Butler regarding the adaptation.

An abstract tour of human history, Severance delves into the thoughts of the decapitated. The play and the stories told there-in are based on the premise that the human head lives for ninety seconds after the moment of separation, and that in that final moment the mind continues to remember, ponder, and regret. The infamously beheaded, from Cicero to Marie Antoinette, Jayne Mansfield to John the Baptist, join a cast of victims from across time and humanity to present a bittersweet account of life on Earth, and the inescapable moment of death."

TUESDAY MARGINALIA

* We've figured out how to bludgeon Teheran into submission - we're sending them Tony Coelho.

* Steven Millhauser - author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler - has a new story in The New Yorker.

* Matthew Sharpe - whose Jamestown is high up on our TBR list - is profiled in Poets & Writers.

* John Freeman profiles Elif Shafak for Newsday.

Since 2003, she has lived in Turkey and traveled to the United States to teach. She calls herself a commuter, not an immigrant. "There is a metaphor I like very much in the Quran, in the Holy Book, and it's about a tree that has its roots up in the air. When my nationalist critics say you have no roots, you are a so-called Turk, I say no, I do have roots, they're just not rooted in the ground. They are up in the air."

* Personally, we think an editor should be fired for using La La Land in a headline to describe Los Angeles.

* Amitava Kumar has a brief report on Colson Whitehead's recent Vassar reading.

* Dylan Jones seems to be trying to say something about the forthcoming Roth Zuckerman book but we're fucked if we can figure out what he's on about.

* At Mary Beard's new TLS blog "A don's life," she asks whether authors should reply to wrong-headed reviews, the case in point being Zadie Smith's comment on Trajan's column:

The truth is that no one ever scrutinises a review with quite the obsessive intensity as the book’s author. The chances are that your self-defence will actually draw attention to your alleged inadequacies. And there’s a high risk too that you’ll come across as more miffed than traduced. Unless the allegations are career threatening (plagiarism and the like) or your letter is drop-dead clever and witty, it may be better to hold your horses, to wait and see if anyone writes in on your behalf, and claim the dignified high ground .

* And, finally, hats off to Levi Leipheimer for his GC win in the Tour of California.  Watching the Solvang time trial got us fired up to get back in the saddle, so we've worked up our own training plan to hit the Piru Time Trials post-honeymoon, when those French dinners will need to be worked off ...

NEXT WEEK'S GUEST BLOGGER

We're clearly not the only ones who thoroughly enjoyed Joshua Ferris' debut novel Then We Came to the End.  Maud Newton's review of same hit the pages of Newsday over the weekend.

Joshua Ferris’ brilliant and incredibly funny debut novel, “Then We Came to the End,” lays bare the strange interconnectedness of human cogs in the corporate machine. The dot-com boom has already turned to bust when the story opens, and the ad agency where our heroes work is laying them off one by one. Milling around in cubicles, taking advantage of increasingly infrequent free morning bagels, they have almost no work to do but plenty of time to talk about each other — and about Lynn, their boss, who may or may not have cancer.

Which is as good a time as any to let you know that Joshua Ferris will be standing in next week as TEV's guest host whilst we are off honeymooning in Paris.  We hope you'll stop by and make him feel welcome.  You can also brave the sardine-like setting of the Boxcar Lounge on Wednesday night and hear him read at 8 p.m.  We'll give Joshua a more proper introduction as his stint approaches.

ROTH HAT TRICK

The Washington Post is reporting that Philip Roth's Everyman will be awarded the PEN/Faulkner prize today, making him the first writer to win the prize three times.

"I'm delighted," he said in a telephone interview. The PEN/Faulkner is a gratifying award, he said, because over the years "there just seems to be a consistency to the quality of the winners."

WAR AND PEACE LITE

A 600-page version of War and Peace, billed as Tolstoy's "original version," is about to be released amid some academic nattering.

Tony Briggs, emeritus professor of Russian language and literature and author of a bestselling translation of War and Peace, disapproves, however.

"To claim that it's the 'original' is entirely spurious and is simply selling the novel short," he said. "This is a sanitised Hollywood happy-ending version where everyone lives happily ever after. But frankly this is an outrage and no one should be misled.

For the extremely lazy, the Independent offers its 155-word version of same:

Sonya and Natasha say bye to their boyfriends, Boris and Nicholas, who are going off to fight Napoleon, and they promise to be faithful, but Natasha is really fickle and as soon as Prince Andrew shows up she promises to marry him, and as he goes off to war she decides to run off with Anatole, but Sonya saves herself for Nicholas because she's a symbol of selfless and unconditional love. Meanwhile, the Russians are fighting the French and finally the Battle of 1812 happens, complete with cannon. So Sonya waits for Nicholas for years, and when he shows up he says his family's broke and he needs to marry this rich chick if that's OK and she says sure, because if you're a symbol of selfless and unconditional love you get dumped on all the time. And they all live happily ever after, except for the French, who are destroyed by a final Cossack attack.

DAS BOOT AUTHOR DIES

Lothar-Guenther Buchheim, author of the novel Das Boot, has died.

Lothar-Guenther Buchheim was also an art collector and set up the Museum der Phantasie (Museum of the Imagination) in Bernried, Bavaria, in 2001.

He based Das Boot on his experiences as a submarine officer during the war.

COETZEE ON ANIMAL RIGHTS

J.M. Coetzee's latest speech in defense of animal rights is excerpted at the Sydney Morning Herald.

It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the standard by which the animal products industry falls short. Traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that humans are capable of?

We certainly don't begrudge Coetzee his beliefs but we sure hope that the newly delivered novel isn't an animal rights polemic.  OK, we're heading out for a burger.

CRYPTIC CARGO

Jon Clinch, the author of the about-to-be-released Finn, which takes Huck's dad as its protagonist, is profiled.

A violent alcoholic and unrepentant racist, Pap Finn turns up in Mark Twain’s 1884 novel as a corpse floating down the Mississippi — nude, with a bullet in his back — inside a shack containing a wooden leg, black cloth masks, a baby’s bottle, women’s underwear and other incongruous items. Clinch used the shack and its cryptic cargo as clues to Pap Finn’s loathsome life, and the springboard for themes in the book.

“The contents of the room are completely bizarre; it’s like something out of a horror movie,” Clinch said. “It seemed to me, taking Mark Twain very seriously as a craftsman and as a moralist, these things were not random. They were there to serve a purpose.”

Jim Ruland will be here later this week with his own review of Finn and interview with its author.