Jess Walter‘s third novel, Citizen Vince, sat atop my “to be read” list for several months, vaulting the top spot thanks to rave reviews and mentions from many readers and writers whose opinions I respect. For whatever reason, I didn’t actually get around to reading the book until late last fall. I’m glad now that I did, because once I closed that book, I craved more of Walter’s work. Thanks to my procrastination, I could immediately start on The Zero, Walter’s National Book Award finalist novel about a New York police officer dealing with holes in his memory as he navigates the post 9/11 landscape.

That book is different enough from Citizen Vince, and that from the two novels that preceded it, that one could be forgiven for wondering it the same writer was at work. Sad but true, the idea of range in a novelist is somewhat foreign and unique. In Citizen Vince, which won the 2005 Edgar for best novel, Walter tells the tale of Vince, a con struggling to go straight as part of the Witness Protection Program in Spokane.

In The Zero, Brian Remy may or may not be on a secret government mission to track down a woman lost in the terrorist attacks on New York. Much as Remy’s Swiss cheese-like memory leaves him grasping to determine not only what happened that day, but what is happening to him in each waking moment, the story itself has intentional gaps. The attacks, the World Trade Center and other touchstones of our knowledge of the event are never mentioned, but Walter’s tale makes it clear that this is the setting of his novel.

The Zero was Walter’s fourth novel and fifth book. Before Citizen Vince, he wrote two crime novels — Land Of The Blind and Over Tumbled Graves – as well as Every Knee Shall Bow, a non-fiction account of the siege at Ruby Ridge drawn from his work covering that event as a newspaper reporter.

TIRBD: For a BookReporter.com interview around the time of Citizen Vince, you described one of your projects in progress as “a social satire, very dark and funny and perhaps a bit inappropriate.” Assuming that was The Zero, do you think that still adequately describes the book?

JW: I guess that is a fair description of The Zero. The word “inappropriate” strikes me as funny now. Certainly at the time I was working on The Zero, I wondered if people would find its irreverence about terrorism and about our culture inappropriate, especially since the book also functions as an allegory about how we got into Iraq. As I was writing the book, to criticize our rush to war and to question why we were trading our freedoms and values for the illusion of security was to be seen as unpatriotic. When people used to ask what a certain book was about, I would answer, “It’s about 300 pages.”

Did you get your start in non-fiction because it was an easier way into the business – both because of your work as a journalist and the ideal subject of Ruby Ridge for your first book – or was fiction something you just decided to try at some point?

I always wanted to be a novelist, but I was making my living as a reporter and was thrust into covering the standoff at Ruby Ridge. I could see right away that it had all of the elements that I was looking for in a book—fiction or nonfiction—pathos and suspense and, above all, a sense of the grayness of people and events. Everyone wants good guys and bad guys, black hats and white, but my belief has always been that the truth—the gray in us all—is far more interesting. Most of my books have circled around that idea. I like to write in all forms and genres and I recoil at being told I should only do one thing, so I’m constantly trying new things. I write poems and short stories and scripts. I’m even writing a children’s book. I think the market drives writers to repeat themselves and there’s nothing I like less than reading (or writing) the same book twice.

Do you think you write the kind of fiction that you do – with real events as a backdrop and plenty of period detail coloring the narrative – because of your background in journalism? Has that tendency hobbled you in any way in terms of exploring different kinds of storytelling?

My writing has been informed by my background as a journalist, but I certainly have never felt hobbled by it, or somehow chained to writing about real events. I like to do research and to immerse myself in real times and places, but for me, this only sets the work in a context, the way 9/11 allowed me to explore a surreal shadow of real events in The Zero. I don’t think it takes any less imagination to create characters against a real backdrop than it does to, say, create a world from scratch in science fiction.

And I write all sorts of fiction, not all of it tied to journalistic research. Most of my short stories, for example, are smaller stories, usually comic, about families. But I do think that, with most fiction writers coming out of MFA programs, former journalists who write fiction can use their research and interviewing skills to great advantage, and can maybe write larger, socially-driven novels as opposed to fiction with more prosaic or domestic concerns.

Richard Russo is working on a script for Citizen Vince, a book that began life as a screenplay. How do you suppose his take will differ from yours, and what are your thoughts about finally seeing these characters on screen?

I was thrilled to have Russo step up to write the script. I admire
his writing so much. One of the reasons I scrapped the screenplay and wrote Citizen Vince as a novel was that I didn’t feel like I ever got to the core of the character in my script (which I started in the late 1990s.) But Russo’s script immediately nails Vince. Like most authors, I suppose I’ll have misgivings if I see those characters on screen. To me, they just are who they are; I never imagine actors as the characters I write and when I talk to Hollywood people, I always stumble on that question –“Who do you see as …” Because I see the character as clearly as I’d see myself or my brother.

Writers lumped into the “literary crime fiction” genre either seem to bristle at the term or embrace it wholeheartedly, but all seem to want to knock down the wall between it and respectability. Does it feel like you are part of a group of writers that can help to do that, particularly given your National Book Award nomination?

Bookstores and readers can call my work whatever they want, but I’m not a fan of any of the labels that are tacked onto fiction. I feel very fortunate to have my work taken seriously, but I don’t feel a part of any group. To me, I’m simply a novelist. I think one of the problems with fiction is this phony wall between commercial and literary. You end up with a dividing line between those stories with plots and those stories with rich characters and strong writing. Mystery writers are supposed to churn out a book a year, with recurring characters, implausible plots and template storylines while literary writers are supposed to eschew plot for poetical books that (no surprise) meander or fall apart at the end. To me, a book generally fails if it doesn’t have inventive language, strong characters and a driving story of some kind. Not only can those things coexist, for fiction to survive and thrive, I think they must. And dividing work into genres and subgenres only heightens the unfortunate division and Balkanizes readers.

You’ve mentioned that you gained some access after 9/11 because you were working on then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik’s memoirs; you also helped Christopher Darden write about the O.J. Simpson case. What is it like helping other people put their thoughts and experiences on the page, and how valuable are those projects in terms of giving you otherwise unobtainable fodder for your fiction?

The process of helping someone write a memoir is an interesting writing assignment, but it’s also exhausting. I really don’t like doing collaborations. But my children have this ugly habit of liking to eat, so occasionally I did let myself get lured into helping someone with their memoirs. In the end, these things provided great material for fiction, but I still don’t think I’ll do it again. It was always just a way to make money, the last choice I had before breaking down and taking—gasp—a real job.

It’s easy to root for John McNally. Sure, the guy seems to be steaming right along, his second critically acclaimed novel now under his belt, joining an award-winning short story collection and a handful of anthology editor credits. But McNally is no overnight success. He has been writing and teaching for years, just waiting for the right people to take notice of his singular talents.

After a patient wait during which he continued these pursuits apace, he is getting that long-deserved recognition. He now teaches as part of the faculty at Wake Forest University, recently received a Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project fellowship, sponsored by Paramount Pictures, for screenwriting, and saw his second novel, America’s Report Card, earn lavish praise from critics and readers.

The book tells the tale of Charlie, a standardized test grader working in Iowa City. His story intersects with that of Janie, a suburban Chicago teen who fears that the death of her former art teacher might portend danger, and flees.

It’s a funny story, told against the backdrop of the 2004 Presidential election. McNally has always been funny – his short story collection, Troublemakers, and first novel, The Book of Ralph, both include several sidesplitting scenes – but here he shoots those poison-tipped darts of comedy at current events, and the results are some of the most spot-on commentary you’ll find on the fiction shelf.

His latest projects include a forthcoming anthology, When I Was a Loser, due from Free Press later this year, and serving as a visiting writer-in-residents at Columbia College this spring.

Caveat: I met John when taking a course he taught at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. I signed up for his class on short fiction after reading and loving Troublemakers. I was not disappointed; John was an insightful, funny and personable instructor, and it has been a pleasure to stay in touch with both John and his work since.

TIRBD: You let yourself take a real political turn with America’s Report Card. What did that do for the writing process?

JMcN: It sped it up. I was writing in real time. The novel is set in 2004, and I was writing it in 2004. The main plot of the story could probably be set anytime in the past 15 years, but I wanted a contemporary subtext to inform the main plot, so I decided to let the daily news make its way into the novel as I was writing it.

Because you were drawing so heavily on your own experience with test grading, was this book any more autobiographical overall when compared to The Book of Ralph or the stories in Troublemakers?

The test stuff – even some of the most ludicrous moments in the novel – Is pretty accurate, but as for autobiography, The Book of Ralph is probably closest to me and my life, even though it’s pretty fictionalized. I don’t write straight autobiography, in general. You could ask me about a million details in The Book of Ralph and whether or not they’re true, and I would probably say, Yes, Yes, that’s true, but if you asked me if any of the stuff in the book actually happened the way it’s depicted, I would say have to say no, by and large. It’s funny, though, how many people think it’s autobiographical. I just saw that it’s being used at some library’s nonfiction book club. I’m not complaining.

Chicago plays a part in your own upbringing and in all three of your fiction books. Why is place so important – particularly that place – to your writing?

Place defines the characters. Imagine Faulkner’s characters in Alaska. You can’t. Place provides the context for who the characters are and why they do the things they do. I write a lot about the southwest side of Chicago, where I grew up, but if I were to set my stories in Evanston, for instance, I couldn’t write about the same characters. Although I don’t consciously think about these things when I write, the socioeconomics of a character plays a huge role in defining him or her.

What effect did your recent screenwriting fellowship have on your subsequent fiction writing?

I suppose it’s forced me to think about plot more, and it’s also given me insight into how outlining might be useful. I’m not sure, though, that it’s affected my writing in any noticeable way. Before writing screenplays, I wrote very visual – and filmic – fiction. If anything, my fiction may become less filmic since I sometimes start a piece of fiction and then think it would make a better screenplay.

Your work has always been funny, which is not as easy as it looks. What role do you see for humor in your work, and how do you know when you’re pulling it off?

Humor fails when I try to be funny, so it works best when I’m not trying. Humor is just part of my DNA; it’s not a conscious choice on my part to be funny when I write. It’s part of my worldview. Ultimately, I think humor is subversive in fiction, and for me, it often functions as a way to bring about a stronger emotional ending because the reader is duped into thinking the story is more lighthearted than it actually is. Again, I don’t do this consciously. I’ve become more aware of that reader response from giving readings.

You often comment about music on your blog – usually in reference to something you hear on the car radio, it seems. Do you listen to music when you write? Do you go out of your way to make music a part of your work as a way of setting a particular tone or feeling?

I tend to like absolute silence when I write a first draft, but I listen to a lot of music when I revise. There’s no logic to what I listen to, but I look back at certain books or stories and can remember distinctly what I was listening to. I have a pretty broad taste in music. I listen to a lot of crap from my youth for nostalgia sake, and I try to find interesting new contemporary/alternative rock bands, so on any given day, I’m just as likely to be listening to Kiss’s “Beth” as I am the new Drive-by Truckers or The Walkmen. (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating: I haven’t listened to “Beth” in a good 10 years.)

What’s next for you?

I have a new anthology coming out in March titled When I Was A Loser. I’m pretty pleased with how this one turned out. (I can say that because, with the exception of one essay, I didn’t write it.) I’m almost done with a new collection of short stories, Ghosts Of Chicago. I’ll be looking for a publisher for it this spring. I’m putting the final touches on a proposal for yet another anthology, which I’ll be co-editing with another writer. And then I’ll start writing what will probably be a behemoth of a novel; I’ve been taking notes for it this past year. It’ll be my Gravity’s Rainbow, only not as impenetrable. Or as long. Or as acclaimed, I’m guessing.

I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and must concur with the many, many reviews out there that herald it as one of the year’s best books. Like most, I found it hard to put down and hard to read at the same time.

The book follows a man and his young son, never named, who are among the few survivors of a nuclear war and who are trying to get to someplace warm. Their travels are told in short paragraphs that, while sometimes lacking much temporal cohesion from one to the next, collectively tell the story of their journey. “The Day After” this is not, it’s more” Mad Max” than anything.

It’s the kind of book that will bear repeat readings, as the allusions and allegory will yield further pleasures down the line. I hate reading reviews before reading a book, but it might have helped this time. William Kennedy’s review in the New York Times was illuminating, and made me want to start again from the beginning to better plumb the book’s depths.

The most interesting thing to me was my own reaction to the father-son relationship. Since the birth of my son a year ago, I’ve found myself more sentimental and more aware of the world as it relates to both him and me. That’s a pretty standard reaction to fatherhood, of course, but with The Road, it also affected for the first time — consciously, anyway — the way I read. The man’s main motivation throughout is to not only protect his son but to shield him from the hell that surrounds them. It’s a tall order, and reading it as a new father who already feels overwhelmed sometimes at thoughts about the kind of world we’ve made for our children, it was downright horrifying.

Just now thinking about the book and how masterfully McCarthy has created this post-apocalyptic world, I’m reminded of how profoundly disappointing Scott Smith’s The Ruins was. It’s not the same story, of course, but Smith was trying in his own way to create an alternate reality just a few clicks away from normal, and churned out little more than a fleshed-out script for a middling TV movie. I kept reading The Road because I needed to find out what happens next; I kept reading The Ruins because I hoped that something would happen next that would redeem all of the cheap thrills that came before. These two novels are an example of how easy it is for a good writer to mess up a good idea, and how a great writer can take a well-worn idea and create a classic.

On another note: While searching around the web for reviews, I came across this from Wired‘s web site, which talks about McCarthy’s fascination with the Santa Fe Institute. The writer never gives interviews — this one from the New York Times from 14 years ago now a sort of holy grail for fans — so it’s surprising to see him quoted throughout the short piece. He doesn’t say much, mostly praising the work of the institute, but there is a passing reference to The Road: “Spending time around the researchers has, he says, ‘made me more rigorous.’ Indeed, his most recent novels – including the new postapocalyptic thriller The Road – have been praised for their lean power.”

Mark Moskowitz may seem to be an unlikely literary hero. A Pennsylvania political advertisement producer by day, he used his spare time a few years back to look into a puzzle: What happened to the author of the obscure book The Stones of Summer?

During a search that led to a connection with the book’s author, Dow Mossman, Moskowitz created a fascinating film, 2002’s “The Stone Reader,” a love letter to reading cloaked in the guise of an investigative documentary.

Thanks to the film, Mossman’s book was reissued by Barnes & Noble and found limited commercial success 30 years after its initial publication. But the value of the film goes far beyond that rediscovery. Mossman is writing again with an eye toward publication after years of doing other things with his life, and the film reignited – or just plain fired – the desire in thousands of people to reconnect with books and read.

Moskowitz took that momentum seriously, founding the Lost Books Club, an effort designed to bring back to print the lost classics beloved by like-minded readers. A second book, The Furies by Janet Hobhouse, was released in 2004 by the New York Review of Books imprint.

Things have been quiet out of the “Stone Reader” camp of late. Moskowitz has yet to follow up that success with another film, Mossman is still writing but has yet to publish further work and the Lost Books Club is stalled at two. But like the patience-trying action in a sprawling, unfolding novel, things promise to heat up again soon.

I interviewed both Moskowitz and Mossman back when I worked for the Cedar Rapids paper (my review of the film can be found here), and was pleased that Moskowitz was willing to take the time to answer a few questions about the project for the Monday Interview.

TIRBD: A chance re-encounter with the Stones of Summer a few years ago led you down a very interesting path. Are you surprised about where the decision one day to pull that book off the shelf has taken you?

MM: Yes. Very much so. It’s about eight years now since I first read it and in that time there have been transitions, both professionally and personally. The book led me to take some risks again, in middle age, and like all risks, you sometimes have no way of seeing the repercussions. If I had just put the book back on the shelf after reading it, my mind and heart may still have been stirred, but the path I chose, to start doing something I’ve always wanted to do, create a narrative – the same thing Dow gave up a generation before – led me to places I would never have seen. Good and bad. Garden of Eden kind of thing. Innocence vs. experience and all that. Today, I am surprised how the personal nature of the work played itself out – I never thought that, as the protagonist in the movie, I would be accountable for years to come to audiences, strangers and even family.

Ideally, everyone who saw and loved your film would have followed up by reading and loving the book. Instead, it seems destined to remain a slightly more well-known cult classic. Do you ever reflect on that?

Not much. We started the Lost Books Club before the movie was even finished in order to have a non-profit way of printing some copies for people who might ever want to read it. I thought 1,000. The movie is not about the book, but about books, and so the demand for the book was something that surprised me. Then again, I suppose any reader might want to check it out after the movie – I would have – but I always knew Dow’s work was for a certain type of reader, albeit, readers I would like to meet (and now have and liked).

At its height, the film seemed to reignite people’s passion for reading, particularly for discovering underappreciated works from lesser-known writers. Has that passion remained, and how has it manifested itself?

That struck me as a bit of a surprise. I thought the film would appeal to obsessive readers, of which there’s plenty, but was taken aback how many people who hadn’t read a book since high school, or who loved to read but couldn’t find the time, were moved by it. Certain types of high school students were some of the most engaged by the movie, and I found this gratifying. I think in our culture these days, when someone has an idea, others have it too, it’s in the air, so around the time of the movie certain publishers were bringing back older, forgotten works, and articles started appearing on favorite lost books, and web sites, and so on. I believe the movie validated or instigated some of this, drove some of it, energized some, but it was in the air.

What is the status of the Lost Books Club effort to get similar books back into print?

It took us more than two years to get tax-deductible status for the non-profit (the two are not synonymous) so we can now accept donations, which are needed. It takes about $10,000 per book. We have a list of about a dozen we’d like to help bring back, with hundreds more waiting to be read and thought about (each week we get suggestions). The goal is not to publish them ourselves, though we will if no one else will, but to support such ventures by others and help bring them back. Thus, Barnes & Noble published The Stones of Summer, and New York Review of Books (NYRB) published Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies. We have The LBJ Brigade by William Wilson ready to go but are waiting for the right partner/moment. It’s not enough to bring the book back just to have it die on the shelf. I’m not interested in publishing or retailing, I’m interested in reading and discussion and how the book affects us. I’d like to work out a program where an individual or corporation sponsors a book, and we give it free to libraries with the condition they must always circulate it (not sell it or pulp it).

I assume you have become a sage for those looking for the great lost book to read. Do you have other books that have made you feel the >way Stones of Summer did that you would recommend?

Many. In fact, I just sent a list off to a movie e-mailer. Whenever I do this I do it off the top of my head. Besides the three mentioned above, David Shetzline’s Heckletooth 3, Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks and Barefoot in Babylon, the first version, about Woodstock.

What has all of this done for your own career, and do you plan to make projects similar to the Stone Reader a part of it?

It threw it into turmoil for a bit. And I had to pull back. It gave me a lot of opportunity to do things that in the end I didn’t really want to do, but now might like to do a great deal. The trick, I realize, and a lesson I should have learned from own movie, is to just keep working. Inspiration comes from daily work – as if the mundane suddenly is too mundane and you must reach for more, strive to do something else. Like writing, filmmaking is a discipline and you must keep at it to do something worthwhile. Yes, I’d like to continue the story, in a sort of different way. I am still interested in how we, as audiences, are changed by narrative – not just literature, but the narrative of the arts and life and memory in general.

Anyone who has ever disagreed with a critic will like the idea behind the cover feature in the latest issue of Time Out New York. The feature, “Critiquing the Critics,” puts the work of New York-based critics in eight disciplines up for review.

According to the piece, they developed a grading scale in five categories – knowledge, style, taste, accessibility and influence – and then asked artists, authors, publicists and others to weigh in using that system. They looked at critics of art, books, dance, film, food, music, classical music and theater.

Sasha Frere-Jones with the New Yorker topped the music list; The panelists rightly dock Frere-Jones for his hipster tendencies, which can be a detriment when writing about artists he discovers when he “goes out of his way to discover new music.” Another commenter says “I often disagree with his picks, but generally look forward to reading him,” which pretty well describes my own relationship with his work. Kelefa Sanneh with the New York Times and Jody Rosen with Slate round out the top three.

John Leonard with Harper’s led the book list. John Updike came in at no. 2 on the list for his work in the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, while Salon‘s Laura Miller was no. 3.

It’s a great idea; one that could keep critics on their toes. It would be bad for critics to worry too much about what the public thinks of their work as it would likely affect what they do and temper their views, but a bit of accountability is never a bad thing.

This is the time of year for journalistic fluff, but even in a season of lowered expectations the made-up huff over bibliographies in novels must surely rank among the silliest stories to make print. In an article in last week’s New York Times, Julie Bosman asks writers and critics about the lengthly bibliography at the back of Norman Mailer’s new novel, The Castle in the Forest. No warning bells immediately go off at that premise, as the presence of a bibliography in a novel is somewhat rare.

The reactions she elicits, however, are comical. James Wood, a critic for the New Republic, calls it “terribly off-putting.” It is posturing, it seems, a bit of self-congratulation for the legwork involved in researching a novel. “We expect authors to do that work,” he adds, “and I don’t see why we should praise them for that work. And I don’t see why they should praise themselves for it.”

Two things come to mind. First, no one need read a bibliography if its mere presence truly offends. Second, couldn’t such a list actually be helpful to readers who want to further explore the ideas, concepts or history involved in the fiction? I for one think it’s great to see where certain ideas might spring from, and while I rarely follow up, it’s comforting to know I can if ever so compelled. Sure, some of these lists might seem a little self-indulgent, particularly when they list dozens and dozens of sources. But rather than look for offense, why not see these as one more way a novelist can connect with a reader? It isn’t getting any easier to do so, and something like this, which in no way compromises the book itself, would seem to be a nice tool to add to that effort.

Michael Chabon weighed in with a subsequent letter to the editor offering another possible reason for such lists: to acknowledge. “If there is some kind of old-fashioned virtue in concealing one’s debt to and gratitude for the hard work of others, it’s difficult for me to see where it lies,” he writes.