About the Author (36 page)

Colapinto:
Really, Cal is it necessary to bring up my—my juvenilia?

Cal:
I’m just saying that I’m glad you finally focused on writing about someone you halfway understood. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. In fact, I remember how, every time you got bogged down in
Author
, when you couldn’t figure out how to push on to the next turn of the story, you’d almost always break the logjam by flat out pretending I was you, and asking yourself, “Okay, what would
I
think and do at this moment?”

Colapinto:
Quite right. I quickly found that, as a novelist, I possessed shockingly few powers of invention when it came to my hero. I remember planning to make you a smooth seducer, so that when you met Janet you’d quickly and confidently woo her into bed. But when I tried to write that kind of scene it didn’t work at all. I was actually hung up on that turn in the story for about eight months. So there was an example of where I said, “Okay, just imagine that this is
me
in this situation.” Hence the awkward, halting, nervous way that you finally weaseled your way into her graces.

Cal:
In the end,
Janet
had to make the first move. You had me kind of retreat into myself in a spasm of doubt and self-recrimination.

Colapinto:
Yes, well, I’m not
that
retiring, perhaps. But I could relate to you in that scene where you take her to dinner and then get terrified.

Cal:
Okay. So we’ve established the autobiographical connection between us. But presumably you never stole someone’s unpublished manuscript, seduced a former roommate’s girlfriend under wholly false pretenses, paid off a blackmailer who knew about your crime and then eventually plotted her murder. Where’d all that come from?

Colapinto:
That brings us back to Highsmith’s
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
. In there she described in clear, non-mystical terms her way of dreaming up the plots of her novels. She would begin with a story “germ,” a little nugget of action, or a situation, that for whatever reason amused or intrigued her. The germ of the plot for her famous novel,
Strangers on a Train
, was
:
“Two people agree to murder each other’s enemy, thus permitting a perfect alibi to be established.”

She then describes what she calls her “casual and unstrained way of letting [an] idea develop into a short story or a book.” And she was very clear about how the writer who hoped to finish his book had better, to the best of his ability, get the whole plot down, in point form, before plunging into the actual writing. None of this, “Invent your characters and they’ll take on a life of their own.” I can’t imagine what sadist dreamed up that bit of misdirection.

Cal:
Probably some canny novelist trying to thwart the competition.

Colapinto:
Yeah. Anyway, Highsmith goes on to say that the best suspense fiction uses incidents and emotions—preferably uncomfortable ones—from the writer’s own life. So when I was seeking my own “story germ,” I cast around for some event in my life, some situation, that had been emotionally charged. Something that had really mattered to me. What came into my head was the time that I had lived with my law student roommate—and specifically the horror and envy I’d felt when he showed me his short story, “Ballinger’s Farm.”

Cal:
You know, it seems to be that you should be embarrassed by that reaction to his story. I mean, how insecure are you? How doubtful of your own supposed “talent”? Your envious reaction to a friend’s short story seems precisely the kind of uncharitable, small-minded, petty emotion that one should keep to oneself.

Colapinto:
Except that I knew every writer could relate to what I was saying, even if few would admit it outright. It’s got to be one of the strongest emotions, this jealousy writers feel about one another’s talents or success-level, or both. Yet it hasn’t been used often as a subject for fiction. And I was conscious of that when embarking on the novel. Actually, one of the worst jolts I got when I was several years into writing
About the Author
was when I learned, from an issue of
Granta
, that Martin Amis was writing a novel “about literary envy.” I was convinced that he was going to scoop me. And in fact the book he published in 1995,
The Information
, did end up having some affinities with the book that was slowly (very slowly) gestating in my drawer. But his book was about older, published authors and their rivalry played out in very different form.

Cal:
Do I sense you trying to get it on the record that your novel was well underway by the time you read
The Information
?

Colapinto:
Uh….

Cal:
So while we’re on the subject of the supposed originality of the theme of artistic envy in
About the Author
, shouldn’t you say a couple of words about Milos Forman’s
Amadeus
? Because, after all, it had a major effect on you when you saw it in 1985, not long before starting
Author
. Remember? It’s about the composer Salieri’s murderous envy of Mozart. I seem to recall that, even at the time that you saw the movie, you said to yourself, “I should tackle that theme some day.”

Colapinto:
Okay, okay. But here’s the important thing. I treated the theme with humor. I mean, earlier in my life I would have tried a heavy, dark treatment. And I would, inevitably, have bogged down in it—and stopped. But now I was operating under Highsmith’s dictum of “amusing myself”—of having some fun. So I found myself writing the following sentences in my notebook:

“What about the story of rival writers sharing the same house. The better of the two dies in accidental circumstances. The mediocre one knows of a superb manuscript that is in the dead guy’s filing cabinet. The day of the death he sneaks in and gets it. He takes it to a publisher.” And from there, I was off and running. By the end of that afternoon, I had the basic plot down from start to finish—fifty-nine pages of notes.

Cal:
So what you’re saying is that
About the Author
is really a kind of slavish imitation of a Patricia Highsmith novel, derived not only from reading her novels, but from a book about her writing methods?

Colapinto:
Not exactly. Because I soon discovered that, unlike Highsmith, I wasn’t interested in writing about a cold-blooded, conscienceless killer—which is her specialty. Initially, I had imagined that you would briskly murder Les. But as I began to write the book, I found that that held no interest for me. I quickly realized that what
truly
interested me was subverting the conventions of suspense thrillers. You were going to be someone who
couldn’t
commit a murder. This struck me as more psychologically truthful—not to say thematically resonant—when considered alongside your inability to commit words to a page. Your character was defined by a kind of inability to perform the decisive act. Be it writing or murder.

Cal:
Well, thanks for not making me into someone as creepy as the reptilian Ripley. So you’re saying that’s the sole way you departed from Highsmith?

Colapinto:
That and my decision to write
About the Author
in the first person. Highsmith never does that. She says that the one time she tried, she failed because, and I quote, “I got sick of writing the pronoun ‘I’, and I was plagued with an idiotic feeling that the person telling the story was sitting at a desk writing it. Fatal!”

In part, I took Highsmith’s comments as a challenge.

Cal:
As if you needed any
extra
challenges—a wholly untested, unpublished, virtually non-writing author tackling his first novel! There really are some pretty strong parallels between us.

Colapinto:
Alas. But I also liked the idea of the extra philosophical or thematic mileage I might be able to get out of having you tell the story in your own words. Here, after all, was a narrator introducing himself as someone who suffered from debilitating writer’s block—a total inability to write a single word—yet the reader holds in his hands a book authored by that very narrator. How did this come about? So on top of the suspense of the thriller plot, I wanted to pose that logical conundrum, and then to solve it.

Cal:
That
is
a departure from Highsmith. She always avoided such modernist shenanigans.

Colapinto:
Right. And I like them. As much as I admire her plotting and characterization and the atmosphere of almost comic dread she works up, there’s something that has always been missing for me in her books—a certain self-consciousness that I like in a writer. She puts her finger on it when she says that she hates using the first person because she’s plagued with “an idiotic feeling that the person telling the story was sitting at a desk writing it.” I like the first person singular for that very reason. Because, after all, someone
is
sitting at a desk writing the words. You can’t get away from that. Or at least, I can’t.

Cal:
Why not?

Colapinto:
Probably because of the writers I read and loved growing up—guys like John Barth, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov. I wrote my Master’s thesis on Nabokov back in 1983.

Cal:
I was wondering when you were going to ’fess up to his influence on
About the Author
. Frankly, I see very little connection, even though I know you were “inspired” by him. Please don’t take this the wrong way, John, but you’re not quite the writer he was.

Colapinto:
But I’m not talking about his amazing writing, his awesome prose style. I’m thinking of what a great storyteller he was, what a great maker-of-plots. His novels are built on the same principles of holding a reader’s attention, entertaining him, providing laughs, thrills, surprises, that Highsmith talks about.

Take
Lolita
. Summarize
that
book’s plot some time! It’s a pure potboiler, pulp fiction, a wild ride—all culminating in a bloody shoot-out revenge killing. Take
Laughter in the Dark
—same thing, only this time it’s the protagonist who ends up getting plugged. Take
Despair
, where it’s the hero’s double who takes the bullet. Take
King, Queen, Knave
with the ol’ love-triangle murder story. Or take even a book like
Pale Fire
, which is legendarily complex. What’s the actual plot? A madman steals the manuscript of an unpublished poem and writes a crazed commentary to it after the poet is shot and killed by an escaped convict who mistakes the poet for the judge who sentenced him to prison! It sounds like a bad movie—which, of course, it is. Nabokov, the old jokester, was always taking pulp conventions and spinning them into works of high art.

Cal:
Okay, I get what you’re saying. You essentially took the weakest, least satisfying aspects of Nabokov and used them as a rationale for your own failures of imagination when writing
Author
.

Colapinto:
I beg your pardon?

Cal:
In
Lolita
, Nabokov has someone run over Lolita’s mother when it’s most convenient for her to die—that is, right after she’s discovered Humbert’s secret diary. You felt that gave you license, in
About the Author
, to have Stewart run over by a car within minutes of Cal’s learning about Stewart’s novel.

Colapinto:
Well—that is—I, it’s not as if—um—

Cal:
C’mon, Cal. I’m a figment of your imagination. I know what goes on in your head.

Colapinto:
You’re correct in that one instance, but—

Cal:
Problem is, I’d argue that in Nabokov’s hands such a device is obviously a parody of bad fiction. In yours… But let it pass.

I want to ask you about another Nabokov book: Pale Fire. It’s also about a stolen manuscript. I wonder if Pale Fire somehow influenced
About the Author
. In terms of the plot.

Colapinto:
Well, Cal, that’s very perspicacious of you! One could almost believe that I put you up to asking that question so that I could point out places where I believe myself to have been particularly clever!

As a matter of fact,
About the Author
does pay tribute to Pale Fire. In that book, Charles Kinbote, the crazed scholar, befriends the poet John Shade, his next door neighbor. Kinbote tells Shade the story of his life—or at least, his delusional version of it. Kinbote believes himself to be the exiled king of Zembla. Kinbote hopes the old poet will write a poem about his reign. Later, when Shade is killed, Kinbote filches the poem Shade had been working on. He expects to find a poem all about the exiled king—and is crestfallen to discover that it is, instead, an autobiographical work about Shade’s own New England life.

Cal:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you conceived of
About the Author
as a kind of inversion of the same events. Stewart and I live as “neighbors” in our apartment. I tell him my life story, and he secretly uses the material for a novel—the reverse of what happens to Kinbote.

Colapinto:
[smugly] Yes.

Cal:
But what’s the point? Nabokov turns the theme into a masterful meditation on art, life, poetry and mortality. You use it as a springboard into a potboiler. With a lesbian scene.

Colapinto:
Quite a good lesbian scene, though. And I don’t think it’s gratuitous. Les is Stewart’s “agent on earth.” When she seduces Janet, it is, for you, as if Stewart is reclaiming her from beyond the grave. That was the idea anyway.

Cal:
So you say. But I wonder if you weren’t simply operating under the Howard Stern aesthetic credo which says that every book, movie, play, TV show and radio program should include at least one scene where attractive women kiss each other.