About the Author (37 page)

Colapinto:
Please! We were discussing literature. We were discussing
Nabokov
!

Cal:
Like he didn’t know a thing or two about tossing in some sex scenes!
Light of my life, fire of my loins
, indeed. But okay. I gather that there was at least one other Nabokov novel that you think is important to my story.

Colapinto:
Right. The novel
Despair
.

Cal
I’ll indulge you. What’s the connection?

Colapinto:
Again, switched identities, false-doubles, doppelgangers—and the role that writing plays in the definition of the self.

Cal:
And who was making fun of “bearded literature professors” a minute ago?

Colapinto:
Hey—it’s a lot of the stuff Highsmith fooled around with, too, except the academics haven’t noticed. Look at
Strangers on a Train
. Two guys who trade murders. Look at
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. A guy kills his friend and steals his identity. Nabokov’s Despair could have been the premise for a Highsmith book. It concerns a businessman, Herman Herman, who meets a poor peasant who is his
exact
double. Herman, who hates his life and wishes to escape from it, decides to try the old insurance scam—where you fake your own death and collect on a big policy you took out on yourself. So he decides to kill the peasant and trick people into thinking it is himself; he will then adopt the peasant’s identity and disappear. The plan goes off without a hitch, except for one small flaw. Herman is quite insane, and not until the end of the novel, when the poor peasant’s body is found, do we learn that there is no physical resemblance between the men at all. The book is part thriller, part crime-novel parody, part dark nightmare, and part high farce—and one of my favorite books.

Cal:
Okay. But apart from this tenuous “doubles” theme, I don’t see much connection to
About the Author
.

Colapinto:
Really? Herman, like you, is an aspiring author. He is telling his own story, in the first person, in a manuscript which, like you, he is writing under intense time pressure, as the authorities close in on him. In Despair, Nabokov has Herman write his story right up to the present-tense moment—to the moment when he has committed the murder. The novel shifts into present tense, like
About the Author
. It ratchets up into this galloping real-time narrative. I loved this effect—but not merely as an effect. I saw how Nabokov—that clever bastard—used it to underline certain points he was making about the creation of written narrative, about the indivisibility of reality and illusion.

Cal:
Which is a fancy way of saying you ripped off the idea! I mean, you have me desperately realizing, as Herman does, that my plan has gone awry, and I’m seeking some way out of the nightmare, casting around for how to twist the plot of my life toward a happy ending. The act of living my life and writing it down become one-and-the-same. That’s what happens to Herman, too. No wonder your novel’s working title, for a long time, was a stark one-worder meant to evoke the Nabokov book: you were calling it
Deceit
.

Colapinto:
Please, Cal. Am I to be allowed no secrets?

Cal:
Furthermore,
About the Author
ends with me being captured by the police in a scene suspiciously reminiscent of the ending of Despair. Herman is cowering in a cabin in the woods, frantically writing down what’s happening, as the police and several gawkers gather outside. In
Author
, almost the identical scene occurs.

Colapinto:
Except you get off scot-free! Let’s never forget that, Cal. A little gratitude would be nice. You end up getting everything in the end. The girl. The money. The movie deal. You get the “memoir” published. You get it all.

Cal:
Sure, but that’s only after you’d originally killed me off in the first draft. Remember? You actually had me panic as the police moved in on me. I happened to be holding Les’s revolver, which I’d taken with me when I fled the Halberts’ house. And I was horribly guilty, because in that version, Les had in fact been tortured to death and Chopper, a complete innocent, had also been murdered in the house. So you had me shoot myself and leave the manuscript as an explanation of my actions—a very long suicide note.

Colapinto:
Okay—it was terminally lame. But I only killed you off so quickly because I was exhausted; I happened to have written the last third of
About the Author
while also writing
As Nature Made Him
. I wanted to
get rid of you
as fast as possible.

Cal:
That’s no excuse. The only reason I’m alive today is thanks to your brilliant editor, Robert Jones, who read the first version and said, “No, no, no. Cal would never commit suicide. He’s shown himself to be way too good at slipping out of trouble.” Your agent, Lisa Bankoff, said the same thing.

Colapinto:
True…

Cal:
In fact, the entire ending emerged from something Robert had said, months before, that stuck in your mind. One day when your were chewing the fat in his office at HarperCollins, he happened to chuckle wickedly and say, “I think Cal should get away with it
all
.” I immediately agreed, of course.
You
weren’t so sure.

Colapinto:
Well, it seemed so radical that you wouldn’t get any kind of comeuppance for your naughty behavior. So, yes. At first I laughed-off Robert’s outrageous suggestion.

Cal:
But my essential indestructibility gradually asserted itself against your fundamentally cautious temperament.

Colapinto:
True enough. After tussling for several weeks, writing innumerable terrible endings—including one in which you actually
fake
your suicide and flee—I finally saw a way to do what Robert had suggested. The whole “Afterword” section wrote itself in a galloping state of inspired joy.

Cal
:
Wrote itself?

Colapinto:
Christ. Okay.
You
wrote it.

Cal:
Thank you.

Colapinto:
But I also had a precedent in mind. One of my favorite novels ends the same way—where the rather badly-behaved protagonist gets the ultimate happy ending.

Cal:
Please—not another Nabokov novel!

Colapinto:
Not this time. It’s another book, one of my favorites.

Cal:
Ahhh, so you must be talking about that other book you never shut up about: Kingsley Amis’s
Lucky Jim
.

Colapinto:
That’s right. In that novel, Jim Dixon gets everything he ever dreamed of. I’ve never quite seen that done before with such brazenness, and it gave me license to do it with you.

Cal:
Hey, I’m not complaining. But just one last thing. Doesn’t it make you uneasy at all to reveal all the “inspirations” and “influences” on
About the Author
? Aren’t novelists supposed to play it coy? Aren’t they supposed to cover their tracks and let readers and critics and professors assume that anything good in the book is the result of the novelist’s own individual genius?

Colapinto:
Probably. But you left me little choice. Besides, it only seems appropriate to reveal the influences on
About the Author
. We were, after all, discussing a novel about literary theft.

John Colapinto’s articles have appeared in
Vanity Fair, Esquire, Mademoiselle, US
, and
Rolling Stone
. His first book,
As Nature Made Him
, was based on an article published in
Rolling Stone
that won the National Magazine Award, was a
New York Times
bestseller, and garnered a Books for a Better Life Award for John. He lives in New York City with his wife and son. This is his first novel.