BOOKS

The Inside Story

As a teenager, driving through Pennsylvania with my father, we saw a green highway sign for Wilkes-Barre. That really set my father off; he had an army buddy who was from there, and with each road sign announcing Wilkes-Barre’s approach, he became more and more determined to get in touch with his old friend. Mind you, this was at least thirty years since World War Two had ended. In those days, there were still phone booths and phone books, and a half hour later we were able to conjure up a short, mild accountant my father’s age who dutifully met us at an old-fashioned diner on the city’s outskirts. They had a conversation of no apparent profundity to a 17 year old, and when we got back on the highway my father seemed to keep turning it over silently in his mind, probably thinking about the past, and where he was now, and how that had happened. And that’s where This Is How It Really Sounds began.

About 30 years later, in 2008, I was exhausted after writing a long, dark, complex book about revolution, greed, idealism, death squads and filicide. The book had the bad luck to come out precisely in the teeth of the economic collapse it had predicted, in a month of historically low book sales. The following month Barack Obama was elected and for the moment the book’s vision of a Corporate-run sham-democracy seemed to evaporate along with the 3–4 years I had spent bringing it to life. My agent told me that my publishing career was most likely over.

I think all writers, periodically, get back to a place of emptiness. I went into my office and threw words at a variety of moving targets: A fugitive financier living in exile in Shanghai. A faded rock star. A pack of teenage snowboarders going out in the Alaska backcountry to name the unnameable. Of all of them, only the snowboarding one, with its quiet winter spaces and its radiant small-town life, had something I really loved in it. But the arrogant financier and the has-been musician, though completely unrelated, had some deep connection I didn’t understand.

I decided to try to write it on that level: the illogical, the intuitive. For a very long time, Sounds felt like the book that would bury me as a writer. I took a break to go to South America, and on the way back I described the entire mixed-up, ending-less plot to an old friend, who rescued the whole project simply by saying “That sounds like it could be a great book.” I returned to Alaska and started reading over the manuscript, and it all seemed different. The book fell together in an exhilarating burst of inspiration that I will probably never experience again.

The Inside Story

Invisible World was my first novel, so I was never actually sure I could finish it. With that first one there’s that element of the impossible that you have to grapple with.

I wrote Invisible World at a bad time in my life. Inner Mongolia had become a metaphor for someplace cold and empty and far-away, but inside. I decided to go there in the dead of winter and to write a short story about the trip as I traveled. I started it in the bar of the New World Harborview Hotel, in Hong Kong, sitting there in this elegant glass and marble lobby with piano music washing through it, drinking a beer and looking out over the spectacular harbor. It was a moment that was romantic and lonely and nostalgic at the same time. I started thinking about a friend of mine who’d used to live in Hong Kong, writing about him in my journal, and that journal entry became Invisible World. I went all the way to Inner Mongolia, then turned around and went directly to South America, and much of the book was written in hotel rooms and airplanes on that and the following trip.

In those days I was traveling almost incessantly for months at a time, until I’d wake up in the morning not knowing where I was. This was before the days of the internet, so when you were out there you had little contact with home, and that feeling of isolation and the zen of travel is very much part of the book. It’s about the Invisible World formed by memory, fantasy, people far away, the imagination — a world that is sometimes more vivid than the world of the senses. It’s also about antique textiles, which embody a lot of those elements for me. More than anything, though, Invisible World is a book about the trip you never got a chance to take, and we’ve all got one of those.

Invisible World was published in 1998 and was translated into German, French, Dutch, Japanese and Czech. It did just well enough to give me a deep misunderstanding of how difficult this all was going to be.

The Inside Story

The idea of revolution had been kicking around in my head and my journals ever since my first trip to Central and South America in 1984, a fact that wasn’t looked on very kindly by the Salvadoran military when they arrested me and translated my journals on my first eventful trip south. I remember that incident clearly, especially being blindfolded and interrogated for 8 hours at the San Salvador jail, and thinking, this guy with the black shoes (I could see a tiny slit of the floor through the bottom of the blindfold) seems nice, just a cop doing his job, but that one with the brown loafers, he’s bad news. He’s one of those death-squad guys. And that perception, correct or incorrect, of the mixture of perfectly decent people and rather evil people, thrown together by a bad situation, stayed with me.

When I saw the drift of the country after 2000, I felt more and more that my next book should take on the subject I’d been wanting to write about for nearly two decades. I jotted down an opening paragraph of AOR when I was still finishing 17 Stone Angels, and didn’t return to it for a couple of years. The rough draft was finished in early 2005.

The research was much more difficult than I’d anticipated. I accumulated a shelf full of interesting books: how to form a new identity, improvised explosives, surveillance and bodyguarding. Also many thick books in Spanish about Argentine urban guerrillas of the 1970s, which I rounded out with interviews in Buenos Aires. I talked to organizers of the 1999 WTO Protests, student activists, 1960s activists, CIA people and assorted others. Unlike the research for 17 Stone Angels, which came together in a few exhilarating weeks, the research for AOR was difficult and, at times, disturbing.

But the most important element of The Army of the Republic — the conflict between James Sands and his estranged son — came directly from my own life. My own 8-year-old son was going through a particularly defiant phase, and I couldn’t help but visualize how it might play out if I never learned to deal with it constructively. That became the seed of the relationship between James and Joshua Sands, which is ultimately what drives the book.

The Inside Story

Buenos Aires is like that drop-dead beautiful woman (or man) you knew who had that troubled history and a dark side you just couldn’t escape. I’d been going to B.A. since 1986 and really wanted to write a book that captured my sense of the place. The research was fairly daunting — imagine dropping in on a foreign city to research the subjects of corrupt cops and petty criminals — but everything came together in a magical way as a parade of cops, criminals, investigative journalists and human rights lawyers paraded across my days. This was unquestionably the most exhilarating writing experience I’ve had. I wrote 17 Stone Angels very quickly, with the idea of writing a straight detective thriller. In typical fashion, everything became completely inverted, with the corrupt police chief “hero” trying to create an ever larger circle of lies. What drives 17 Stone Angels is not the story of a good man finding out the truth about a crime, but about a bad man finding out the truth about himself, and that’s what made it interesting for me. I finished the rough draft in three months, and the book in eight.

The first thing that happened was that the book was optioned by Paramount on behalf of Tom Cruise’s production company, who was in turn acting for the great screenwriter Robert Towne. We thought we were really off to the races now.

My agent submitted the book 42 times and we got exactly one offer, which we turned down. There’s always a certain pattern to these submissions, for me. First, there’s the ridicule directed at the editors who’ve been so stupid as to reject it, and the disbelief at their idiotic reasons for turning it down. Then, as the rejections keep pattering in, the doubt starts, and by the end, there’s that feeling that the book really is the way they see it: too literary, or not literary enough, overwritten, or underwritten, or not violent enough, or set in a foreign country or… you name it. Somehow, the book is all of those contradictory negatives at the same time. They’re the editors: they must be right.

Fortunately, we had better luck on the exterior. In January of 2004, 17 Stone Angels was published in the UK by Orion Publishers under the title The Stone Angels. It was followed by the French translation, Les Anges des Pierre, from Pygmalion in Paris, and then Dutch, German, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai editions. Finally, ten years later, 17 Stone Angels was published — with its correct title — in the United States, by Four Winds Press.

But what about that movie? It was re-optioned, a screenplay was written, and then it was dropped. That’s life in Hollywood. But it was a pleasant fantasy while it lasted, and one should never discount the value of a pleasant fantasy.