Archive for January, 2009

My first tour journal reads a little greener than I’d like to admit, but I was green. So there you have it.

Below you’ll find my archived tour journal, beginning with the very first public reading of Gods of Aberdeen at a mall in Newton, MA. The best part of my too-long tour was the Italy jaunt, and reading it over I realize I didn’t convey how much fun I was having. I was too blinded by stress. I had also not yet been immunized to critics, and even though reviews for Gods were largely favorable–better than I expected, actually–the occasional critical salvo cut me to the bone. Mid-tour I found myself in various hotel rooms, staring at my laptop at one a.m., Googling my name and book title. Searching for something nasty someone, anyone, had said.

I believe such masochism is especially common in first-time authors. We already believe we’ve conned the public, the publishers, and critics who like our work. So we search for validation of these feelings. It’s our form of self-flagellation. We think it will inure us to the inevitable bad review. It doesn’t, of course. It only ruins our fun.

Enough confession. Enjoy.

2006

MILAN, ITALY, Tuesday, February 21st: Tuesday morning in Milan I’m a willing hostage in the lobby of the Carlyle Brera Hotel. I’m seated on a couch. To my left is my interpreter—an exceedingly intelligent woman who works for many of the publishing houses in Milan—and across from me are Carolina and Lidia, both media liaisons representing Sonzogno Editore, my Italian publisher. I’m jet lagged and my Italian is terrible, and the first of thirteen interviews that day is with one of Milan’s premiere teenage magazines, Young 18.

The first question from the interviewer is the most intelligent question regarding my novel that any journalist has asked me in five months of touring. She asks:

Aside from everything else in your book, this book seems to be about male friendship, and difficulties of navigating love between male friends. Would you care to comment?

I pause, look at my interpreter, and say:

“That’s the most intelligent question any journalist has asked me on tour.”

My interpreter speaks to the journalist, and everyone laughs knowingly. Yes, Carolina says. All the American authors say that when they come here.

Now I’m invigorated. Thirteen interviews later I’m exhausted. I’ve been interviewed by radio shows, websites, newspapers, fashion magazines, literary journals. I’ve had lunch with Ornella Robbiati, head of Sonzogno Editore and grande dame of the Italian publishing scene. She’s such a grande dame I give her full control of my lunch order, and she does not disappoint. Tagliatelle with wilted greens and a cream sauce, a pork tenderloin which would tempt a Lubavitcher, and finally a wet chunk of tiramisu that’s so good I feel like I’m cheating on my wife. Ornella orders a Cabernet. I have a glass. It’s too much, really. Just. Too. Good.

The next morning the process begins again. This time, Carolina and Lidia tell me, I’m being interviewed by some very important newspapers and magazines, most of which lay claim to having the widest circulation in Milan. The first interview of the day is a gentleman from Il Matino, Milan’s largest Christian magazine, and he asks me what I think about Harry Potter and alchemy, and whether such superstitious, quasi-witchcraft-oriented topics are acceptable for Christians.

I make a rookie mistake and compare certain themes of my book (the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone, etc.) to the quest for the Holy Grail, which in turn mirrors one’s quest for salvation from Christ.

(I say rookie mistake because I’m in Italy, where the Catholic church—however modernistic the Italians are becoming—is still very much relevant, if not spiritually then at the very least culturally.)

There’s a pause. The interviewer asks me if I’m Christian. No, I tell him. There’s another pause. Then I attempt to rescue my poor Semitic self by telling him I believe the average Italian reader is strong enough in their faith to not be swayed by a work of fiction, and he smiles and nods as he scribbles something down.

MILAN, ITALY, Wednesday, February 22nd: Again, the theme of day two is the intelligent questions. Every journalist has read my book, and I know they have because their questions are just too pointed, too insightful, to be gleaned from the book jacket or other book reviews. I can’t believe how impressive these journalists are. And they can’t believe an American wrote a book with so many classical references. Their impression of Americans—artists or otherwise—is that of a fetish for the new and a childlike blindness toward the past. Which, as they are quick to point out, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But, as they are equally quick to point out, neither is it necessarily good.

Another object of fascination with these Italian media types is the culture of American colleges. One interviewer from Campus magazine (you can guess which demographic his magazine is geared toward) tells me that our college system is entirely different from Italy’s. Despite the name of his magazine, Italy doesn’t have our type of college campus. Students don’t go away to college and live in dorms. They don’t speak with their professors outside of class. They don’t develop the typical college life as we know it.

This same interviewer tells me that Italians believe American colleges are all like Animal House, and he mentions John Belushi with a nod and raised eyebrows, as if asking for confirmation.

“No,” I say. “Not all American colleges are like Animal House. In fact, very few are like Animal House. I, for example, went to a small, quiet school.”

So, he asks, you did not party in college like the characters in your book?

I can see what he’s looking for, and I give it to him.

“Sophomore year I invented a new ‘Olympic’ event,” I say. “Fireplace mantle-diving onto beanbags. In my underwear. And then, after I won the gold medal (as voted by my housemates) I cracked open a celebratory bottle of horrible champagne and knocked myself out with the cork.”

Yes, the interviewer says, and he smiles and nods. I then realize we haven’t really talked about my book, and it doesn’t matter.

An attractive young woman from Noir Magazine, with short curly hair like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, asks the most hilarious question thus far:

Do you live a noir life?

I look at my interpreter and ask her what she means. My interpreter says something to the interviewer, who asks the same question, so I respond:

“I guess so.”

Explain, she says.

“Well, I don’t own a trenchcoat and I don’t smoke.”

So what is it about your life that is noir?

“I don’t know. I’m a happy guy. Most of the time.”

Is your fashion noir?

“Yes.” (I have no idea what this means, but I had to give her something)

The interviewer nods and jots something down. She then asks:

You are a writer of noir…what advice would you give to readers to help them introduce more noir elements into their lives?

“I’m not sure,” I say. “Spend more time in fog. Move to a port city.”

Please keep in mind I’m not going for sarcasm here. I just don’t how to answer these questions, so I go for the literalism angle, which sometimes gets me in trouble. But what else could I have said? Commit a double murder. Have an affair with a wealthy man’s wife and discover her body in your bathtub.

Just when I think this interview is going nowhere, the interviewer says:

Your book talks about the search for immortality. Would you like to live forever?

“Yes,” I say. “And I know I’m supposed to give the wise-man answer, but at this point in my life, I think dying is crap, and I’d like to not die for a very, very long time.”

She taps her knee with her pen, looks at her notes, and says:

But don’t you think death is what gives life its beauty? That the tragedy of our inevitable death is what gives meaning to our short lives?

I immediately fall in love with her. And then I collect myself and say:

“I agree with you 100%. But I’d still like the opportunity to test your theory.”

Thirteen interviews later, I’m finally finished. Twenty-six interviews in two days. The statistics, for those of you interested in this sort of thing:

Average interview time: 30 minutes.
Average number of questions per interview: 10
Average number of pasta dishes consumed, per day: 3
Average number of minutes spent obsessing my skin and hair in the hotel bathroom mirror before beginning day one of the interviews: 60
Same category, as it relates to day two of the interviews: 45. Give or take.
As seen every day, average number of heart-stopping Italian women dressed like the patron saint of impossibly chic fashion: 1,000. Give or take.
Percentage of those women who tucked their jeans into their boots: 83% [ed. note: this trend has taken two years to reach Boston mainstream fashion]

COMO, ITALY, Saturday, February 25th: My wife and I decide to spend the remainder of our trip in Como, a small, lakeside town ten minutes from the Swiss border. Imagine the prototypical small Italian village with narrow back alleys, tall, stuccoed buildings with medieval-era doors, ancient churches that toll the hours, and little piazzas every few blocks
with fountains trickling in the center and cobblestones underfoot. Combine it with towering mountains on all sides, dotted with white homes. The mountains are so close, you could easily look into the windows of the uppermost homes with a pair of binoculars.

During one afternoon walk—well-dressed men on bicycles, swooping pigeons, a priest dressed in full vestment walking solemnly under the arches of a medieval church—I see my book in the front window of one of the bookstores. If I were in America, I would stop in, introduce myself, and sign the whole lot.

I stop in, introduce myself in broken Italian, and sign the whole lot. Photos are taken by the store employees. A young, teenage girl approaches me with her father smiling and whispering words of encouragement in the background, and she asks me in halting, trembling English:

Will you please sign this for me?

I’m floored. Not because she’s buying my book, not because I feel famous, but because this young girl in Como, Italy, thinks she’s asking me to do her a favor, when she’s the one doing me a favor. She’s buying my book. Out of all the books in this bookstore in this little town in northern Italy, this Italian girl came to the bookstore to buy mine, and of all the lucky moments in the universe, I just happened to be in that bookstore at that moment.

She says her name is Valentina. Her father shakes my hand, shakes my wife’s hand, and Valentina stares with jaw open as I sign. I shake her hand and thank her, and she stares straight ahead, like she’s in the presence of some famous person who stopped by for a quick chat before heading back to his rarified universe. She doesn’t realize I feel the exact same way about her. Valentina, you made my year.

Postscript: The next night we have drinks with Enzo, one of the bookstore employees, and his girlfriend, Lucia. We communicate in halting English, my awful Italian, and drawings on napkins. Enzo and Lucia insist on giving us a ride to the airport the next morning, and they give me a gift. An English translation of I’m Not Scared, by Niccoló Ammaniti. The wife and I are heading back to Como this summer. Enzo and Lucia are helping us find a place. Their warmth and generosity made that small town in Northern Italy feel like home, and I’m already a little homesick.

Postscript Postscript: We haven’t yet made it back to Como. Two years later I’m still homesick for that little town by the lake.

2005

WINSTON-SALEM, Saturday, September 10th: For the first time in my life I get a driver waiting for me at the airport. Bonus: he was in the Special Forces. He wants to talk fishing and football. I ask if he hunts and he says the guns bother him. I ask if he was in Vietnam and he nods and goes back to talking about fishing. So there I am, sitting in the backseat en route to the Holiday Inn Select, talking with a Vietnam vet/special forces guy who is now my chauffeur, and I’m wondering why the hell is this guy driving me? I write books. He, as Max Fischer would say, was in the shit. I should be driving this guy wherever the hell he wants.

Sweet tea and fried chicken for dinner, and the next morning I get in the book festival shuttle with the rest of the authors (shuttle driven by the Special Forces chauffeur) and we head for Bethabara Park. The book festival is one strip with big tents and little booths, and my Junior League escort escorts me to my tent. I do my thing sans microphone, while directly across the way one of the south’s most popular writers—Dorothea Benton Frank—does her thing to a packed house. In the middle of my Q&A I see a volunteer taking the empty chairs from my tent and bringing them to Dorothea’s. Humbling, my friends. And not surprising at all.

Low attendance notwithstanding, my audience kicks ass. Great questions, attentive smiles (or, at the very least, extremely well-feigned attentive smiles), and afterwards I’m escorted to my table to sign books. For ten minutes I sit and no one shows up. Then I realize I’m sitting under the wrong name. Julia Alvarez. Yes, there is some Spanish blood in me but I’m definitely not Julia Alvarez, and so I move to the table marked Micah Nathan. One person arrives with my book in hand. To my left sits Dorothea Benton Frank. The line for her table extends to the ocean.

Twenty minutes pass, I sign stock at the B&N tent, and then head back to the hotel. The author dinner is that evening, and as the wine is poured, our charming, proper Southern women hosts become loud and hilarious. They start talking about sex. Someone brings up Mormons. I tell them all I know about the Mormon religion: After death, Mormon men go to a special “Mormon planet” where they are given twelve virgins. Twelve virgins? Who would want such a thing, I ask. Sounds like a lot of work. Twelve whores would be a lot closer to paradise then twelve virgins.

Silence. I search the table for a Mormon, but everyone has wine in their glass.

Next event: Concord Festival of Books, “New Literary Voices Panel.” Concord, Massachusetts. Sunday, October 23rd at 3:00 p.m..

NEWBURYPORT, Friday, August 12th: Cross H.P. Lovecraft with Norman Rockwell and the Patagonia catalogue and you get Newburyport. It’s the quintessential New England town, complete with ruddy-faced native sons and Talbot-clad big-city expats, tooling around the bricked streets in their Jeep Wranglers and British racing green Range Rovers. There’s the ocean, exquisite dining on every corner, and a hint of that fine New England gothic coating the whole town. It reminds me of Gloucester, without the heroin underbelly.

The reading is fun. Can I think of a better word? No. I won’t. Fun works well. It’s fun because the events director has made my job easy. She designs a poster and staples it throughout town. Her efforts pay off—about half the audience is strangers. Some of the attendees are friends who’ve come to several of my readings. God help them. They get to hear the same excerpt. After the reading we hit a local restaurant, and the events director joins us. I talk to her about Tokyo, and the Japanese consumer fetish. She lived in Japan for five years, and tells me how scary the Japanese consumer fetish is. I tell her I’m impressed with Japanese consumer fetish. I love Japanese consumer fetish. I love writing the words Japanese consumer fetish.

But I am impressed with Japanese consumer fetish because they do it without guilt. They go all the way. No griping over the hollowness of a consumer culture. They dive in, gobble it all up, then crap it out the next month. There does seem to be a paradox behind their gluttonous shopping habits…by making items so disposable, one treats the items with a kind of disdain, even as one worships the culture in which the items flourish.

So if my agent were to sell Japanese rights to Gods of Aberdeen, would I be content with one million Japanese teenage girls gobbling up as many copies as they could, then throwing out the book a month later, or would I rather have someone buy my book and keep it for the rest of their life?

A part of me wants art to be disposable and impermanent. Another part of me shudders at the thought of so much work ultimately meaning very little. I spent seven years on my book. You can read it in one week. All art is impermanent. It has to be. Otherwise it’s…stagnant. Like those friends of yours who still listen to the same music they did in high school.

Next event: Bookmarks Book Festival. Winston-Salem, North Carolina. September 9-10

BROOKLINE, Thursday, August 4th: Brookline Booksmith is a prime example of bookstores as community anchors. They have author events just about every day, a frighteningly well-read staff, an events director who moonlights as an avant-garde musician, and a little gift shop in the back that sells things like the Jesus Christ action figure. Collect the whole set…Judas…Pilate…and now the Mel Gibson Roman Soldier with working mallet. Remember when Mel was cool? Remember Road Warrior? What happened to those days….

The reading at Booksmith turns out to be very mellow. Brookline is a town of serious readers, and even though I’m a little nervous about the Q&A part, the audience, as usual, is terrific. Bonus: I receive my first heckle. Not really a heckle, though. More like a blurt from a friend. And a confusing blurt, at that. After the reading we hit the local Chinese restaurant/dance hall. I get drunk on sake and fried shrimp.

Highly recommended: The Found Footage Festival. A cornucopia of Pop Culture vomit. The most entertaining event I’ve been to this year.

Next stop: Jabberwocky Books. Newburyport, Massachusetts. Friday, August 12 at 7 p.m.

BOSTON, Thursday, July 14th: I’m at Newtonville Books, sharing a reading/signing with Todd Hasak-Lowy. The owner of Newtonville Books, Tim Huggins, in an exceedingly cool guy. The reading room looks like the Paris underground: pale overhead lighting, chalking brick, age-grayed planks on the floor. Tim gives me a terrific intro., the audience applauds politely (most are there to see Todd), and I launch into my well-oiled spiel.

It doesn’t feel so well-oiled, though. Only my wife can tell—afterwards she tells me she noticed I struggled. I agree, but I can’t say why. Something just felt off…I had a brief out-of-body experience while reading my usual passage, and as I read the last sentence I wasn’t quite sure how I got there. After the reading we all go to the local pub. It seems as though Todd’s entire extended family is there. The pub is like a bar mitzvah party. I have a beer, tell a few Attila the Hun stories, then hightail it out of there.

On the way home it hits me. A migraine. Like cold icepicks jabbing my eyes. My stomach lurches and as we swoop along the Arborway I think I’m going to vomit. I’m sickened and relieved. Sickened because I feel like shit, relieved because the migraine explains my off-night. The disjointed thoughts, the out-of-body sensation…it’s called a prodrome. So I did a reading with a prodrome. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration while in the midst of a week-long migraine. I’m not complaining.

Next stop: Brookline Booksmith. Brookline, Massachusetts. Thursday, August 4th at 7 p.m.

NEW YORK, June 27th-June 30th: Despite what popular convention would have us believe, Buffalo rocks. I have six media events in my hometown—four readings, a stint on the morning show, and an appearance on a local news program. I take lead story on the local news program, ahead of both the Lupus guy AND the fashion show. The attention makes me forget that my sales are modest (curse Amazon and its public sales rankings; who wouldn’t become obsessed? Who wouldn’t check them every day, several times a day, and feel his heart sink in time with the rankings?). For the first time in my young career I hear someone in the media say “his book is FLYING off the shelves.” It makes me laugh, and if Matrix were here, he’d laugh too.

This is the first time on my tour that a majority of the audience has read my book. The difference is huge. We connect. A woman reads aloud her favorite passage from my book (later someone tells me they saw her copy of my book and it’s marked with notes and underlinings and highlighted paragraphs. Can you imagine anything more humbling?). My fifth grade teacher shows up. I realize that book tours don’t have anything to do with sales. It’s all about artistic juice. We use it up in the creative process. Feedback trickles in…maybe our agent says something, maybe our editor throws us a bone. But most of the time it’s a wasteland. That’s where book tours come in. There are people who actually give a shit about what we write.

A few things I’ve learned thus far:

1. Bring your own pen to all readings.

2. Invariably, someone in the audience will ask about your next book. Don’t talk about it. Ever. At best, you won’t get the enthusiastic response you hope for. At worst, someone won’t understand the burgeoning plot, and that delicate shell of a work-in-progress may crack.

3. Someone will ask how sales are. Smile and shrug. Say something like “well, my agents still returns my calls, so…” Then go home and check your Amazon sales ranking (actually, don’t do that, but you will, anyway. Trust me: even Odysseus would relent).

I’ll miss Buffalo. Despite its gritty, rusted image, it’s a gentle city without pretension. And our hotel cost us fifty bucks a night.

Next stop: Newtonville Books. Boston, Massachusetts. Wednesday, July 13th.

WASHINGTON, Tuesday, June 21st: Seattle feels familiar—strange, because I haven’t been back to the west coast since being born there. Everyone is earnest and the drivers are slow, and there are bicycles and soy lattes everywhere. I’m asked to kayak and I politely decline. Hiking? Nope. Mountain climbing? Uh-uh. Give me basketball, I insist, and I’m told of a court tucked into the side of a hill. Beautiful view of Mt. Rainier from right under the basket, my friend says. I grab my sneakers and hop in the rental car. My friend grabs his kayak and darts out onto Lake Washington.

Down the street from the basketball court lives a kid named Bobby, whose older brother is considered one of the top five high school players in the country. That afternoon, I play 3 on 3. Bobby plays with me. His sixteen year-old phenom brother is on the other team.

Being the only white player on the court, I’m immediately given three names: Larry Bird, John Stockton, and Jerry West. But I’m not white, I tell them. I’m Jewish. Everyone pauses, unsure of whether to laugh or not, and then one of the elders sitting on the courtside bench explodes with laughter and claps so loud the ravens watching our game scatter in a black spray.

Jews aren’t white, the elder says.

Of course we aren’t, I say. We’re a minority.

Our team wins the first game, loses the second game by a basket, and then Bobby’s brother stops screwing around and shows us why he’s being pro scouted at the age of sixteen.

For the first time in my life I’m dunked on. I hit a jumper over his outstretched arm and everyone oohs, so next play he intercepts a pass, bounces the ball off the backboard, catches it in mid-air, and throws it down so hard the rim clangs like a church bell. My teammates quickly give up, but I play harder. I can sense my intensity reflected off them. Hustling white kid from the rarified air of Brookline, Massachusetts. John Stockton must prove his basketball prowess. Larry Bird must represent. Jerry West will not be dunked on a second time.

Jerry West is dunked on a second time. We lose badly and I take a well-deserved seat near the elder on the courtside bench. Bobby walks home with his friends. The elder and I watch as the phenom hits ten 3’s in a row.

That’s easily the best player I’ve ever played against, I say.

He was just fooling, the elder says. If he wanted to he could have scored every point, all three games.

I was fooling, too, I say, and the phenom stops his practice and turns to me.

What’s that? he says.

I didn’t want to dunk on you on your home court, I say. Especially in front of your little brother.

The phenom rolls me the ball. I strut to mid-court. Two deep breaths, then I begin my trot to the three-point line and explode toward the basket. I leap, outstretch my arm…

And lay it in. Softly. Off the backboard.

Next stop: Bistro Bookers at Chef’s Restaurant. Buffalo, New York. Tuesday, June 28th.

CONNECTICUT, Tuesday, June 14th: Books on the Common in Ridgeport. Behind the Pizza Hut there lives an old bookstore surrounded by strip mall hell. The owners are Ellen and Darwin, and when I arrive they’ve put out food and drinks, set up a comfortable chair for me in a quiet side room, and arranged a few rows of folding chairs. Ellen is nervous because she’s afraid no one will show up. My reading is scheduled on the same night as the Ridgefield summer concert series, she explains. There’s a Scottish band playing in the park that night, and I figure beautiful weather and bagpipes trump first-time authors every time.

Ellen and Darwin put me at ease with their kindness. Ellen tells me to wait for a few minutes while Darwin trolls the surrounding businesses for audience members. I sit in the comfortable chair, cross my legs like Dick Cavett, and watch as people slowly trickle in. The reading goes well. The questions are intelligent and varied, and I’m so relaxed I feel like I’m in my living room. Afterwards Ellen and Darwin recommend Wild Ginger, a local pan-Asian restaurant. Ask for Ben, Ellen says.

The food, as promised, is excellent, and Ben treats us well. Rachel drives home because I’m buzzed on sake and sleep deprivation, and I close my eyes and listen to the rain slapping the windshield.

Next stop: Third Place Books. Seattle, Washington. Saturday, June 18th.

BOSTON, Thursday, June 9th: Second book tour stop. Borders Book in Boston, Massachusetts. The events director—a gracious, genuinely interested woman named Susan—gives my wife a free iced mocha from the coffee bar. I don’t get nervous until everyone shows up. It’s like an episode of This is Your Life. All the subcultures in my life mix for this one evening. The guys from the basketball court, the women from the fencing club, my fellow writers, my old friends, my new friends…they all show up, they all take their seats while I take a final swig of water, spill some on my shirt, and stand at the oak podium. I read for six minutes and answer their questions for thirty minutes. Two things are accomplished:

1. I reference Brian Dennehy not once, but twice.
2. We spend most of the time laughing.

The event is so much fun I forget the purpose. Selling books, of course, but how much more enjoyable to write something, have people read it, then have them ask you questions. Buy it used or check it out of the library or borrow it from a friend, and when you’re finished, give me your questions and criticisms and observations. Please. I insist.
Strange how art—even a solitary art like writing—creates human connection. I am continuously amazed that more authors don’t talk about the profundity of connecting with one’s audience at these readings. Most of what I read from various authors is melancholic, bitter complaint. “Only two people showed up…when they introduced me they botched my name…nobody bought the book…”

Count yourself fortunate those two people cared enough about your art to donate their time. It’s your book. You’re the expert on it. Act like one and don’t be ashamed to show your love.
Next stop: Books on the Common. Ridgefield, Connecticut. Tuesday, June 14th.

NEW YORK, Saturday, June 4th: The first stop on my book tour. BookExpo America in NYC at the Jacob Javits. Simon & Schuster gave me a booth, a poster, a felt pen, and a trusty publicist who ushered me around the enormous building and was patient enough to let me engage in sublimely nerdish banter with the guys at the Wizards of the Coast booth (waxing nostalgic for D&D never felt so good).

Six hours later I’d signed 150 copies of my book, read for six minutes on a panel of “Emerging Voices” (did I emerge at that moment? Sort of), shaken hands with smiling industry pros who were all very gracious, and met my Spanish publishers who proudly (and thankfully) announced they were making my title the lead for their fall catalogue.

Tiresome world-weary author persona aside, it was awesome. Awesome in the truest sense of the word—puritanically awesome. Fire and brimstone awesome. Is this the sort of thing authors complain of? Meeting the people who take the time and the effort to give a shit about your creation? How could you possibly complain?

There was something cosmically funky about seeing the faces behind the Conan comic books. It confirmed Conan wasn’t real, and those responsible for perpetrating his adventures look a little like me. The steely-eyed Cimmerian has a publisher, and the publisher wears glasses. Glasses. Dear Lord.

So I signed books until 1:30 (everyone was nice and I wished I had more time to give them), then I wandered around and requested/pleaded/pilfered books from whatever publisher caught my eye. At 2:30 I sat on the three-person panel and read a six-minute excerpt from my book. I was nervous for about thirty seconds until the prose sucked me in, and then I was back in my Brookline apartment, reading to my wife for the millionth time. When the six minutes ended I looked up and had one thought:

“Yeah. I’m thirsty.”

One hour later my wife and I sat at the now-abandoned Simon & Schuster bivouac and watched the dregs of untaken ARC’s carted off in dollies, and opposite us there was a poster of Dr. Phil on the wall, below a poster of David McCullough. Dr. Phil looked like Dr. Phil and David McCullough looked like Mr. Hooper.

The train ride home was relaxing. I watched Kill Bill on my laptop. Rachel read the first chapter of the galley for Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle. We split a bottle of Sam Adams and toasted to the kindness of humanity.

Next stop: Borders Books. Boston, Massachusetts. Thursday, June 9th.

If you’re interested in why I started writing Gods of Aberdeen the answer is simple: it was a story I wanted to read.

But it didn’t begin that way. It began as a mental image, one thirty-second scene conceived sometime around my junior year of college. A young boy, dressed in a threadbare coat, carrying a duffel bag with all his possessions, trudging across a snow-covered lawn. All the usual gothic imagery applies – swirling winter sky, bare trees clacking in the wind, ahead a massive stone building with towers and arches and stained glass. It’s the student union for Aberdeen College, and the boy stops at the base of its front steps and all he can do is look up and stare.

From that scene sprouted my story; a coming-of-age novel that squeaks between the Scylla of The Catcher in the Rye and the Charybdes of A Separate Peace. I know comparisons are dangerous, especially with those two behemoths, but their shadows fall across every coming-of-age novel I’ve read, and they most certainly fall across mine. I’ll be the first to confess.

My narrator is Eric Dunne, a brilliant 16 year-old orphan who leaves his foster family and their New Jersey tenement, and begins his search for an identity at Aberdeen College, a wealthy liberal arts school in Connecticut. His intellect can’t rescue him from alienation – it makes it worse, actually, a 16 year-old whose intelligence is only matched by his naiveté – but he soon finds acceptance into a small circle of students, all of whom live off-campus with a Medieval history professor in his country estate, helping him complete his three-book series on the Middle Ages.

What follows? A charismatic professor obsessed with his legacy, Eric’s reluctant foray into alchemy, the seductions of an older woman. An old librarian who claims he’s immortal, and a cocktail of students too wealthy and too intelligent for their years. If, as the saying goes, a path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom, my novel illustrates what happens when one sets out on that path without a moral compass.

I chose alchemy, and specifically the Philosopher’s Stone, for its metaphorical power. Alchemists were learned men who spent their lives searching for immortality, unaware their quest took the very life they worked so hard to prolong. They believed in both empiricism and faith, in the sacred and the profane, and somewhere along that continuum walked alchemy on the thinnest of ropes. I found it fascinating; man pitting his mortality against his intelligence, as if he could outthink death. And how apt, I believed, to set this within the academic milieu. “Publish or perish” can be interpreted in many ways, including in its most literal sense.

Although I started writing this novel for myself, it quickly evolved into something less narcissistic. I wanted to tell a good story, and it didn’t matter if I knew how it was going to end, because in many ways the story never ended. A good tale is organic and always changing, and if the reader can’t see the mirrors and false bottoms then the story works. To that end, I hope I’ve succeeded.

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Gods of Aberdeen

Prologue

I remember Aberdeen College well—even now I could tell you what it looks like, on any particular day, at any particular time. I could tell you how the air tastes and how long the shadows are that run from the silver maples in the Quad, streaming over the grass like rivers of ink. I could tell you about winter in Aberdeen, sloping ice-sheathed drifts, tall, naked trees painting the snow black. How the wind sounds when it darts through the forest, how the sky looks at night, white dots spattered across a shadowy canvas.
Not too long ago I returned to Aberdeen, to Dr. Cade’s house, walking to the back, to the pond, which I expected to see as I remembered it most fondly: jagged reeds along its edge; kites of gnats looping endlessly above a mirrored surface crinkled by the wind; nets of hornwort and duckweed hugging the shores. But despite the years the flash of memories was still too vivid, and I couldn’t dip my fingers into the cool water for fear of seeing something bubble up from the unknown depths and greet me with hollow eyes and bared teeth. And as for Dr. Cade’s house, the house that had seduced me away from my freshman year at Aberdeen, it now looked abandoned. Its windows were covered in grime, the paint was peeling, and the driveway didn’t wind through the eons of time, as I’d once imagined, but ended where it always did, at a small walkway where the grass poked between the flagstones.
I drove into town and saw that Aberdeen itself had also withered; time diminished it into what it always was a stately old college necessarily blind to the outside world. The H.F. Mores Library, where mysterious forces once loomed, was now only a stuffy crypt of books. The hills and forests surrounding campus, where we’d spent those bitter winter mornings searching for our lost friend, had regained their anonymity, towering copses of spindly trees dissolving into a dark blur. There were a few students milling about the Quad, those who’d returned early from summer break, and I glided among them, unseen, under Garringer’s spire-tipped shadow, to the black oak at the edge of campus. On its trunk, amid puckered scars and cracked bark and an obsidian trail of ants, I looked for the remains of the initials Dan and I had carved into the wood, many years ago on a warm October day. I knew where Dan was, but the other friends I’d made during those days had long disappeared within the folds of time, swallowed like old wounds on the trunk of that black oak.
I went back to Aberdeen because I hoped it could return something of mine it took long ago. But I realized such places never give back what they take. It’s a toll they exact, and when the debt has been paid you know your time is done not by the clang of any bell, but by the soft rustle of apathy. Nostalgia becomes a dark lens, the promise of immortality sheds its skin, and you find yourself gliding, unseen, under the shadows of the giants in your life, who have grown too tired to take notice.

Aberdeen

Chapter 1

I arrived in Fairwich at dusk, and with my arrival came the rain. The clouds had been threatening all day, from New Jersey to Connecticut, and when I stepped off the bus there was a gust of cool wind, the clouds rumbled softly, and the rain began. I called for a cab from a payphone booth and waited in the booth, watching the sidewalk darken and the leaves drip. Down the street a little boy dropped his bright yellow bike on a front lawn and ran into his house.
The storm had worsened by the time the cab arrived. The cabby wore a green baseball cap, frayed around the edges, the plastic backing of the cap dug into the tanned, black-hair-bristled rolls on the back of his neck. A limp cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. I asked him to take me to Aberdeen and he nodded, one hand on the wheel, the other draped over the top of the passenger seat. He asked me if this was my first year. I said it was.
“Where you from?” he said.
“New Jersey,” I said.
“I used to date a Jersey girl,” he said.
I leaned my head against the window and stared at the trees, letting them whip by in a brown and green blur. The road didn’t have any shoulder, just a thin line where the blacktop ended and spiky weeds began. It reminded me of my old home in West Falls, riding into town with my mom, staring at the road edged with dusty, dark earth.
“First time in the country?” The cabby eyed me in his rearview.
“I’m an American,” I said.
He looked at me in the rearview again. “You serious?” He laughed. “I mean out here. In the country. Farms…forests…”
“Oh,” I said, “I haven’t been in the country since I was ten.”
“Parents don’t take you camping anymore?”
“I’m an orphan,” I said.
“No shit?”
I nodded.
The cabby took the cigarette out of his mouth, stared at it a moment, and flicked it out the window.

As the cab rounded the bend of the brick entranceway, behind the thinning maples and pines, there stood Garringer Hall. It looked less like a student union than a medieval castle, and I imagined a dragon, with green scales and membranous wings and eyes like glistening rubies, circling down from the gray sky and perching on the largest of the three spires. I pulled out the tri-fold map that had been sent to me in my acceptance package. Two smaller structures flanked the hall, with a covered brick and wood causeway joined to the westernmost building. This was the H.F. Mores Library—where I would be spending two mornings per week, according to my work-study assignment—not as tall as Garringer but longer, made of the same rough-cut granite blocks and topped with mullioned dormers. The easternmost building was all ivy-covered dark stone with a turreted roof, a massive clock sitting atop the center turret, and I recognized this structure as Thorren Hall, the main classroom center on campus. We drove slowly up the gradually sloping hill, students hurrying around us with their gray umbrellas and brown book bags and black shoes shiny from the rain.
I don’t remember exactly what I expected of my housing, though I imagined it would be similar to every image I’d seen on TV of college dorms: small, carpeted, and a bed with a sagging, stained mattress. I was surprised, however, when I opened the heavy wooden door to my room in Paderborne Hall. Inside was a gracious space, with an eleven-foot peaked ceiling, a scarred parquet floor and a dark-stained desk, set against bookshelves still showing the litter of students past—gum wrappers, pens, and paper clips. Ivory-colored drapes fluttered in the breeze from an open window. I dropped my bag and sat on the floor, listened to the soft thunder, watched the sable-colored clouds rolling over the swaying trees with their pale leaves turned up against the storm.
Affinity for open spaces is in my blood; I was born and spent the first ten years of my life in West Falls, Minnesota, in a small house on a farm. My father left when I was five, and my mother died of cancer when I was ten, and I was sent to live with her second cousin Nana, in a two-bedroom apartment in one of Stulton, New Jersey’s “urban renewal” zones. It was a prison sentence. Nana didn’t seem too fond of me, and her husband Leon and their two sons were downright hostile. My classmates at my new school didn’t like me because I was too young, having skipped a grade in grammar school.
There was something suffocating about Stulton, like a wet, gray blanket had been dropped over the city and we were all trapped underneath. Summers were the worst—the squall of dripping air conditioners, hot bus exhaust, heat shimmering off the sidewalks. During summer I missed my childhood home the most. I felt if I could just return to West Falls and sneak back into my house and live like a stowaway in the crawlspace or under the attic eaves, that everything would be okay again, that I’d slip back into my former life and it would be as if my dad had never left and my mom had never died. But going back home was just as impossible as my mom’s resurrection. West Falls had died with her, and Stulton was all I had left.
But eventually I adjusted, and I made the high school into my sanctuary, the only place where I could read in peace and not have to listen to the blaring TV or the barking dogs or the arguing neighbors. I’d stay in the school library after hours, reading my books until the janitor noticed and sent me home. Sympathetic teachers gave me paper and pens, notebooks and a calculator, and I won academic awards every year up until graduation. I displayed an affinity for languages, especially Latin. By senior year I’d made some good friends, and even though I missed West Falls, I’d developed a sort of hardened loyalty to where I was. It was misery, but it was a misery I knew well.
After graduation my friends scattered like seeds in the wind. I was the only one who stayed. I took a job as a stock boy at a convenience mart across the street from our apartment, and every month college brochures arrived and every month Nana told me I was too poor to afford college, and slowly I felt myself catching her apathy and resignation about life. My friends were gone. My sanctuary—high school—was gone. So I lowered my head and kept working and stashed the money from my paychecks in a hole in our bathroom floor. And then one Sunday night, while taking out the trash, I saw the dark outline of a brochure with ABERDEEN COLLEGE printed across the front in gleaming white, peering at me through the garbage bag’s translucent plastic. I ripped open the bag, took out the brochure, and read it while sitting in the dim light of the stairwell.
Aberdeen College. Located in Fairwich, Connecticut. Established 1902. Its motto, printed beneath:

Ex Ungue Leonem

From the part we may judge of the whole. Literal translation: from the claw we may judge of the lion. The glossy brochure photos promised it all: gently sloping hills, lush trees, a shadow-speckled country field. Centered on the front of the brochure was Garringer Hall, looking like a Gothic cathedral with students standing on its front steps. The blonde women were smartly dressed with plaid bows in their hair, and the men had leather book bags and preternaturally confident smiles. Ex Ungue Leonem. Every student a representative of Aberdeen College, for now and the rest of their days. The tang of New England countryside will seep into your skin, snake its way into your bones, and there it will remain, tendrils of ivy forever enshrouding your limbs.
The seduction was brief and complete. Everything else was a formality—the application, the pleas for financial aid and scholarships, the letters of recommendation from my teachers and my boss at the convenience mart. The day I received my acceptance letter I took my money from the bathroom floor hole and bought a bus ticket and a leather book bag. Three months after reading that brochure in the dirty stairwell of my Stulton tenement, I finally escaped. Aberdeen College was my deliverance.