New Projects (novella and short story collection)
American Sophomore
American
Sophomore is a biographical novella about
James Hogue, the runner, conman and prisoner – partly inspired by Geoffrey
Wolff’s biography The Duke of Deception
(1979), articles I read in The New Yorker
in recent years and my own experience as a marathon runner.
Told in the first
person, we learn directly about this real-life conman who
tricked his way into Princeton
University under a false
identity. The remarkable thing about Hogue was that he was talented as a runner.
But his expectations for himself were so high that he kept on desiring his life
to reach higher levels of perfection. This compulsion led to Hogue assuming various
false identities and casting himself frequently as younger than he was – all to
reach a pinnacle of physical and intellectual self-esteem. I will aim to begin Hogue’s
story while I continue work on The
Murderess and the Hangman.
The novel is entitled American Sophomore because of Hogue’s penchant for returning to
schools (again and again) in order to fulfill his running fantasy. We
all want second chances…especially in American lives.
Trouble in Paradise
Finally, Trouble in Paradise is the name of a proposed collection of short
stories. After reading Penelope Lively’s recent fictional memoir Making It Up (2005), I am inspired to
use two methods in combination for writing a short story collection.
The first
is the idea of creating several strands of one’s life that didn’t happen, the
roads not taken, the decisions not made – in other words, each story would
reflect a journey within my own life where I self-consciously either did or
didn’t do something. For example, I went to the University of Oxford,
but what if I had gone into the military?
Similarly I came to live in America in 2003 but what if my decision had been
to go to Australia?
How would these decisions have affected my career, my relationships, and the
universal question, what kind of person would I have become?
The second method
is to base each story around a location I know well, set up a kind of potential
happiness, and then intrude with a shocking event – often inspired by the
haunting short stories of Patricia Highsmith (whose biography I have just read
and found fascinating). Hence the title Trouble
in Paradise aims for a kind of unnerving everyday quality.
Combining these
two methods would give me a narrative strand to explore in my mind while
writing (my own past), plus characters that are essentially versions of myself
(though not necessarily the same age or gender). A horrific turn of events then
occurs in a place that at first
appears normal, pleasant, relaxing, exciting, or otherwise agreeable to the
unknowing protagonist.
Here are a few brief examples of stories
for the collection (as inspired by my own life):
The Obituary Writer (Washington, DC)
After living in Washington,
DC for five years (as I have) opposite the
State Department and four blocks from the White House on the George Washington
University campus, I
would like to write about this strange place. The power capital of the world,
DC suffers from a vacuum – at weekends it is very quiet around these huge
government buildings, an eerie feeling for such a famous and monumental
landscape.
This leads me to create the character of an everyday office drone (a
clerk) who would work in my neighboring building, the anonymously named General Services Administration
Building. As it turns out
in the story, Mr. Fedex (a humiliating name while working for the federal government) actually
has an interesting if depressing job, writing obituaries for unknown government
workers for the in-house government magazine.
But what happens when he sees an
obituary for a woman he knows is still alive? Should he let the woman get away
with fraud? The incident inspires him to dare to escape his job, but instead he
finds solace in manipulating the obituaries (just adding or removing a detail
here or there for his own entertainment), with the idea that he will get caught
(and be forced to change his life). But he doesn’t get caught. And so suddenly
his job is filled with all kinds of new potential.
But for how long can he
maintain the charade (creating exciting new lives for dead people in print)
before there’ll be trouble from the federal bosses who sit upstairs looking out
over the National Mall?
The Film School (London)
In one version of my past, I attended a
film school in the north of England,
called The Northern School of Film and Television in Leeds.
The constant atmosphere there was of a kind of removed doom, the feeling that
everyone was pursuing an impossible dream – of breaking into movies – and
constantly fighting the realization that London
was where all the film activity really happened.
But what if the film school
had been in London?
Where would I be now? Would life really be better? In this story, I plan to
begin in Leeds with a character called Mike
Small who operates the sound boom, somewhat humiliatingly, while trying to
write scripts and begin a career as an assistant director. But the scripts get
changed and the director repeatedly asks for more and more production value
from a budget of $3000.
So when Mike successfully transfers to the London Film School and tries to forget about Leeds,
what happens when the people from up north start turning up on the set, trying
to ride on his coattails, trying to sabotage his new job for their own
professional advantage?
The Cheating Don (Oxford)
This story is set in Oxford, a city I know well, but one I left
almost a decade ago. A friend of mine still teaches English at the University
of Oxford and with his recent appointment to St. John’s College, I have been
turning over a story in my mind about a version of myself who never left Oxford
but stayed within the university structure.
This story will delineate the
middle age of an ambitious Psychology don who grows bored with his comfortable
life and steady position on the college faculty – nothing is ever under threat.
So one by one, he begins manipulating his students sometimes with academic
favor such as boosting their grades, sometimes with minor cruelties.
Then he
meets a young postgraduate but discovers that for some curious reason his
charms do not work – he cannot manipulate her. And so the stakes are raised
but, strangely, the girl (called Fleur) neither resists his sexual advances (even
when they turn dark) nor fears his threats once she withdraws her affections
from him.
Things grow complicated when he meets Fleur’s boyfriend, and both the
don and the boyfriend embark on an unlikely and furtive affair themselves (the
younger man being more experienced) and the girl grows both jealous and
violent.
Suddenly too much is happening at this quiet Oxford college, and the don regrets his
re-involvement with life. His job is threatened…his seductions are publicized
in the college…and now the boyfriend is threatening to ruin his marriage…
But
will Fleur, strangely, actually offer to help and put his life back together?