I REMEMBER LAKE STREET IN BRIGHTON, MA. 2005. I REMEMBER back-to-back blizzards, White Hen Pantry, walking my dog through the grounds of the seminary across the street. I was living with two waitresses, one of whom was my girlfriend. I was quitting the pack-a-day smoking habit I’d cultivated on purpose over the previous four years to make me write better and eat less. I’d taken a break from writing after finishing MVP. But getting an agent to represent me was validating and encouraging and I could not sit still much longer. A book was inside me worming around wanting to get out.

Spring. The snow melted. I took a walk. The sidewalks, covered for months by snow and at last exposed, were not Boston sidewalks. They were now the sidewalks of my neighborhood growing up. I grew up in a subdivision in Centreville, Virginia. That is, Northern Virginia. We called it NoVA. It’s in Fairfax County, outside Washington, DC. I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years and years: a legend from when I was growing up, about a teenager hanging himself from a playground basketball hoop in our subdivision. I could see him with incredible clarity. I could see everything—my adolescence, all the feelings of life for me in 1998. I could see the whole book. It felt like it was falling from the sky onto my head.

I went home and wrote the first line: “His name is Grayson Donald and he is dead.” The rest came out in a deluge. A couple months later it was done.

I’m obsessed with other people’s secrets. Their deepest, darkest, most secret stray thoughts and desires. I write creepy things about the psychologically abnormal, which is everyone. I write about Americans who have chosen to isolate themselves and what that does to them. And Northern Virginia is populated with people who have chosen to isolate themselves. It exists for that purpose. The origins of the region are in the federal government’s desire to scatter the headquarters of its various bureaus and departments to minimize the damage of a Soviet nuclear attack. Isolation is embedded into its essence. It is coded into its planning and design.

This is a region built by and for prosperous people expecting to have total control over their environment. Crime would be low, transportation would be convenient. Houses would be big and roads would be wide and neighborhoods would be clean, but there would be culture and community on demand, at little risk, as desired, for a low price. Prosperity. Peace. It was the manifestation of the literal, analytical, bureaucratic philosophy of American life held by the handful of planners and attorneys who built the region and made billions from it.

In retrospect, from my point of view, NoVA is ultimately about privileged, affluent, isolated, modern American life juxtaposed alongside timeless, unchanging death. Life in NoVA in 1998 was one in which death was held at bay and quarantined to the news and the poor neighborhoods—elsewhere. The vision held by the planners was working. Death had been cut from the equation like a stain from a rug. The economy was booming. Everyone was rich. And young. There was no war, at least none we had to be concerned about. Peace on earth, as far as we were concerned. Of course it was all a bubble. Because 9/11 was lingering. The 21^st century was lingering. That’s what NoVA is a portrait of—that deathless eve. This was the American Dream come to fruition. At last. I painted a portrait of that—what that thing looks like that generations and generations of Americans have been striving for over hundreds of years out faith more than anything else.

It’s a novel of failure, too. It’s about the failings of my parents’ baby boomer generation. The point of Northern Virginia—in addition to trying to control that which cannot be controlled, to trying and cut out from life that which cannot be cut out—is the children. To educate and prepare the children. Not everyone who lives in Northern Virginia wants to live there, but they do because it’s a safe place to raise the kids and the public schools are the best in the nation. But, in my experience, the irony is growing up in such a place with such a purpose produces children who are utterly unprepared for anything at all except college applications and SATs and pop culture trivia discussions. They have little character, little world experience. Everything they’ve experienced has been virtual. That’s the big, meaty motherfucker of it all.

NoVA is about one such kid. He would rather die than live another day in Northern Virginia. Dying is his only escape, at least as far as he can see. Such is his lack of perspective. Being a product of the above described place. Having been failed by the older generation.

When NoVA was published, some people who had read MVP wondered why the author’s follow-up was completely ignored. Here’s the best I can do for an explanation:

We do not live in a media-saturated world. We live in a world of torrential media chaos. We are thrown into it and must stay afloat and cannot escape it, no matter what we do. We must grasp at whatever flotsam comes rushing by us as we tread water and grab on to it, consume it as quickly as possible in order to keep our bearings and any sense of comprehension and identity and then look for the next thing. That’s how we live now. That’s not just a feature of our life, that is our life. (I am, basically, stealing Todd Gitlin’s phrase and idea—the torrent of media—from his book Media Unlimited. Also, Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita is also a very, very good book that might resonate with you as it did with me.)

In this chaos, everything must behave itself. Books are to behave book-ily. Movies must behave movie-ily. Music, music-ily. And so on. They must. If they don’t, or if they do so in too roundabout a manner, we must let them go past—we must skip them—and they must go unconsumed and sink into oblivion. Because when we are rushing along, drowning, in torrential media chaos, we do not have time for anything too difficult or negative or anything in which we cannot immediately recognize the utilitarian benefit to us. We need our media consumptions to give us specific things—distraction, connection, information, or whatever else it is we want from it. Because that’s the point—what do you want from it? What do you want it to give you? Because what you want, you get. And you’ll get it only when you want it, only to the degree to which you want it, for only how long you want it, and then it will make itself scarce leaving only wanted traces of itself so you may move on to whatever experience or obligation is next. This is what reading fiction is right now. It has to be, whether we like it or not.

In this environment, I wrote a novel that does not behave novel-ily. It’s the novel that fell from the sky onto me. A book that cannotquickly and with minimal effort be consumed, digested, and neatly cataloged and filed in its proper location in each consumer’s personal torrent. Therefore it made little sense to the market. And did not resonate. And has been, with exceptions, allowed to sail on by into oblivion.

But that did not matter to me, because I wanted something else more than I wanted large-scale resonation (i.e., book sales): I wanted to write about where I came from. I wanted to purge the chaotic, confused, painful, disturbing, vivid memories from growing up that were still swirling inside me at the time and were still (and are, even now) affecting my day-to-day life and interactions. These were not the sweet memories of youth. These were troubling, traumatic, personal memories. NoVA is a personal book. A primal scream. I wanted to kill them, the memories, drown them in my dense prose and big paragraphs and relentless details. At some point it became a choice: purge and change but risk oblivion or hold back and not change but lessen the risk of oblivion?

I wanted to write about what it was like to grow up in the time and place that I did. A standard, basic writerly impulse. Nobody else had written about it. Nobody else had said it. Novels had been written about the suburbs, and about teenagers, and about suicide, and about the 1990s, but none of them ever quite rang true to my experience. They still took place, to me, in exotic distant lands. My experience of growing up did not behave fiction-ily. Therefore it could not be written about fiction-ily without writing about it falsely. Which I was not interested in doing.

Northern Virginia is the most accurate microcosm of America there is—a place designed and built by calculation to cut out the bad stuff from life—the inconvenience, the filth, the crime, the death, the poverty—so as to make a few men massive profits and to provide those who live there with peace, prosperity, and the pursuit of happiness—on demand. And until I wrote NoVA, it was a place and an aspect of American life that had gone unrepresented by American literature. Like with modern elite professional athletes and MVP, with NoVA I wrote about something that had not yet been written about in literary fiction—a distraction with little aesthetic value, a blight on the landscape, as most readers of literary fiction see it.

When that crucial point came to go full throttle or not—to write a book that behaved or not—I decided I would go full throttle. This book, I could see from the first moment I saw it that day I took that walk after the blizzards, would not behave fiction-ily. It would not behave, period. It was not going to possess any of the necessary fads and facets of current American literature—half-digested ideas, easily recognizable characters, characters and themes and plot points only there to flatter the reader so as to keep her attention, slickness and manipulation disguised as quality, and so on. It was not going to sit on a figurative shelf ready to provide a user-friendly- on-demand-literature-reading experience to whoever wanted to pay to have that. It would go too far. It would indulge anger. I was angry. I had serious anger. I had my reasons. It still lingers, but not nearly as intensely. I’ve matured. But anger is the predominant emotion in our times. Why do we let it into our politics—need it in our politics—but feel alienated and repelled by it when it is in our literature, unless it comes to us neutered and leashed and clearly, safely labeled? NoVA does the things books are not supposed to do if you want to have any kind of career as a fiction writer in America in the twenty-first^st century. It would ruin your day, this book would. I could feel that as it wormed around inside me and as it came out in quick-piling typewritten pages. I saw it that first moment on that spring day in Brighton. But above all else it would be what fiction must be: true.

Looking back, what a wonderful, naïve, innocent place I was in, writing NoVA. It’s a book that is experienced as a painting or a sculpture or, most of all, an installation. It’s difficult, makes you work. You do not take what you want from it. It takes what it wants from you. No wonder it was an utter commercial and even critical failure. I had a feeling it would be. I did not care. Anyway, I told myself that I did not care. I held out hope that the bottle would catch lightning and something big and miraculous would happen. But it was an arcane, guilty hope. I hardly dared entertain it.

I came to literature through Jack Kerouac. That’s what excited me about writing: putting real-life human blood and soul and consciousness onto the page, convention and structure be damned. Real-life human blood and soul and consciousness as I had experienced it did not match what I had been reading out there up to that point. I wanted to write the way people once wrote but do not anymore. There are many reasons why they do not. We wear too many masks, for one thing. Another reason is that if you do, there will not likely be much support for it. That’s not a complaint, it’s just the truth. I wanted to do it even if it had to be the first and last time, lest it all turn into a suicide mission. I had to do it—just once, while I was still 23 and had the ability to access that primality, before things changed, like they must.

My agent by the time my first novel, MVP, was published—for reasons I hope are unrelated to me—was losing heart and her interest in the publishing business was waning and she had a foot out the door and nobody else at her agency was stepping into her place, again for reasons that I believe and hope had nothing to do with me. But at my prodding, she had worked up a two book deal with my editor at Scribner—for NoVA, which was by then completed, and a massive, 1200 page novel I was in the midst of at that point, The Good and the Ghastly, which is now much shorter and due out June 2011.

Production on NoVA began. My agent was not even working as an agent anymore, she had gone back to her previous career. Nobody told me that. No one at the wheel on the business end of things, publication went slowly and confusingly. Publication was set for December 30, 2008. Not exactly prime time billing. That was demoralizing. During the editing phase, I looked at NoVA since I had written it two years earlier. I did not like what I saw. I did a top to bottom rewrite. There was little publicity or critical enthusiasm except for a handful of very enthusiastic reviews, which were validating, especially in the face of all the indifference, for example Mike Lindgren’s in the L Magazine, which called it “the best…novel to appear in the last five years.” Still, it felt like a stillbirth. But what should I have expected? Yet I believed in the book, I had confidence in it, I put my soul in it (it’s still there—go find it), I stand by it. It was the best thing I had ever written and could have written, by far. But I did not know how to push it. How to find and reach out to those who might like it and help it, how to get over my hang-ups and ineptitude about tooting my own horn and publicizing my own work. How to do the things I probably should have been doing but could not do. I didn’t feel I was ready—I didn’t feel I had a solidified enough identity as a writer yet to subject myself to the ruthlessness of the torrent, the chaos. I could subject my work to it, but not my identity and personal being and image. I was 26 years old. I did not understand the game, had no innate knack for doing what is necessary to make a weird, difficult book like NoVA float. I still don’t have that innate knack, but I have a more approximate idea and a healthier understanding.

I kept any bellyaching to myself. It would leak out from time to time in little dark spats, mostly in the nighttime in the long dark Boston winters in which rooms always felt so small, ceilings too low. I remember a five minute telephone interview with Boston’s alternative to the alternative newsweekly. That was the only interview for NoVA. I remember it took place in the midst of a blizzard—another blizzard. A book of blizzards. Boston was a blizzard—one big beautiful one. One interview, three readings—attended by about four people, total. One was a mentally ill man who sat in the front eating a Family Size bag of Funyuns who kept interrupting me to ask questions about what happens to suicides in the afterlife and afterward gave me a packet of religious tracts he’d written 30 years earlier and probably still walks around Boston with, going to book readings, eating Funyuns, interrupting. He’s probably doing so right now.

Despite the indifference of the market, I love NoVA and am beyond proud of it. It’s what fiction should be: ruthless, misbehaving, funny—true. I like to think literature is the one thing that can transcend the torrent of media chaos that is our lives. And in going through the hard grueling experience of writing then publishing NoVA—through the book I’ve hurt family and ended friendships—I’ve come to a resolution in which I’ve realized that Northern Virginia, despite it being such a nonliterary place, a place that feels like nowhere—not like how a small Midwestern town might feel like nowhere, but how a clean room in a brand-new upper-mid range hotel at an airport in a mid-sized city feels like nowhere—is as legitimate a subject for fiction and art as any other place in America where people come from. Everything I write from now on will be about Northern Virginia. Even the characters in NoVA will reappear in other things. They already have. Northern Virginia is my territory. Because as un-book-ily as life there is lived, life there is part of modern American life. Northern Virginia, like it or not, is the most American place in the world. A day in NoVA in 1998 is a lifetime in America right now. For reasons you would never see coming.

NoVA and all others at Amazon

January 2011

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