Thoughts on my debut novel
Writing this book—my somewhat delayed “debut novel”—was the most fun (and the hardest job) I’ve had in a long, long time. And it is my favorite. I could not be prouder of Younger Next Year and the impact it’s had on a bunch of lives, but this one is still my favorite. I hated to finish it because I missed the people so damn much. Sounds silly, but it’s true. The deeply devoted brothers, ten years apart (I never had a brother; I’d gladly take either of these two)—such decent and loving men. And the two heroines, of course. I am simply in love with both of them and was from the first time they cropped up in my mind. One of them, Cassie, I belatedly realized, is a lot like my second wife, Joan, another woman of the West, whom I’ve always respected and adored (in equal parts) and to whom, among others, the book is dedicated. Alex, the other woman, the Ariadne figure . . . I don’t know where the hell she came from. She just loomed up, out of the night, alarmingly sensual and irresistible, and has never left. A bit of a murderess, you know, but irresistible. Nobody’s perfect, after all; not in this book anyhow.
And then there’s Maine and the people up there . . . the sights and smells and sounds of the coast. I know that world very well indeed, and it was a joy to linger there, to “go deep” and savor it. My wife, Hilary, and I spent half the summer there for twenty years, cruising on the good sloop Wandering Aengus, which looks quite a lot like Nellie in the book. There’s not a harbor or gunkhole on the coast where we have not spent time. Lots of relatives sprinkled around up there, too, the quick and the dead, including my beloved son Tim and his family (quick; very, very quick).
The book has some intellectual pretensions—which you can surely skip—which gave me particular pleasure and great difficulty. For example, it presumes to be a retelling of the Minotaur myth, the story of the beast—half man and half bull—who was kept in a labyrinth under the city of Knossos on Crete, in the oldest myth in the Western canon. In the ancient story, “tribute children” from other islands are regularly fed to the monster, until he is finally slain. Here, too, there is a monster , and he is slain: an alarmingly powerful and sensual Greek billionaire who is a threat—or a hero—to almost everyone in the book. His is the murder that must be solved in the end, no matter how much he may have deserved it. But the labyrinth is different here . . . more like a powerful eddy or whirlpool, which spins away under our city, under our lives. And its great pull is addictive sexuality: a joy to some and a source of dread and death to others. The notion is that we all know the labyrinth and we have all dipped a toe in it at some point. Whether in delight or agony. How it works in different lives at different times is an endless fascination to me. And maybe to you, too; I wouldn’t be surprised.
Finally, there is some pretentious bullshit about the role and force of man-made laws in a godless world. I’m afraid I can’t get enough of it. Like me, the narrator is a lawyer, a Rules Man. And he is also the “Practical Navigator” of the title. (That‘s also the title of a famous book published in 1802 by my townsman Nathaniel Bowditch of Salem; it quickly became the definitive book on ocean navigation and stayed that way for over 150 years.) His role is to see his loved ones through from one peril to the next and then to safety. His greatest difficulty is that heroes—including his beloved brother and the two women—are “above the law” and go places and have experiences the narrator can only follow at great risk. Trying to “do the right thing” in the face of irreconcilable contradictions—between man-made law and “divine law,” for example—is a peculiarly Greek problem . . . suitable to a tale based on the earliest Greek myth.
Happily, you can ignore all that stuff and just wallow in sex and violence from beginning to end. I did, and it was great fun. It’s never prurient, by the way. Sexuality is a core theme, and it is dealt with directly, but it does not embarrass or offend. You may or may not want to read this much about it, but it is a vast force in almost all our lives. It may be interesting to watch it pull and switch and tear as you follow the navigator through dangerous and uncharted waters.
