Thomas Mullen

Hey folks-

Goodreads.com has set up an author interview page for readers to post questions to yours truly. Have any questions on the writing process, or where I get my ideas, or why I do what I do? Or what the deal is with a certain mysterious character in my new book, or anything at all about the previous two? Don't be shy. Go to this page and post a question for me. I've been posting answers all week, and I'll answer any new ones on Monday.

And would someone please tell the sun to come back to Atlanta? Some of us are much, much better writers when it's sunny out. Thanks.


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Here's a kind of random interview of yours truly that my UK publisher just posted to its Web site. Items discussed include Atlanta traffic, Indiana Jones (man, I just keep bringing him up), and being marooned on an island with one book.

Positive blog reviews of The Revisionists have been popping up, which is great. Although also slightly weird: bloggers, remember that the book doesn't come out for another month and a half! Kindly hold back the effusive, gushing praise until the book is actually, you know, available to be purchased by curious readers. Thanks!


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A while ago, a friend of mine made a comment about one of his formerly favorite bands, and it's stuck in my head for a while now. Honestly, it's been so long that I can't even remember which band he was talking about, but the bottom line is that he had previously worshipped the ground they played on, but then he got their new album and he really, really hated it. Sucked just wasn't a strong enough word. He thought of a lot of other ones. He went yet further, stating that the new album was so incredibly bad (so unforgivably bad) "that it makes me reassess their earlier work." In other words, he was realizing that maybe those earlier albums, which he had once gone on and on to me about, and which had been the very soundtrack of his life for a few years, were actually bad, simply because their new one was bad.

Huh?

This was maybe a year after my first novel had been published, an experience which forever changes the way one feels about book reviews, movie reviews, the online reviews of kitchen products, blogger posts about that one restaurant with the one waitress who was a total bitch that night because she forgot to put my salad dressing on the side, etc. So maybe I was feeling a tad over-vulnerable, and over-defensive about artists being knocked, and over-protective of my friend's formerly favorite band. (Whom I'd never really dug much, actually.)

But I started thinking: Even if the new album is the worst album my friend had ever heard, and even if he felt a sense of profound, even personal disappointment (as if he was let down not by some musicians he'd never met but by one of his own friends, or as if he'd been cheated on by his girlfriend), why does that have to alter his feelings about their earlier albums, which he'd always loved? Those albums haven't changed. They're still awesome (or at least, as awesome as he'd always thought of them as being). Why does he feel the sudden need to "reassess" them?

Because here's the thing: I think we want to think of our favorite bands, and writers, and directors, and atheletes, as perfect. Or at least damn close. I still remember when I was in high school and I was in a big, big U2 phase, I liked them so much that I'd blow $12 on a UK import of one of their singles, just so I could get the one or two rare B-sides that came with it. These were tracks that they hadn't put on their album, or released in the US, but still I had to have them. And I listened to them, and ... they weren't very good. (Some of the rare U2 songs in that era, actually, were great. But others were B-sides for a reason.) And I found my opinion of the cherished U2 lowering a bit. OK, they were still great, but it's not like every time they plugged in their instruments they created perfection. Some of their songs were just ok. The lads were smart enough to keep those songs off their albums and use them as B-side fodder, yes, but still. Those songs were proof to me that the band wasn't perfect. Which, you know, sucked to discover.

So it's all the worse when your favorite writer/artist/director/quarterback tosses out a bad follow-up album/novel/movie/playoff game. (I will not speak of the Patriots' last few postseason performances here.) It proves to us that they are human. They make mistakes. But does it mean that their earlier successes weren't actually successes at all? Just because they aren't successful all the time?

The reason, I would submit, that a work of art succeeds is because the artist takes risks. My friend dug that band's first two albums because he'd never heard anything like it; they melded various sounds together in a new way, they took their listeners to a bold new place. I feel the same way when I crack open a great novel by a writer I've never read before, or an amazing film. We want our artists to take risks, to tread on new ground, to avoid playing it safe. We hate it when someone plays it safe and writes the same damn book over and over, or records the same album three times. Where's the sense of adventure, we ask? It all feels too ho-hum. We want another bold leap forward.

But risks, by their very definition, are incredibly likely to fail. Sometimes when the artist takes another risk, it works yet again (wow! even better than their first!) but sometimes, yikes, it's a risk that just doesn't pay off. It doesn't mean their earlier work was worse than we realized. It just means that the odds got them this time, and that our romanticized version of the artist as perfect is being replaced by this unfortunate glimpse into the sausage-making process of art, which ain't always pretty.

Am I thinking of this now because I'm about to publish a book that takes a lot of risks? That is in many ways quite different from my first two? That combines various elements that aren't normally placed in the same narrative? Perhaps. Of course, I happen to love the darn thing, and I think it's a lot closer to perfect than sausage. (Though I do like sausage.) No doubt someone else might feel differently, and they'll be so enraged by the new risks that they'll think maybe my first two books weren't as good as they thought. (Well, maybe they weren't.) But it's my job to test out that tightrope, so I'll continue to do so, one imperfect step at a time, hoping as usual that someone's holding the net.


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I'm nearly a month late on this one, as school break and kid illnesses and a beach trip have thrown off the schedule, but I've been meaning to write about this great story in the Wall Street Journal about the trend of "literary" authors writing "high-concept" novels.

The story's author notes that this summer and fall a number of literary authors will be publishing novels that deal with the supernatural or other elements that are normally consigned to the genre shelves. Colson Whitehead will publish a zombie novel, Tom Perotta will publish a book about the aftermath of the Rapture, Lev Grossman is publishing his sequel to The Magicians, and British author Glen Duncan is starting a series about a werewolf. She writes:

"The explosion of fantasy titles from mainstream authors is eroding decades-old divisions in the publishing industry. ... A new era of experimentation is sweeping literary circles."

Mark me as firmly in favor of this. I've always been a reader of literary fiction and the classics, and I used to have that requisite snobbery, thinking of myself as someone who didn't read thrillers and didn't read sci-fi and didn't read spy novels. But a few years back I realized that most of my favorite recent novels were books that combined a certain literary aesthetic with the plot structure of noir or mysteries, or with the more imaginative elements of sci-fi or fantasy. I'm talking books by Michael Chabon, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy. People who realize that the ability to write well and insightfully is key, but who also understand that without a good story, it's so much frilly air. Books whose plots are as powerful as their prose, by writers who realize that narrative is every bit as important as (and every bit as difficult to do right, if not harder than) character and the careful deployment of a really cool metaphor.

So I guess I'm now part of a trend. My last book had noir elements and magical realism, and my new one, The Revisionists, is a sort of literary spy novel with a time traveler set in contemporary D.C. I didn't realize I was part of the zeitgeist -- I just thought they were cool stories -- but hey, it's nice to be not alone on this adventure.
(And it's also worth noting that this isn't exactly a brand-new trend. It seems every few years there's another story about this. Lev Grossman himself wrote this story two years ago, again for the WSJ.)

Despite these occasional stories, the bias against genre-breaking novels is still strong among certain circles of academics and book critics. Just a week ago, in Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review of Monica Ali's new novel about Princess Diana, she writes that, for a Booker-nominated, highly praised writer like Ali, a princess novel "seems like an awfully high-concept, low-brow endeavor." The implication being that it's unbecoming for serious authors to write "high-concept" books; such writers should instead focus on quiet, internal, borderline inert fiction. I haven't read Ali's new book and don't honestly plan to, but I resent the way Kakutani thumbs her nose at anything high-concept, as if taking risks and daring to chart new horizons is somehow unartistic and unworthy. (Whitehead's new book I'm particularly psyched about -- I loved his first, The Intuitionist, a noirish racial allegory, but his subsequent books, to me, have felt very well written but lacking in narrative strength. I think zombies might be exactly what he's needed to get that mojo back.)

Look, I'm not saying I dislike a good work of realist contemporary fiction: my bookshelves are bursting with them. But I am saying that such fiction is not, and never has been, inherently better or more artistic or more moving or more encapsulating of human nature than a less realistic novel featuring a cyborg, or a bank robber, or even (yes, it's possible!) a vampire. Ultimately, it's not the subject matter that matters, it's the execution. A great writer should be able to make you care just as much about a hardboiled detective as you'd care about a lonely overeducated housewife in suburban New York.

Like any trend, this is likely a pendulum swinging thing, and I'm sure it will again seem uncool to write anything that crosses genre lines -- well, it already is to Kakutani, but a time will no doubt come when most other people too get sick of it. The question is, will that be in five years, or fifty, or 100? Maybe the realistic stranglehold on literary fiction, which started cutting off the more imaginative plot arteries early in the previous century, will stay loose for another generation or two. I'm sure we won't all be writing about the fantastic and the bizarre and the noir, but perhaps enough of us will so that such stories will be considered respectable rather than slumming. Maybe the slums are where the action is--and the emotions, and the poignant moments, and the sobering insights, and the artistry.


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I've seen a number of hilarious yet sad lists of book reviewer cliches (like "a writer to watch" or "beautiful, spare prose") kicking around the Net lately. Google "book review cliches" and you'll see a bunch -- there's even a Bingo board of cliches, so you and friends with way too much time on their hands can play over Sunday brunch while reading the Books section of the paper (assuming you still get the paper, and assuming your paper still has a Books section, which are both pretty dangerous assumptions to make these days).

The book reviewer word that breaks my heart is "readable." I can't believe someone would use this word to describe a book, one they actually enjoyed and think that you will too. It's intended as a compliment, but in fact it indicts the rest of contemporary literature. Because the simple fact that they're saying "hey, this book is great because it's readable" is to imply that other books aren't readable.

Let's ponder that one for a moment. Other books aren't readable? Literally? Or even figuratively? I'm not sure which is more depressing: 1) the fact that this might actually be true, that too many writers are opting for overly dense or academic or show-offy writing styles, afraid that accessibility is the mark of a hack, or 2) the fact that readers think it's true, that they aren't trying hard enough to embrace new styles and will instead conclude that anything a little weird or different is in fact "unreadable."

No one (least of all a critic) would ever describe a film as "watchable," or a paining as "viewable," or a restaurant's cuisine as "edible." In all of these art forms, those adjectives are assumed as the most basic requirement for audience participation. Of course the movie is watchable -- why else would the critic even write about it? Why else would the film have even been made? Yet in contemporary literature, our standards have fallen so low, and our expectations of even the existence of an audience are so sketchy and vague, that a book simply being able to be read is a distinction worthy of pointing out in a review.

If I ever tell you, "Hey, check out my new book, it's really readable!" please, please talk me down from whatever ledge I'm lingering on, and remind me that it's all going to be okay.

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