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And Another Thing...

Several years ago, when someone in England bought up all the domain names of all the authors he could think of, I was rather glad. Julian Barnes and a few other authors sued him, as I remember, but conducting a website was the last thing I wanted to do. I didn’t then know what a website was for, but now I do--it’s for expressing those afterthoughts that come to you
when the book has already been published, the tour is over, and no one is asking your what you think any more, at least, what you think about a given subject (in my case, say, horse racing or reading novels).

So, welcome.

The Atlas of the Novel--see the booksblog.

The Atlas of the Novel is a wikipedia like project which, I hope, will someday be a guide to the novel as a map rather than as a list. My plan is that a reader who might be interested in a certain spot on the globe will be able to look into the Atlas of the Novel and see what she might read about that spot. One novel about a place might lead her to another one more recent, older, more famous, more obscure. And since novels are quite often about a character’s travels, the Atlas might lead a reader elsewhere--from England to India to Afghanistan, to Russia, for example. As yet, the Atlas is a mere seed--I have begun the lists but not the mapping. I expect it to be the product of my leisurely older years. I add to it each week and I include lists of novels readers send me. If you have a list, please organize each entry “author, title, publication date, places visited”. If you have several entries in one geographical area (say, North America), please list them NW to SE.

Thanks!
My new novel (available February 13, 2007) is entitled Ten Days in the Hills. It is set in Hollywood (Pacific Palisades) at the beginning of the Iraq War. It opens the morning after the Oscars (remember them? Michael Moore won best documentary for “Bowling for Columbine”) and continues for the next ten days, exploring the lives and thoughts of five women and five men. At the center are Max, a Hollywood director, and his girlfriend, Elena, who writes how-to manuals. The others, who show up more or less by accident in the course of the day, are Max’s 23-year-old daughter Isabel and Elena’s 20-year-old son, Simon, Max’s former wife, the legendary actress Zoe Cunningham, her boyfriend (a guru), Paul, her mother, Delphine, Delphine’s friend, Cassie, and Max’s agent, Stoney. Then Max’s old friend from New Jersey, Charlie, turns up. They never leave!

An excerpt from Ten Days in the Hills appears under my name on the Random House website, here,(http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400040612&view=excerpt).

The next thousand words? Right here:

“They stopped kissing. He put his leg over hers and pulled her more tightly against him. Now that the kiss was over, she thought maybe it was this she liked best, the skin-to-skin contiguity of solid flesh, which, of course, was not solid flesh at all, but layers of various tissues, and, from the point of view of physics, lots of empty internal space. Perhaps as a young girl in biology class, when the elderly biology teacher set the orange on the lab table and said, “This is the nucleus,” and then walked to the far corner of the room and held up a pea and said, “This is the electron,” and then demonstrated, as best he could given all the junk in the room which they were to imagine as emptiness, the passage of the pea around the orange, she had hardly paid attention to him, because what she could not stop noticing was that her best friend, Linda, was whispering to her other best friend, Margie. The way that teacher lifted his arm, clad in brown tweed, and the way she could not really see the pea between his thumb and forefinger, and the way that the orange was bright against the smooth blackness of the lab table, was as vivid to her at fifty as it had been at thirteen, though, and of course that was why he demonstrated that space in just that way, so that indifferent twelve-year-olds would notice and remember. As a result of such idle biological experiences: here was the arm, here was the leg, here was the hip and the curvature of the chest. As they squeezed her and pulled her even more tightly against his vibrant warmth, she had in her mind an idea of the long limestone-white bones with their striated brick-red bulging attachments, and over those the bright azure-and-magenta network of blood vessels, and encasing them the squamous cells and the dermis and the epidermis, with its tear-shaped hair follicles out of which sprang those single dark hairs—each hair having a follicle of its own. When he held her and squeezed her and pressed up against her and warmed her and comforted her, she was aware of the variety of his anatomy. He was a mesomorph. As he moved, the layers slid smoothly and noiselessly across one another. As she pushed against him, the springing hairs flattened; she felt the different texture of his skin against hers. When children were raised without biology teachers and encyclopedias, how did they perceive the bodies of their lovers? It was impossible to know, Elena thought. “I want to make a movie about this very thing,” he said. “I was thinking about it last night at the Oscars. My Dinner with Andre, but in bed naked. My Lovemaking with Elena. This is how her body looked. This is how my body looked. This is how the light in the room changed as the sun rose and the clouds came in off the ocean. This is what we said. This is what we did. This is what we felt. Ninety minutes. Doesn’t that sound great? We’ve made love for ninety minutes any number of times, and every time was interesting and most of them were worthy of film. But, and here’s the great part, it would be a real filming challenge. How would you get in close? How would you set up the camera? What sort of film stock would you use? I mean, look at the skin of your arm here.” He lifted her arm. It looked brownish and mottled to her, like a fauxed wall, though not shiny. “With the right lighting, we could make that skin look any way we wanted to. Rich, deep peachy pink. Parched, bleached-out sand color. But how would we make it look like you, just like you? That’s what I would want, except, of course, the actress wouldn’t be you. Frances McDormand, maybe. I thought of her. Anyway—” He turned her palm and kissed it. “This is a fabulous idea. Never been done before. But you can do almost anything as an indie feature now. Not like fifteen years ago, when you were stuck with what they gave you.” He grinned. “Let’s look at your arm again. Put it here, next to your stomach. Now, see that contrast? That’s a beautiful thing, only seen in fifty-year-olds.” His hand was the beautiful thing, she thought. It cradled her wrist, made a contrast with her own hand, about which she had no opinions—it was hers, she made do with it. But he said, “I mean, this film would have things that My Dinner with Andre didn’t have, like penetration and a variety of camera angles and lots of point-of-view shots. Voice-over. I don’t think My Dinner with Andre had very much voice-over at all—I need to watch it again. The actor who plays me is talking, and the camera reveals things that he’s looking at, sometimes things that he is staring at—for example, the skin on your arm. What if the camera focused on the skin of your arm for five minutes, or even for a minute? Probably I haven’t stared at the skin on your arm, or, say, your belly, for five minutes, but I bet I’ve stared at it for a minute more than once. What did I see? I can barely remember. But I know I stared at it with fascination. After all, it was your arm! Love you, love your arm! I mean, just as an example, let’s turn your arm over and look at the inside of your wrist. Here’s the base of your hand, kind of rounded and mounded up, and then here are your tendons. If we move your hand backward and forward, we see that the right tendon, as we are looking at it, pops in and out—when your hand is flexed forward and backward—but the left one barely moves. That’s interesting. Don’t....”

Well. You can just imagine what happens next!

They keep talking....
If you should wish to purchase a copy of Ten Days in the Hills, it will be available in bookstores and on the web as of February 13. My main book buying principle (independent? chain? web? used books?) is that you should frequent all types of bookstores as much as possible and buy buy buy. That’s what I do.

All of the books on this page are available from Randomhouse.com

Barn Blind was published by HarperCollins
At Paradise Gate was published by Simon and Schuster
My small biography of Charles Dickens was published by Penguin