The First Time - novelists - Interview

MEET THE SEVEN DEBUT NOVELISTS BEHIND SOME OF THIS FALL'S MOST TALKED-ABOUT BOOKS

There's the stand-up comic who wrote an entire book in longhand between gigs all over Ontario. The Oxford-educated Brit who took off on his girlfriend's tales of her imaginary childhood chums. The writer who used the guys in a girl's life to tell her story. One dropped out of high school, another out of Smith--twice. To support their habit they've waited tables, answered phones, written stuff (copy, columns, pop-psych pieces) they didn't want to write. These first-time novelists all had stories aching to be told, and they all found the wherewithal to tell them.

ALAN WATT

"The first draft was, like, perfect fucking bliss. I felt like a Stradivarius and the words were flying out of me," says Diamond Dogs author Alan Watt, whose novel is due out this month from Little, Brown. Watt had written a lot of unproduced plays, but had never thought of doing a book until a novelist friend suggested it. Watt was about to fly from L.A. to Ontario to do stand-up, which was how he made a living. "I didn't have a laptop, so I wrote the whole book on yellow legal pads," he remembers. "There were times when I was writing 5,000 words a day." Originally, Watt never intended to show the novel to anybody. "There was zero desire for any kind of validation. I was finally going to say what I wanted to say." This wasn't the first time he'd gone against the system. Back in high school, he dropped out three months prior to graduation. "I had a bad attitude. I walked in and the principal said, 'You're late,' and I cleaned out my locker and left."

LUCINDA ROSENFELD

"I'm telling a girl's story through fifteen encounters with fifteen different guys," Lucinda Rosenfeld, thirty, says about her novel "What She Saw...," due out this month from Random House. "So much of a woman's experience is shaped by the interplay with men, it seemed like a cool ordering principle." She's prepared for people having a problem separating her from the novel's heroine, Phoebe Fine. "In a book like this, everyone assumes the heroine is you; but although Phoebe is a side of me, I'm more the narrator." Phoebe, Rosenfeld explains, both defines herself through the attention she gets from the opposite sex and is repelled by it. "I was interested in peering into someone who's able to manipulate men in certain ways, to play out certain traditional female roles or not." The power of sexuality, plus substituting men for ambition, also intrigued her. "It's like the Monica Lewinsky question. The only way she knew how to get power was to blow it. You can get attention being sexy, but what kind of power is t hat?"

BEN RICE

"It all started because my girlfriend, Mollie, had two imaginary friends when she was a child," says Ben Rice, the twenty-seven-year-old writer of Pobby and Dingan (Knopf, Sept.). "I became fascinated by the idea, and asked myself what would happen if they got lost. The story came out of that question." He set the tale in the Australian opal mining town where Mollie had grown up: "Lightning Ridge is all about searching, looking for this elusive gemstone, so it seemed perfect." When Rice, who'd been a graduate student at Oxford, finished the book, he gave it to a poet and don there for an opinion. "I expected him to say, 'Yeah, nice, but keeping working at it.' Instead he said, 'Send this to an agent immediately!'" Rice recalls. He took the don's advice--and got a phone call the very next day. Originally, Rice thought that at 21,000 words, Pobby and Dingan was too short to publish on its own, but his agent and editor disagreed, no doubt enthralled by the novel's terse but eloquent language. "A lot of novelists spin out a work to make it more marketable," Rice says. "It was nice to be able to say, 'This is the story."'

HEIDI JULAVITS

"I started with the landscape and then worked my way in." Heidi Julavits's book, The Mineral Palace, due out this month from Putnam, is set in the Colorado Plains town of Pueblo where her grandparents lived for a year during the Depression. "My grandmother found the good in everything except Pueblo. She told me she cried every day she lived there," the thirty-two-year-old author recalls. Although few actual events from her grandmother's life appear in the book, "I think in a way I was exploring her. She was gregarious but also enigmatic, more available to the world than she was to her family. After my grandfather died, though, she did start to really talk to me about their marriage, and that's what I based the marriage in the book on." Until she actually visited Pueblo, Julavits said she'd been "writing, writing, writing" and not getting anywhere. "I just felt like I was missing the point somehow. I had to understand the setting and the sort of place it was first, and then I was able to put people inside it. So the characters came out of a place for me."

MAT JOHNSON

"Some people who first read the book said, 'It's about this guy who hates being black," Drop (St. Martin's Press, Sept.) author Mat Johnson remembers. "And I was like, no, it's not that. He loves being black; he just doesn't like being poor." As did the book's protagonist, Johnson, twenty-nine, lived the good life in London for a while, but then he had to go back to his hometown of Philly, spending close to a year working at the electric company. Eventually, Mat moved to New York and got an MFA at Columbia. By the time he left school, he had a rough draft of the book. "Before, I'd been trying to do Toni Morrison Knockoffs; that was my idea of what a writer should be," he says. "With this book I was like, I'm $50,000 dollars in debt, I'm not good at anything but writing stories, I have to give it everything. Once there was this stoner guy who lived on my floor who talked about how when he went to Amsterdam, 'the stuff was so fresh it dripped.' That always stuck in my mind. If you're going to create art, it has to be so good that if you squeeze it, it drips."