A little background on The Return, a novel I published this past week with PFP/AJAR, a small independent house owned by my good friend, Peter Sarno. Sixteen years ago I had a dry spell--not creatively, but in terms of publication. Although my first novel, Leaving Losapas, had garnered a lot of attention and sold pretty well, my second, A Russian Requiem (both are now available from PFP/AJAR) had a tough go of it. The editor whod bought it--Alan Williams at Grove Press (a fine man and superb editor, whod edited some of Saul Bellows novels)--resigned a few months before the book came out. My agent was on maternity leave. I took the book to Little, Brown, and my editor there resigned or was fired on publication day. The publicist assigned to me there went on maternity leave, too. Despite some good early reviews, the novel was basically ignored, as is the case with most books when the editor isnt around to speak up for it in-house. I have a painful memory of talking with the interim publicist, who told me she was trying to get me on the Terry Gross show but it will have to be a phone-in because we have no budget to bring you to Philadelphia. I offered to pay the train ticket myself ($66 in those days) but it never happened. Then, as now, the sales of your most recent book played a large role in determining how kindly your next manuscript would be treated. My next manuscript was Revere Beach Boulevard--the story of a compulsive gambler and how his addiction affects the people who love him-- and, for a while, it wasnt treated kindly at all. Wed just had our first child, Amanda had left her job at Historic Deerfield to be a full-time mom, and, though I had some income from teaching at Bennington, I taught only half the year (made $27,000, if I remember right), and our new family of three could have used a book contract. But, between 1993 and early 1998 there were no book contracts. I felt like my career--which had gotten off to a late but pretty good start--was already drying up. There were a bunch of rejections, a couple of close calls, but no offers. And then my agent at the time, Cynthia Cannell, got it into the hands of Michael Naumann, a highly regarded editor and head of Henry Holt and Co. Michael started reading it on Friday and bought in on Monday and for a while it looked like hed really get the company behind it. But when a new German chancellor was elected, Michael--a German citizen--was tapped to be Minister of Culture. He left Henry Holt for Berlin a few months before pub-date. The book did well in spite of that, was a finalist for the PEN New England/L.L. Winship Prize and, to this day, is the only book of mine ever to make it onto the Boston Globe bestseller list. . .for a week or two. But the man who took over for Michael Naumann was someone whod known me a bit at Houghton Mifflin, John Sterling. I could be wrong, but I think John isnt a big fan of mine. I submitted a novel called The Ride to Revere Beach, which was supposed to be the second in the Revere Beach Trilogy--a sequel to Revere Beach Boulevard--and John declined to make any offer at all. My days with Henry Holt were finished. At that time I was publishing the occasional essay in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, and Deanne Urmy, an editor at Beacon Press, called me one day and asked if Id be interested in putting together a collection of essays for them. That book, which came to be called a memoir and to be titled, Revere Beach Elegy, won the Massachusetts Book Award for non-fiction. By default, it became Book Two of the Revere Beach Trilogy. A couple of years later I published In Revere, In Those Days, which made the third book of a pretty unusual trilogy--a memoir sandwiched between two novels. From time to time Id go back to The Ride to Revere Beach, take it out of the drawer and fool around with it. Eventually I reworked the whole thing, retitled it as The Return, and showed it to Peter Sarno. He liked it right away and agreed to publish it. We both then put a lot of time and effort into the copyediting, fact-checking, design and printing--all those things that hide between the pages of every book. And, as I mentioned in another post, my wife Amanda provided a gorgeous photo of Revere Beach (to complement the gorgeous--much gloomier--photo of Revere Beach that graces the cover of Revere Beach Boulevard.) The novel has just now become available, some fifteen years after parts of it were written. So maybe The Revere Beach Trilogy should be re-named The Revere Beach Quartet, or The Revere Beach Foursome. I dont know. But Im pleased and grateful that PFP/AJAR has brought it out, and Im at peace now that Ive been able to continue the lives of the characters from Boulevard. Of all my backlist books, Boulevard still sells best, by far, so I hope those readers and some others find The Return, and find it to their liking. I thought this little history might be of some interest to them, and to those brave souls who write for a living or dream of publishing a novel one day. Never surrender.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 23:13:56 +0000
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