About a month ago, Nicholas Goldberg wrote a column in the Los Angeles Times in which he mentioned that he had a friend whose book club’s only rule was that the books they would mutually read—and, it is assumed, intelligently discuss while eating cheese and drinking wine—had to be no longer than 200 pages. You may not find that disconcerting, but I, who have written several novels well over that ill-painted, splintered-filled benchmark, see it as disturbing as hell. What the hell is their deal? Do they like only concertos and not symphonies? Half-hour sitcoms and not season-long continuing dramas? Insubstantial snacks instead of a hearty meal? A half-roll in the hay instead of prolonged, tender love-making?
I’ve brought sex into this blog to emphasize that I’m genuinely disturbed about the above because my latest novel (which releases today), The Reluctant Heterosexual: A Tragicomedy in Four Movements A Prelude And An Interlude, doesn’t conclude its story until page 499. It even has a long title!
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But then, I have not made it a habit of accommodating readers with short attention spans.
Am I being fair? After all, there is a place for short novels. I’m thinking stuffed in that small space between the bottom of a door and the floor to stop drafts.
Now that certainly isn’t fair of me, is it? But then, neither are those who accuse big books of being doorstoppers.
Nicholas Goldberg was not casting aspersions against his friend’s book club; he admits that short books can be great. But then he joined me in my umbrage when he read a virulent attack against big, long books in the UK’s Spectator Magazine by John Sturgis entitled, “Good Riddance to Long Books.” Sturgis was celebrating the fact that several short novels were put on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. And yes, he joked that the prize was “...putting the short in the shortlist.”
One of Sturgis’ main complaints about big, long novels was that holding a hefty book in one hand while riding on the subway strains his wrist. Well, get thee to a Kindle, man! Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1440 pages) weighs no more than Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (160 pages) in their Kindle editions.
Goldberg also makes this point, which I think makes a lot of sense: “I’ve had a theory for a long time that American students are trained in high school to dislike great authors because instead of reading their best books, they’re assigned their shortest books. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Dickens’ mediocre Hard Times, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.”
To be fair, any writer of fiction who is at least competent in their craft and art knows that a story needs to be as long as it needs to be, to be entirely told, whether long or short. But that said, novelist Jane Smiley defines the novel as “A lengthy, written, prose narrative with a protagonist.”
Lengthy is the keyword here. Sometimes it takes time to immerse the reader’s brain in all the events in a story and the nuances of personality that drive those events.
But still, I feel compelled to explain why The Reluctant Heterosexual came in at 499 pages—the longest novel I have written, the longest story I have told. The explanation is a story in itself—the story of the novel’s writing.
The seed for TRH was planted in the late 1980s when I was writing screenplays and trying to get them produced. A man who fancied himself a producer (and possibly a sex god) told me a true story he heard about a man who spies a gorgeous woman across a ballroom during a big charity do at a San Francisco hotel. He asked someone who she was, and that someone told him. Except that someone, looking across the ballroom, mistakenly thought the man meant a woman standing next to the gorgeous woman instead of the gorgeous woman herself. Deciding to play matchmaker that someone, finding it impossible to introduce the man to the mistaken woman in the crowded confusion of the enormous charity do, did, at least, get the mistaken woman’s permission to give the man her phone number. The next day the man called the number and got an answering machine. But he left a message, she called back, and they had a pleasant conversation. Indeed, it was more than pleasant. They made a genuine mental connection, all while his mind was imagining the gorgeous woman being on the other end of the line. He asked her out on a date. She said yes. He showed up at her apartment for the date. She opened the door and…
It was an excellent setup for a romantic comedy. So I decided to write a screenplay based on it, which I entitled, Wait for the Beep! Those old enough to remember analog tape phone answering machines for the home will recognize the term.
I liked the screenplay. I liked much of the dialog I wrote for it. There was just one problem. It had a lousy ending. Or, rather, no ending at all. Silly me, I had given the protagonist too much depth. I made him a man who liked only gorgeous women. And a brilliant neuroscientist who hated ignorant people. And he had a pretty strict standard for what he called intelligent. And if a woman, no matter how gorgeous she was, did not meet that standard, he could not get serious about her. During his phone conversation with the mistaken woman, he discovers that she is not only intelligent but charmingly and wittily so. But when she opens her door, he finds to his immediate disappointment, that she is not the gorgeous woman he thought he was meeting. He had been excited to find a gorgeous woman who was also the charmingly intelligent woman who was his dream. The mistaken woman standing before him is not. Not that she is unattractive. Just not his standard of gorgeous. It is more than an awkward situation. But they go on the date, nevertheless. And, of course, it’s disastrous. It is a horrible night. Not without some biting banter, of course. What’s a rom-com without biting banter? And yet, you know they must end up together, right? So I get them together at the end. But it just didn’t sit right. Or lay right, as the case may be. Because although they have sex at the end of the night, given who they both are (she has acerbic and skeptical ideas of love and marriage, not to mention the baby carriage), I couldn’t imagine that any bells rang out that night.
Plus, I had to go and create another character who’s a geneticist striving to develop a formula for a “stick shift for the sex drive.” I liked this guy. He was wacky, if brilliant, quotes Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene theory, and, in my mind, looked like a young Tim Burton. But this brought up the interesting issue of evolution and sex. And the evolution of sex—or the lack thereof. A pretty heady theme for a supposed romantic comedy.
I knew I had more to write about than a screenplay would allow. So I decided to take the script and turn it into a novel to add what narrative prose could offer. I was happy with Wait for the Beep!, the novel, except that the ending was not a real ending.
Then I decided to turn it into a stage play. I was excited about what stagecraft could bring to the story’s structure and how I could manipulate time and the order of events. It was a joy to work on. I was happy with the bulk of the work. Of course, the ending still sucked—in more ways than one.
So Wait for the Beep! sat for years in three formats, three disappointing drafts, its characters calling out to me forlornly, wondering why I had abandoned them.
Eventually, after I had written and published several novels which did have satisfactory endings, I was struck on the top of the head with a realization prefaced by the mental whisper of Dummkopf! The reason Wait for the Beep! never had a satisfactory ending was because it wasn’t the whole story! I had not told the entire tale. Having concluded that my real art was narrative prose fiction, it was now clear that I had begun something I hadn’t finished. And in a sense, I hadn’t even started it. What I had written was just the middle of a whole. The beginning and the end of the full story of my two main characters—now named Robert Leslie Cromwell and Sandra (Sandy) Smith—needed to be told.
And so, Wait for the Beep! became The Reluctant Heterosexual: A Tragicomedy in Four Movements A Prelude And An Interlude.
Why movements instead of chapters? That was dictated by the tone of the original piece, which I still wanted to play as a standard rom-com. Or, at least, in the guise of a typical rom-com. But now I was aching to fill in the stories of Robert and Sandy. Who were they? Where did they come from? What had shaped them into the people in the rom-com? And what happened after the events of the rom-com? And what about this stick shift for the sex drive? What was that all about? How did that affect the story?
None of this other stuff could play like a rom-com. The parts of the whole story, like the different movements in a symphony, would have to have their separate tones and tempo and be played, I suppose it could be said, in different keys.
PRELUDE
Robert and Sandra - San Francisco - 1992
The introduction of Robert and Sandy. They have been married for over ten years. Sandra, a longtime employee of the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, is now the executive director of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Robert is the co-founder of TOTLS Genetics (no one could ever get out of Robert or his partner, Gerald Podobinski, the meaning of the initials TOTLS). TOTLS Genetics, founded in 1981, revolutionized humanity. Robert and Sandy are worth nearly a billion dollars. We see them coming home from a charity do for the Legion of Honor to their modern mansion built in the style of a San Francisco painted lady. They banter about an old acquaintance of Sandy’s who was at the do. A still gorgeous woman. Sex is requested. Sex is denied. After Sandy wonders how they got together as a couple, they go to bed. And after Robert takes the other pill.
FIRST MOVEMENT
Robert - Los Angeles - 1950s to 1980
Robert’s story from before he was born. He’s the son of a lanky and laconic B-movie/TV cowboy second banana. And a gorgeous, sexy, not very talented singer/actress. This movement ends as he leaves for the San Francisco Bay Area to become a professor/researcher at UC Berkeley. As it unfolds, we are privy to his intellectual and sexual development.
SECOND MOVEMENT
Robert and Sandra - San Francisco - 1980
This movement is the original Wait for the Beep! rom-com of Robert and Sandy meeting awkwardly and having a disastrous date ending in sex. It ends with a surprising last line. We also meet geneticist Gerald Podobinski, who wants to develop a “stick shift for the sex drive.”
THIRD MOVEMENT
Sandra - Azusa; San Francisco; Europe -1950s to 1980
Sandy’s story from before birth to her education in art history in San Francisco and Europe. She is an orphan adopted by an older couple, both orphans themselves. She is a bit of a tomboy as a child who loves to read and discovers a passion for art. She also learns about boys’ silliness, no matter their age.
INTERLUDE
Dr. Gerald “Jerry” Podobinski - Q&A -1992
The transcript of a Q&A with Gerald Podobinsky conducted by the author of a proposed book entitled: A Stick Shift for the Sex Drive: How Doctors Gerald “Jerry” Podobinski and Robert Leslie Cromwell are Changing the Human Sexual Dynamic. Podobinski is in his element here, explaining to the author everything about the stick shift for the sex drive, which comes in two pills: CONTROL and ABANDON. In addition, he covers the development and history of the drugs which have made him and Robert fabulously wealthy. And he does it in his outrageous, un-self-censored manner. He also mentions quite seriously that, in his opinion, Robert and Sandy’s is the love story of the century!
FOURTH MOVEMENT
Robert and Sandra - San Francisco - Cheviot Hills - Azusa 1992
The final movement picks up the morning after the end of the Prelude. Robert and Sandy have a conversation about sex that ends with Robert making a horrible, unintended confession. Sandy is shocked. She accuses him of having raped her over and over for years. She leaves him. Robert is stunned.
How is all this resolved, if it is? Well, that is revealed at the end. Or is it?
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So—I wrote a long novel. Over its long gestation, it changed literary forms several times. It grew appendages to become a romantic comedy wrapped between two bildungsromans accessorized with science fiction and alternative history.
And if that doesn't intrigue you, then this is not the novel for you.
Available in Trade Paperback
With The Reluctant Heterosexual, I conclude my thematic trilogy: The Love, Sex, and Pursuit of Happiness Novels. All three novels look at these essential aspects of the human condition, with each novel focusing on one of the three. By the Sea: A Comic Novel looks at our unease when unhappy. Bully 4 Love: A Rather Odd Love Story takes a skewed view of this most revered emotion.
If you want to read about my other books, please follow this LINK to the My Books page on this blog.
Cheers to all!
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