The last five books have all come from the same set of characters. I have just begun working on a new novel that will come from a new place, with no characters, ideas, or connection to the previous series. Instead of one character who is half-French who misses her homeland, both characters are fully French and it is set in the gorgeous scenery of southern France, somewhere near Bergerac, the land of Cyrano.
If and when The Wind and the Shore is done, if it makes its way to the bookstores, here’s what you might read on its back cover:
For four years, Colette was the most popular singer in Europe. Now she’s not even the most popular of her former backup dancers. After two worldwide bestselling albums, she takes more creative control and ends up with less control over her own life. Now, after four more albums, each less successful than the last, she’s determined to make a comeback and show her fans she’s grown from Europop Princess into a mature, wiser Queen.
Edouard Blanc was an unknown just out of film school when he ran the camera on the set of the music video to Colette’s biggest hit. After a career of year after year of lower-stakes projects, his latest turn behind the lens is now a hugely-successful movie. Suddenly besieged with offers to step out from behind the camera and fulfill his lifelong dream to direct his own screenplay, he retreats from Paris back to the countryside of southern France where he grew up to mull over his next move.
When he comes across Colette singing in a venue a hundredth the size of the stadiums she used to pack, the two old acquaintances from the same peaceful, small town on the Dordogne reconnect. The two stars meet going in opposite directions, he now the name everyone knows and she the name everyone used to know. After one too many glasses of wine, she jokes that he should make one last documentary: this one a behind-the-scenes “making of” her comeback album.
Wanting to feel the complete freedom he hasn’t felt in years, he surprises her by accepting. What follows is a summer in which they both find out that when it’s over, it’s not the fall that hurts a person, it’s the sudden stop at the end.
Hear me do a reading of the opening of the book.
The series is not finished—Eileen, Richard, Karl, and Orion still have so much more to do. (I’ll be starting on their sixth book later this year while I work on this one.) This new project is intended and designed to be a standalone. I imagine the relationship between the two characters to be similar to the one between Paul Varjak and Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a movie that stood alone so well by itself that it never got and absolutely never needed a sequel.
The events that happen in the series books are there to serve the characters. They are a way of dropping some eels into the swimming pool and see how they all individually react. It’s easy to imagine that Karl would go swimming and laugh, Richard would try to keep the eels away from Eileen, Eileen would grab them by slick little bodies and chuck them out of the pool (and then complain that her hands were icky), Orion would use his paw to unlock Karl’s cell phone and then bark for a pool cleaner, Karl’s wife Colleen would shake her head and say, “Not this again,” and bring out the pool skimmer and get to work, and so on.
Having a core like this is the only way (in my opinion, at least) to keep a series going. While each event I drop in gives each of them a chance to show off their brilliant qualities and their baffling ones, Karl will always show how his mind operates on another level (sometimes sublime, sometimes sub-basement), Richard will always step up and demonstrate his love for Eileen, and Eileen will always take two steps forward and one step back toward accepting it and healing from her PTSD. With characters like these, the events that happen to them aren’t actually all that important because it’s the personalities that carry the load, so I could keep coming up with new oddball things to throw at them until I start typing on the Big Keyboard in the Sky.
The new project is not like that. Although at this moment in the conception they are two strongly-drawn characters, they have to be: the book is at heart a character study, just as Breakfast at Tiffany’s was at its core the study of a lonely, out-of-place young woman whose dreams were to big for her grasp. (The movie spends its first three minutes telling you exactly what it’s about, and it does it without a single word. That exquisite sensibility may be why this is one of those rare instances where the movie is better than the book it’s based on.) This project is the study of a woman who’s had her dream come true, then had it fall from her grasp through nothing more than the fickleness of fame and the inevitability of being a human.
The Wind and the Shore is more serious than what I’ve done before because its purpose isn’t to entertain, it’s to raise questions and watch the characters work together to grapple their way to answers. The series books are quirky but mainstream/upmarket. This one is more along the lines of true literary fiction.
What drew me to write this novel is the question, “Why did Britney Spears collapse spectacularly while her French counterpart, Alizée, didn’t?” What was it about the one that made her strong and made the other shave her head? How does someone who was once so famous deal with watching her fans fade away? Is it better to have never been a star at all than to end up ignored after having been adored?
In the end, I will have an answer, but that doesn’t mean it will be the answer. And if the answer you have is different from mine, that’s not a flaw, that’s something great. It will mean that the book is about something that’s too big for the book itself to hold. Many of my favorite works of art are like that: Madame Bovary and Mrs Dalloway, César Franck’s Violin Sonata, Salvador Dalí’s “Young Woman at a Window,” Éric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, the video game Kentucky Route Zero… they all leave you with the feeling—or even the certainty—that they were about more than they were “about.” Those are the ones that, like a good glass of scotch, leave a taste in your mind afterward, and as they sit longer, the taste changes as you do.
A book asks you a question and answers it for you. A good book asks you questions and lets you answer them. A great book asks questions neither you or it can answer.
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