Little Inklings

by Clay Smith

photograph Courtesy of Michener Center For Writers

A fast-paced thriller about a man who steals $7,500,000 from a deserted feed store and pays dearly for his theft: Somehow, this is not a plot you'd expect from the director of UT's Michener Center for Writers. But the ersatz thief in James Magnuson's Windfall is a UT English professor who at one time had a brilliant idea to investigate the complexities of the relationship between Emerson and Thoreau, and the pilfering takes place in South Austin, so the telling, at least for local readers, may make complete sense coming from a local author. Windfall begins by tracking Ben Lindberg as he's out searching for his family's lost cat. On the walk, he stumbles upon the loot, ponders, of course, what to do about it, ponders again, and then -- could it be otherwise? -- takes it. That tidy summary hardly does justice to Magnuson's ability to make his thriller literary, to make it readable yet thoughtful, but brevity, rather than a full explication, is more desirable for a book that so effortlessly engages and hooks the reader.

Perhaps the oddest experience in reading Windfall is getting hooked on the book while simultaneously acknowledging that its plot must be one of the world's oldest. A whole other conversation with Magnuson about suspense, and the subtlety required to sustain it, would be fitting for a book this genuinely thrilling, but I wanted to ask Magnuson, who is the author of six previous novels and has been the director at the Michener Center for five years, about the inherent paradoxes of writing a thriller whose protagonist is a professor.

Austin Chronicle: Windfall is about a professor, and we tend to think of their lives as existing in the realm of the unreal, but what happens to your professor is significant for how very real, and dangerous, it all is.

James Magnuson: Here's what I thought: You don't have to utterly articulate your theory before you write a book, right? But you have little inklings and I did think that, I thought, "This is pleasantly rude, what I'm doing." Because I've read academic novels, David Lodge, I would love to write a David Lodge novel -- I love the farcical quality. But there are almost certain conventions, a certain kind of satire, of the stupidity and the provinciality, of whatever department the writer happens to be in. No one would ever think that this was an academic novel in one sense just because of the genre that it's in. The other thing that I loved in Tom Wolfe's first book, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was the rudeness of talking about money, it was salutary. I thought, that's great, you know -- the differences between people. People are too polite to really talk about it and we think that professors are too polite to talk about it but there's a little wounding nerve in there that you can get at that's really interesting, you know, that you hope cuts to another level.

AC:Well somebody could definitely do a class analysis of your book.

JM: The reality, my first instinct was, I didn't want [the villains] to be drug dealers, the villains have to be real estate developers, but I couldn't pull it off; it didn't make any sense. But I wanted to take you on this toboggan ride and I wanted both that ascent -- it's both him discovering himself in another social class that he's not that comfortable with and he finds himself in this big house with a maid and doesn't know how to negotiate the maid, right?!

AC:At the Michener Center, you must work with people talking about and tweaking specific phrases all day long, working with students who have created whole worlds, and you or other teachers have to enter those fictional worlds. Do you have to separate yourself from that daily work in order to write your own fiction?

JM: There's eight different ways to answer it. It's very important for me to keep my writing life separate from my working life, and to keep it a little more innocently, a little more naively -- don't bring all your theories or, frankly, the worst thing you can do is to bring the "dignity" that you think you're due as an administrator into your writing. I mean, who would want to read such a book? You've got to write as if none of that happened. So I try to stay away from it.

AC:Do you go through any specific steps to ...

JM: Sometimes it's hard. You've got to write first. Right now, it's so hard because all my days are taken up, there's no time for other activity that keeps me clean in a way, you know? But the other thing is, you can't think about writing the kind of book that your students would like or that would be admirable, no, you just write from ... follow it where you go. The writing life at least for me has taken me so many different places in terms of things I'm writing about, in terms of styles, that I want it to be as much as possible a kind of private journey. And to not think about what the prevailing literary standards are. Unless you do it just a little bit to cut against prevailing fashion. That's my own instinct, is to go against what's certified, approved; find some other way. So my instinct is always a bit out into the hurly-burly. I started out publishing in quarterlies, but my instinct is for another world; that's just the way I'm put together.

AC:There is a philosophical bent to the book, it's more than just a detective caper.

JM: I think if you do this right, you can do both. You can do it within the context of a "thriller." You can do all kinds of things. Robert Stone? I would love to write like Robert Stone. ... Novels like this in one sense are more of a romance than a novel. They're better than the more domesticated setting, where everything is safe and controlled and there's something you can learn about character in these worlds of more extreme risk. There's a reason why we get hooked into books like this.

AC:Don't people who read "intelligent" novels tend to be uncomfortable getting wrapped up in a thriller?

JM: Because so many people say, "Oh my God, I read this in two nights, I couldn't put it down." On the other hand, people love that experience. Whatever the trend, there's always counter-trends. One of the very interesting things is that many very serious novelists, the best novelists, have gone back to writing almost Victorian novels. Whatever has been ignored for 50 years, go back and try it. Not 50 years, go back 100 years. You know, A.S. Byatt or the other person would be Peter Carey. And they're beautiful and it's sort of recapturing something. And yet they feel utterly new. I think you do need to be aware as a writer of the whole history of the novel but that doesn't mean somebody couldn't be daring by setting out to be the next Robert Louis Stevenson. Whatever is totally outré is very tempting, to say, "What would everybody really disapprove of?" And that's what gets us as opposed to the fragmentary.

AC:A novel has to be ideas and emotion; it can't be just one or the other. Is it tempting to create a professor as protagonist who has such a facility with ideas?

JM: I wanted somebody about as smart as me, these issues about Thoreau and Emerson, they really do interest me. And the whole twin pulls in America for purity on the one hand and excess on the other and that's why this guy is pulled apart. We want as Americans to simplify our lives and to purify ourselves to an extraordinary degree and that impulse isn't uncomplicated either. On the other hand, it's like, "Oh man, look at these mansions out in Westlake, I want some piece of that." How many writers are out looking for hot stock tips, you know? Writers are always ridiculous in their ideas about making money.

On the other hand, part of the book is this guy is trying to write a book that he no longer believes in. He's got a hot topic and it turns out to be a dead end and in that sense the academic is actually a gloss, a mask for the problem of the writer. Who hasn't been in that situation? Where you start a book, it seems so promising, and at some point you just lose faith so that his problem is not just that his salary is whatever it is, $30,000, it's other kinds of hopes in his life have dimmed too, which have to do with his intellectual life as well, the lights are going out for this guy in a number of ways.