William Landay

Official website of the author

Defending Jacob

The Murder Gene

Last September in Italy, a man convicted of what would, in this country, be called second-degree murder or manslaughter had his 9-year sentence reduced on appeal on the grounds that he exhibited

abnormalities in brain-imaging scans and in five genes that have been linked to violent behaviour — including the gene encoding the neurotransmitter-metabolizing enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). … Giving his verdict, [the judge] said he had found the MAOA evidence particularly compelling.

The ruling marks the first time a defense based on behavioral genetics — the argument that a defendant’s genes caused him to commit the crime — has affected the outcome of a criminal case in any European court. To my knowledge, no defendant has ever succeeded with this argument in America, either, though many have tried.

I have written before about the implications of behavioral genetics for criminal law, which is built on the assumption that we are generally responsible for our own actions. Surely this is an issue the criminal courts will have to face: some people may indeed be genetically hard-wired for violence. But this decision comes as a surprise to me because the science does not seem to justify it, not yet. We simply don’t know that a single gene like MAOA causes specific behaviors, even in very specific gene-environment interactions. It is a bad decision but a telling one: as the science of behavioral genetics advances, at some point the courts will find it impossible ignore. (To learn more, a great scholarly article by law professor Owen D. Jones is here.)

For now, though, the idea of a “murder gene” is the stuff of novels, not science. My own next novel takes up this very issue. It involves a man named Andy Barber, who descends from a long line of violent men and whose teenage son Jacob is accused of murdering a classmate. Jacob, it turns out, also carries the MAOA gene variant — sometimes called the “warrior gene.” Preparing for his son’s murder trial, Andy says,

The legal question we discussed most … was the relevance of Jacob’s violent bloodline. We referred to this issue as the “murder gene” to express our contempt for the idea, for its backwardness, for the way it warped the real science of DNA and the genetic component of behavior, and overlaid it with the junk science of sleazy lawyers, the cynical science-lite language whose actual purpose was to manipulate juries, to fool them with the sheen of scientific certainty. The murder gene was a lie. It was also a deeply subversive idea. It undercut the whole premise of the criminal law. In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention — the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea — “the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.” This is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes, not with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness. But that is the argument Logiudice [the prosecutor] would make if he had the chance: born bad. He would whisper it in the jury’s ear, like a gossip passing a secret. We were determined to stop him, to give Jacob a fair chance.

The murder gene may indeed be junk science, for now at least, but it is a haunting idea. We are quite comfortable with the idea that certain benign traits may inherited — musical talent, athleticism. Why not a talent for violence?

Image: Bryan Christie, “Pharmaceutical Brain”

A Male Jodi Picoult

Yesterday my novel-in-progress reached a critical milestone. My editor and I had a long talk in which we agreed that the story is now all in place. A new ending, which takes the story in a direction I never dreamed of when I began writing page 1, now seems right and credible, even inevitable — in the way that good endings always seem inevitable once you have “discovered” them. So what remains now is just minor changes, polishing. In 2-4 weeks I will turn the manuscript in and essentially be done with it. There will be a few more rounds of edits, but from here on the changes will be increasingly picayune, things like moving commas and checking for internal consistency. Important, yes, but less arduous.

The feedback from my editor, Kate Miciak, has been glowing. Kate is a brilliant editor and not one to bullshit. Lord knows, she has been blunt about my manuscripts in the past. So when she raves, I take her at her word. And she is raving about this book.

The hope is that the book will appeal to a wider audience than my first two have. It is not a gritty urban crime story. The setting (the suburbs) and the characters seem more “relatable.” It should be more accessible to the wide swath of readers who, to be frank, I will have to reach if I am to make a go of this: women, book clubs, general-fiction readers who simply won’t consider genre mystery or suspense, no matter how literate or rich. Not to worry: the book is a crime story. But it is equally a family story and a lot less bloody than my other novels have been. I know, I know — I’m getting old, going soft.

A few other random developments:

  • The book still does not have a title. This has bugged me from the start, as I’ve written here before. A title brings the whole project into focus. A book without a title is like a forgotten name — it is right on the tip of your tongue but you can’t quite find the words. Infuriating.
  • I hope to “publish” the first chapter online very soon. I’d love to share at least a little bit of the story with readers who have been waiting for a long time already and now will have to wait until next summer. Obviously this raises copyright issues but I can’t imagine Bantam will object. They routinely publish the first chapter of upcoming books as a teaser. Stay tuned.
  • The last couple of weeks have been a root canal. I lost energy and focus. Attention fatigue set in; I have been staring at this project too damn long. Worse, I had just expended quite a bit of energy to get the manuscript in, only to be told the ending needed a complete rewrite. So maybe a letdown was inevitable. Still, this was a lowpoint. That’s the way it goes, though. Writing a novel is a marathon. There are lots of ups and downs like this. Now, at least, I am over Heartbreak Hill and racing for the finish. Now run, you lazy bastard, run!
  • The book will be a lead title for Bantam in spring or summer 2011. The precise pub date has not been set yet and won’t be for quite some time. As all publishers do, we will look for a window when no bigfoot authors are rolling out their summer blockbusters. It’s hard enough to generate buzz during the lulls.
  • My editor envisions a hardcover-to-trade-paperback path for the book. That is a big step for me, one I am very excited about. I have always felt that my books are miscast as mass-market paperbacks, and I have always wanted to see them in trade format. (Trade paperbacks are the larger size, priced around $12-$15. The format signals readers that the publisher considers the book a significant one, worthy of the higher price even for a paperback.) There has been some category confusion about my books, I’m afraid. They look for all the world like airport thrillers but they read like something else. What that “something else” is, exactly, is anybody’s guess. “Literary crime”? Good luck finding that section in your local bookstore. Unfortunately, there is no precise pigeonhole for me in the market, which is why my books have been tough for publishers to position. But trade paperback gets closer to the mark.
  • It has been suggested that this book might become a template for me and, rather than pursue more violent tales of urban mayhem, I might just settle down and become “a male Jodi Picoult, with a touch of Scott Turow.” Which sounds just grand to me.

Finally, thank you, sincerely, to everyone who reads this blog and sends emails and “likes” me on Facebook and waits around for years between books. You readers mean the world to me. It is a privilege to be a novelist. You all make that possible. I never forget that.

Will e-novels be shorter?

Ephraim Rubenstein - Still Life With Burned Books

A few weeks ago, over on Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell wrote a post that I’ve been thinking about ever since.

I would estimate that about 80% of the non-academic non-fiction books that I do not find a complete waste of time (i.e. good books in politics, economics etc — I can’t speak to genres that I don’t know) are at least twice as long as they should be. They make an interesting point, and then they make it again, and again, padding it out with some quasi-relevant examples, and tacking on a conclusion about What It All Means which the author clearly doesn’t believe herself. The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself. Length may also, of course, reflect some practical judgments concerning the book as a display object.

He went on to predict “an explosion in the number of very short books/essays” as we move to a world of electronic publishing, because buyers will not be put off by shorter books when they can’t actually see (or display) them as physical objects.

I hope he is right, of course. The extinction of padded-out nonfiction books would be good news for everyone, except maybe Malcolm Gladwell.

But what struck me most about the post was how rare it is to see a discussion of how this new medium will affect books themselves. The conversation about ebooks is obsessed with the business of publishing. Which traditional publishers will survive, which won’t? Which reader will dominate, iPad or Kindle or something else? How will authors get by when publishers’ margins approach zero, as resellers like Amazon drive down prices and tent-pole authors find they don’t need traditional publishing houses at all? In all this, relatively little is said about the books.

What about fiction? In a world of ebooks, will fiction shrink, too?

I think it will, but not for the same reason. Unlike nonfiction, which begins to feel overstretched when there are more pages than ideas, there is no “natural” length for a story. Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby are equally masterpieces, of unequal length. I just finished Wolf Hall, a cinderblock of a book, but it did not feel overlong at all. If anything, it ended too soon. (I raved about it here.) The test is whether a story works dramatically. Even a very short story can feel too long.

And that is what will force novels to shrink: as we increasingly move to reading on screens, everything begins to feel too long. The reading public is losing its ability to stay focused on a longer text. Online, readers are conditioned to graze, to nibble and move on. Even the verbs we use for reading on the internet, browse, surf, suggest how superficial the experience feels. These increasingly are our readers, of fiction and nonfiction alike: harried, restless, impatient.

Worse, ebooks will increasingly share the same screens as the rest of the digital tsunami. No longer will you turn off your computer and open a book in peace. The iPad and whatever is likely to follow will be fully web-enabled, so the whole Times Square of the internet will always be one click away. For the moment, dedicated ebook-reading devices like the Kindle offer a quieter reading environment, but that is likely to change as more versatile devices like the iPad enter the market.

I have seen my own patience for long books begin to shrivel. So many novels now seem to drag, particularly in the second act. To be fair, part of it may be other pressures: between two young kids and working, I am squeezed for time. But part of it is the distracted feeling we all share today. It is the way we read now.

I have begun to tune my own writing accordingly. I made a conscious decision to make my third novel shorter than my first two by about 20%. Most of the tightening is in that critical second act, where the pace tends to slow down and the plot often wanders, to no real purpose. I am keenly aware that this novel will be competing with an array of new media and that my hold on the reader’s attention is precarious, and it scares the hell out of me. My competition  is not other novelists; it is all the other media crowding onto my readers’ screens and into their minds, try as they might to shut them out. I simply can’t afford to shuffle my feet for a hundred pages and expect the reader to still be there for act three.

Of course, there is nothing new about novelists shaping their work to the tastes of contemporary audiences. Dickens’ novels are long and intricately plotted because that was what his audience demanded. He generally wrote for serial publication in periodicals, so his stories had to extend and ramify over very long periods, like modern TV series. (HBO’s “The Wire” was often compared to Dickens’ stories, and rightly so.) Serial publication also allowed Dickens to monitor how his books were being received and tweak them as he went along to give readers what they wanted.

It is hard to give readers what they want, of course, because it is impossible to know what they want. But I suspect that shorter novels will increasingly become the norm, just as shorter nonfiction will. This, it should be noted, is a hopeful prediction. Better that novels go on a diet than die out altogether.

Image: “Still Life With Burned Books” by Ephraim Rubenstein (oil on linen, 38″ x 50″).

Done!

Last Friday at 11:00 PM I emailed the finished manuscript of my book to my agent and editor. At this point, it is hard to know how long it has taken to refine this book from the first gleam of an idea to completion. But it has been almost three years since I finished my last book and started to develop this idea. The story has been through several iterations in that time. At one point I got so frustrated with it I even set it aside to work on something else. So it is obviously an enormous relief to be done with it.

The story in its final version involves a 14-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate in a comfortable Boston suburb. My film agent described it, in perfect filmspeak, as “Presumed Innocent” meets “Ordinary People,” which puts you in the right ballpark at least. But the story began life as something quite different. The germ of the idea was simply: father watches his son accused of murder and wonders, “Who is this stranger I have raised?”

What first caught my imagination was the sight of defendants’ parents sitting stoically in the back of a courtroom during a trial. What is it like for them? I have seen crime stories told from the point of view of criminals and victims, but here was a player whose misery goes unnoticed. In a way, they are blameless victims, too.

The parents’ situation also gets at a question that was on my mind, not about crime but crime novels: why do good people who would never dream of stealing a piece of gum read with pleasure about bloody murder? The question is not limited to crime novels. Stories about crime dominate the news, too, for the simple reason that people watch them. We have always been fascinated with crime dramas. Some of the oldest stories we have are crime stories.

I think that in crime stories we must see some reflection of ourselves. Just as the Oedipus story — the first detective story, reputedly — enacts a primal instinct, so do other crime stories resonate with us by touching fantasies and fears we only dimly understand. “Bad men do what good men dream,” as one observer puts it.

The audience’s fascination with crime is especially poignant in the case of the murderer’s parents. Here the identification with the criminal is more than an imaginative projection, because every parent identifies so closely with her child. Genetically and socially, the child is made of the same stuff as the parents in some mysterious combination of nature and nurture. So, when those parents sitting in the back of the courtroom ask, “What does this story say about me?”, they are asking the same question as the reader curled up in bed with a crime novel — they simply have more at stake in the answer.

These were some of the ideas I wanted to tease out in this novel. Now, finally, it is written. There will be more work to do, of course. What I have handed in is just a draft. There will be rewriting. Depending on what my editor thinks of the pages, there may be a lot of rewriting. But the hardest part is done, not just the writing itself, going from a blank page to a finished manuscript, but the conceptual work — going from that first dim inspiration to seeing the story before you. Some of the hardest work is done, invisibly, before you write that first sentence.

Last Words

Yesterday I finished the last scene of the new book, a scene I had been wrestling with for days. Endings are a tricky business. Obviously the last page of a novel should move the reader somehow, which is why writers tend to swing for the fences. This is where the prose often puffs itself up — “So we beat on, boats against the current,” that sort of thing.

There is an old joke that no man should wear a Greek fisherman’s cap unless he is both (a) Greek and (b) a fisherman. Well, stirring finales like “So we beat on…” ought to come with a similar warning to writers: Don’t try this unless (a) you are F. Scott Fitzgerald and (b) you have just written The Great Gatsby. By the end of an effective novel, the drama of the story should be moving enough, anyway, without the need for grandiose writing. Less is more.

But there is danger at this end of the spectrum, too. I find a lot of novels end too abruptly to be satisfying. They show too much restraint. They simply stop. To me, as a reader, I want all my time and emotional investment in the characters to be paid off somehow. Less is more — but only to a point. Then less becomes too little.

So it is a difficult balance, and I finally managed to get something down that I could live with. Now I go back to fill in a few holes. There are a couple of short scenes to write from scratch plus one to rewrite, then I will have a few weeks to edit and polish before I send it all to my editor, Kate Miciak, at Random House. Several more rounds of edits will follow, until we all run out of time or patience, whichever comes first. But the heaviest lifting is done, and that is a huge relief.

The Importance of Shipping

Seth Godin advises writers and other artists (at around 7:45 of this video), “What you do for a living is not be creative. Everyone is creative. What you do for a living is ship.… That is the discipline of what a creative artist does.” Even allowing for a little hyperbole (obviously artists have to be creative and ship), it is a useful reminder.

I ran across this clip the other day, just as I have been laboring to finish my third novel. And “laboring” is just the word for it: after a December that was by far my most productive month ever, I have been useless in January. I have not been writing well enough. Much, much worse, I haven’t been writing enough, period. I have rationalized my January slump as exhaustion and “part of the creative process” and all the usual horseshit, but listening to Godin I wonder if it isn’t the lizard brain after all — fear of finishing, of showing your work, being judged. Yes, even now, with two books under my belt.

I have sometimes been jealous of my writer-friends who were trained to write on deadline. Advertising copywriters do not learn to write truthfully, and journalists do not learn to write beautifully. But they do learn to finish. Or call the damn thing finished, whatever imperfections remain, and move on to the next assignment. In the long run, that may be the most valuable skill of all.

Finish. Ship. Next project. That is the unpoetic reality of being a writer. All writers know this, yet all writers need to hear it again and again. Myself included.

Source: Seth Godin: “Quieting the Lizard Brain” on Vimeo. Read Godin’s blog on the same subject here.

Title Trouble

I remember the moment I came up with the title “Mission Flats” for my first novel. It was late, long past midnight. The house was quiet. I lay in bed unable to sleep, which is common for me. (I am a chronic insomniac.) I had been playing around with the word “mission” for the title. The book is about Ben Truman’s mission, his adventure far from home, an odyssey that roughly follows the arc of traditional adventure myths described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The novel also drew on the Boston neighborhood of Mission Hill as part of its inspiration. In fact, I considered both “The Mission” and “Mission Hill” as titles. But a lofty, aspirational, resolute word like “mission” needed a downbeat flat note to balance it. So I swapped in “flats” for “hill,” thinking perhaps of Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. The words fell into place — click — and there it was.

I knew I had it. Right from the start, from that first click, the words “Mission Flats” seemed inevitable, perfect, unimprovable. The proof of its rightness was that the title, rather than just being a sign hung on the front of the book, began to shape the story. The high-low sound of it — Mission (up), Flats (down) — catalyzed the writing. Intentionally or not, I began to write a story to fit it.

There was no such parting of the clouds for “The Strangler.” My own working title for that book was “The Year of the Strangler,” which I still think is a truer reflection of the story. The novel is not just about the Boston Strangler case. It is — at least it is intended to be — a panoramic view of the Boston underworld in the early 1960’s, taking in the formation of the Mob order that would rule the city for the next forty years and also the reconstruction of the city both physically and economically. Alas, my editors, both here and in the U.K., loathed “The Year of….” It sounds like a history book, they said. And because I was inexperienced and too eager to please, I accepted the suggestion of “The Strangler” as more focused, more evocative, and more marketable. Let me be clear: the fault was entirely mine. If I did not like the title, I could and should have said no. I understand that. But I did not, and the title still rankles. It simply does not fit the book.

So this whole business of choosing a title is deadly important. And for my novel in progress, I still don’t have one. No click. No itchy inkling of a Really Big Idea trembling just out of reach, about to reveal itself. Nothing. I don’t even have a working title. On my computer, the manuscript resides in a folder called “Book Three.” This has been going on for over a year.

The problem occupies more brain-space than I can afford to give it. In the sprint to the finish line, my thoughts should be 100% on the story. Instead I churn one title after another.

The candidates fall into some of the usual categories.

  • Wordy, colloquial, faux-conversational titles — oh so trendy at the moment (Then We Came to the End, We Need to Talk About Kevin, It’s Beginning to Hurt, This Is Where I Leave You, all descended presumably from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love).
  • Solemn one-word titles (Atonement, Possession, Damage).
  • Place names (Cold Mountain, Mansfield Park, Gorky Park).
  • Character names (Jane Eyre, Billy Bathgate).
  • Allusions (Tender Is the Night).

Of course, there are as many categories, as many ways to name a book as you care to dream up. These are just the ones I have been turning over in my head.

The title candidates, for the moment:

  • Line of Descent: because the story involves a teenage boy who is descended from several generations of murderous men and is himself accused of murder.
  • Cold Spring Park: the public park where the murder takes place.
  • Jacob: the name of the boy who is accused (probably used in some construction like “About Jacob” or “Regarding Jacob”).
  • The Murder Gene: which the boy and his parents fear he has inherited.
  • Guilt, violence, inheritance, blood, nature: all words rolling around in my head like loose marbles.

Some of this confusion is self-inflicted, no doubt — paralysis by analysis. At this point, having thought about it too hard for too long, I may not recognize the click when I hear it. Or, more accurately, since in art the eureka! experience is a subjective one — there is no such thing as a perfect title, there is no “right” answer — I may not be allowing myself to think that any title is right, or right enough.

Anyway, the struggle to name Book Three goes on. Cast your vote, if you like. I need all the help I can get.

Book 3 Update: The Final Push

Bates Reading Room - BPL

Toward the end, writing a novel is a race against the clock. Deadlines that once seemed absurdly far off suddenly loom into view. The story itself demands that you write faster, too, with more urgency, so that the reader will feel the acceleration and she will be pulled along with you to the finish. That is the stage of writing I am entering now, and I am dreading it.

I am behind schedule, as usual. It seems unlikely I will make my internal deadline of January 1 for a completed manuscript, but I am going to kill myself trying. The real deadline, when the manuscript is actually due on my editor’s desk (well, in her email inbox), is April 1, and the cost of missing it — the loss of my publishers’ trust, the loss of future prospects — is simply too high for a midlist, erratically productive writer like me to survive at this point in my career. So the internal deadline remains January 1. That should leave me enough time for rewriting and polishing. Alas, November and December will not be much fun for me.

The good news is that the book itself is working. I have never been one of those writers who feel, as many claim to, that the characters come alive and act on their own while the writer merely watches, furiously writing down the action like a medium at a séance. It is always work for me, always an uphill push. Still, when it is right, something happens: the material feels rich, it generates ideas organically, the direction of the story becomes more obvious. With this book, thankfully, that something has happened.

In terms of pages, I am probably only halfway through the manuscript, maybe a bit further. In terms of story, I have reached act three, the final build-up to the climax. The story concerns a Boston prosecutor named Andy Barber whose teenage son is accused of murder. (A film producer who read the existing manuscript described it in perfect Hollywood-speak as Presumed Innocent meets Ordinary People, which, I am embarrassed to say, is pretty close.) As act three opens, the case goes to trial. I have never written a courtroom sequence before, but I am confident I can. I have been in court many, many times in my prior life as a prosecutor. More important, the courtroom is such an inherently dramatic arena and trials are so scripted and rules-bound that there is a ready structure for the storytelling. So again, this is all to the good.

I continue to labor over the title. The working title remains Blood Guilty but I detest it. This is a bigger problem than you might imagine. The title crystallizes the story in my mind. Not having a title makes the whole project feel foggy and uncertain to me. I have churned up alternatives — Seed, The Good Father, In Our Blood, many others — but each seems worse than the last. It is some comfort to remember that Fitzgerald never liked the title The Great Gatsby for his masterpiece and he tried to change it right up to the time the book went to press. The Great Gatsby, it must be admitted, is not a great title, so maybe this is less of an issue than it seems at the moment.

That is where it stands. I am turning for home. It is a difficult stage in the process, but then they’re all difficult. I am back to writing every morning at the Boston Public Library reading room (pictured above), though my old quota of a thousand words a day is not going to get it done anymore. I am now just writing as much as I can every day until I run out of gas.

I am not complaining. It is a privilege to do what I do. There are only a handful of full-time novelists on the planet, meaning novelists who make a decent living at it without the need for a day job. So I am blessed and I understand that. Still, these next eight weeks are going to suck.

Photo: “Study” (main reading room of the Boston Public Library) by Haydnseek (link).