Lowell Sun (Massachusetts)
May 1, 2014 Thursday
BEHIND A BEST SELLER – Chris Bohjalian is the latest in Pollard’s Author Series
By Ed Hannan, Sun Correspondent
Chris Bohjalian is a rare breed: a prolific author who has published a
book a year for each of the past five years (including his forthcoming
novel Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands) and a prolific speaker who will be
visiting 19 cities in 21 days to promote the book when it comes out in
July.
But all that work won’t keep Bohjalian from coming to Lowell next week
when he visits Pollard Memorial Library on Thursday, May 8, at 7 p.m.
Bohjalian is the latest author to speak at the library, joining Ben
Mezrich, Dennis Lehane, Linda Greenlaw, Michael Holley, Bob Shrum,
Nathaniel Philbrick and William Martin in an author series that
started in spring 2007. He won’t be discussing Close Your Eyes, Hold
Hands, though. Rather, he’ll be talking about last year’s novel, The
Light in the Ruins.
“The book tour is designed by my publisher, Doubleday, to support the
launch of my new novel,” Bohjalian said in a recent telephone
interview. “These speeches are far more leisurely. I usually speak
about whatever the library or the organization is interested in
hearing about, so for example (this week), I’m giving four speeches in
three days about three different books.”
But if you’ve ever been to a Barnes and Noble and seen an author
speak, you might think that Bohjalian will be reading copiously from
The Light in the Ruins. Think again.
“There are times when I do read from my books, but these kind of
speeches, my feeling is that if people want to read the book, they
can, but I want to give them something they wouldn’t otherwise get,”
he said. “In this case, it’s the research for the book, the back
stories, the incredibly funny or ridiculous moments that occurred when
I was researching the novel.”
In talking about The Light in the Ruins, Bohjalian said he will talk
about the location of the novel, the historical events around it, and
more.
“I’ll prepare some remarks about Tuscany, Italy, in the second World
War and the quandaries that inspired the sorts of characters in my
novel. I’ll also talk about my career and the state of publishing, no
doubt, because it always comes up.”
The 51-year-old Bohjalian, who was born in White Plains, N.Y.,
attended Amherst College and now lives in Vermont, has published 15
novels over the past quarter-century, including the bestsellers
Midwives (1997) and The Sandcastle Girls (2012).
Midwives was Bohjalian’s fifth book. It’s a novel centered on rural
Vermont midwife Sibyl Danforth, who becomes entangled in lawsuits
after one of her patients dies after an emergency C-section. Oprah
Winfrey anointed the book in her Oprah’s Book Club in October 1998,
which helped propel it to becoming a New York Times and USA Today best
seller. The Lifetime Movie Network later turned it into a television
movie with Sissy Spacek in the lead role.
His next novel, 1999’s The Law of Similars, looked at a widower
attorney suffering from nameless anxieties who started dating a woman
who practiced alternative medicine. It also made the New York Times
best seller list, as did 2007’s The Double Bind, 2008’s Skeletons at
the Feast and 2010’s Secrets of Eden. These days, Bohjalian is a
critical darling whose works are always much anticipated by his avid
fans and fondly viewed by book reviewers whose job it is to read books
on a regular basis.
Although some of his books fall under the category of historical
fiction, Bohjalian’s novels have tackled weighty issues such as
homelessness, animal rights and environmentalism. He’s particularly
proud of Skeletons at the Feast, which is one of the historical
fiction novels, along with Sandcastle Girls and The Light in the
Ruins. “It’s about one German family’s complicity in the Holocaust,”
Bohjalian says. “Sandcastle Girls is a love story set in the Armenian
genocide and The Light in the Ruins is a whydunit about an Italian
family targeted by a serial killer in the wake of the second World
War.”
As for those other books? “They tend to be contemporary literature
about people like you and me,” he says.
But, as any fan of a prolific novelist will tell you, the biggest
challenge is to avoid falling into a pattern where your successive
novels are categorized before anyone even reads them (think Grisham,
Clancy, etc.) Bohjalian shares that pressure.
“I never want to write the same book twice. That’s important to me.
And it’s important to me because it’s more fun for me and because I
never want my readers to say, ‘He’s fallen into a formula.’ What I
tend to write about is whatever subject I think I can be passionately
interested in for a year of my life. There’s that old maxim you and I
have heard so many times, ‘Write what you know.’ I never subscribed to
that precisely. I think it’s great to write what you know, but I think
it’s fine to write what you don’t know. Be a journalist. Figure it
out. My feeling is it doesn’t matter if you write what you know or
what you don’t know. What matters as a novelist is you write about
something you care about deeply and something you will care about a
year from now.”
Anyone as prolific as Bohjalian begs the question as to whether he
ever abandons a project before it is finished.
“I’ve aborted books when I’m 200 pages into them because I realize
this isn’t working and I can’t fix it,” he says. “Either my talents
are not commensurate with my vision or I’ve just grown bored and if
I’ve grown bored, then heaven knows my readers are going to grow
bored.”
What happens to the books he doesn’t go forward with? After all, when
a musician decides not to release a recording, it usually ends up in
some sort of posthumous compilation. That doesn’t happen with authors.
Interestingly, Bohjalian sends all of his unfinished or abandoned
projects to his alma mater, Amherst College, where they are archived.
“If you are a scholar, or a masochist, you can go there and go to the
library and see my unfinished manuscripts. If they’ve wound up there
in that form, they are such a train wreck. I would discourage anyone
with a life from wasting any time there. Steer clear.”
How should anyone coming to Pollard Memorial Library to hear Bohjalian
prepare for the event?
“I want people to have a great time. That’s all I want when someone
comes to my events. I want them to have a lot of fun. There’s this
notion sometimes that a book reading is dull or that I’m going to be
standing there with my nose in a book and I’m just going to read
aloud. While I’m a pretty good reader, the fact is, I want people to
leave the evening having had a really great time, to be energized, to
read not just my books, but other people’s books. If they haven’t
already read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch or Jodi Picoult’s latest
book, to dive into them.”
Even though Bohjalian is a regular speaker at these types of events,
don’t be afraid to ask him a question he’s been asked before. “There
really isn’t any question I’m tired of answering. I’m sufficiently
narcissistic and egocentric that I’ll talk about myself until they
yank me from stage with a cane.”
While he’s been publishing novels since 1988’s A Killing in the Real
World, don’t expect to find that one at your bookstore or library.
“I wrote the single worst first novel ever published, bar none, A
Killing in the Real World,” Bohjalian says. “You won’t even find it on
my website. It is thankfully out of print.”
That said, if you’ve read every Bohjalian novel and want more of him
in your life, check out the Burlington Free Press newspaper. He’s
written a weekly column every Sunday for the past 22-plus years, an
amount of content he estimates at 7.5 additional novels in word count.
And if you’re wondering what Bohjalian enjoys reading, here’s a list
of books he’s enjoyed in the past few months while reading galleys of
fellow authors: Dog Beach: A Novel by John Fusco, One More Thing by
B.J. Novak (yes, the guy who was on The Office), And Sons by David
Gilbert, Me Before You by JoJo Moyes and The Luminaries by Eleanor
Catton.
From: Baghdasarian