“Do you know Proudhon?”

(Note: This post is the thirty-seventh installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 36. You can read the earlier installments here.)

I’ve spoken a lot about the problem of novels with too much information, but it’s also possible to have too little. Too much, and readers start to feel the weight of the mass of undigested research; not enough, and they’re likely to become confused by names or ideas introduced without adequate explanation. Done in moderation, an obscure reference or two dropped into the text without comment can enhance the book’s atmosphere: we see this in Pynchon, not to mention Eco, and even in a suspense novelist like Thomas Harris, who often introduces forensic terms or obscure tradecraft in dialogue as a way of enriching the background. Done poorly, however, it can yank the reader out of the story, as he or she wonders what the hell the author is talking about. Finding the right amount of explanation involves striking a difficult balance between narrative flow, clarity, and reader engagement. The answers vary from one book—or scene—to another, and you can only figure out the correct proportions through revision, endless rereading, and intelligent feedback.

One of the hardest things about writing The Icon Thief was managing the information that the book contained, and I’m not sure I always succeeded. The book was always conceived as a story that was on the verge of flying apart from the density of the material it presented: it’s a book about paranoia and information overload, and I wanted to could convey some of the characters’ experience to the reader by making the network of intertextual references and ideas—some introduced for only a page or two—slightly more compressed than usual. In the first draft, this meant that the conspiracy thread took up a disproportionate amount of the story, and one of my first tasks in the rewrite was to pare it down as much as possible. In the process, I made some of the material even more compressed than before, but trusted, or hoped, that the reader would simply accept these names and dates as part of the story’s texture. And while I think it works for much of the novel, there are a few sections where I may have taken it a little too far.

In Chapter 36, for instance, in a long conversation between Maddy and Lermontov, I mention Gustave Courbet (and in particular his notorious painting The Origin of the World), René Magritte, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and the Vehmgericht. I introduce them into the dialogue as smoothly as I can, with as much background material as necessary, and try to write it so that even a reader who isn’t familiar with the particular references can treat them as part of the chapter’s verbal music: even if they don’t know the words, I’d like them to hum along with the tune. But that isn’t always what happens. One comment that I invariably got from readers after the book came out was that it sent them constantly to Wikipedia, and while I think this was intended as a compliment—and it does seem to have introduced some people to a lot of interesting material—I’m a little unsettled by it. Ideally, I want readers to keep turning pages, and every time a reference requires them to set the book down and look it up online, I’ve broken the narrative momentum. And that’s a mistake.

Yet I’m not entirely sure how, or even if, it should be changed. Now that years have gone by since I first wrote the book, I can see its strengths and weaknesses more clearly, and there are certainly moments when I feel I should have paused the narrative to flesh out the factual background. (In particular, I really wish I could go back and insert another explanatory paragraph or two about Duchamp. Even if it seemed like an artificial intrusion at the time, it would have clarified the action that followed for a lot of readers.) Still, when I read over this chapter again, I think it works, within the conditions imposed by the novel itself. The Icon Thief was the novel I had to write at that stage in my career, to work out my own feelings about information in fiction, and if I deliberately took it to the edge in certain places, it’s only so I could start to pull back later. In the novels I’ve written since, I’ve taken pains to structure the plot so that the story isn’t overwhelmed by the historical background, to the point where, in Eternal Empire, it serves more as a thematic counterpoint, introduced only rarely, to the story taking place in the present. But I’m still not sure I have it quite right…

“We’re standing at the tip of a very interesting triangle…”

(Note: This post is the thirty-second installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 31. You can read the earlier installments here.)

When it comes to conveying information to the reader, extended dialogue scenes are both highly useful and a potential pitfall. On the one hand, you’ll sometimes find that there’s no other way to narrate certain material, especially for events that fall outside the scope of the novel itself, which is the case, for instance, with the account of the Dyatlov Pass incident in City of Exiles. When handled judiciously, it’s often the best option for filling in backstory, which can better be covered in a few paragraphs of conversation than in an extended flashback—although here, as always, you need to tread carefully. On the other hand, a conversation that occupies most of a chapter can seem artificial or contrived, as when Dan Brown’s characters spend page after page delivering undigested exposition on dubious historical events. Long dialogue scenes, by definition, constitute a break in the action, and they can quickly grow tedious, especially if several occur in succession. Worst of all, they can disrupt the fictional dream, once the characters cease to talk naturally and turn into mouthpieces for the author’s ideas.

The Icon Thief contains perhaps five or six chapters that consist mostly of dialogue. Part of this is due to the constraints of conspiracy fiction, in which characters are often called upon to narrate events that occurred years or centuries before, and not always reliably. I can also credit, or blame, the precedent set by Foucault’s Pendulum. As I’ve mentioned before, Umberto Eco’s novel—which still remains one of my favorite books—is something of a cul-de-sac for unsuspecting young writers: his characters don’t just talk at length about convoluted conspiracy theories, but do so for hundreds of pages. Eco gets away with it because he’s a genius, and because the underlying material is usually fascinating, although even I tend to skip most of the chapters on the history of the Jesuits. But skeptics from Tom Wolfe to Salman Rushdie have objected, and not without reason, at the lack in Eco’s work of anything resembling an ordinary human conversation, and although I hope I’ve since managed to exorcise most of his influence, it didn’t stop me from indulging in a few long, talky scenes that clearly owe a lot to his example.

When dealing with a series of long dialogue scenes, the author has a number of options. Above all, he needs to cut them down as much as possible, which I tried to do in The Icon Thief, although I imagine a lot of readers would argue that they still go on too long. He can parcel them out gradually, interspersing them with chapters of more conventional action, or he can replace them with expository prose or indirect dialogue, although this is often a case in which the cure is worse than the disease. And when all else fails, he can at least set the conversation against an interesting background, and vary the setting from one scene to another. You often see this in movies, which like to stage talky moments with the characters standing, say, on a rooftop for no particular reason. (In Miami Vice, the backdrop is so gorgeous that it’s hard to focus on the dialogue.) And you often see exposition delivered in the middle of an action scene, although this can backfire as well: crucial details of the plot of L.A. Confidential are explained while the characters are dangling the district attorney out a window, and although it’s a great scene, it takes a couple of viewings to fully process what they’re saying.

Chapter 31 of The Icon Thief was heavily revised with these points in mind. I knew that the material was strong—it’s the scene in which I lay out the argument, not altogether seriously, that Marcel Duchamp was working as an intelligence agent in New York—but the staging presented a problem: in the original version, Maddy and Ethan discuss this over lunch, which was a bit too similar to a later scene in which they do much the same over dinner. It would be best, I decided, to get them out of the office, and fortunately I hit on a reasonable excuse: Ethan could give Maddy a quick walking tour of Duchamp’s former residences in New York, all of which were suspiciously close to the homes of the art patrons John Quinn, Walter Arensberg, and Walter Pach. (I may have been inspired by the scene in JFK in which Jim Garrison takes his colleagues on a similar circuit of Oswald’s haunts in New Orleans.) Rewriting the scene posed a bit of a problem, since by then I’d moved from New York to Chicago, meaning that I had to fill in my notes with some help from Google Maps. Still, the result is a chapter that is substantially more interesting than the same information conveyed over lunch. And there’s much more of this sort of thing to come…

“You know who Walter Arensberg was…”

(Note: This post is the thirtieth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 29. You can read the earlier installments here.)

Most conspiracy theories are inherently ridiculous. When they aren’t based on outright fabrications, like the legend of the Priory of Sion, they’re generally founded on a very selective interpretation of the available evidence, with tenuous connections presented as gospel while inconvenient facts are elided or ignored. And as I’ve mentioned before, these days, it’s easier than ever to construct a conspiracy that seems plausible at first glance. With a world of information available to even the most casual paranoid, the wildest theories can be supported by a few cherry-picked facts, as long as we don’t try to put them in context. It’s the kind of sloppy thinking that often finds a home in politics and junk science. As we saw in last year’s election, no matter what you want to prove about tax cuts or the budget deficit, there’s always a study somewhere to back you up, and you only need to look at some of our less reputable recent works of popular science to see how easily you can draw any conclusion you want about the brain.

When it comes to writing a conspiracy novel, a writer has an even greater degree of freedom. He can indulge in as many outlandish assertions as he likes, as long as they’re presented with a veneer of credibility—unless, like certain authors I could name, he coyly hints that the secrets he’s describing are really true. But he needs to be careful. The crucial element, as always, is suspension of disbelief. Even if few readers take the story’s claims at face value, it’s still important that they believe that they’re true within the context of the plot, which generally means that you can’t open with anything really wild. Suspension of disbelief works exactly the same way in a conspiracy novel as in any other kind of speculative fiction: you’re more likely to draw readers into the story if your implausibilities present themselves gradually, even casually, and in a reasonable disguise. If the author pulls it off, the transition between the merely unlikely to the blatantly impossible will be so subtle that the reader won’t realize until after the fact that he’s been taken in.

In The Icon Thief, I had to build my central conspiracy in stages, moving from the assertion that Marcel Duchamp had been influenced by the Rosicrucians—an argument that has been made repeatedly by serious academics—to even more farfetched claims, culminating in a vast, shadowy conspiracy that extends into all corners of history. In theory, the pieces could have been presented in almost any order. As a practical matter, however, I knew that I had to start with points that even a skeptical reader might be willing to accept on faith, at least in the interest of advancing the story. The conspiracy theme of the novel really begins in Chapter 14, when Tanya lays out the case that Rosicrucian symbolism can be found in the work of Duchamp and his contemporaries. It’s an argument that sounds great only if you take it out of context, and choose to ignore most of the evidence of Duchamp’s career and personality. But it’s the kind of selective misinterpretation that has an honorable history in art criticism, and it serves to introduce the novel’s skewed vision of the world in easy stages.

But there’s an even more interesting connection between Duchamp and Rosicrucianism, and it has the benefit of being more or less real: Walter Arensberg, Duchamp’s leading patron and close friend, was obsessed with the Rosicrucians, and in particular with the idea that Francis Bacon was the true author of the works of Shakespeare. Any argument about Duchamp’s Rosicrucian influences really ought to begin here—it’s a legitimately fascinating sidelight on the history of art, even if Duchamp himself seemed justifiably skeptical of Arensberg’s claims. Yet I chose to save this detail for much later in the novel, to the point where it’s only mentioned here, in Chapter 29, more than halfway through the book. A conspiracy theory, like any form of creative writing, needs to start strong, but it can’t reveal all its cards at once. Like the plot of the book in which it appears, it needs to save a few big moments for later, in places where the story needs a jolt of energy. By introducing it here, I might not be able to convince a reader to take the argument seriously, but I can at least make the case that these characters might. And they’re going to start taking it very seriously indeed…

So what is the writing life?

“Thoughts on art, culture, and the writing life.” When I typed that blog description more than two years ago, I don’t think I gave it more than a few minutes of thought—I only knew I had to enter something in that blank space in the template. I’d been planning to start an official author site for a long time, but the actual look of the page was thrown together in an evening or so of work, and I can’t say I put a great deal of consideration into most of its components. Even the idea of concentrating on issues of writing and creativity was a fairly random choice: I only knew, as WordPress recommends, that it’s good to make the focus of your blog as specific as possible, and these sorts of issues were the only topics I could imagine myself writing about on a daily basis without getting bored. Over time, my sense of what this site could be has grown and evolved in many ways, but I’m also surprised by how much of it has remained the same. (I’m still pleased by the simplicity and elegance of its layout, which is due entirely to The Journalist theme by Lucian Marin, which I chose because of my preference for black text on plenty of white space. I still think it’s the best blog theme around.)

Yet the words I so casually typed on that first day still haunt me. Part of it is the kind of quiet confidence they try so hard to exude, which at the time was really something of a pose. When I created this blog, I’d just sold my first novel, which was almost a year and a half from publication, and my sense of what “the writing life” would be was rudimentary at best. True, at that point, I’d done nothing but write for more than four years, but the only visible results were a couple of magazine sales and a steadily diminishing bank account. For most of that time, the only kind of writing life I knew was one in which I was still essentially working for myself, while trying to get the attention of editors and agents, and although I often introduced myself as a novelist at parties, it was only with the additional caveat: “But only in the sense that I’m trying to write a novel.” It’s no accident that I waited until I finally had a book deal before putting my thoughts on writing online: I believed, right or wrong, that it would give my ideas some legitimacy, and also hoped that it might be useful to share my experiences, in real time, as I entered the next phase of my career.

Two years later, I’m still not sure what the writing life is. In its larger dimensions, it’s tantalizingly elusive: like every writer, I’m always greedy for higher sales, more glowing reviews, and other things that are entirely out of my control. It becomes slightly more clear in the smaller details. There are things about my career that I’d love to change, but ultimately, I know that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have spent much of the last decade doing exactly what I want. My routine can be challenging or aggravating, and there are mornings when I still wake up dreading the first draft of the unwritten chapter to come, but I ultimately spend each day doing all I’ve ever wanted since I was ten years old: telling stories, living other people’s lives, putting words down on paper. Like every life worth living, it comes with certain sacrifices, and I wouldn’t have been able to get even this far without giving up a great deal along the way. But I remain mindful of the words of my hero, Marcel Duchamp, which struck me so deeply that I used them as an epigraph to the epilogue of The Icon Thief: “Life is more a question of expenses than of profits. It’s a question of knowing what one wants to live with.”

Of course, the second you find a way of living that works for you, life has a way of yanking you out of it. With my first child due to arrive in just over a week, and possibly sooner, I’m on the verge of the greatest change I’ve experienced since I left home fourteen years ago to go to college. I don’t know exactly how my life will look after that point, but it’s safe to say that my carefully cultivated routine will be blown to pieces—an experience I look forward to sharing on this blog, assuming I can find time and energy between midnight feedings. And the change will be a fundamental one. Over the past eighteen months alone, I’ve written and sold two novels, along with many articles and short stories and well over a quarter of a million words of blog posts, a number that strikes me, right now, as totally insane. I’ve taken enormous pleasure in transforming myself into a kind of writing machine, but I can’t keep it up forever. That part of my life is ending now, or at least changing into something infinitely richer and more strange, and although it scares me a little, I can’t wait for what comes next. Because the more I think about it, the less I believe anything like “the writing life” really exists. In the end, it’s just life.

“Culture Shock 1913,” a special one-hour program on the birth of modernism, premiered last night on the Fishko Files on NPR. I pop up around the 10:45 mark to talk a bit about Duchamp. You can listen to it here. 

“Inside, there were five racks of paintings…”

(Note: This post is the twenty-fourth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 23. You can read the earlier installments here.)

The painting at the center of The Icon Thief is basically a MacGuffin. There, I said it. At this point, I hope there isn’t any doubt about the sincerity of my respect for and fascination with Marcel Duchamp and the ways in which his example and influence are deeply entwined with the themes of this novel, to the point where the decision to structure the plot around the mystery of Étant Donnés seems all but inevitable. But it wasn’t. If I’d been ordered to change the premise to involve the theft and recovery of a different work of art entirely, I could have done so with minimal disruption to much of the surrounding story. I would have had to construct a new conspiracy theory around a different artist and write a new ending to accommodate the shift in emphasis, but perhaps seventy percent of the novel—everything involving Powell’s investigation, the Russian mob, and much of the art world material as well—would have survived intact. Would it have required major surgery? Of course. But it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as bad as the grueling rewrites that I’ve been asked to do for other projects.

That’s the nature of the MacGuffin: an object that exists to drive the plot and characters, but which could easily be replaced by something else, if necessary. And this is true even of objects that seem inextricably connected to the stories in which they appear. You could replace the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark with the Rod of Aaron or the Urim and Thummim or any number of other equivalent artifacts without changing an iota of the plot, aside from a few lines of dialogue. I’ve argued elsewhere that a good MacGuffin can immeasurably enrich the story in which it appears, or at least give the writer ideas for scenes or images that never would have occurred to him otherwise, and this is certainly true of The Icon Thief. But it says something about the nature of suspense fiction, and perhaps its limitations, that its components are so interchangeable. I knew from the beginning that this novel, as a conspiracy thriller set in the art world, would need to be structured around a particular work of art, and Étant Donnés was by far the best I found—and, if I’m going to be totally honest here, one of the best that anyone has ever found. But that doesn’t mean that something else wouldn’t have worked more or less as well.

You could even make the argument that other works of art would have been more appropriate, given the factual background of the novel itself. In Chapter 23 of The Icon Thief, Ilya finally penetrates to the art vault in which the painting is kept, after using a number of the clever tricks so dear to the heist story. Inside, he finds a rack of paintings, of which I write: “He did not give them a second glance, although one was a Braque and the other was a Bonnard.” These paintings are mentioned only in passing, but they’re really a nod to the other directions that the plot might have taken. Braque and Bonnard were two of the artists in the collection of Paul Rosenberg, an art collector who plays a crucial role in the true story that secretly lurks in the background of the novel, and if I were a real stickler for accuracy, I would have chosen one of these artists, or Picasso or Matisse, instead. If I chose Duchamp, it was only because he was the artist I wanted to write about. In fact, Rosenberg, at least to my knowledge, never collected Duchamp, although he certainly could have, and so I felt justified in awarding him this fictional painting.

Which brings us to another important point about MacGuffins. Study for Étant Donnés doesn’t actually exist, although I was careful to find a place it could have occupied in Duchamp’s catalog and to explain how it might have remained unknown to the larger art world. And the primary reason I went with a fictional painting, along with the various revelations about its provenance and history that I wanted to make, was that I needed a painting that would work as a MacGuffin. In particular, it needed to be relatively small, so that it could be smuggled unobtrusively out of Russia and so that Ilya could carry it out of the mansion under one arm—and, later in the novel, roll it up and conceal it beneath his clothes. In retrospect, this strikes me as a bit of a cheat, which is why, in Eternal Empire, I structure an important plot point around a real work of art, the Peter the Great egg made by the House of Fabergé, and take pains to characterize its appearance and provenance as accurately as possible. Here, though, the invented painting falls under the anthropic principle of this particular novel: without it, the rest of the story couldn’t exist in its current form. And this painting still has a long way to go…

The return of the 23 enigma

After last Friday’s record Mega Millions lottery drawing, instead of dreaming about all the things I’d buy if I had $640 million—like the full edition of The Plan of St. Gall, for instance—I found myself fixating on the number 23. As the more paranoid among us have long understood, the number 23 recurs at particularly significant moments in history. This lottery, with the attention of so many millions focused on the outcome, seemed like a particularly appropriate time for the number to appear, and it didn’t disappoint. The winning numbers were 2, 4, 23, 38, 46, and Mega Ball 23. Numerologically inclined observers noted the two 23s at once, and a few even made reference to a certain Jim Carrey movie. But there’s even more here than meets the eye. 46 divided by 2 is 23. So is (38/2) plus 4. And I’m not going to even try to get into the significance of the fact that the drawing was held on 3/30/2012.

The 23 enigma was first publicized by one of my intellectual heroes, the author and skeptic Robert Anton Wilson. Wilson, in turn, had heard about the phenomenon from William S. Burroughs, and he wrote about it at length with Robert Shea in The Illuminatus Trilogy. Since then, the 23 enigma has become widely known, with countless discussion threads devoted to exposing its uncanny recurrence in all of our lives. And the secret of the number 23, of course, is that there is no secret: given sufficient cleverness, as Wilson puts it, you can find an arbitrary number anywhere, as long as you’re looking for it in the first place. As such, it’s a particularly evocative example of how we impose meaning on the world around us, which, as regular readers know, is my favorite subject as an author. (The enigma even makes an appearance in The Icon Thief, in the form of April 23, 1916, which was the date of one of Duchamp’s earliest readymades, the Easter Rising in Ireland, and the three hundredth anniversary of the death of Shakespeare. April 23 is also my brother’s birthday.)

Wilson is a fascinating character. A former associate editor for Playboy, a close friend of Timothy Leary, and later a fixture of the Berkeley region, he remains, along with Montaigne, one of my favorite exemplars of agnosticism as a way of life. I’ve written at length about why I think a kind of permanent agnosticism is the most pragmatic intellectual position for a working writer, and Wilson took this position to its extreme. He was a skeptic, or more accurately a zetetic, who took great delight in puncturing the claims of New Age fraudsters, pseudoscientists, and conspiracy theorists, but also took equal glee in pointing out the more dogmatic forms of scientific materialism, and he remained open to rather farfetched ideas, like the possibility that he might be receiving transmissions from an intelligent entity on Sirius. To my eyes, Wilson was the best sort of agnostic, which is what you often get when an atheist takes a lot of psychedelic drugs.

In fact, Wilson was a bit like another one of my skeptical heroes, Marcel Duchamp, in that it’s often hard to tell the difference between his serious work and his practical jokes—and that some of his most important and influential insights often began as a sort of prank. The difference between Wilson and Duchamp is that Wilson was genuinely funny. (Duchamp often claimed that he was trying to be funny, and referred to The Large Glass as a “hilarious” picture, but he’s more in the tradition of slightly frigid, labored French jokes that put the rest of us to sleep.) And it’s Wilson’s sense of humor that I find more inspiring as time goes on, if only because I can’t dream of matching it. The Icon Thief will never approach the humor of The Illuminatus Trilogy—although note the symmetry of their titles!—but I hope it captures some of the same sense of how we impose meaning on the world, and on our own lives. As I was writing this, I just got a call from my agent. And as I was hanging up, I couldn’t help but notice that the first three digits of his phone number were 223…

A few thoughts on readings—and an invitation

First, a bit of self-promotion: I’m going to be reading tonight at After-Words bookstore on 23 East Illinois Street in Chicago. If you’re in town, you should definitely drop by, if only because this is a truly beautiful bookshop, with a thoughtfully curated selection of new releases on the upper level and a large, brightly lit basement of gently used books. I’ll be there starting at 6:30 pm, talking a bit about Duchamp and the mystery of Étant Donnés before reading a selection from The Icon Thief, followed by questions and a wine reception. Beverly Dvorkin, the owner of After-Words, has been incredibly helpful since the book’s release, and I’m truly grateful for her support. Because among other things, this is my first reading as a novelist, and I’m genuinely curious to see how it goes.

I’ve always been amused by the fact that soon after completing a novel, a writer is suddenly compelled to develop a set of skills that are the exact opposite of those required to write a novel in the first place. Writing a novel requires long hours of daily, solitary work: it’s introspective, introverted, and rewards those who can shut out the rest of the world to focus on a highly personal project. Once a novel is published, however, an author is expected to become a completely different person overnight: extroverted, out in the world, and willing to promote himself and his work to anyone who cares to listen. Very occasionally, you find a writer in whom both aspects seem to comfortably coexist—Norman Mailer comes to mind, although the king of public performance was apparently Dickens—but it’s not surprising that many novelists regard the whole process with ambivalence, if not outright disdain.

I fall somewhere between those two extremes. I have no trouble talking to the press, but given the choice, I’d prefer to write all day without worrying about other responsibilities, promotional or otherwise. Yet I also crave spending time with other people, both in person and online. This is a solitary life, by definition, and I’ll often go an entire day without talking to anyone but my wife. It’s a necessary state of affairs, but also dangerous. Despite a few recent attempts to speak up for introversion, it seems clear that creativity arises largely from collaboration and interaction with those who care about the same things (or care with equal passion about something else). For an author, readings are an essential way of connecting with those who matter most, which is why they’ve always been part of a writer’s life for reasons that have nothing to do with current trends in book promotion.

When I head over to the bookstore tonight, then, I’ll think back to some of the best readings I’ve attended, when both author and audience just seemed to be having a good time: I have fond memories of readings by writers like Audrey Niffenegger, Nick Hornby, Joshua Ferris, and even Mailer himself, whom I saw speak in New York a few years before his death, to my everlasting gratitude. I can’t hope to match masters like this, but I expect it will still be fun. And hopefully I’ll come away with some of the satisfaction that Thomas Mann describes of his own readings: “What has been carefully forged in the course of long mornings is poured out over the listeners in a rapid hour of reading; the illusion of improvisation, of polished extemporization, intensifies the impression; and when others are stirred to marvel, we for our part believe that everything is fine.”

Thoughts on a Descending Nude, Part 2

In my opinion piece in today’s Los Angeles Times, I describe the uproar that greeted Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where it resulted in a sort of mass hysteria. After the first hostile reviews began to appear, the galleries were mobbed, with attendees standing in line for forty minutes to catch a glimpse of the painting before being whisked away, “shrieking for help,” in the words of one contemporary observer. It’s tempting to compare this response to the mayhem Duchamp witnessed firsthand three months later in Paris, at the premiere of The Rite of Spring, but there was something almost affectionate in the furor over the painting, which inspired dozens of parodies and become a favorite of viewers disposed to be skeptical of modern art, as if they suspected that Duchamp himself was in on the joke.

All the same, it’s instructive to compare the American response with that of the Paris Cubists, who forced Duchamp to withdraw the painting from the Salon des Indépendants one hundred years ago today: both saw the joke there, but only the Americans were happy to play along. And the punchline is that if hadn’t been for its ludicrous title and the ensuing scandal, Nude Descending a Staircase would probably only be of interest to specialists. It’s innovative, but in a limited way: it uses parallel outlines to map the motion of the body through space, an effect familiar from comic strips, but the result isn’t really successful—the figure lurches along with little resemblance to an actual human being. (One critic called it “a descending machine,” and to modern eyes, it resembles nothing so much as a kind of zombie.)

If he had been so inclined, Duchamp might have gone on to refine his technique, but he seems never to have been tempted to follow up on the initial impulse. Instead, he went beyond painting altogether. During his trip to Munich the year before, he was already chafing at the limitations of what he called “retinal art,” becoming increasingly obsessed with process, notes, and titles. Indeed, the deliberately provocative title of Nude Descending a Staircase may be the most Duchampian thing about it: the reaction taught him that the tension between a work of art and its title could be more interesting than the work itself, leading to the frequently eye-glazing or sophomoric titles of his ensuing pieces, like The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, which seem to be trying to recapture the magic of that first, indignant response.

Duchamp, in short, would always be an outsider and provocateur, a role that he seems to have embraced wholeheartedly. For the rest of his life, he lived quietly and simply, playing chess and working on projects for his own amusement, to the point where it’s often hard to tell the difference between his art and his private jokes—although in Duchamp’s best work, the line between art and leg pull is fine indeed. (The posthumous installation Étant Donnés, which he worked on in secret for twenty years, is either his final masterpiece or the most elaborate prank of all time.) And it all began with the response to Nude Descending a Staircase, which, almost by accident, set the stage for the most influential career in modern art. Neither Duchamp nor the rest of us would ever be the same.

Thoughts on a Descending Nude, Part 1

In 1912, Marcel Duchamp, who would one day be acclaimed as the most influential artist of the twentieth century, was twenty-four and living in the shadow of his two older brothers, one a highly regarded painter and printmaker, the other a celebrated sculptor. Marcel, by contrast, was a somewhat indifferent artist who was seriously hoping to pursue a career as a humorous illustrator. (A few years earlier, several of his drawings had been prominently displayed at a local skating rink.) As a painter, his work was characterized by cautious imitations of Cézanne and the Cubists, and although he had been allowed into Parisian art circles, this seems to have been at least partially out of respect for his brothers.

All the same, it was an exciting time to be an artist in Paris, where a politically engaged circle of Cubists met frequently in the shared garden of a row of artists’ studios in Puteaux, arguing over matters of theory and inveighing against their rival Futurists. Duchamp was often there, although he seems to have been less interested in theoretical debates than in playing boules on the lawn. Yet he had also begun to paint more seriously, and like any ambitious young artist, he would have welcomed the chance to display a piece at the upcoming Salon des Indépendants. The year before, a group exhibition of Cubists had caused a nice little scandal, and the Puteaux circle saw the upcoming show as their chance to make a case for a reasonable Cubism.

Unfortunately, as I’ll describe more fully in an opinion piece in tomorrow’s Los Angeles Times, Duchamp’s entry, Nude Descending a Staircase, was anything but reasonable. In the end, it was rejected by the Cubist hanging committee, and on March 18, 1912, Duchamp was asked to withdraw it from the exhibition. This embarrassing incident, in which his brothers had played no small part, evidently contributed to one of the most mysterious episodes in his early career: his decision, a few months later, to visit Munich, a city where he had no close friends. Duchamp never explained the reasons for this trip, but it seems to have been inspired, at least in part, by the fact that there were no Cubists in Germany.

During his two months in Munich, Duchamp worked alone, away from the influence of other artists. He produced several important canvases, but also began moving in a direction that would take him past painting entirely. In particular, he made a series of notes toward a more ambitious work, one that would appeal to the mind, not the eye, and that would ultimately culminate in his first true masterpiece, The Large Glass. And he was still working on this project in Paris the following year when he discovered, much to his surprise, that Nude Descending a Staircase, the painting that had been so ignominiously rejected the year before, had unexpectedly made him one of the most famous artists in America.

To be continued…

A good week and a big anniversary

Well, it’s been an interesting week. The Icon Thief is out in stores—including the Harris Teeter supermarket in Arlington, Virginia, where the photo above was taken—and it seems to be doing fine. I recently got my first look at the cover art for City of Exiles, which looks fantastic, and I’m hoping to post it here as soon as my publisher signs off. Work on The Scythian continues at a reasonable pace. And if that weren’t enough, I had the best meal of my life, Community is back on the air, and I just received word that The Icon Thief will probably be picked up for publication in Italy. (This is especially exciting because it’s my first foreign rights sale and my first translation, and it means that the odds of Umberto Eco at least hearing about my novel just incrementally increased. More details to follow soon.)

Best of all, on Sunday, I have an opinion piece appearing in the Los Angeles Times to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of a singular event in art history. On March 18, 1912, under intense pressure from his family and the Parisian art establishment, Marcel Duchamp, then only twenty-six years old, took a taxi from his studio to an exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants, where he withdrew his controversial painting Nude Descending a Staircase. This decision, and its surprising consequences, would forever shape the career of the man who would later be hailed as the most influential artist of the twentieth century. Over the weekend, I’ll be talking a bit more about Duchamp’s decision and its larger significance, and for the full story, you can check out my essay in a couple of days. Hope you enjoy it!

Why I wrote The Icon Thief

When I first began working on The Icon Thief, nearly four years ago, I had one goal in mind: I wanted to write a novel that I’d like to read myself. It would be a big intellectual thriller, packed with ideas and action, with characters I genuinely cared about, or at least found compelling enough to follow to the end. It could be read simply as entertainment—as an attempt to deliver as complete a modern novel of suspense as I possibly could—but would also reward readers who were ready to dig a bit deeper. It would be exciting enough on a surface level to keep the pages turning, but would also benefit from being read more closely a second time. It would be organized, inventive, and as clever as I could make it. From the start, if only because I love narrative complexity perhaps more than I should, I knew that it would have an expansive plot with multiple storylines that would converge as the novel progressed. Ideally, it would have a couple of big surprises, and an ending that would do justice to all that came before.

Whether or not I succeeded is something that the rest of the world will have to decide, now that the novel is finally in stores. For my own part, I’m more fascinated by how the novel evolved in ways that defied my own expectations. As I’ve explained over the past week, it took me down some unexpected byways, from the Rosicrucians to the art world, from Russia to Duchamp, and ended up focusing on an enigma that I’m still thrilled to have been the first novelist to explore. It’s a strange feeling: I know this novel almost line for line, but there are still parts that take me by surprise, or that I don’t seem to have invented myself as much as discovered by accident. Every writer, I suspect, can relate to this feeling, but this doesn’t make it any less striking when it happens to you. If The Icon Thief works, and I think it works well enough, it does so for reasons that I never could have predicted when I wrote out my first page of notes. And as with most novels, it wasn’t until I was finished that I understood what I was writing about in the first place.

If there’s a single thread that connects The Icon Thief to its two sequels, one of which I’ve already completed, the other of which I’m starting tomorrow, it’s the question of how we impose meaning on the world around us, even if there’s no larger meaning to be found. We’re constantly looking for structure in works of art, in history, and in the events of our own lives. Sometimes the patterns are really there; sometimes they’re the product of imagination, paranoia, or sheer intellectual will; and sometimes—as is ultimately the case in all three of these novels—they’re some combination of the above. As a writer, I’ve spent my life trying to find order in a disorderly world, and I’m pretty good at it, as are many of my characters. But reality always resists our best efforts to pin it down, and the readings of the world in which we’d most like to believe—whether because they’re reassuring, advantageous, or merely interesting—aren’t always true. And The Icon Thief and its successors are about coming to terms with this fact.

Of course, you should never trust what a writer says about himself, especially when he’s explaining why he wrote something. As literary critics know, a writer’s account of the reasons behind his work is often a kind of performance in itself—hence John Milton’s claim, for instance, that he wrote Paradise Lost “to justify the ways of God to man,” when we know that he actually considered a wide range of subjects before deciding on his final theme. Milton, it seems, just wanted to write a great poem. And one thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that every work of art is secretly about the process of its own creation. If The Icon Thief centers on the theme of information overload, then veers into a consideration of what it means to live a good life outside the systems that we impose on the world, it’s because I went through a similar journey myself while writing it. And if that journey is now drawing to a close, or at least entering a new phase, it’s certainly been a surprising one. What more can I say? The book is out now. And if you’ve come this far with me, I think you might like it.

Quote of the Day

Nobody knows what I lived on. This question, truly, does not have an exact answer…Life is more a question of expenses than of profits. It’s a question of knowing what one wants to live with.

—Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp’s doorway

The door stands alone in its own room in the eastern wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s a little out of the way, tucked into a corner of the Marion Boulton Stroud Gallery, also known as the Galerie Rrose Sélavy. Nothing in the blandly worded placard at the entrance indicates that anything unusual lies beyond. When you peek inside, you see a small, dimly lit room, empty except for an old-fashioned wooden door, set into an archway of brick. If you’re particularly observant, you might notice that the room isn’t quite like any other at the museum—there’s a carpet on the floor, instead of concrete, and the walls around the door are covered in textured plaster. Most visitors simply glance around for a moment, take in the door, see nothing else, and head off to the next obligatory stop on the tour. Only a few notice the light coming through the pair of small holes drilled into the door at eye level. And even fewer—at least of those who aren’t aware of the secret—ever venture close enough to look inside.

Étant Donnés, to quote Jasper Johns yet again, is “the strangest work of art in any museum.” And it’s strange even if you don’t know the circumstances of its creation. Look through those eyeholes, leaning in close enough to catch the faint odor of fragrant wood, and you see, behind the door, the startlingly lifelike image of a naked woman lying on a bed of dry grass, her legs spread, a glowing lamp in one upraised hand. The woman’s head is concealed by the edge of a brick wall, making her seem faceless, but if you look carefully, you can make out a tantalizing lock of blond hair. In the background, there’s a forest, a blue sky with clouds, and even a moving waterfall. It’s an incredibly detailed tableau, quiet, mysterious, and meant to be seen by only one viewer at at time. When I first saw it in person, I had spent close to nine months preparing for that moment, but it’s far more startling to see it without any advance warning. As a museum guard remarked to another group of visitors as I was on my way out: “You can’t unsee that!”

Yet Étant Donnés remains strangely unknown, even among those who care about art, at least in comparison to its creator’s other works. This is despite the fact that the story behind its creation is as fascinating as any I know. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: for the last forty years of his life, Marcel Duchamp, the most influential artist of the twentieth century, claimed to have retired from art. Instead, he played chess at a very high level, gave occasional interviews, and oversaw the display and reproduction of his earlier works. After his death in 1968, however, it was revealed that he had spent at least twenty years working on a final installation, in complete secrecy, laboriously transporting it from one studio to another whenever he moved, confiding only in his wife. Whatever it meant, it had clearly been on his mind for decades: the first notes toward what later became Étant Donnés appear as early as 1934. And he had deliberately timed it so that the work would only be revealed when he was dead, perhaps so he could avoid being asked any questions.

These days, thanks to a ravishing study by Michael R. Taylor of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in honor of the installation’s fortieth anniversary, we know a great deal about how Duchamp made Étant Donnés, but still almost nothing about why. It was solitary, methodical work, involving much trial and error with body casting, materials for making the skin, and creating the trompe l’oeil effects. Many of his solutions are charmingly quaint, like a hobbyist making a diorama in his garage: the effect of the moving waterfall, for instance, is created by a revolving light bulb inside a biscuit tin. And that’s the strangest thing of all. Duchamp, more than any other artist of his generation, declared war on what he called “retinal” art, which appealed to the eye, not the mind, and was only interested in reproducing what it could see. His attempt to move past representation changed art forever. Yet the entire time, in secret, he was systematically experimenting to find ways to represent what is, for all its dreamlike trappings, the most classical subject of all: a woman’s body. And nobody knows why.

This is the enigma at the heart of Duchamp’s career—and at the center of The Icon Thief. Tomorrow, on the day my novel finally comes out, I’ll do my best to explain why this mystery has intrigued me for so long.

Me and Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp is the most influential artist of the twentieth century. It says so right on the cover of my book. And it’s true. More than any other modern figure, Duchamp—notably with his famous Fountain, which was recently named the century’s single most important work of art—forever shaped our understanding of what it means to be an artist, in which selection, process, and theory are just as important as the final result. (If nothing else, if you’ve ever wandered into a museum or gallery and wondered what the hell was going on there, that’s almost certainly due to Duchamp’s legacy, with its ongoing influence on all conceptual art.) Yet aside from Nude Descending a Staircase and a few other iconic pieces, Duchamp has never penetrated the popular consciousness to the extent of a Picasso or a Warhol, and even among those who care deeply about such things, many details of his work and his fascinating life remain essentially unknown.

Up until a few years ago, this was true of me as well. I’d like to say that my decision to write a novel about Duchamp was the result of a carefully considered intellectual process, but in fact, it was pure serendipity. While doing research on art history at the Brooklyn Public Library, I stumbled across the wonderful book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? by James Elkins, who explores the issue of why we’re collectively drawn to interpret and tell stories about pictorial works of art. In passing, Elkins mentions the strange theory of art critic Philippe Duboy, who postulates that Duchamp, while working as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, quietly erased and modified drawings by the artist Jean-Jacques Lequeu, as part of an obscure vendetta against the architect Le Corbusier. If this “theory” doesn’t make any sense, don’t worry: I ended up buying a copy of Duboy’s incredibly expensive book on the subject, only to find that I couldn’t make head or tail of it either. (For one thing, it gets its libraries mixed up: Duchamp actually worked at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, so he couldn’t have made the changes that the author implies.)

Yet I’d been bitten by the Duchamp bug. And I quickly discovered that the hard part wasn’t constructing a conspiracy novel around Duchamp, but deciding which conspiracy to use. Even if you think, as I do, that Duboy’s book is a waste of time, and a model of how not to construct a conspiracy theory, you’re still left with an embarrassment of riches. You have Rhonda Roland Shearer’s controversial contention, for instance, that many of Duchamp’s readymades were actually carefully constructed by the artist, who built them in secret and passed them off as found objects for reasons that remain unclear. You’ve got the frequent attempts to link Duchamp’s work to alchemy, the cabala, and, yes, Rosicrucianism. You have the allegation, made in at least two books, that Duchamp knew the identity of the Black Dahlia murderer, a particularly juicy story that plays an important role in The Icon Thief. And then there’s the question of what Duchamp was really doing in New York City during the First World War…but for that, you’ll need to read my novel.

It’s easy to see why conspiracy theorists love Duchamp: his work is simultaneously designed to elicit and frustrate obsessive interpretation. Yet the endless attempts to pin him down as an alchemist, a secret revolutionary, or even a Rosicrucian have little to do with the man himself. Duchamp, more than any of his contemporaries, was the ultimate skeptic and outsider, unwilling to be confined to any one artistic school, even as he influenced them profoundly from the margins. For most of his life, he lived as simply as possible, with close to a complete indifference to money, in order to devote himself more fully to his work. He was, uniquely, a movement of one. And even as I toyed with his legacy in The Icon Thief, I found myself seduced by his example. He was brilliant, uncompromising, and impossible to classify. And although my book regards him from many different angles, often all at the same time, I hope my readers remember him, above all else, as a model of what the artistic life can be.

At the center of the book lies Duchamp’s final masterpiece, which he worked on in secret for twenty years, claiming all the while to be retired. On Monday, I’ll finally consider the enigma at the heart of The Icon Thief: the installation, revealed only after Duchamp’s death, that Jasper Johns has called “the strangest work of art in any museum.”

My ten great movies #2: Blue Velvet

Having just watched the fifty minutes of deleted scenes on the recent Blu-ray release of Blue Velvet, I’m more convinced than ever that the secret hero of my favorite American movie is editor Duwayne Dunham. Some of the rediscovered scenes are extraordinary—the scene with Jeffrey and Dorothy on the rooftop, in particular, is one I’ve been waiting to see my entire life—but including them in the theatrical cut of the film would have resulted in a movie like Inland Empire: fascinating, but shapeless and digressive, and of interest only to a small cadre of devoted fans. Dunham, who edited Return of the Jedi only a few years earlier and would later become a successful director in his own right, no doubt deserves much of the credit for paring the original cut down to its current, perfect two-hour form, a crucial step in the process that placed David Lynch, however briefly, at the center of our culture.

Because for all its strangeness and sexual violence, this is a remarkably accessible movie, an art film that takes the shape of a thriller and, rather than undermining the genre’s conventions, honors and extends them. For the only time in his career, with the exception of a few indelible moments on Twin Peaks, Lynch displays an almost childlike delight in the mechanisms of suspense for their own sake, and his great set pieces—bookended by the two scenes of Jeffrey peering through the closet door—deserve comparison to Hitchcock by way of Duchamp. (Some have detected the influence of Étant Donnés in Lynch’s vision here, which I can only imagine subconsciously influenced my decision to put Duchamp’s installation at the center of my first novel.) Like L.A. Confidential, this a total film, a work of art that evokes every emotion that we can feel at the movies, and for me, it’s even more: a vision, or a dream, that I’m grateful to revisit again and again.

Tomorrow: The best film ever made about the artistic process, and my favorite movie of all time.

The story of a cover

Back in February, my editor emailed to say that my publisher was holding an art meeting soon to discuss the cover for The Icon Thief, which at that point was still known as Kamera. He invited me to put together my thoughts on possible designs, as well as some comparable covers, and, obsessive that I am, I obliged with a memo of nine long paragraphs, complete with illustrations. (I thought briefly about including a quick mockup I’d put together in Photoshop, but thankfully refrained from doing so.) The response to my ideas at NAL was very respectful, but I had no way of knowing what the result would be, or how much input I would ultimately have in the process.

In my memo, I noted that the novel has three major plot elements: Marcel Duchamp, Russia, and the Rosicrucians. (If I haven’t spoken much about these topics on this blog, it’s because I want to keep the plot a surprise, although I expect I’ll be posting more on these subjects as the publication date approaches.) Among the corresponding images I proposed were the exterior of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where Duchamp’s Étant Donnés is located; an overlay of some Russian text; and the rosy cross. I also included images of a few covers that I thought were comparable: An Instance of the Fingerpost, Foucault’s Pendulum, The English Assassin by Daniel Silva, and The Messiah Secret by James Becker (the latter two of which, like my own novel, are published by NAL’s Signet imprint).

After that, I didn’t hear anything about the cover for months, until last week, when I received the rather remarkable image that I posted yesterday. Looking at it now, I’m gratified by how much of my input was reflected in the final version, accidentally or otherwise, and how many of the novel’s themes are visible in one form or another. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is here, of course, as well as the red cross of the Rosicrucians, along with some Russian text—evidently a stock photo of an old manuscript, but still gorgeous—visible in the background. Above all, the title of the novel is beautifully rendered. (Incidentally, the meeting where the cover design was discussed was also where the subject of a possible title change was first raised, a fix I now wish I’d made years earlier.)

As for the other symbols, they were chosen more for their visual impact than anything else, although they contain subtle messages of their own. The cherub on the upper right looks ahead to House of Passages, the second installment in the series, in which cherubim of a very different kind play an important symbolic role. On the upper left, we have a view of Peles Castle in Romania, which doesn’t figure in the story yet, but may have a role to play in the future, as the action of the series moves ever eastward. As for the red cross…well, this is an extremely important symbol, and its true significance won’t become clear to readers of the novel until almost the very last page. For now, though, you’ll have to wait a bit longer.

Stumbling into a story: recognizing a great idea

One of the accidental themes of my recent posts has been the idea that, since a novel can take up a year or more of your life, you’d better choose your subject carefully. And at first glance, the stakes can seem dauntingly high. Choosing a subject for a novel is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from the analogous process for a short story, since a novel takes considerably longer and is exponentially more complex. It’s possible to occasionally gamble on a doubtful premise for a shorter piece, or even a novelette, but for a novel, the potential cost in time and effort is far too high. And while I’ve previously outlined various ways of generating ideas, I haven’t addressed what might be the most important question of all: how do you know if an idea is worth it?

Part of me is inclined to slightly misquote A.E. Housman here, and say that I can no more define a good idea than a terrier can define a rat. Looking for good ideas is simply what writers do, consciously or unconsciously, and the process of identifying an idea for a novel is undeniably a matter of intuition. And the best ideas often come to us with a forcefulness comparable only to love at first sight, or perhaps to Justice Stewart’s definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. When I first saw Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, for instance, I knew that I had to write a book about it. But at that point, I’d also been researching a novel about the art world for months, with a crucial missing piece at its center, which allowed Étant Donnés to slide neatly into place.

This gives us one important clue: great ideas don’t exist in isolation. They’re simply one important step—and not necessarily the first—in a process that will inevitably outlast that initial burst of enthusiasm. Which also means that your instinctive level of interest or excitement is not necessarily the best measure of whether an idea is good or not. As I’ve mentioned before, you’re going to be approaching a novel in all kinds of moods, and there’s going to come a time, especially after you’ve spent months on research and outlining, when you find your own premise exhausting. This kind of burnout happens to every writer. The real test of an idea’s value, then, isn’t how much you love it at first glance, but whether it’s the kind of long-term, sustainable idea that can nourish the lengthy process of writing a novel.

This is the best advice I can give: since great ideas are only meaningful as part of a process that includes craft, hard work, and a lot of luck, the best way to ensure that you’ll recognize an idea when it comes is to get the process started, now, long before the idea shows itself. You begin by deciding, once and for all, to write a novel; you tentatively arrive at a genre, a tone, maybe even a setting or some characters, while knowing that all these things are likely to change. Then you go exploring, casting your net wide at first, then gradually zeroing in on your true subject. That way, you’ve prepared a place for great ideas to nest, and are less likely to be sidetracked by ones that are seductive but unproductive—although you should always write everything down. And when you finally stumble across that great idea, if you’ve laid the groundwork accordingly, you’ll recognize it at once.

Why I am a novelist

I’ve only ever wanted two jobs. My first dream job, which occupied my imagination roughly from the ages of six to ten, was, of course, paleontologist. (Even today, I can still remember the approximate dates of the Mesozoic Era, a fact that came in handy at a recent trivia contest.) When I was ten, though, it suddenly occurred to me that it might be even more fun to be a novelist. I could still write about dinosaurs—although a certain novel released that same year beat me to the punch—and just about everything else. At the time, like most kids, I was curious about a lot of things, and the immediate appeal of being a writer was that it would give me an excuse to learn about whatever I wanted.

Twenty years later, that’s still a big part of why I want to write for a living. What didn’t come until more recently was a love for the writing process itself. Early on, writing was pretty much just a pretext for following my interests wherever they led me, and it’s only in the past ten years that I’ve begun to find the actual mechanics of writing deeply interesting. At some point, the writer’s tool kit of plot, language, character, and theme became as absorbing a subject as those external topics—Marcel Duchamp, Russia, the art world, the Rosicrucians, to name only those involved in The Icon Thief—that I used fiction as an opportunity to explore. And the realization that I also love writing for its own sake is one of the most significant discoveries of my life.

Writing fiction, as I see it, is the greatest game in the world. Other authors may approach it differently, but for me, it’s a chance to construct something beautiful and elegant that didn’t exist before. It’s the same impulse, I imagine, that leads people to build ships in bottles or construct crossword puzzles (something that I’ve also tried, with less success), but extended over a much longer period of time. Writing a novel still strikes me as just about the most challenging thing that an artist can do on his or her own. It requires both massive sustained organization and the ability to recognize fleeting moments of inspiration. It draws on all parts of the brain. And it has tested me in ways that I couldn’t have imagined when I began writing for a living.

This love of structure and artifice is the main reason why I’ve thrown my lot in with the novel, rather than nonfiction. Narrative nonfiction or journalism is, in some ways, a superior excuse to explore the world, but with it comes a certain responsibility to the facts that doesn’t quite fit with my conception of writing as a great game. I try to make my novels as accurate as possible, but there are times when I prefer a convincing impossibility, as long as it’s elegant and surprising and not too far removed from the truth. At some point, I may try my hand at nonfiction, but for now, I’m sticking with the novel. As any writer will tell you, being a novelist is quite hard enough.

Goodbye, Kamera

So as you may have noticed, there have been some significant changes to this blog since last week. My first novel, which is still scheduled to come out in February of next year, will no longer be called Kamera. Instead, you can all look forward to reading The Icon Thief. Why the change? It’s a long story, but the short version is that I don’t think anyone, myself included, was ever entirely satisfied by the title Kamera. On the one hand, I loved its compactness and opacity, and the fact that it had three distinct meanings in the context of the novel. On the other hand, nobody seemed to know what the hell it meant—or even how they were supposed to pronounce it. (I always said it like “camera,” but purists rightly preferred the Russian pronunciation.) And it didn’t give you much of a sense of the genre, tone, or story. For a debut novel that will largely be sold by its title and cover, this was a significant problem.

Things came to a head about two weeks ago, during the cover art meeting at NAL. After the meeting, my excellent editor told me that everyone was enthusiastic about the book, but noted that several attendees had raised some concerns about the title. When he very gently asked if I would consider changing it, after some thought, I agreed. It wasn’t an easy decision, and part of me was reluctant to part with a title that I had been using for more than two years. Truth be told, though, I was a little sick of Kamera as well—as my brother-in-law likes to point out, it’s rather reminiscent of a certain flying turtle—so I welcomed the chance to start with something new.

Which isn’t to say that it was easy. The first two titles I pitched—The Merchant of Salt and The Secret Museum—didn’t exactly set the world on fire. In the end, I did pretty much what you might have expected: I made a mind map. I stared for a long time at the other books on my shelves. And it was the title of James Billington’s The Icon and the Axe, which I’ve spoken about here before, that finally pointed me in the right direction. Once I came up with The Icon Thief, it just seemed right—it evokes Russia, crime, and the art world, and also suggests, at least to me, the central figure of Marcel Duchamp, who cheerfully appropriated existing objects and symbols for his own incomparable work.

All in all, then, I’m pleased by new the title. Unless, of course, it ends up changing again. In the meantime, though, you can update your Amazon searches accordingly. (And for more stories of titles that changed at the last minute, check out an amusing article here.)

Research as a way of dreaming

As I argued yesterday, researching a novel, at least at its earliest stages, isn’t primarily about factual accuracy, but about dreaming. While it’s certainly important for an author to get his or her facts straight—if only because there’s nothing like an obvious error to yank the reader out of the story—such fact-checking can usually wait until later in the process, sometimes even after the bulk of the novel is finished. The first round of research, by contrast, is less about verifying facts than about gathering material for the imagination, which runs best when kept fed and happy. Here, then, are some tips on approaching the research process when you have the germ of an idea for a novel, but not much else:

1. Cast your net wide. Later, as you dig more deeply into the meat of your story, specifics are essential, but at the earliest stages, they can be deadly. An unwritten novel can be about anything, and it’s a mistake to lock yourself into one particular conception before it’s absolutely necessary. It’s best, then, to begin your research with as general a view on the subject as possible—even to the point where the subject itself disappears. For Kamera, which is about the art world, I didn’t begin with books on art collecting, or even on the history of art, but with books on eyesight and visual perception. In particular, I began with James Elkins’s excellent Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?—a book I found at random in the library, as I’ll be discussing further below. And if it weren’t for an aside in Elkins’s book, I never would have thought of learning more about Marcel Duchamp, a decision that has shaped the past three years of my life, and counting. Careers are made from such moments.

2. Stay off the Internet. While the Internet certainly has its place in the research process—especially for checking the thousands of small, specific details in a novel that would be impossible to verify otherwise—it isn’t very good for dreaming. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and how the right side, which is where ideas come from, operates at a slower pace than the left. Doing research online is a classic left-brained activity: it’s fast, efficient, superficial. To lure out the right brain, you need to park yourself in a comfortable chair with a couple of the largest books you can find, because it’s often not until after a few hundred pages that the right brain finally kicks in. Sometimes you’ll emerge with only one good idea from a book of three hundred pages—as I recently did with The New Cold War by Edward Lucas—but it’s an idea that never would have occurred to you online. Books, in this case, are just better.

3. Read the books that nobody else reads. Books and authors go through cycles of popularity, and in my experience, it’s the books that are out of print or out of fashion that are the most fruitful for a writer’s work. Remember, we aren’t looking for factual accuracy, but to coax the right brain to life, a sensation that is almost inseparable, at least to me, from the smell of old books and bookstores. (Which, my dad says, is really the smell of mildew. “And happiness,” I reply.) If you’re doing research on a particular subject, unless it’s something like search engine optimization, look for books that were published before you were born: they’re likely to be better written, more eccentric, and more conducive to imagination than books that came out yesterday. The more recent the book, the more likely it conforms to currently fashionable habits of thought, which is the last thing a writer needs. (Example: an original edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, while useless as a reference book, is infinitely superior to more recent versions as a tool for dreaming.)

4. Let books find you. On this subject, I’ve already quoted Robert Graves, who said that the books he needed to write The White Goddess “were soon sent, unasked for, by poet friends or tumbled down into my hands from the shelves of a second-hand sea-side bookshop.” Most writers, I imagine, know how this feels. Perhaps the most useful book that I’ve found in the research for Midrash is James Billington’s great The Icon and the Axe, which I discovered in the dollar bin of the Housing Works Bookstore in New York. And I’ve already mentioned how the heart of Kamera was inspired by a chance library discovery. But such books will only find you if you’re prepared to recognize them when they appear—and if you haunt used bookstores and libraries on a regular basis. If you don’t already spend at least an hour a week browsing the stacks somewhere, you probably should.

5. Allow for randomness. Sometimes the best ideas come from sources that have nothing to do with your novel at all. It’s hard to predict when such moments will come—it can be when you’re watching television, or at the movies, or reading a novel on a plane—but it’s also possible to encourage them to appear. There are certain books in our culture that are treasure hoards of randomness, mines of ideas waiting to attach themselves to your imagination, and it’s crucial to find time for these books as well. You’ll probably have your own favorites, but my own indispensable lucky bags of ideas include Brewer’s Dictionary (the older the edition, the better), The Whole Earth Catalog (ditto), The Golden Bough, The White Goddess, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe, and (a recent discovery) The Portable Dragon.

This, then, is the first stage of research, which involves endless browsing and daydreaming, and what seems like a lot of wasted time—as does much of a novelist’s life. But this stage is so essential that I recommend that you devote at least a month to it (though more than six weeks is verging on procrastination). Later, when you’re drawing on the well of ideas you’ve acquired, you’ll be very glad you did.