Smoodin Among the Jackals

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE at UCLA in the early 1970s, Roberta Smoodin often fantasized about what it might be like to spend two idyllic years in a fiction-writing workshop. “I imagined Gertrude Stein’s house in Paris in the ‘20s, people sitting around talking about literature and art,” she says. “But it turned out to be more like a den of jackals. I didn’t speak for the two years I was in the UCI workshop. Everyone else was so sure of themselves and so tough. It was all very Darwinian.”

The good news was Don Heine. Smoodin’s writing had the kind of quirky, metaphorical style that appealed to him; he told her, toward the end of the first year, that she was a novelist struggling to burst out of the short-story cocoon. “If it hadn’t been for him, I might never have written a novel,” she says, hunched on a couch in her West Los Angeles home, arms wrapped around blue-jeaned knees. She published two short stories in literary quarterlies while in the program; when it ended, she took off for Washington to try a novel, supporting herself with a secretarial job and staying in touch with Heine. A New American Review editor had sent some of Smoodin’s stories to prominent New York literary agent Liz Darhansoff, who agreed to shop Smoodin’s just-completed novel. It didn’t sell.

“I felt wounded,” Smoodin says. “But Don helped me see it less as a personal rejection than as a professional endeavor that just didn’t work out.” In 1978 she completed another novel, “Ursus Major,” and sent it off to author Blair Fuller, whom she’d met at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference. Fuller sent “Ursus” to Knopf, which published it in 1980, establishing Smoodin as an eccentric comic voice. Atheneum published Smoodin’s subsequent two novels, “Presto!” (1982) (which, like “Ursus,” was excerpted in Esquire magazine) and “Inventing Ivanoff “ (1985). Currently, she awaits publication of “White Horse Cafe,” a tale of Los Angeles street life and perilous romance sold to Viking/Penguin by Smoodin’s new agent, Melanie Jackson.

At 35, with four published novels behind her, Smoodin’s no longer the milquetoast of Irvine workshop days. “The jackals actually did me a favor,” she says. “Getting beat up by 11 peers makes it harder to get beat up by the world.”