First Time Out

Lawrence Thornton, Michael Chabon and Elizabeth George have everything in common and nothing at all. Each is a Southern Californian and, within the last year, each has achieved every writer’s dream--publication of a critically acclaimed first novel.

Aside from that, you probably wouldn’t find them at the same dinner party: One writes elegantly plotted British detective mysteries, another about Latin American politics. The third chronicled the exuberance and Angst of a young American during his last summer before adulthood.

But if their subject matter varies widely, this year’s crop of first novelists is alike in the unconventional, almost casual way they came to acclaim. Thornton is 50 and has spent much of his life studying narcissism in literature. George, at 39, has spent a good deal of her life educating teen-agers about Shakespeare. And Chabon, 25, is fresh out of graduate school.

Then, too, their novels have a curious common denominator: None is set in California. In a way, that’s not surprising. For as Elizabeth George, who writes about England, says: “People say you should write about what you know. I believe a writer should write about what she doesn’t know.”

Lawrence Thornton

In “Imagining Argentina “ (Doubleday: $16.95), Lawrence Thornton’s highly acclaimed first novel, an Argentine children’s playwright whose wife has been abducted suddenly discovers he has an astonishing gift: He can “see” with chilling clarity the fates of those who have disappeared at the hands of the military regime.

While that kind of magic realism might be considered standard fare for a Latin-American novelist like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it’s an astonishing leap for a 50-year-old former college professor from Pomona, a happily lapsed academic whose first book, he laughs, recalling its “typical scholarly title,” was a work of criticism called “Unbodied Hope: Narcissism in the Modern Novel.”

Hearing Thornton discuss the genesis of “Imagining Argentina,” a fictional version of the terror that gripped the country in the late 1970s through the early ‘80s, one thing becomes clear: He believes that he and his visionary playwright have a lot in common. “What happened to me is not very different from what happened to Carlos in the novel,” he said, sitting in his rustic, airy living room in Claremont.

A Television Report

It all began one early winter evening in 1983, when Thornton, then living and teaching in Bozeman, Mont., caught a segment of “60 Minutes.” It told the story of the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo, the Argentine women who courageously demonstrated to demand that the military government return their missing children.

“There was a close-up of one of these women,” Thornton said, “and she said very matter of factly, ‘Yes, I think they have all my children now.’ She was out there every day, marching in that plaza, doing something that now seems miraculous.”

Although Thornton--who describes himself as “very political”--had been following the situation in Argentina since the torture and killings of civilians were first reported, “I remember turning off the television set and being very moved by what I’d seen.”

It was shortly after that he had the “visitation.”

“I went into my kitchen, and I started to take some notes, and half an hour later Carlos Reuda just walked in the door. And what came out of the next couple of hours was a compressed version of the novel.”

Clearly embarrassed, Thornton runs a hand through his thinning brown hair and shakes his head. “It’s very strange,” he stammered. “There’s no way to talk to you about it. It was there, and it was a visitation.”

Since its hard-cover publication in September, the book has sold 20,000 copies. Foreign rights have been sold in nine countries, it’s been snapped up by Book of the Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club (Bantam will release the paperback version in September), and it’s been optioned for a film by Richard Gere. Then there are the literary awards: winner of the PEN/Hemingway, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner, winner of the PEN West, a Guggenheim. And a three-book, six-figure contract with Doubleday.

What makes the book’s success even more remarkable is that Thornton has never been to Argentina--a fact that has caused some critics to harp on the lack of authenticity of some of his scenes.

“There’s been this kind of question,” Thornton said with a chuckle. Then, in a whisper, he mimics a reviewer: “If he hasn’t been to Argentina, what the hell does he know?” To Thornton, it’s a moot issue, really beside the point, because it “presupposes that fiction is really just a kind of shadowy history.”

After publishing his first short stories in a “little literary journal” called Spectrum when he was 18, Thornton nonetheless chose the academic route: a doctorate in English at UC Santa Barbara and teaching stints at several universities, including UC Santa Barbara and the University of Montana, ending up at UCLA.

From Critic to Writer

“The idea was always out there that after I’d done the kind of critical work that interested me, I’d stop and do fiction,” Thornton said. “Once I wrote my first book, that was in 1982, I had no more to say as a critic. So I started writing fiction and I have not stopped.

“If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have opted for an MFA (master of fine arts) program. But the idea of trying to make a living as a writer when you’re in your early 20s seems very perilous to me. I wish that I’d come to the fiction earlier, but maybe I wasn’t ready to write.”

Michael Chabon

His first novel sold for $155,000, about 30 times the usual advance. It has been a national best-seller and is into its third printing since it was published in April. He’s got a six-figure movie deal to write the screenplay based on his book. And he’s widely being hailed as the next J. D. Salinger.

“Right now, I don’t feel any different,” said the novelist. “My wife and I live in the same house, with the same rented furniture. I have less time to myself than I did before, but it’s not horrible.”

Meet Michael Chabon, the current literary star of the twenty-something crowd, the author of the hot, hip novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” (William Morrow: $16.95), a coming-of-age story about love, drugs, sex and the Mafia.

On a muggy afternoon in Newport Beach, Chabon sprawls across a bar stool in one of his favorite local haunts, a hamburger joint called Dillman’s, sipping some syrupy pink thing. He is wearing faded blue jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, white tennis shoes, and his brown mane of curls is slicked back. Later over lunch, he wipes his French fries in a pool of ketchup. And that’s when it hits you: Why, this literary hotshot is just a kid.

The kid, who is 25, seems to be aware of his youth as well. When he talks about when he finished “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” in 1987--when his only hope was to have it approved as his master’s thesis for the graduate-writing program at UC Irvine--he sounds like a young writer with self-doubts. And when you ask him whether all the money and hoopla for “Pittsburgh” is justified, he gets uncomfortable.

“No,” it isn’t, he responded quickly. Why? “Because it’s a first novel. First of all, I have very mixed feelings about that book, and there’s this inevitable falling off in my opinion of whatever I’ve written after six months. It’s always been there. I know five years from now I’m going to loathe this book.”

Chabon grew up in Columbia, Md., in a family of avid readers. When he was 11, his father, a pediatrician, and his mother, a lawyer, were divorced, and it was about that time he began to write short stories. But for years he didn’t finish anything. And the stories he did finish went unpublished. Then came “The Great Gatsby” and the graduate program at Irvine.

“I was beginning to get apprehensive about going into this ‘serious’ writing program,” he said, “where there’d be all these ‘serious’ writers writing these ‘serious’ novels, and I thought I’d better have a novel, too. But I didn’t have any idea about what it would be about or whom.

“Then I reread ‘The Great Gatsby,’ and what I got from reading it was that it was incredibly short. ‘Wow! A novel doesn’t have to be 350 pages.’ So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll try to write one just this long. Then I read ‘Goodbye, Columbus,’ which is even shorter. And I noticed that both of these books take place over the summer. So I thought, ‘What a great way to structure a novel.’

For the next few months, Chabon worked on his novel but didn’t mention it to anyone. He finally showed it to novelist McDonald Harris, his adviser, who was so impressed that he sent the manuscript to his own New York agent, who gave it to a colleague. About five weeks later “Pittsburgh” was sold in a fierce bidding war to William Morrow.

Set in the city of the same name, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” revolves around the escapades of Art Bechstein, a confused young graduate of the University of Pittsburgh (Chabon’s alma mater), who has “that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer” before he officially becomes an adult.

The novel has a homosexual theme, and a few weeks ago Newsweek ran a story on emerging gay writers and included Chabon in the pack. He was not worried that people would think he was gay. (“No big deal,” he says.)

“What bothered me about it was I was afraid that when gay people found out I wasn’t gay, they would feel my publisher had been misrepresenting me. The publisher did get calls, but once it was explained it was Newsweek’s mistake, they calmed down.”

If Chabon is weary of the spotlight, it’s understandable. He’d just returned from a nonstop book tour in the East. He had Town and Country magazine coming over to photograph him and his poet wife, Lollie, later that afternoon. People magazine had called the day before to cancel an interview with him. He was so relieved he didn’t even bother to ask why.

In the meantime, Chabon is working on a new novel, and teaching at Irvine Valley College. “I’m mostly doing it because I want to,” he says.

It certainly isn’t for the money.

Elizabeth George

If you had to guess the writer who concocted the following murder--a religious pervert in a Yorkshire village gets his head chopped off--you probably wouldn’t figure it was Elizabeth George.

She is a former high school English teacher who can readily quote Shakespeare. In 1981 she was Orange County Teacher of the Year.

It’s a hot afternoon in Huntington Beach, about as far from Yorkshire as you can get. George, 39, is perched on a white leather couch in her living room, delicately sipping a diet Dr Pepper. She lives here with her husband, Ira Toibin, a high school principal, and a nervous dachshund named Brandy, who at the moment is glued to George’s lap while she talks about her first book, a British detective novel called “A Great Deliverance” (Bantam: $16.95).

The author of this “horrifyingly plausible tale,” as one reviewer put it, looks about as sinister as a nun. Her chestnut hair perfectly in place, she’s wearing a frilly ivory blouse, pressed maroon slacks, stockings, and matching maroon sandals. About the only deadly thing about George, who taught high school seniors advanced composition for 12 1/2 years, is her quick, penetrating mind.

George has written a mystery that has more psychological complications than a case study by Freud and more wacked-out characters than a line-up on Donahue. The twisted and deceptive plot could have come straight out of a headline in the National Enquirer or the New York Post. It also breaks one of the key rules of detective fiction, which unfortunately can’t be divulged here. “It would give away the story,” the mystery writer says.

Reviewers are touting George, who was raised in a brood of Italians “similar to the family in ‘Moonstruck’ ” and has a master’s in psychology, as the next P. D. James.

“The thing I like about mysteries is they provide a structure upon which I can hang a theme,” George said. “The structure is the corpse and the attempt to solve the murder, and the theme then can grow out of that structure.”

Compared to her characters, George’s past is dull. Her mother is a nurse, her father an administrator for a conveyor company, and she grew up hearing him recite Robert Frost, and discuss literature, theater and art. At age 7, she decided to become a writer, and wrote her first novel: a “Nancy Drew type of book” when she was in the seventh grade. Her second novel almost was published when she was in high school. A third unpublished novel followed when she was in her 20s, and she nearly threw in the towel.

“So what happened is: I got my teaching credential instead of writing, I got my master’s degree in counseling instead of writing, I taught for 12 1/2 years instead of writing.

“But it was never a case of someone teaching and wanting to do something else. I enjoyed teaching, but I also knew that I should be writing, that I had a facility for language I ought to be using. And I did use it in the classroom. I always did the assignments my students did.”

It was one of those assignments that eventually led to George to write “A Great Deliverance.” She was teaching a course, Writing the Mystery, reading Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, P. D. James and other British writers, and out of that came her first book. She now has a four-book contract with Bantam, including her second novel, “A Suitable Vengeance,” to be published next year.

An Anglophile to the core, George doesn’t care for the hard-boiled American mystery novel. “The down-and-out detective living in a one-room apartment with a neon sign going on and off just has never really appealed to me,” she says, and she’s been spending her summer vacations in Britain since the late ‘60s.

“Wordsworth talks about poetry being an emotion recollected in tranquility, and that’s what writing’s like for me. When I go to England, I do my research, then I come back, and then my process of writing the book is a process of emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Her agent, Deborah Schneider, got her a two-book, $50,000 deal from Bantam which expanded to four. As for “A Great Deliverance,” it’s had 11 foreign sales, Book of the Month Club will feature it, and there’s interest in a movie.

In the meantime, George has finished another mystery, “Payment in Blood,” and is working on a fourth. And though she’s quit the classroom, she still stays in touch with some of her students.

“They have been very excited about this,” she says, “I think because I did it the old-fashioned way. I didn’t have any connections with literary agents or editors. It was like the classic case of a person beating the odds. And I think it gave everybody this feeling of it can be done.

“Getting published is a form of affirmation. It told me that this niggling feeling I had all my life that I was supposed to be a writer was correct. Because I think the great fear in this business is that fear. Am I kidding myself?”