A Grad’s Fantasy Fulfilled: His Thesis Is a Novel One

Tapping away on their manuscripts in the dead of night, fledgling novelists cherish their fantasies.

There is the over-the-transom fantasy, an old standby in which the manuscript is submitted anonymously and becomes a best-seller. Or, there is the chance-encounter fantasy, in which the aspiring writer runs his grocery cart (skateboard, 1975 Toyota, fill in the blanks) into the famous editor, and voila! , instant publishing opportunity.

But the senior thesis fantasy?

It may just be that until John Burnham Schwartz mustered the courage to tell his Harvard University faculty advisers that he intended to satisfy his graduation requirement in the East Asian studies department by writing a work of fiction, this particular reverie had even less credibility than the grocery cart scenario.

But green-eyed and earnest, Schwartz used a novel called “Yamadera” to graduate magna cum laude and to snare a yuppie dream job with First Boston, the upscale investment firm.

Reworked and retitled as “Bicycle Days,” the novel will be published Monday by Summit. Schwartz is 23. Instead of working at First Boston, he is working on his second novel.

‘Hungry to Do More’

“You feel a little used up when you finish a first book, but that just made me hungry to do more,” Schwartz said as he prepared for his first reading from the book at the public library here. (Schwartz will read at Dutton’s Books in Los Angeles on June 9.)

Schwartz nursed a glass of Saratoga water as he made this pronouncement. As he spoke, he occasionally chased an errant shock of thick brown hair from his forehead. A former varsity squash player at Harvard, he radiates none of the I’ve-seen-it-all, tried-it-all, smoked-it-all and drunk-it-all qualities that characterize many of his comrades in the burgeoning literary Brat Pack of auteurs under the age of 30.

He seems eager, not bored or blase. Like Ethan Canin, a best seller by age 27 and an inspiration of sorts to John Burnham Schwartz, he writes with hope, not nihilism. “Bicycle Days” has a fresh and gently self-mocking tone. Not one character takes drugs or undergoes a crisis of gender identification, the staples of what his editor, Ileene Smith, calls “all those fashionable and extremely irritating books” by young writers who seem to take negativity pills along with their morning coffee.

“I’m a positive person, I guess,” Schwartz said. “I really enjoy people. I like to laugh, and I like to laugh at myself. As much as I can, I do.”

Religiously Mixed

He uses three names, he said with some self-consciousness, not to make a pretentious literary statement, but because “I come from a religiously mixed marriage. My mother’s side is old New England WASP. My father’s side is Austrian Jewish via New York.”

In fact, a family much like Schwartz’s own plays a key role in “Bicycle Days.” His mentors at Harvard may have thought they were getting a historical novel, or at least a work of fiction that offered an anthropological look at the culture of Japan, where the story is set. Instead Schwartz produced, in a three-week nonstop, no-sleep frenzy at his word processor, a rather wide-eyed coming-of-age novel in which the central character comes to grips with the divorce of his parents some years earlier.

“It takes place in Japan,” Schwartz said. “But it’s not about East-West relations.”

At least one of the Harvard faculty members who read the novel-thesis was not pleased by that fact. He graded Schwartz accordingly, and suggested that this first novel to be submitted to the East Asian Studies Department also should be the last.

But Schwartz defends his use of fiction to explore certain facets of life in contemporary Japan. His American protagonist, Alec Stern, lives with a Japanese family and works for an American high-tech company. Lest he be accused of creating an autobiographical character, Schwartz cleverly disguises Alec by making him a student at Yale. However, it comes as no surprise to learn that Schwartz spent the summer between his junior and senior years at Harvard living with a Japanese family and working for TRW, an American high-tech company.

Richer Picture of Life

“One of the things that really good novels are successful at is creating a richer picture of the fabric of life than historians are capable of doing,” said Schwartz, who took “more Japanese history courses than I knew what to do with.

“I wasn’t trying to have any kind of objective eye. I was trying to write about what it’s like to live there, every day, and what it’s like to be a foreigner in Japan.” Schwartz brushed the mischievous hair away. “It’s hard to be more foreign than you are in Japan,” he said.

In Japan that summer, Schwartz’s job was in public relations. “I took businessmen to dinner every night and we got drunk,” he said.

It was not exactly the material of which great literature is made. But then, neither were the subjects of the poems Schwartz said he used to write “when I was young,” from the ages of about 9 to 13.

“They were very flowery,” he said. “And, I’m afraid, not very good.”

By ninth grade Schwartz was writing short stories. But he gave up this form of self-expression when he went away to prep school and took up squash.

Two days before he left for Choate, he remembers taking his mother aside and imploring her, “Promise me you and Dad won’t get divorced.” There had been no obvious signs of trouble, Schwartz said, so his entreaty “stopped her right in her tracks.” Three months later, “they split up.”

‘Tumultuous Freshman Year’

Schwartz said he buried his anger in sports. At Harvard, he staged a “tumultuous” freshman year with mandatory complements of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. As the final death knell to any hopes of creative expression, “I started taking economics classes.”

In the meantime, both parents remarried. His father, Alan Schwartz, is a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer. While returning from a visit on Maui with his mother and her new husband, the poet W. S. Merwin, young Schwartz, by then 19, suddenly began scribbling on the back of an air sickness bag. It may or may not have been an appropriate medium for a tongue-in-cheek short story called “A Sensitive Man of the ‘80s,” but Schwartz did manage to get the first 20 pages published in the Harvard Literary Review.

Within a year, Schwartz had returned to poetry. He enrolled in a class taught by Seamus Heaney. “I started to write a poem a week,” he said. “That was when I fell in love with the language.”

By the time he accepted the job with First Boston, “I felt very uneasy,” Schwartz said. “I felt like I had put on a coat that didn’t fit right.”

Family connections steered Schwartz to Amanda Urban, the literary agent who represented him on “Bicycle Days.” Once the manuscript was sold to Summit, Schwartz pulled out of investment banking and set himself to reworking his novel.

“Bit by bit,” he said, the book took shape. “It was like learning to walk,” Schwartz said.

Smith, his editor, marveled at the determination Schwartz showed in revising four separate drafts of the book.

“Twenty-three though he is, he has incredible instincts for improving his own work,” she said. “He dug in. His life now is so entirely different from the life he seemed destined for.”

‘Marker in the Woods’

Schwartz said he was fueled by “the freshness and excitement of doing something totally new.” But at the same time, he said, “I really felt like I was returning to something, writing, that was the closest to me. That feeling was like a marker in the woods. It told me to keep going.”

In some ways Schwartz concedes that his youth is a handicap. “I want to know more,” he said. “I need to have more experiences. I am ambitious, and what I mean by that is that I want to be able to write larger books.” Right now, “my experiences are not up to my ambitions.”

So lately he has been reading Plato. “Why not?” he said. “I want to find out what fits where. I would like to have a world view that is larger than the one I have.”

Schwartz has learned early to have confidence in his ear for characters, and to listen when they speak to him. Recently, an older guy, about 30, has been inhabiting Schwartz’s brain. It seems very likely that he will be the main character in the next novel by John Burnham Schwartz.

“People say ‘don’t let it go to your head,’ ” Schwartz said of the experience of publishing his first novel at such a young age. “But to me, there is always the next one.

“All I’ve got is this guy’s voice in my head,” he said. “Now he’s going to have to tell me what’s going to happen.”