Author Finds Happy Ending to Novel Idea

It is a novel without a happy ending. But, as a publishing story, it turned out just fine for author Merrill Joan Gerber.

Gerber’s manuscript for “King of the World,” a bleak but engrossing story of wife abuse and love, garnered her 26 rejection notices during the five years she shopped it around to publishing houses.

She almost gave up on the book and, even though she had published works before, was considering giving up writing altogether.

“I had become very depressed,” said Gerber. “This was the most powerful thing I had written. . . . You begin to wonder . . . was I crazy? Were they crazy?

“I offered them my best and got nothing,” she continued. “I just didn’t want to take the blows anymore.”

Just when Gerber was at her lowest point, however, novelist Cynthia Ozick nominated “King of the World” for the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award. In January, 1989, Gerber was notified that she had won the award, which included $1,000 and publication by the New York publishing house. Her book came out last month.

The award is given annually for “overlooked manuscripts of enduring literary value.”

“I get 80 to 90 manuscripts each year. Merrill’s book stood out from all of them,” said Bill Henderson, publisher of Pushcart Press. “It’s not a dry account of abuse you read in newspapers or a horror story. . . . It’s about two human beings who live in these pages. This book will always remain with me.”

Henderson created the award in 1981 in hopes of discovering worthy manuscripts that have been overlooked by today’s “high pressure, bottom-line oriented” publishing companies.

He says other publishers didn’t pick up on Gerber’s book because it is not an upbeat novel with a happy ending. Publishers, he said, were scared by that.

The book’s central characters are Ginny, an insecure woman who considers herself unattractive, and her husband, Michael, who is good-looking and exciting, but also abusive and increasingly crazy.

One publisher turned the book down, saying: “How could she live with this man? Why doesn’t she just leave?” Gerber said.

“They looked at her as weak for not leaving him right away,” Gerber explained. “They didn’t see her courage for staying. It takes enormous commitment to love, caring, marriage and the family to stay. . . . The women who stay in these relationships are not cowardly. They are very brave.”

Gerber, 51, who lives with her husband, a Pasadena City College professor, in a comfortable Sierra Madre ranch house, said the book has nothing to do with her own life.

“Nothing in this book is based on my own marriage or my own husband. . . . I’ve been happily married for 30 years,” she said.

Nevertheless, writing “King of the World,” her fourth novel, was an intense experience for Gerber.

She had been thinking about writing a novel dealing with domestic violence for a long time, but didn’t start until the story came to her one day as she browsed through a computer store. When she sat down to test one of the computers, she started writing the beginning of the novel.

“I came home and told my husband: ‘We have to buy a computer--I have a book to write,’ ” Gerber recalled. (She had written previous books and stories on a typewriter.)

After the computer arrived, Gerber wrote day and night for three months. When the book was finished, Gerber said, she was “astonished at the voice” she had created. She had entered the mind of a disturbed and violent man. “It was a breakthrough into another consciousness,” she said.

Gerber is always on the lookout for such breakthroughs, even in daily conversations. “I never enjoy ordinary chit-chat,” she said. “I need to know people the way they really are. . . . I’m always wondering how others’ lives are, always looking for clues.”

“King of the World,” Gerber said, is influenced by her friends who have been in abusive relationships, as well as by the people Gerber came in contact with when working for a crisis hot line more than 10 years ago.

“Family violence is extremely prevalent today,” Gerber said. “I have close friends who are involved in these same circumstances. . . . They are ordinary people who never thought they would find themselves in this downward spiral.”

Born in Brooklyn to a middle-class family, Gerber started writing when she was 7. Her first published work, a poem about a squirrel, was published in a small literary magazine when she was in the eighth grade.

“Writing allowed me to be alone with the people of my imagination,” Gerber said. “There is a lot of silent time in a writer’s life, but I enjoy those times.”

Her family moved to Florida when Gerber was 14. During high school she experimented with journalism, but said newswriting was too restrictive. She later attended the University of Florida, where she took a creative writing class taught by novelist Andrew Lytle, who became a primary influence on her writing career, she said.

“He is a brilliant man who takes literature very seriously,” she said. “He never talked about how you can market your book, but rather about how you can do your best writing, how you can make the story come alive for your readers.”

Since then, Gerber has published four novels, two collections of short stories, nine novels for young adults and more than 60 stories in magazines including the New Yorker and the Atlantic. She also teaches night classes in creative writing at UCLA, Caltech and Pasadena City College.

Gerber, who has three daughters, gives her own parents a lot of credit for her success as a writer. She said she learned a love of words from her mother, who taught her how to make rhymes at an early age. From her father, she said, she learned about the “largeness of life.”

“He wasn’t too interested in money. He loved sunshine and birds. . . . He loved laughter,” Gerber said.

“My father was an antique dealer, and he used to bring home books by the carton,” Gerber recalled. “I would arrange the books in a pile next to my bed, always putting the best on the bottom. And it was my duty to read them all. They allowed me to enter all these little worlds.”

Her second novel, “An Antique Man,” published in 1967, is largely based on her father’s life and his death from leukemia. Told in the first person by an older daughter, it is a story of a tight-knit Jewish family, its love and its pain.

When the conversation turns to upcoming projects, Gerber mentions a new novel in the making. But she sidesteps any further inquiry. “It’s like the beginning of a great love affair,” she said. “You don’t want to talk about it just yet because you are not sure how it will turn out, and you don’t want anything to go wrong.”