His Satire Is Right on the Money

The New York Times Book Review called it an “an uproariously satirical book, the product of an opulent imagination.”

The Los Angeles Times described it as “arrestingly original.”

And the Washington Post said it’s “funny, irreverent, imaginative . . . a first novel of unusual charm and intelligence.”

The glowing praise is for “Ordinary Money,” Louis B. Jones’ offbeat novel about two down-on-their-luck men and their families in a lower-middle-class section of Marin County and what happens after one of them comes into possession of $20 million worth of counterfeit $20 bills--bills that look so real even the Feds can’t tell they’re fake.

Jones, 36, a 1987 graduate of the UC Irvine MFA Program in Writing, lives in Mill Valley in Marin County. In “Ordinary Money,” Jones uses counterfeiting as a metaphor to raise questions about financial worth and self-worth, and about what is real and what is fake in American life.

But there is nothing counterfeit about the many positive responses Jones’ novel is receiving.

A modest 8,500-copy first printing (Viking; $18.95) sold out within four weeks; the book is now in its second printing. It was a Book of the Month Club alternate selection, and is No. 14 on the San Francisco best-seller list.

Before the novel hit bookstores last month, Jones said, Viking was taking a “cautious” approach to publicizing his novel.

“They’ve been good to me, but they didn’t decide in advance this would be a big deal,” Jones said. “You know how they are with first novels. They don’t want to bet heavy. Understandably so, but then the book started to make all these friends on its own. Now they’re sending me to Seattle, Portland and Chicago to do signings and readings.”

Jones was in Orange County this week for a book signing at the Bookstore in Irvine and to give readings at the Rizzoli International Bookstore at South Coast Plaza and at UC Irvine.

Jones, a soft-spoken man, said he is not surprised by the rave reviews “Ordinary Money” is garnering.

“An author is a schizophrenic personality,” he said. “On the one hand, I know how good the book is; on the other hand, I’ve seen good books get hurt.”

He added: “I’ve found they (critics) are very generous to me, maybe because I’m a first-timer. I’m glad they like it.

“Everybody’s getting that book exactly the way I want it--all the metaphysical questions (and) the ironic stuff. Everybody’s really enjoying all those levels of the book I hoped that they would.”

Jones, a Chicago native, has been writing since the mid-’70s, when he was a classics major at the University of Illinois. Publishers rejected his four previous novels, which would seem to make the success of “Ordinary Money” all the sweeter.

“I think so,” Jones said, “and it also gave me a lot of perspective on it. I mean, now a single success won’t knock me off course (as a writer), and I can follow my star: follow the little truth that I’m interested in in life.”

Jones is a part-time assistant English teacher at the College of Marin. His wife is photographer Brett Hall, daughter of Oakley Hall, co-director of the graduate and undergraduate writing programs at UC Irvine.

It was during his two years at UC Irvine, where he roomed with classmate Michael (“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”) Chabon, that Jones wrote the first and second drafts of “Ordinary Money.” He also struck up a friendship with fellow writing student Jay Gummerman, whose collection of short stories, “We Find Ourselves in Moontown,” was published last year. Gummerman sent Jones’ manuscript to his agent, Joy Harris, in New York in the summer of 1988. Within two weeks, Harris had sold “Ordinary Money” to Viking; actor Don Johnson optioned the book for a movie soon after.

Jones received a $15,000 advance--more than twice the $5,000 to $7,500 that first-time novelists typically receive--but it was still far less than the well-publicized $150,000 Chabon received for his first novel.

But money is not a high priority for Jones, who wrote those first four novels while holding down a variety of odd jobs, waiter and construction worker among them. He is content to live in a small cabin in the woods.

On a typical day, he rises at 4 a.m., starts a fire in the wood-burning stove in his study, and sits down at his computer for as long as six hours, writing about “the truth of modern life.”

Jones writes, he says, because he has a need to write.

In fact, after his third novel was rejected, he said, he reached a point at which “I realized I’m really an actual writer and I’d do this if I never got paid. And so I realized I was already a success: I got what I wanted, you know what I mean? I guess it’s almost irrelevant if Newsweek magazine reviews it and I’m on the San Francisco best-seller list.”

Jones is now working on a new novel. In it, the owner of a Shakey’s pizza parlor--he is a minor character in “Ordinary Money”--and a UC Berkeley physicist have a quarrel over real estate boundary lines. This novel, like Jones’ others, is set in the Marin County town of Terra Linda, where he once lived, “a spy in the service of literature.”

In fact, Jones said, he is so wrapped up in writing this novel that “it’s almost like the old novel (‘Ordinary Money’) and its success is a distraction, you know what I mean? It’s really about the process of creating, not something about making a star and all that nonsense.”