Across The Beer Bar With Lev Raphael
Welcome back Liz fans and others! Today I'm thrilled to welcome a fellow Michigan author, LEV RAPHAEL.
Liz: Welcome to my beer bar Lev! What can I pour for you to start?
Lev: What’s on Tap? Stella? All right! That’ll do me, at least to start. I love Belgian beers. It’s partly sentimental because my parents lived there for five years and had glowing memories of living in that strange bilingual little country, and partly because I’ve had three amazing trips to Belgium. So every time I drink Belgian beer I feel connected to the past in powerful ways. Plus, well, they taste pretty damned good. And I even know how to pronounce Hoegaarden correctly. When I’m over there, that is. It wouldn’t make sense here.
Liz: Ok, I'll join you but with a brew from one of my favorite Michigan breweries: a Big Red Coq, a hoppy Belgo-American red ale from Brewery Vivant!
I “met” you while sitting my car listening toStateSide the WUOM state-centric radio show with Cynthia Canty and crew.I’ll just admit it right now, I have a thing about voices and yours is pretty awesome but I digress. What really interested me was your concept for a mystery/thriller set on a fictional Michigan college campus. As the child of academics that was my playground and co-eds were my babysitters (and I am a huge fan of Jane Smiley’s “Moo”). So you had me. Tell Liz-land a little about Nick Hoffman, your 1st person protagonist in “ Assault With a Deadly Lie .”
Lev: It’s always good to hear people enjoy my radio voice. As you know, scientists say you can’t hear their own voice accurately, which seems a cruel trick of nature, no? And people love hearing me read my work. But I digress, too. Double digress.
Anyway, Nick is a displaced New Yorker, formerly low man on the totem pole in his English department at “The State University of Michigan” because 1) he likes teaching freshman 2) he likes teaching them composition 3) he was a “spousal hire” (see below). He’s also a natural born worrier, and he’s quip-happy, too. He loves mysteries and he’s an Edith Wharton scholar who did a secondary bibliography of Wharton. That means he found and read and annotated every book, article, and review about her ever published—in every language. So it’s an extremely useful research tool for students, scholars and just anyone interested in Wharton. Which means his colleagues who write books that nobody reads or understands, well, they’ve despised him for having produced something practical.
In the new book, though, we see him after he’s risen to a position of some authority and even power. He now has a nice office (as opposed to being in the basement) and his own secretary through a bequest from a former student because he runs a visiting author program, and his life has actually turned around. That makes other faculty dislike him even more. His life partner Stefan (who first appeared in my novel Winter Eyes) is the department’s writer-in-residence (which is why Nick was hired) and he’s written a best-selling memoir after some low points in his career. They now have a lot more money than they’ve ever had before in their lives--and they like spending it.
Liz: As the interview progressed I realized the plot was very “ripped from the headlines” as a statement about the overreach of police authority and the out-of-control terror a regular citizen of a small, mid-west university town would experience in the face of it. You told me later something I kinda knew being a scribbler myself—that the book was in progress well before all hell broke loose in St. Louis, Cleveland, New York and plenty of other places we never hear about. Why is the subject of the potential “police state” important enough to you to warrant a novel about it? Have you had any direct experience with that sort of thing?
Lev: My parents both survived the Holocaust and my mother grew up in a dictatorship, so it’s not surprising that in my household threats to human freedom were taken very seriously, wherever they happened. My parents followed the Civil Rights Movement and parents were unrelentingly critical of discrimination—how could they be anything else?
The first piece of writing of mine that got a lot of attention was a report on Martin Luther King Jr. in fourth grade. It was on display at the local school board. I idolized him and I can remember where I was, the exact chair I was sitting in when I read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
I’ve been watching what’s been going on since 9/11, things like the government wanting to know what library books you take out (remember that?), and the growing threats to our privacy, with a lot of concern. Those “free speech zones” amaze me—you know where they corral protesters at presidential events. I understand the importance of national security—our eldest has worked in DHS—but I agree with the late Chalmers Johnson (author of Blowbackand other amazing cultural/historical studies) that the U.S. has become a militarized empire, and this ethos has trickled down to the local level, to your police department and mine. Even down to Midwestern towns of 25,000 that feel they need armored vehicles which can withstand landmines. Seriously? Our thinking has become really skewed in this country and too many cops think of themselves as soldiers and see citizens as The Enemy. So Assault With A Deadly Lie was a long time coming even before I actually started writing it five years ago. I’m getting thirsty. I’ll have another Stella, please.
Liz: As the aforementioned “professor brat” (I was a preacher’s kid too…and it’s all true) I absolutely adored your use of names for Nick and Stefan’s fellow professors and their administrators. Really put a face on a lot of them in ways mere description of their clothes and faces wouldn’t. To me, the book was as much a statement about “absolute power corrupting absolutely” within academia as it was the bigger social concerns of warrantless searches and home invasions by police. But I’ll tell ya, I got the sense that the academic world is one you (Lev) aren’t terribly fond of, vis-à-vis all the politics, jealousy and other nonsense. Was it something you always pictured yourself doing—teaching writing and lit crit at a Big State University? If not, what was your dream job?
Lev: Whoa! When are you writing your memoir? You must have great stories.
Liz: Oh, stop it....Ok, we can talk about that later.
Lev: I have my dream job but it’s not teaching: I’m a full-time author, which is something I dreamed of since second grade when I fell in love with story-telling. I’ve only been teaching at MSU for a few years as a guest author who’s published in twelve genres. Could be thirteen (I think it looks too calculating to keep exact score after ten).
I actually have very little to do with academia or literary criticism per se. I teach my classes in mystery fiction, creative writing, or Jewish-American Literature, mentor my students (which is awesome), and I go home. I don’t attend meetings, don’t get involved in politics and get along with everyone I know in the department.
I adore teaching, though, and it’s in my blood—my mother and her father were both teachers, and my brother is a rabbi which makes him a kind of teacher, too. My father is a know-it-all, so that grants him unofficial teacher status, I guess. I double majored in English and theater in college—well, almost—and the performance aspect of teaching is part of the thrill. It’s very much a high-wire act. I was also lucky to have an amazing, nurturing role model in college who informs everything I do in the classroom and how I think about my students and what I give to them.
Liz: Whoops! We have empty glasses. What’s up next for you?
Lev: I’d like a Duvel this time, please. Interviewing is thirsty work. Oh, you also mean what’s next in my writing life?
Liz: Uh, no... I mean, in your glass, silly. I'm gonna stick with the Brewery Vivant options and go with a Tart Side of the Moon, their utterly delicious Belgian inspired dark farmhouse ale.
Lev: I’m working on a sequel to The Vampyre of Gotham , which is set in early 1900s New York and features a wealthy Jewish vampire who discovers that he has powers ordinary vampires don’t. I love working in this genre, and my first foray was a riposte to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth where she treats her Jewish character very stereotypically, which is a shame, since it’s such a fine novel. So I rewrote the book from his POV: Rosedale in Love . It was an amazing experience turning her story inside out, delving into the period by reading Gilded Age fiction and nonfiction, books like a woman’s guide to employment. Did you know they had personal shoppers in 1900? Well, rich women did, anyway.
I recently got an idea for a ghost story, too. So who knows for sure what’s next? I started out as a short story writer, won a big prize judged by the editor of the Best American Short Stories series and was published in Redbook out of the gate and thought that was my path. But I always read across genres, as far back as elementary school, so I kept moving on, and on, and on to something different. It’s never boring, and I always have more than one project going at a time. I have about nine other books in various stages. Some are 40 pages along, some just a title and an opening (but a good opening), and for a few I have dozens of research books waiting to be read. I love learning new things, writing new ways.
Liz: One of the striking things for me as a reader of this book was Nick’s continual use of movie references (as well as book ones, of course). Are you a huge movie buff? Name a single movie you would watch anytime even though you’ve seen it a thousand times and why.
Lev: I grew up in New York where several TV stations played movies several times a day all through the week. So I gave him that love along with other aspects of myself for fun while making him very different from me in that he doesn’t write, he’s a scholar, and he took the teaching path while I chose writing (and much more). My “Desert Island Film” is definitely Midnightwith Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, Mary Astor, John Barrymore, and Frances Lederer. I lost count of how many times I’ve seen it. It’s got one of the funniest scripts ever written in the 1930s and I fell in love with the wit and style when I was in elementary school. Colbert’s sarcastic delivery always cracks me up and it’s got a screwball comedy plot and one-liners that are brilliant. It’s also not well enough known so I want to champion it by mentioning it hear. MIDNIGHT!
Liz: One thing about first person point of view narrative is the extreme, psychological closeness you get as reader to the protagonist. I felt as if I knew you, Lev, by being up in “Nick’s” head so cozily and while I’m not typically a fan of 1st person POV I really enjoyed it—testament to the author’s craft, in my opinion. I have never written a 1st person POV novel but am contemplating one that will also be a kind of mystery/thriller set in Ann Arbor, but from a guy’s POV. I fully acknowledge that putting myself front and center “as” the protagonist of a novel makes me uncomfortable. I like my remove in deep 3rd person even though I do use settings and worlds I move within.
As an author (and an expert/professor in the craft of writing) do you think that an author’s choice of point of view should be driven by the “genre” or by the author’s choice for his or her characters? Why did you decide on “being” Nick as the author?
And Nick---he’s been in several other books I understand (along with Stefan I assume). Tell Liz fans about those.
Lev: I think every story finds its own way of being told. You won’t know for sure how you want to write yours until you try it in more than one way, that is more than one POV. I’ve done that, written openings in 3rd vs. 1st to see which felt more natural for the story, which worked better, which one I felt more comfortable with.
Nick was born in a screwball short story about a couple entertaining the lover of one of them for dinner. My editor at St. Martin’s Press who had published my first book of short stories--which won a Lambda Literary Award--liked it and said I should develop it into a series. Most of the other stories in that book were pretty dark. Nick came to me as a kind of combination of different people I’d met and heard over the years, distilled, refined, and focused into one voice.
I love the closeness people feel when they read the book and think it’s me. I take that as a compliment—it means the book is a success, it’s swept them away. And writing the book, I feel as if Nick is telling me his story, not that I’m telling it for him. I’m not being romantic and reifying him, saying “my characters tell me what to do” because it obviously all comes from my unconscious. But he’s got his own place there. I think he’d move out, though, if I had to crank out a Nick book every year. I love too many other genres to do that.
The newest book Assault With a Deadly Lie is a novel of suspense in which something terrible happens and then things just keep getting worse and build to a big climax. You can read it without having read the others—I’ve written each one so it can stand alone, but if people want to start with Let’s Get Criminal, that’s cool. It brings me that much closer to upgrading my toaster.
The previous ones were constructed as mysteries: a body is found and Nick gets drawn into the puzzle of discovering who did it and why. That’s classic amateur sleuthing which I enjoy, but I felt I’d done as much as I could do in that vein and was going to end up repeating myself if I didn’t crank the series up. Plus I love suspense in books and movies when it’s done well. I love Ken Follett’s early work and Alan Furst, Daniel Silva, and Faye Kellerman and more writers than I can remember.
Liz: Finally, a nightcap and a final question. What’s your poison?
I’d like something Thirties, a Sidecar, since we were talking about Midnight, or I was. But a “top shelf “Sidecar with cognac not brandy and Cointreau not Triple Sec. You’re buying, right?
Liz: Yeah, dude, I'm buying. I'll end my night with one of my favorite bourbons, Basil Hayden with a single ice cube. I'm sort of easy that way....This book’s main character is a gay man, in a committed, loving relationship. He and his husband (you don’t mention they’re married but maybe they snuck into the courthouse last March and got hitched) are wealthy, successful, settled and (wait for it) Jewish/Catholic. In other words, to my mind, they pack a one-two social wallop in terms of “the Midwest norm.” (don’t worry, I’m originally from the South where it’s way worse). I love them to pieces and their Westie, their Lexus, their expensive tastes in booze and their heavy crystal-ware. I can’t wait to get my hands on Nick’s other stories (see my review below). The exploration of how their relationship is strained by the horrible events that pile in on them during the course of this novel due to no real fault of their own OTHER THAN being two gay, successful men in a position to influence students is very realistic (although….I wanted them to kiss or something at least once but hey, that’s just me).
Lev: Gotta interrupt: there isn’t physical contact between them precisely because they’re traumatized. I’ve talked to people dealing with sudden enormous traumas and they sometimes can’t even bear to be kissed or touch or hugged. I wanted to show the strains on their relationship in every possible way. They divide a couple, and that makes bearing the strain even worse. You’re facing the same crisis, but you’re not as united as usual.
Liz: Fair, but I still wanted to them to maybe SAY that or something....anyways, my question (and there is one, be patient and drink your nightcap) relates to your recommendations about books. I move in a mixed group of authors, many of whom (including myself) write books about gay men in loving relationships. Some of it is, as you and I’m sure most “literature professors” will claim, is god awful, pornographic, repetitive, nonsense. And some is. Mine’s not but this is my blog and I can say that.
Lev: You go, Liz!
Liz: Well, we have to toot our own horn in this market, trust me. Can you recommend to me and to Liz fans any other books that feature this sort of normal-everyday-guys-who-happen-to-love-each-other-and-are-just-trying-to-make-a-living-and-be-happy as the protagonists? Most of it, frankly, is in the “too much sex” category for many readers (myself included) so I’m seeking MORE books that have gay men (or women for that matter) as the “heroes” of their own lives.
Lev: I’m really out of touch with LGBT fiction right now, I have to admit. But I think Ellen Hart writes wonderfully-plotted mysteries with lesbian characters and she’d be someone I highly recommend in the mystery genre. I confess I’m also not up-to-date in contemporary American fiction, either. That’s partly because I keep starting books and thinking, “I’ve read this before….” My reading is much richer in memoir, biography, cultural history and history right now and I look for great story-telling and beautiful writing. Though I am consumed by The Game of Thrones novels which are all-around dazzling. My favorite contemporary novel is Sea of Poppies by Amitav Gosh. His sense of texture is incredible and he is an epic story-teller.
I also read a lot of older authors. I just finished a stunning novel by Stefan Zweig, my mother’s favorite author: The Post-Office Girl, about how a girl stuck in a hick town in Austria after WW I gets a taste for the high life and becomes a criminal. It’s mind-blowing. I also have a passion for Zola who is being re-translated by Oxford University Press and the books are so stunning in English you can’t believe they’re translations. The Ladies Paradise is about the first major department store in Paris (they had shoplifting and White Sales even then!); The Kill is about real estate speculation; and Money is about stock market corruption—both feel like they could be about America in the 1990s and 2000s. These are juicy books that transport you to another world the way the best fiction should.
Liz: Also, (sorry, gotta sneak this in), you teach a class in Jewish-American literature and I want at least two of those titles you assign to me by saying: “Liz drop everything and go read these.” I just finished “Jerusalem Maiden,” by Tallia Carner and really enjoyed a lot about it (I’m giving it a 3.5 star review later). And yeah, I loved “The Red Tent” but I’m guessing that’s the equivalent of “50 Shades” to a lot of scholars.
Lay some book recs on me, Professor. My one-click finger awaits (yes I said that).And thanks for stopping by!
Lev: Thanks for having me. It was nice being had. (yes, I said that, too).
Nobody calls me Professor if I can help it. I may have a PhD but that seems like something I acquired in another life and gave up because it left a bad taste in my mouth—like a fondness for Cheetos.
I taught briefly after I earned the degree, but quit to write full-time and also went on to review for the Detroit Free Press, the Washington Post, Jerusalem Report and other print outlets; review on WUOM’s former Todd Mundt Show; and have my own interview show on WLNZ in Lansing where I talked to guests like Salman Rushdie and Erica Jong. Now I review on WKAR monthly and blog on books and art and whatever strikes me as important on The Huffington Post. My latest blog, written after the Charlie Hebdo massacres, currently has over 1600 Facebook Likes, Shares, and Tweets.
Okay, so, you want some recommendations? I have two excellent entrances for people where they can sample dozens of authors and find out who they might like to read further: these are both anthologies by Derek Rubin, one of memoirs, one of stories: Who We Are and Promised Lands. Many contemporary authors are in there that you might not have heard of but will want to know better. Think of it as a wonderful set of hors d’oeuvres to tempt you on to the next courses. Pun intended.
Liz: Sounds great! Thanks so much for your time, presence and recommendations.
cheers!
To find out more about Lev, check out his website here.Next time you see us we'll be having real beers together!
And now for my review of "Assault With a Deadly Lie."
Nick and Stefan have a lovely life full of expensive furniture, a cute little dog, jobs they love and great food/drink. But like most illusions, this one is shattered, seemingly forever within the first couple of pages of the novel in such a way that leaves the reader breathless with dismay.
The cops burst into their home, drag them out onto the lawn without anything resembling an explanation much less a warrant, take Stefan off to be interrogated and leave poor Nick standing there, wondering what in the hell just happened.
Luckily, their quirky, upscale neighborhood in "Michiganopolis" is also home to a feisty lady lawyer with a bug up her ass about the police state. She swoops in to calm things, give advice and get both Nick and Stefan thinking about just who in the heck would want to set them up for such a shocking display of force.
Mr. Raphael sets up his fast moving mystery/thriller in classic fashion, jumping straight into the plot fray with both feet. And the narrative never slows from there.
It turns out that there are several potential perps--from homophobic academic colleagues to surly journalists all ate up with professional jealousy. The "lie" in the title is to me, less "lie" and more "misunderstanding" but it's one that's the catalyst for one whacked out individual's action.
But what made this book so incredibly entertaining in a true "can't put it down" way is the general fabulousness of the first person point of view protagonist, Nick Hoffman. Between them, he and his partner Sefan are a delightful mix of Jewish/Catholic, spiritual/materialistic, worry wart/amateur detective (and ultimately self-protective vigilante but I'm not gonna give away the ending).
The men are fun together, even though they are going through a god-awful set of days between the police raid, threatening neighbors with mini vans, and enemies with a penchant for road kill surprises. And while the ending was not a huge surprise to me, it is very well executed.
This book is perfect for fans of mysteries with a touch of "current events" reality. Go read it. You won't regret it. Me? I'm gonna grab another one of the Nick Hoffman novels....
A Five Lager Read!
Liz: Welcome to my beer bar Lev! What can I pour for you to start?
Lev: What’s on Tap? Stella? All right! That’ll do me, at least to start. I love Belgian beers. It’s partly sentimental because my parents lived there for five years and had glowing memories of living in that strange bilingual little country, and partly because I’ve had three amazing trips to Belgium. So every time I drink Belgian beer I feel connected to the past in powerful ways. Plus, well, they taste pretty damned good. And I even know how to pronounce Hoegaarden correctly. When I’m over there, that is. It wouldn’t make sense here.
Liz: Ok, I'll join you but with a brew from one of my favorite Michigan breweries: a Big Red Coq, a hoppy Belgo-American red ale from Brewery Vivant!
I “met” you while sitting my car listening toStateSide the WUOM state-centric radio show with Cynthia Canty and crew.I’ll just admit it right now, I have a thing about voices and yours is pretty awesome but I digress. What really interested me was your concept for a mystery/thriller set on a fictional Michigan college campus. As the child of academics that was my playground and co-eds were my babysitters (and I am a huge fan of Jane Smiley’s “Moo”). So you had me. Tell Liz-land a little about Nick Hoffman, your 1st person protagonist in “ Assault With a Deadly Lie .”
Lev: It’s always good to hear people enjoy my radio voice. As you know, scientists say you can’t hear their own voice accurately, which seems a cruel trick of nature, no? And people love hearing me read my work. But I digress, too. Double digress.
Anyway, Nick is a displaced New Yorker, formerly low man on the totem pole in his English department at “The State University of Michigan” because 1) he likes teaching freshman 2) he likes teaching them composition 3) he was a “spousal hire” (see below). He’s also a natural born worrier, and he’s quip-happy, too. He loves mysteries and he’s an Edith Wharton scholar who did a secondary bibliography of Wharton. That means he found and read and annotated every book, article, and review about her ever published—in every language. So it’s an extremely useful research tool for students, scholars and just anyone interested in Wharton. Which means his colleagues who write books that nobody reads or understands, well, they’ve despised him for having produced something practical.
In the new book, though, we see him after he’s risen to a position of some authority and even power. He now has a nice office (as opposed to being in the basement) and his own secretary through a bequest from a former student because he runs a visiting author program, and his life has actually turned around. That makes other faculty dislike him even more. His life partner Stefan (who first appeared in my novel Winter Eyes) is the department’s writer-in-residence (which is why Nick was hired) and he’s written a best-selling memoir after some low points in his career. They now have a lot more money than they’ve ever had before in their lives--and they like spending it.
Liz: As the interview progressed I realized the plot was very “ripped from the headlines” as a statement about the overreach of police authority and the out-of-control terror a regular citizen of a small, mid-west university town would experience in the face of it. You told me later something I kinda knew being a scribbler myself—that the book was in progress well before all hell broke loose in St. Louis, Cleveland, New York and plenty of other places we never hear about. Why is the subject of the potential “police state” important enough to you to warrant a novel about it? Have you had any direct experience with that sort of thing?
Lev: My parents both survived the Holocaust and my mother grew up in a dictatorship, so it’s not surprising that in my household threats to human freedom were taken very seriously, wherever they happened. My parents followed the Civil Rights Movement and parents were unrelentingly critical of discrimination—how could they be anything else?
The first piece of writing of mine that got a lot of attention was a report on Martin Luther King Jr. in fourth grade. It was on display at the local school board. I idolized him and I can remember where I was, the exact chair I was sitting in when I read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
I’ve been watching what’s been going on since 9/11, things like the government wanting to know what library books you take out (remember that?), and the growing threats to our privacy, with a lot of concern. Those “free speech zones” amaze me—you know where they corral protesters at presidential events. I understand the importance of national security—our eldest has worked in DHS—but I agree with the late Chalmers Johnson (author of Blowbackand other amazing cultural/historical studies) that the U.S. has become a militarized empire, and this ethos has trickled down to the local level, to your police department and mine. Even down to Midwestern towns of 25,000 that feel they need armored vehicles which can withstand landmines. Seriously? Our thinking has become really skewed in this country and too many cops think of themselves as soldiers and see citizens as The Enemy. So Assault With A Deadly Lie was a long time coming even before I actually started writing it five years ago. I’m getting thirsty. I’ll have another Stella, please.
Liz: As the aforementioned “professor brat” (I was a preacher’s kid too…and it’s all true) I absolutely adored your use of names for Nick and Stefan’s fellow professors and their administrators. Really put a face on a lot of them in ways mere description of their clothes and faces wouldn’t. To me, the book was as much a statement about “absolute power corrupting absolutely” within academia as it was the bigger social concerns of warrantless searches and home invasions by police. But I’ll tell ya, I got the sense that the academic world is one you (Lev) aren’t terribly fond of, vis-à-vis all the politics, jealousy and other nonsense. Was it something you always pictured yourself doing—teaching writing and lit crit at a Big State University? If not, what was your dream job?
Lev: Whoa! When are you writing your memoir? You must have great stories.
Liz: Oh, stop it....Ok, we can talk about that later.
Lev: I have my dream job but it’s not teaching: I’m a full-time author, which is something I dreamed of since second grade when I fell in love with story-telling. I’ve only been teaching at MSU for a few years as a guest author who’s published in twelve genres. Could be thirteen (I think it looks too calculating to keep exact score after ten).
I actually have very little to do with academia or literary criticism per se. I teach my classes in mystery fiction, creative writing, or Jewish-American Literature, mentor my students (which is awesome), and I go home. I don’t attend meetings, don’t get involved in politics and get along with everyone I know in the department.
I adore teaching, though, and it’s in my blood—my mother and her father were both teachers, and my brother is a rabbi which makes him a kind of teacher, too. My father is a know-it-all, so that grants him unofficial teacher status, I guess. I double majored in English and theater in college—well, almost—and the performance aspect of teaching is part of the thrill. It’s very much a high-wire act. I was also lucky to have an amazing, nurturing role model in college who informs everything I do in the classroom and how I think about my students and what I give to them.
Liz: Whoops! We have empty glasses. What’s up next for you?
Lev: I’d like a Duvel this time, please. Interviewing is thirsty work. Oh, you also mean what’s next in my writing life?
Liz: Uh, no... I mean, in your glass, silly. I'm gonna stick with the Brewery Vivant options and go with a Tart Side of the Moon, their utterly delicious Belgian inspired dark farmhouse ale.
Lev: I’m working on a sequel to The Vampyre of Gotham , which is set in early 1900s New York and features a wealthy Jewish vampire who discovers that he has powers ordinary vampires don’t. I love working in this genre, and my first foray was a riposte to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth where she treats her Jewish character very stereotypically, which is a shame, since it’s such a fine novel. So I rewrote the book from his POV: Rosedale in Love . It was an amazing experience turning her story inside out, delving into the period by reading Gilded Age fiction and nonfiction, books like a woman’s guide to employment. Did you know they had personal shoppers in 1900? Well, rich women did, anyway.
I recently got an idea for a ghost story, too. So who knows for sure what’s next? I started out as a short story writer, won a big prize judged by the editor of the Best American Short Stories series and was published in Redbook out of the gate and thought that was my path. But I always read across genres, as far back as elementary school, so I kept moving on, and on, and on to something different. It’s never boring, and I always have more than one project going at a time. I have about nine other books in various stages. Some are 40 pages along, some just a title and an opening (but a good opening), and for a few I have dozens of research books waiting to be read. I love learning new things, writing new ways.
Liz: One of the striking things for me as a reader of this book was Nick’s continual use of movie references (as well as book ones, of course). Are you a huge movie buff? Name a single movie you would watch anytime even though you’ve seen it a thousand times and why.
Lev: I grew up in New York where several TV stations played movies several times a day all through the week. So I gave him that love along with other aspects of myself for fun while making him very different from me in that he doesn’t write, he’s a scholar, and he took the teaching path while I chose writing (and much more). My “Desert Island Film” is definitely Midnightwith Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, Mary Astor, John Barrymore, and Frances Lederer. I lost count of how many times I’ve seen it. It’s got one of the funniest scripts ever written in the 1930s and I fell in love with the wit and style when I was in elementary school. Colbert’s sarcastic delivery always cracks me up and it’s got a screwball comedy plot and one-liners that are brilliant. It’s also not well enough known so I want to champion it by mentioning it hear. MIDNIGHT! Liz: One thing about first person point of view narrative is the extreme, psychological closeness you get as reader to the protagonist. I felt as if I knew you, Lev, by being up in “Nick’s” head so cozily and while I’m not typically a fan of 1st person POV I really enjoyed it—testament to the author’s craft, in my opinion. I have never written a 1st person POV novel but am contemplating one that will also be a kind of mystery/thriller set in Ann Arbor, but from a guy’s POV. I fully acknowledge that putting myself front and center “as” the protagonist of a novel makes me uncomfortable. I like my remove in deep 3rd person even though I do use settings and worlds I move within.
As an author (and an expert/professor in the craft of writing) do you think that an author’s choice of point of view should be driven by the “genre” or by the author’s choice for his or her characters? Why did you decide on “being” Nick as the author?
And Nick---he’s been in several other books I understand (along with Stefan I assume). Tell Liz fans about those.
Lev: I think every story finds its own way of being told. You won’t know for sure how you want to write yours until you try it in more than one way, that is more than one POV. I’ve done that, written openings in 3rd vs. 1st to see which felt more natural for the story, which worked better, which one I felt more comfortable with.
Nick was born in a screwball short story about a couple entertaining the lover of one of them for dinner. My editor at St. Martin’s Press who had published my first book of short stories--which won a Lambda Literary Award--liked it and said I should develop it into a series. Most of the other stories in that book were pretty dark. Nick came to me as a kind of combination of different people I’d met and heard over the years, distilled, refined, and focused into one voice.
I love the closeness people feel when they read the book and think it’s me. I take that as a compliment—it means the book is a success, it’s swept them away. And writing the book, I feel as if Nick is telling me his story, not that I’m telling it for him. I’m not being romantic and reifying him, saying “my characters tell me what to do” because it obviously all comes from my unconscious. But he’s got his own place there. I think he’d move out, though, if I had to crank out a Nick book every year. I love too many other genres to do that.
The newest book Assault With a Deadly Lie is a novel of suspense in which something terrible happens and then things just keep getting worse and build to a big climax. You can read it without having read the others—I’ve written each one so it can stand alone, but if people want to start with Let’s Get Criminal, that’s cool. It brings me that much closer to upgrading my toaster.
The previous ones were constructed as mysteries: a body is found and Nick gets drawn into the puzzle of discovering who did it and why. That’s classic amateur sleuthing which I enjoy, but I felt I’d done as much as I could do in that vein and was going to end up repeating myself if I didn’t crank the series up. Plus I love suspense in books and movies when it’s done well. I love Ken Follett’s early work and Alan Furst, Daniel Silva, and Faye Kellerman and more writers than I can remember.
Liz: Finally, a nightcap and a final question. What’s your poison?
I’d like something Thirties, a Sidecar, since we were talking about Midnight, or I was. But a “top shelf “Sidecar with cognac not brandy and Cointreau not Triple Sec. You’re buying, right?
Liz: Yeah, dude, I'm buying. I'll end my night with one of my favorite bourbons, Basil Hayden with a single ice cube. I'm sort of easy that way....This book’s main character is a gay man, in a committed, loving relationship. He and his husband (you don’t mention they’re married but maybe they snuck into the courthouse last March and got hitched) are wealthy, successful, settled and (wait for it) Jewish/Catholic. In other words, to my mind, they pack a one-two social wallop in terms of “the Midwest norm.” (don’t worry, I’m originally from the South where it’s way worse). I love them to pieces and their Westie, their Lexus, their expensive tastes in booze and their heavy crystal-ware. I can’t wait to get my hands on Nick’s other stories (see my review below). The exploration of how their relationship is strained by the horrible events that pile in on them during the course of this novel due to no real fault of their own OTHER THAN being two gay, successful men in a position to influence students is very realistic (although….I wanted them to kiss or something at least once but hey, that’s just me).
Lev: Gotta interrupt: there isn’t physical contact between them precisely because they’re traumatized. I’ve talked to people dealing with sudden enormous traumas and they sometimes can’t even bear to be kissed or touch or hugged. I wanted to show the strains on their relationship in every possible way. They divide a couple, and that makes bearing the strain even worse. You’re facing the same crisis, but you’re not as united as usual.
Liz: Fair, but I still wanted to them to maybe SAY that or something....anyways, my question (and there is one, be patient and drink your nightcap) relates to your recommendations about books. I move in a mixed group of authors, many of whom (including myself) write books about gay men in loving relationships. Some of it is, as you and I’m sure most “literature professors” will claim, is god awful, pornographic, repetitive, nonsense. And some is. Mine’s not but this is my blog and I can say that.
Lev: You go, Liz!
Liz: Well, we have to toot our own horn in this market, trust me. Can you recommend to me and to Liz fans any other books that feature this sort of normal-everyday-guys-who-happen-to-love-each-other-and-are-just-trying-to-make-a-living-and-be-happy as the protagonists? Most of it, frankly, is in the “too much sex” category for many readers (myself included) so I’m seeking MORE books that have gay men (or women for that matter) as the “heroes” of their own lives.
Lev: I’m really out of touch with LGBT fiction right now, I have to admit. But I think Ellen Hart writes wonderfully-plotted mysteries with lesbian characters and she’d be someone I highly recommend in the mystery genre. I confess I’m also not up-to-date in contemporary American fiction, either. That’s partly because I keep starting books and thinking, “I’ve read this before….” My reading is much richer in memoir, biography, cultural history and history right now and I look for great story-telling and beautiful writing. Though I am consumed by The Game of Thrones novels which are all-around dazzling. My favorite contemporary novel is Sea of Poppies by Amitav Gosh. His sense of texture is incredible and he is an epic story-teller.
I also read a lot of older authors. I just finished a stunning novel by Stefan Zweig, my mother’s favorite author: The Post-Office Girl, about how a girl stuck in a hick town in Austria after WW I gets a taste for the high life and becomes a criminal. It’s mind-blowing. I also have a passion for Zola who is being re-translated by Oxford University Press and the books are so stunning in English you can’t believe they’re translations. The Ladies Paradise is about the first major department store in Paris (they had shoplifting and White Sales even then!); The Kill is about real estate speculation; and Money is about stock market corruption—both feel like they could be about America in the 1990s and 2000s. These are juicy books that transport you to another world the way the best fiction should.
Liz: Also, (sorry, gotta sneak this in), you teach a class in Jewish-American literature and I want at least two of those titles you assign to me by saying: “Liz drop everything and go read these.” I just finished “Jerusalem Maiden,” by Tallia Carner and really enjoyed a lot about it (I’m giving it a 3.5 star review later). And yeah, I loved “The Red Tent” but I’m guessing that’s the equivalent of “50 Shades” to a lot of scholars.
Lay some book recs on me, Professor. My one-click finger awaits (yes I said that).And thanks for stopping by!
Lev: Thanks for having me. It was nice being had. (yes, I said that, too).
Nobody calls me Professor if I can help it. I may have a PhD but that seems like something I acquired in another life and gave up because it left a bad taste in my mouth—like a fondness for Cheetos.
I taught briefly after I earned the degree, but quit to write full-time and also went on to review for the Detroit Free Press, the Washington Post, Jerusalem Report and other print outlets; review on WUOM’s former Todd Mundt Show; and have my own interview show on WLNZ in Lansing where I talked to guests like Salman Rushdie and Erica Jong. Now I review on WKAR monthly and blog on books and art and whatever strikes me as important on The Huffington Post. My latest blog, written after the Charlie Hebdo massacres, currently has over 1600 Facebook Likes, Shares, and Tweets.
Okay, so, you want some recommendations? I have two excellent entrances for people where they can sample dozens of authors and find out who they might like to read further: these are both anthologies by Derek Rubin, one of memoirs, one of stories: Who We Are and Promised Lands. Many contemporary authors are in there that you might not have heard of but will want to know better. Think of it as a wonderful set of hors d’oeuvres to tempt you on to the next courses. Pun intended.
Liz: Sounds great! Thanks so much for your time, presence and recommendations.
cheers!
To find out more about Lev, check out his website here.Next time you see us we'll be having real beers together!
And now for my review of "Assault With a Deadly Lie."
Nick and Stefan have a lovely life full of expensive furniture, a cute little dog, jobs they love and great food/drink. But like most illusions, this one is shattered, seemingly forever within the first couple of pages of the novel in such a way that leaves the reader breathless with dismay.
The cops burst into their home, drag them out onto the lawn without anything resembling an explanation much less a warrant, take Stefan off to be interrogated and leave poor Nick standing there, wondering what in the hell just happened.
Luckily, their quirky, upscale neighborhood in "Michiganopolis" is also home to a feisty lady lawyer with a bug up her ass about the police state. She swoops in to calm things, give advice and get both Nick and Stefan thinking about just who in the heck would want to set them up for such a shocking display of force.
Mr. Raphael sets up his fast moving mystery/thriller in classic fashion, jumping straight into the plot fray with both feet. And the narrative never slows from there.
It turns out that there are several potential perps--from homophobic academic colleagues to surly journalists all ate up with professional jealousy. The "lie" in the title is to me, less "lie" and more "misunderstanding" but it's one that's the catalyst for one whacked out individual's action.
But what made this book so incredibly entertaining in a true "can't put it down" way is the general fabulousness of the first person point of view protagonist, Nick Hoffman. Between them, he and his partner Sefan are a delightful mix of Jewish/Catholic, spiritual/materialistic, worry wart/amateur detective (and ultimately self-protective vigilante but I'm not gonna give away the ending).
The men are fun together, even though they are going through a god-awful set of days between the police raid, threatening neighbors with mini vans, and enemies with a penchant for road kill surprises. And while the ending was not a huge surprise to me, it is very well executed.
This book is perfect for fans of mysteries with a touch of "current events" reality. Go read it. You won't regret it. Me? I'm gonna grab another one of the Nick Hoffman novels....
A Five Lager Read!
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