From Fugitive to Professional

The word terrorist is thrown around quite a bit these days. We can all agree that the events of 9/11 was the work of terrorists. Few people would hesitate to call Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, a terrorist. But what about Palestinian children who throw rocks at Israeli soldiers? What about the Zapatista movement in Chiapas? Those are more difficult questions, especially now that the Zapatistas aren't using military weapons to achieve their revolution. But they are actively working to overthrow the Mexican state.

For a brief moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s the protest movement against the war in Vietnam took a violent turn. Frustrated protesters made the argument that the immoral war needed to be stopped by any means necessary. Bombs were set, people were killed and many of the perpetrators went into hiding. They became fugitives. Were they terrorists?

In Janis Hallowell's new novel She Was, Doreen Woods, a professional mother living in Denver, is one of these fugitives. A student radical at Berkeley in the 1970s, she has eluded capture for 35 years and transformed herself from a violent teenage war protester into a mother nervous about her son's attendance at a peaceful anti-war rally. She hardly seems like a violent enemy of the state.

"I wanted to write about a fugitive woman," Hallowell said in a wide-ranging interview. "These women really existed, more than one. There were few notable political things that women did, but women took starring roles in this kind of action."

The action in question is a bombing at Columbia University that kills a black janitor. Hallowell recounts the night from the perspective of Louis Nilon, the victim, in a spellbinding prologue that evokes pathos without being sentimental. The janitor makes his rounds thinking about his life while listening to the Ali-Frazier championship fight. It's clear that a human being has died in this explosion. There's no writing off of Nilon as collateral damage.

That's more damage than Hallowell's real life model for Doreen Woods, Kathleen Soliah, did when she planted bombs in Los Angeles police cars in 1975. Those bombs didn't go off. Soliah went into hiding and 24 years later was arrested living under the name Sarah Jane Olson. She was back in the news last month, when she was released from jail and rearrested due to an administrative mistake.

"I decided to turn up the volume a little more," Hallowell said. "I wanted to bring into higher relief the moral ambiguity of the situation. It's one thing if you set a bomb and it doesn't go off. But it does explode and kills a black working-class man--the very kind of person that the radicals said they were doing these things to help. I made it harsh on purpose. I didn't expect to feel compassion for her."

Gradually, the reader does come to feel compassion for Woods. Hallowell not only shows us the life that Woods leads in Denver, which includes taking care of her sick brother, but also her personal history leading up to the fateful evening at Columbia University. It's a story set in the turbulent, emotional times of the Vietnam war. The beliefs of sons and daughters are set against the values of their own parents as American living rooms became increasingly hostile places. It's easy for a smart, impressionable 19-year old to be lured into the world of violent student radicals after seeing the damage the war has inflicted on her beloved older brother.

More importantly to developing compassion, Hallowell shows us Woods' life after the bomb explodes. She gives us the story from a variety of viewpoints including those of her husband, the woman pursuing her and her brother Adam, a troubled Vietnam vet. These different narratives add texture and a scope that couldn't be achieved if we were with Doreen the whole time.

"I had to find ways to get into their skin," Hallowell says of the characters she writes. "You have to find the humanity of everyone you write about. There are memoirs about the subject, but as a memoir you only get your perspective. In fiction you have the freedom of telling the story from any perspective. That's what's powerful about fiction. I didn't even try first person with this book."

It's a good thing, too, because the scenes from Adam's point of view are among the most powerful she writes. Adam has some harrowing memories of cruelty and inhumanity from Vietnam that are floating to the surface of his hallucinating mind throughout the story. It's not the kind of writing that you'd expect from Hallowell. Her first book was the excellent novel The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn, a first-person tale of a teenager who might have the divine spirit in her set in a fairly tame Boulder. It hardly seemed like the resume of someone who would write searing scenes of the Vietnam War.

"When it became clear to me that Adam's story involved being a vet, I resisted it. I'm a woman. I had no business writing about a war that I couldn't have fought in. I talked to Nick Arvin (the author of Articles of War) and he told me some of the best war scenes were fiction. I decided to dip my toe in with some research and went to the Vet center in Boulder. One of the vets told me that everybody in the war knows the war from the 10 feet around them. Everyone's experience was insular and different. That gave me the confidence to write the scenes."

Once you read this novel it's almost impossible to think of Doreen as a terrorist. Her mistake, which haunts every day of her life, seems like a terrible youthful indiscretion. It pales in comparison to the atrocities that Adam witnessed in Vietnam. When a grandstanding politician refers to her as a fugitive terrorist at the end of the novel, it is jarring. Surely Doreen Woods isn't what we mean when we talk of the war on terror.

But it's our contemporary situation that gives this novel such resonance. Hallowell might be writing of the anti-war movement in the 1970s, but its impossible to read She Was without thinking of Iraq and our grappling with how to handle terrorism now.

"When I proposed the book, I had to stick to my guns and say 'I think this is going to be timely'", Hallowell said. "If we'd pulled out of Iraq, I wonder how easy it would have been to sell the book. It has to be relevant to what's happening now. I'm pleased it's coming out before the election. After the election, things could really change in Iraq. A novel has to work in a timeless way, but it taps into the zeitgeist of today and that is nice."

Hallowell will be speaking about and signing She Was at the Boulder Book Store on May 8 at 7:30 p.m.

Anatomy of a Buy

"How do you decide what to buy?" is one of the most frequently asked questions I get from people I meet outside of the book business. Depending on my mood, I tell them that I guess wildly, use assorted sales data to make a professional judgment, or just slavishly order what my reps suggest, while I drink lattes and eat bonbons all day. No matter what I answer, their reaction is always the same. "That just sounds like the greatest job. You must love your work."

The truth is a combination of all of those answers, except I don't drink coffee during my appointments and instead of bonbons, the process brings to mind the fried-meat -- scrapple. I don't drink coffee because long ago, my co-workers forbid me from imbibing caffeine while on the job. They claim it hypes me up too much and I get strange new marketing ideas that have everyone running in circles. I once drove our publicity manager to tears as I barked ideas at her faster than she could write.

Last Friday, my HarperCollins rep sold me the summer list. This is one of the more important buys of the year because Harper usually vies with Penguin as the second biggest publisher in the land behind Random House. Also, the summer is traditionally when Harpers releases its strongest titles. That was certainly the case in 2007. I also feared that the weak Christmas performance of HarperCollins' titles might put some added pressure, or at least a whiff of desperation into the selling of this list.

The buy really began about three days before the appointment when the sales rep called me up to tell me that he had at least five "make" fiction titles on the list. By that, he meant he had either debut novels or novels from relatively unknown authors that Harper was hoping to sell in large quantities. His assertion put me on guard immediately. It seems to me, that debut novels almost never sell well in the summer. It's the season for comfortable beach reads by established favorites. If a summer novel is going to break out, I would sooner expect Hachette (that's Little Brown in English), or Penguin to publish it than Harper. Hachette and Penguin both put a lot of cooperative advertising funds behind specific new fiction titles they believe in. Harper does not. Harper just doesn't offer the same sort of co-op. Their plan basically directs buyers towards more established titles.

I've learned over the years that trusting my intuition can get me in trouble, so I decided to do a little research. I found only 13 mildly successful hardback fiction titles from last summer that I'd classify as "make" fiction. I defined a successful title as one selling five copies or more, hardly a blockbuster. The top title in this group was Hooked by Matt Richtel which sold over 50 copies. Richtel used to live in Boulder and he did a signing for his book attended by family and friends along with some customers. Hooked was published by Twelve, a new imprint of Hachette's, that is dedicated to publishing about one book a month and really giving them a lot of publicity. It seems to be working. Hooked was one of several titles that Twelve has sold well.

The other dozen titles that met with modest success included Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee, another Hachette author. Lee did not have a signing at our store, but Hachette did host a lavish author dinner with area booksellers last winter that created a great deal of excitement behind the title. I wrote up the evening in a January post, Free Food For Booksellers. Penguin had four titles on the list, most notably The Tea House Fire by Ellis Avery. Avery's title was accompanied by lots of co-op funds and spent three months at the front of the store on sale at 25% off. Who knows how successful it was nationwide? My guess is the fire didn't spread too far from the teahouse. Avery's title is already available as a remainder. Even the all-mighty publishing juggernaut Random House only "made" three hardback fiction titles last summer.

Harper's lone entry on the list was The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer, a powerful novel about a Jewish family in peril in newly fundamentalist Iran in 1981. I concluded even before the rep made it to the store, that our sales would have to come from books other than his "make" fiction. You might guess from this analysis that perhaps the Boulder Book Store just can't sell hardback fiction. You would be wrong. According to a website that compiles sales data for independent stores, we are ranked 11th in sales out of about 200 stores in hardback fiction sales. To misquote Sinatra, "If you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere."

Fortunately, Harper has a really strong list with several surefire fiction and nonfiction titles that we will sell like crazy. Still, I doubt the list can beat last summer's, when Harper hardback titles (led by works from Michael Chabon, Deepak Chopra and Thich Nhat Hanh) dominated our bestseller charts. All three of those authors signed here to large, adoring crowds. This year, I am particularly excited about The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester, What Now by Ann Patchett, She Was by local author Janis Hallowell and an untitled political book by Ron Suskind.

All four of these authors have had bestsellers in the past. Winchester's The Professor and the Madman is still a book group favorite, even though I must admit I think he took a fascinating story and did his best to make it dry as dust. Patchett's book is geared towards people making transitions in their lives, whether they are graduating from high school, changing careers or becoming a parent. That covers just about everyone in Boulder. Suskind has scooped journalists and authors alike, and gotten a ton of publicity, with his two previous works on the Bush administration The Price of Loyalty and One Percent Doctrine. I loved Hallowell's first novel The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn. It was a quirky, well-written story about faith that took place in Boulder. A signing with her will definitely produce one of the better-selling novels of the year.

Wedged between all of these great books -- and others by Louise Erdrich, Joanne Harris and Edward Dolnick -- were pages and pages of what could kindly be described as filler. It's the gristle and bones between the pork in the sausage. To give the reader an idea of just how much chaff there is in the publishers' wheat, last summer, I bought 264 new titles from Harper and only ten of those books sold 50 or more copies. Those bestsellers accounted for 75% of all of the sales from the list. Sadly, over 30% of the titles (mostly books I brought in in ones and twos) didn't sell a single copy. Thank God, we don't buy Harper nonreturnable. That doesn't even factor in all of the books (probably 25% to 40%) that I don't buy at all.

At one point, I turned to the rep who was trying to convince me to buy one copy of a rather academic-looking history book that Harper had no discernible publicity plans for whatsoever and said, "Why does Harper even bother with a book like this? Why don't they leave it to a smaller publisher that might do it justice, like W.W. Norton or Oxford University Press, and focus on what they do well?" He didn't really have an answer. When Harper publishes a small history book, it's about their 200th priority. If Harvard published the same book, it might be one of their top three books of the season. Publishers often use print runs to tell you how important a book is to them. A print run of 10,000 from Harper is insignificant. The same print run from the University of Chicago is cause to break out the champagne.

Back to those "make" fiction books. I took most of them, although they are probably doomed to failure. A relationship between a publisher and an independent bookstore is a complicated affair. We are desperate to host signings by top-flight authors and they really need independent stores to take chances on their small novels to have any chance for them to work. Last year, Harper got us more great authors then any other publisher. Even though the odds of success are slim on their "make" novels, the least I can do is try to bust out a few of these authors.

The two most promising are Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain and The Outlander by Gil Adamson. Harper is having a bookseller dinner for Stein in January, which will hopefully produce some enthusiasm, while the Adamson novel is set in the mountains of the west and has blurbs from Jim Harrison and Michael Ondaatje. Maybe one will break out and be the Cold Mountain or The Lovely Bones of 2008.

The buying of books here at the store is not a pretty sight and it's not without its give-and-take between the sales reps and the buyers. Perhaps at the next Christmas party when I'm asked how I buy books, I'll just launch into a dissertation on how the old Philadelphia favorite of my youth, scrapple, is made from all the parts of the pig that are still lying around after you've made sausage. It will be graphic and a bit disgusting, but I think it will convey the spirit of the buy.

Chat Amongst Yourselves

Sherman Alexie's new novel, Flight, contains a reading group guide so thorough and meticulously written that you might think you could skip Alexie's own words and get the gist of his work with the guide. The reading group guide, 44 elaborate questions filled with quotations from the novel, even has its own author cited (actually, the credit says "prepared by"), Barbara Putnam. (Personally, I prefer to have my meals prepared and my books written.) It's like buying The Sound and the Fury with the Cliffs Notes bound in.

I must admit I have a love/hate relationship with these reading group guides. I can't tell you how many times a decent reading group conversation at the store has screeched to an abrupt halt because someone pulls out a question from the book's guide. It's usually something absurd: Do you think the narrator's love of cats influenced her decision to strangle her child in the sandbox? Or perhaps just a bit more subtle: The author mentions popular songs in several scenes. What do bands like U2 and The Police mean to the main character? What does music mean to you? I sigh loudly when these questions are brought into the conversation, feeling like I'm back in school with a mediocre English teacher. I really don't want to be back in a high school classroom. I really don't want to feel like the love of literature is being beaten out of me by a bored wannabe poet who is just trying to make it to summer break.

The few times I enjoy the guides are when I'm reading a book on my own and I'm left confused or uncertain about a character or a plot element. Sometimes ruminating on the questions in the back of the book brings me to a point of clarity that I couldn't have achieved if I had just put the book down and moved onto something else. Am I the only one who thinks reading group guides are much better without a group?

My biggest problem with reading group guides, and frankly, with reading groups themselves, is that style and form are almost never discussed. The questions are always about plot, motivation, setting and what the author's opinions might be. Those aren't very interesting topics for discussion.

Instead, I want to know why an author chose to tell a story in first person instead of third person. Can we trust the first-person narrator? If not, where are the hidden clues that make us doubt? I want to talk about why an author chooses certain words, and how that language creates a mood or a setting through its sparseness or volubility.

The best reading group guides, including some of HarperCollins' P.S. titles, contain interviews with the authors, or lists of further reading put together by the author. This was the case with Janis Hallowell's excellent and underrated novel, The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn. My favorite feature was Hallowell's list of recommended movies that are on the same theme as her book. Hallowell came in to speak to our store's reading group about her novel, and when we asked her about the reading group guide, she seemed a little embarrassed by the whole thing. We assured her it was great, and I can only hope that if the publishers are going to insist on including these guides, the authors will be involved in creating them. Somehow, this adds some humor and makes it feel less academic.

Back to Alexie's novel for a moment. I really loved this novel and enjoyed its quirkiness, its shifting time periods and the growth of the narrator, Zits. When I finished and saw that there was a reading guide, I was actually kind of excited. On the surface, this novel seems like a simple tale. An half-Indian boy living in various foster homes falls under the spell of an evil person, goes to a bank with a couple of guns and starts shooting. Just as he is shot dead on the scene, his consciousness is jettisoned out of his body and out of the present day, into an FBI agent in 1975. This time-travel-body-shifting continues, and he picks up a few lessons along the way, until he is reunited with his own body. It's a lark, like Vonnegutt's best work, and it makes you think differently about familiar moments in history.

But I knew that it couldn't be as straight-forward as it appears on the surface, so I turned to the reading group guide. It was a slog. I know that these are well-thought-out questions, but by the fifth one I needed a drink and by the tenth one all the joy I had from reading the book was seeping out of me. I had to stop. These were questions for teachers or professors to use in their classes. These were questions that deserved essays in response, not flippant, wine-soaked, book-club chatter.

Here's an example of one such question: "As in the Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, we are startled to read about people rummaging through Dumpsters for food just to survive, even in this land of great plenty. Zits says, 'I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share. . . . They're like spoiled little ten-year old bullies on the playground . . . if you try to get even one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you' (page 26). Do you see any of this in your community?"

So what if I see people dumpster-diving in my community? That doesn't particularly help me to sympathize more with Zits. It certainly doesn't bring me any closer to understanding the depth of Alexie's work.

If Flight had to include a reading group guide, I wish Alexie would have done it himself. He is a funny and insightful person with a lot to say and many interesting opinions about American culture, history and politics. Ironically, this reading guide makes it seem like he's a dead white author, instead of a vibrantly living American Indian writer.