 Edward Schwarzschild, author of Responsible Men |
The whirlwind tour is a thrill for the affable, gregarious author: "This is my vision of a book tour, getting to travel all over the country, catch up with people you know and meet new ones, go out for a drink afterwards in some smoky bar."
The First Fiction Tour was created by Cindy Dach of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, who hopes to entice a younger, hipper crowd to attend fiction readings by bringing young writers to nontraditional venues like comedy theaters and college town bars. The 2005 edition kicked off with a raucous crowd at Jimmy Tingles Theatre in Boston; the least well-attended event was in Iowa City, where the four authors arrived on the day that beloved Iowa Writers Workshop leader Frank Conroy died. "Everyone was in shock," Schwarzschild says. "No one wanted to come to a reading." Two of his former students drove all the way from Minneapolis, and he tried valiantly to focus on their dedication instead of the empty seats. "What is it about the way we're wired," he muses, "that always gravitates towards the negative instead of what's right?"
It's a question his fictional hero might well ask. Max Wolinsky is a third-generation salesman who's drifted away from his father and uncle's old-country work ethic into real estate scams, selling shares in a beachfront retirement home that will never be built. He's returned from Florida to his native Philadelphia for his son's bar mitzvah, on the eve of his ex-wife's remarriage to their former gardener. It's supposed to be a quick visit, but Max finds that family ties bind him in unforeseen ways. And he can't resist running a con on what seems, at first glance, like an easy mark.
Schwarzschild lives in a neighborhood of refurbished brick row houses near the Empire State Plaza, where most of the streets are named after birds: Lark, Jay, Dove, Swan. Schwarzschild's house is sunlit and airy, with a living room opening into the checkered-floor kitchen by way of a baby grand piano. A vintage accordion sits by a television console so old that its screen is as round as a porthole. Schwarzschild hopes to learn accordion and fix the TV, if he's ever home long enough. Meanwhile, they are beautiful objects, reminiscent of another time.
Responsible Men has an other-era flavor as well, from the saturated, Edward Hopper hues of the dust-jacket art to its insistence on such old-fashioned values as plot and moral inquiry. Though Schwarzschild pays homage to the iconic salesmen of such landmark American dramas as "Death of A Salesman" and "Glengarry Glen Ross," he gives each character a sly, often funny, spin. Max is a con man with a guilty conscience, who blurts out his shady plans to a woman he's met at a bowling alley. We also meet a tennis-pro thug, a two-timing expert on eelgrass, and a Boy Scout troop that keeps kosher, builds bonfires in urban parking lots, and has secret ties to the Chinese Mafia.
"I'm interested in people who are not totally ethical or totally unethical, but somewhere in the middle—trying to do right but tempted to do wrong to get ahead, that complicated, blurry middle ground," says Schwarzschild. He pulls out a small orange notebook and reads a few phrases from a Graham Greene epitaph: 'The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.' These are the kind of characters I'm drawn to as a writer."
There are people for whom literature is as essential as air, and Schwarzschild appears to be one of them. His conversation is peppered with references to his "literary god" William Kennedy (the de facto laureate of Albany), rueful wishes that he'd read Proust and Joyce in high school, and regrets at the recent deaths of Conroy, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, and Hunter S. Thompson ("so many greats"). He's landed a lit addict's dream job: teaching fiction writing and literature at SUNY Albany and working for the multiarmed New York State Writers Institute.
Kennedy founded the Institute in 1983 with his post-Ironweed MacArthur Fellowship, matching funds from SUNY Albany, and the support of then-governor Mario Cuomo. It sponsors an impressive roster of events, including a Visiting Writers Series, which has hosted nearly 500 literary readings; Spring 2005 guests include Maxine Kumin, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Eric Bogosian. Schwarzschild often introduces visiting writers and interviews them for the Institute's archives. "I get to hang around with every author who passes through town." He grins like a kid in a candy shop.
He's brought me to The Daily Grind, a cozy basement café whose bakery case sports a bumper sticker that reads, "Friends Don't Let Friends Drink Starbucks." Our table, under a street-level window, is littered with crumpled napkins and the remains of an oddly pink muffin. "I didn't do that," Schwarzschild tells the waitress, who laughs. He's a regular here, often lingering to grade student papers.
Schwarzschild attended Cornell, where his burgeoning interest in creative writing derailed him from the premed track. He did graduate work at Boston University and Washington University, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on writer-photographer collaborations ranging from Walt Whitman and Matthew Brady to James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He taught at Sweetbriar College for four years, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, where his fiction workshop colleagues included ZZ Packer, Adam Johnson, and Julie Orringer. Though he started writing the seed material for Responsible Men—short stories about the elder Wolinskys, two of which won prizes from magazines—as a graduate student in Boston, it was at Stanford that Schwarzschild started shaping this material into a novel, extending its narrative arc and adding two more generations.
He's quick to acknowledge that his fictional Wolinskys have taproots in his own life. "There's some of my father in all of these characters, though he's very upstanding, the kind of guy who wants to pay extra taxes, just to be sure." The seamy Philadelphia streets Schwarzschild conjures in loving detail are his childhood neighborhood. Like Max's son Nathan, teenaged Ed was pushed into a Boy Scout troop that kept kosher even on camping trips, although "no one sold anything, legal or otherwise, and I didn't get to kiss any girls. I hated it. I wanted to capture that raw, teenage energy of banging heads with your parents."
Schwarzschild says his novel "comes from real emotion and memory, transformed by the imagination into fiction, but there's real power in that emotional core." Like Caleb Wolinsky, his father, William, works as a manufacturer's representative, selling textiles to mills. He sometimes brought young Ed along on his rounds, an experience described vividly in his novel ("floors of looms, floors of dye, floors of sewing machines, the dust like brightly colored snow, the smell like paint and sweat and laundry, the noise an endless train running over his head") and an essay called "Life of a Salesman." After a buyer for a Baltimore factory asked Ed whether he'd be as good a salesman as his father someday, the usually self-contained William told his son, "You are not going to be a salesman. Because it's a miserable job.... Because I wish I wasn't a salesman and I don't want you wishing the same thing someday. You can be whatever you want when you grow up, just not a salesman. Okay?"
William Schwarzschild got his wish: None of his three sons are salesmen. Ed's older brother is a marine biologist; the younger, a lawyer. Their mother is a nurse/anesthetist whose book club is reading Responsible Men. Schwarzschild's debut shows signs of becoming a breakout first novel. Besides the First Fiction Tour selection, it's a Book Sense Notable pick for May. Early reviews range from respectful to jubilant; Schwarzschild seems stunned that Entertainment Weekly gave him an A- to Ian McEwan's B. "That's just a mistake," he says, "[McEwan's] Saturday is a wonderful novel."
Schwarzschild just turned in a short story collection called The Diamonds of Philadelphia, to be published by Algonquin, and has started an as-yet-untitled second novel, which will somehow unite a male professor at a Southern women's college in the early 1900s and another Schwarzschild, Carl, who worked with Albert Einstein and collected data that proved the existence of black holes. "I write in bursts, or what passes for bursts, during breaks from teaching," he says. A summer stint at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts should offer a much-needed stretch of free time. But first, there are all those book signings to attend. Traveling by plane, train, and Subaru to bookstores all over the country, Edward Schwarzschild has added a twist to the family tradition: He's a traveling salesman of literature.