Endangered Species

“I smiled sadly for a love I could not obey.”
-David Bowie, Lady Stardust

Finally, Endangered Species is done, or at least I have a complete draft to edit. It’s been eleven years since I first scribbled it out on my afternoon coffee breaks at Olin Library. I had just finished writing The Last Bender. Like all of my novels its genesis involved two impulses: a what-if scenario and an engagement with another piece of writing. For the Last Bender the what-if scenario was simple. What if scientists invented a drug that radically accelerated human intelligence to machine-like speeds but that when it broke down in the body it turned people insane? What if in their insanity they hallucinated scientific theories that drove them to murder people? What if a recovering drug addict with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was the detective investigating the murders but instead of being a free agent, a romantic Dark Knight, he worked for a mega corporation, Monozone Inc., in the nation of Inania? The piece of writing was The Little Sister, which I read over Christmas at my mother’s and James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia. I thought, fuck, I can do this. Torrential, hard boiled surrealism. Low tech noir. Nasty, depressing, futuristic sex. Detectives without honor.

For Endangered Species the what-if was: what if a guy who never moved from his apartment got a call from his first and only girlfriend. Who is this guy? How come he never moved? Who is she? Sally is an academic and Alex is a bibliophile, a Romantic autodidact, the type of person dismissed by professors and grad students as a hopeless, naive fool at best; a reactionary at worst. He has an eccentric family. His mind wanders through the narrative. When I discovered his brother Roy, the dark thread was in the weave. The writing that served as goad was a piece of MFA crap I heard at a Book and Bowl soiree at Cornell. (Book and Bowl was a club for writers and artists founded long ago, with a small endowment. Pynchon and Nabokov are rumoured to have been members. Every generation some quixotic soul at Cornell rediscovers the endowment and starts it up again). It was one of those clever short stories in which nothing happens, but the narrator breathlessly tells the reader about her family, adopting a modified Tristam Shandy tone. I thought, fuck, I can do this.

I wrote two other versions of Endangered Species. Version one read more as an outline and I dropped it. In 2001 I started to rewrite it, expanding as I went. Then Maja became pregnant with our third child, Andrew, and a bad case of high blood pressure, possibly pre-eclampsia, put the kabosh on that. Before returning to it I started The Man Who Can’t Die, after listening to the first few chapters of Brave New World driving back to Ithaca from Minnesota. I never finished listening to it, and I hope I didn’t rip off Huxley to much. What if scientists invented a drug that cured human unhappiness and ennui but killed 10% of everyone who took it?

A year and a half ago I took up the project again. I had Eric Maroney’s careful annotations to the original manuscript and the unbelievably patient, constant and indispensible ear of Philip Shelley as guides. And it’s done, more or less. An hour or two a night, a page or two a day and after a year and a half I have a 541 page manuscipt, as compared to the original 125 pages. So it is possible to be a full time worker, father of five, husband and novelist.