Bad Americans: Part I is a collection of interconnected short stories that follow 12 strangers who gather in a billionaire’s Hamptons mansion to date, compete, and tell stories during the summer of 2020 and the COVID pandemic. What was the inspiration for this book?

The inspiration actually started almost 25 years ago, in 2001. Right after the 9/11 attacks, I moved from New York City to the UK to study abroad at the University of Oxford. Right across from my College, Wadham, was Blackwell’s Bookshop, and sometimes I would explore books there. I started reading The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, in depth. I had already read The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, in high school, and in general, I really liked the exciting, satirical works of the past. At the time, I was also experimenting with narrative forms and basing them on the ancient and classic works I was reading. For my Fiction Workshop Tutorial, I tried to write a story within a story, but it didn’t go so well. I thought that one day I would have the narrative skill to do this–to one-up Boccaccio and Chaucer and write a frame novel with short stories where each reflected and reinforced the other, and our time.

So fast forward to 2019, I was finishing up the editing of The Dance Towards Death, the third book in The Brotherhood Chronicle, which was coming out in September 2020, and I started thinking about the next book in The Human Tragedy, my panoramic portrait of American society in short stories, the modern version of Balzac’s Human Comedy. The first volume, Good Americans (2013), was a highly provocative and challenging short story collection that definitely did progress its form, but it was also rather conventional in its basic structure. So I thought to myself, how do I one-up that? And that’s when I thought back to my original challenge from 2001. I already had 4 books under my belt, each with a different aesthetic or narrative challenge, so I figured I was up to the great task of writing a novel containing stories that worked both ways: as a novel and a short story collection. I came up with a basic sketch of 10 Americans quarantined in an academic library during a pandemic. Each day they would interact, and each night one would tell a story.

Then the pandemic actually hit us. In late January 2020, I became extremely sick and had to cancel my trip to SE Asia. NYC shut down, my parents got sick, and neighbors died. My mom was on the frontlines. And I followed everything that was happening. I saw the rich were moving to the Hamptons to escape, just like in The Decameron. And there were breadlines on the streets of Queens, riots in Manhattan. Assaults on Asian-Americans, a disproportionate toll on People of Color, especially frontline workers. Rhetoric about immigrants. So I realized, as someone who was dedicated to realism in my works as it was, that I had all the material in front of me for Bad Americans. I just needed to do background research, and eventually, after the first draft, get some opinions on the stories and the characters telling them. The setting moved to The Hamptons, I invented all the characters, and wrote a massive first draft, both frame narrative and individual stories. I got feedback on the individual stories from people I trusted who might have similar backgrounds. Some of the stories, and to a lesser extent, character details, changed a bit, though not dramatically. And the frame narrative just needed to be condensed, which I eventually did after successive drafts.

With twelve major voices, how did you keep each character distinct? Did any character surprise you as you wrote them?

It just happened, I don’t know. I did initially write a bunch of character sketches. There were a lot of details about each character in the first draft that were discarded in future drafts, and there were some concerns by beta readers early on about the characters’ needs and motivation to be in The Getaway. But in general, the characters stayed consistent and dimensional. All my books feature tons of characters, and each is multi-faceted yet vivid, so that wasn’t difficult per se. It’s just the way my imagination works. So I could already picture them all from the beginning.

I’m not sure any of the characters really surprised me. I guess my main dilemma was how to portray the billionaire Olive Mixer. The popular choice would be to make him into some evil rich person, a la Squid Game or something. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make him dimensional and human too. He has his reasons for creating The Getaway, like each guest has for being there. Of course, he is Big Brother here, but nevertheless, he didn’t need to be overly evil or anything. Same thing with Taylor, or Ricard, or even Lisa and Hayley. They all have their good and bad sides. They might annoy you, but that just makes them more human and realistic.

The book doesn’t shy away from political and cultural clashes. What risks did you feel you were taking?

The whole book is a risk, as is all my work. So I figured, as long as we are breaking all the rules, we might as well go all the way. Of course, it’s basically prohibited to have political and, to a lesser extent, cultural clashes in mainstream literary fiction. With the latter, especially when you have someone of a particular cultural background, according to the unwritten rules, you can only write about that group. The truth is, we live in a cross-cultural society, especially in Queens, NY, so that’s absurd, especially if you’re trying to portray reality, and it also highly dilutes the possibilities of narrative content and form.

And really, the extent to which contemporary politics should play a role in the book’s conflicts was a dilemma for me early on. Other than being against the grain, I was also worried that such references would make the book feel dated for someone reading it 20 or 40 years from now.  But I decided that if I was really going to make a realistic portrait of the time, there’s no way I could shy away from it. That was one of the major fault lines of the time, as it is today. So I embraced it, at least early in the book.

Each guest’s story changes how the group sees them. What does the book suggest about the power of storytelling itself?

We tell ourselves and each other stories all the time, and this is especially true in trying circumstances, especially when a bunch of people are forced to be together. But the short story collection has become a rather staid form. Everyone knows how a collection of stories is going to be structured at a basic level, even if it’s a novel-in-stories, like Winesburg, Ohio, and many books like it onwards (Olive Kitteridge, for example). And usually, we know that each individual story is going to end with some sense of character revelation. So one strength of having frame characters tell the stories is that it makes them and us see these stories as a dynamic, fluid, and even questionable form. Unless we have an unreliable narrator, to some extent, each story in a traditional collection is given somewhat holy and unimpeachable status. But you wouldn’t give that status to a story your barber or Uber Driver told you. Even while being thoroughly engaged and entertained, you would question its authenticity and its objectivity, wouldn’t you? So, on a basic level, that’s what the book is trying to get at: storytelling at its rawest and most realistic form.

Now, transfer that rawness to the immediacy and tensions of the pandemic, and you see the true power of storytelling emerge, which is the haunting effect of portraying the basic struggles of life: life and death, love and loss, privilege and want. And apply it specifically to characters from different walks of life quarantined in a mansion, and now you have a third dimension, which is context. The characters know each other on a basic level, many of them might even want to date each other, but they don’t necessarily trust each other, or know the context of their lives or positions. Now you are questioning and portraying, but you are also revealing. And you are seeing a picture of the lives of others who are not in the mansion either.

So each character has an objective for each story, each reveals themselves in each story, but not necessarily in the way they want to, and perhaps they have a different goal for each character listening. And the other characters will see them through a mix of their preconceived notions, and how they’ve been convinced or changed by the story in question. It’s an endlessly complex equation you can go over and over. Which is the point of the exercise.

So I think the book demonstrates the immense power of storytelling and also the complexities of the motivations of narratives told.
 

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