Andrew Goldstein: A Novel as Family Project

A while back, I mentioned Eric Orner’s art for his brother Peter’s novel, Love and Shame and Love. Recently, I saw a galley of Andrew Goldstein’s The Bookie’s Son, which also has drawings throughout the novel. In the acknowledgments, he mentions that these drawings are also a family affair, and I thought some of y’all might be interested in hearing about that, so I got in touch with his publicist and asked what he could tell us…

The other day, I was on the phone with a young woman at Book Baby and she said she loved the illustrations in The Bookie’s Son. She repeated this again later, which made me feel good since my daughter Lucy had drawn them. My original idea was to use real photos of my family even though the story is a fictional version of my childhood. I like the idea of mixing fact and fiction, memoir and novel, but at some point I chickened out. I decided that it might be too confusing for the reader, though I did use a real photo of my parents for the cover, which my son Max designed.

I use the illustrations at the beginning of each chapter. They are simple line drawings that were once more common in novels. The illustrations of people are based on family photos; there are also some drawings of physical objects and one racehorse. I debated the decision to use illustrations because one could argue that it is better for the reader to form their own impressions of what the main characters look like. I respect that perspective but in the end, for this novel, I decided the images added to the content.

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19 May 2012 | guest authors |

Read This: Recent Character Approved Selections

I realized it had been a while since I mentioned any of the books I’ve been reading for my regular column with the USA Network’s Character Approved blog—like the centennial editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs that the Library of America put out. It’s been something close to 30 years since the last time I’d looked at A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, but those stories sucked me right back in, and the new introductions are pretty interesting—Junot Diaz on the Martian stories especially, but you’ll still want to give Thomas Mallon on Tarzan a look.

I also really liked Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamour in Glass, which I totally expected—after all, I’d enjoyed Shades of Milk and Honey when it came out in 2010, and this was a straight-up sequel. Kowal found a great solution to the problem of what to say about your romance characters once you’ve hit the Happily Ever After; as I noted, Glamour in Glass is “a charming fantasy, a delightful comedy of manners, and a gripping suspense story, expertly blended into one novel.”

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18 May 2012 | read this |