Challenging times call for creative measures – and so it is that newspapers, purveyors of factual truth, have joined forces with fiction writers, purveyors of psychological truth, in the hope of expanding their readership and providing that readership with an escape from the grim news of the day.
On Sunday, July 12, The New York Times devoted its entire magazine to fiction. And the Boston Globe recently serialized Ben Mezrich’s “The Mechanic,” a novella, the Globe said, “with a strong Boston accent.”
I’m delighted that Dee DelBello — publisher of the Westchester and Fairfield County Business Journals and of WAG magazine, which I edit — has decided to serialize my latest novel, “Seamless Sky,” published in January by JMS Books, next week in the business journals and in September in WAG. If “The Mechanic” has a strong Boston accent, I’m proud to say “Seamless Sky” has a New York one, albeit by way of California, as the centerpiece of the book is set in Manhattan around the events of 9/11. There Jade Cabral is a golden guy. Brilliant and handsome, with a California coolness and a Harvard MBA, he is poised for wealth and success in New York’s Financial District.
But Jade harbors a secret flaw, a thirst for revenge against Señor Rodriguez, the California landowner who deprived his father – Señor’s out-of-wedlock son, John Virgil – of his family’s rightful inheritance and place in the world. Jade thinks that if he succeeds in New York, he can make up for every loss and humiliation his family has endured at the hands of Señor. That searing quest leads him into the arms of Nan Spencer, a lovely, fragile socialite, and to the top of the financial world – the Twin Towers. There Jade survives 9/11 only to discover in its aftermath a fate worse than death.
I never intended to write a novel about 9/11. Having been a tangential part of the team that covered the terrorist attacks for The Journal News, I saw what those who lost and lived through it suffered, are still suffering. I would never want to exploit the privilege of having reported on it.
At the same time, 9/11 is part of me, as a New Yorker, an American and a writer – one who has always been fascinated by how leadership and power shape our workplaces, Wall Street and our nation. Determined to explore this theme in a new book begun in the years just after 9/11, I found those events too compelling not to revisit them.
But while 9/11 is the literal and psychological high point of the story – indeed, a dividing line so seismic that it reverses the narrative’s trajectory in the second half of the book – it is not the only inspiration for the novel. I’ve always loved big, juicy, multigenerational tales like “Wuthering Heights,” “So Big” and “East of Eden,” in which the second generation mirrors the first as the characters plumb some of the central themes of human existence – injustice, ambition, revenge, forgiveness, love.
It is my hope that readers will come to find in “Seamless Sky” a not-so-distant lens of another tumultuous time through which they can safely explore their own feelings of loss, anger, grief and acceptance.