David Trent craves success as a writer … perhaps even more than he wants to write.
Trent’s ambitions are clear early on in Matthew Pearl’s “The Award” when he creates a forged recommendation from a well-known writer to help launch his career. But Trent is still struggling when he and his girlfriend Bonnie move into a weird third-floor apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The place is riddled with problems, but it turns out his downstairs neighbor is the esteemed novelist, Silas Hale. David smells an opportunity but completely misreads Hale, a vicious and vituperative man who delights in tormenting lesser writers. David is willing to abase himself and to lie to and maybe even lose Bonnie if it means achieving greatness. Pearl’s cast of characters also includes the smug and privileged Barnaby Masters, David’s rival for Hale’s mentorly affection and for literary success.
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Then David stumbles into success, but at a cost – there’s a death, and ultimately another, and, perhaps worse (in David’s eyes), he’s responsible for the loss of a genuine literary talent. It’s a dark and twisted tale, and Pearl, who has previously written historical novels that have included Dante, Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Dickens, said in a video interview that this was the most fun he’d had writing a book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Before the book begins, there’s a note saying, “Some of this happened.” So, how many deaths are you responsible for?
I probably shouldn’t answer that. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek about me reflecting on my journey as a novelist. All novels pretty much grow out of our own lives. But I’m someone who doesn’t like to draw from my own life, so that message was in a sense to myself, too, an encouragement that it could actually be a useful exercise. I’m a very non-confrontational person. When I feel stress or something feels negative, I try to forget about it and not talk about it. I just put that in a corner of my brain. So I found it empowering to draw from that corner of the literary world.
All the characters are drawn from getting to know that world and other writers.
The word satire has come up a couple of times in early responses to the book, which is totally fine. If you haven’t actually lived through some of the more intense parts of the writing world, at least in New England, then it may feel that way. I feel like I held back from how far I could have pushed it in relation to writers that I’ve actually encountered.
Q. When you’re writing these thrillers, do you plot out the ending before you start?
I try to outline, but I keep the outline loose enough so it’s never stopping me from letting it change. I always think I know where I’m going, and I’ve gotten better at letting myself go in different directions.
When he forges a recommendation from an accomplished writer, that was one of the things I hadn’t planned originally. I got stuck fairly early, and I needed to think of that and go back and layer that in to show us something about David’s personality. So that was really important, and it wasn’t in the outline.
This was the most fun book I’ve ever written. I was writing it for fun. It’s the only book since my first one where I didn’t tell anybody other than my wife that I was working on it. I actually wrote “rules” on my document. And one of them was to have fun – writing is not always fun.
Q. Your earlier historical novels also revolved around writers – Dante, Poe and Dickens. Is there a link between those and this contemporary novel?
This mirrors the character David a little bit – I really did start writing almost by accident. Growing up in Florida, I met multiple astronauts who had been to space long before I ever met a writer. So it seemed more realistic to go to the moon than to write a book. Everything we read was by people who were dead, so it didn’t seem like a thing you could aim to do. Then, in college, I majored in literature.
So it’s not a coincidence. I was exploring what it means to be a writer in those books. It was kind of my education. And being a writer does seem like an alien species to most people. I still struggle when someone says, “What do you do?”
Q. One writer in the book is more talented than David, but walks away from writing because of how cutthroat the world is. Could you imagine yourself ceasing to be a writer?
Some really talented writers I’ve known have walked away because they sort of lost their path or became too exhausted. I have those thoughts, too. It’s such a personal process; you’re putting yourself out there, and we all can feel very drained by that at times. I know in my own head, I’ve reached points where I say to myself, “I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”
Q. David is far from heroic in the way he handles, or doesn’t handle, confrontation and crisis, and in the way he treats his girlfriend. Do you worry about how far you can go before the reader might say, “I don’t want to keep spending time with this guy.”
It’s a real trick. I love characters like that. My personal preference is a character where I’m asking, “Why am I continuing to root for him?” One way to do it is to put the character in a world where he’s surrounded by darker forces, so his ability to survive that becomes what you’re rooting for, because that’s something we can all relate to.