Monument
On republishing a novel in a new time, with a new name
In 2019, McClelland & Stewart published a novel I wrote called The Empress of Idaho. It’s set in the late 1980s, in a town big enough for a high school football team but not big enough for a decent mall.
I was enormously proud and excited about the book. Others were too. I would hear from people who worked at Penguin Random House, not my editor or publisher, just early readers who wanted me to know they loved it. There was a hard, confusing, semi-autobiographical quality to the novel, about a teenager named Adam and his relationship with an older woman, a newcomer to the town named Beatrice.
(the original title and cover)
Cathal Kelly, a writer I admire, read it and said, “If Gillian Flynn, Richard Ford, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Irving got together to write a novel, they would come up with The Empress of Idaho. Todd Babiak has gotten very close to perfection here. Plan ahead before you start—once you do, you will not be able to stop.”
These quotations on the backs of books, called blurbs, only show up if the person who reads the book likes it. This quotation and another one by Claudia Dey, another writer I admire, who called it “a 1980s Lolita turned into a darkly compulsive miniseries by Jean-Marc Vallée” made me sweaty and wild with optimism.
Cathal and Claudia absolutely understood the novel, what I was trying to do. Everyone would think similarly. Soon I would be dining with Zadie Smith.
Some early online conversations about the novel focused on the sexy bits, so much that my future boss wanted to know if all this could embarrass the Australian state of Tasmania, where I was about to start a new job.
My boss need not have worried.
Nothing really happened with the novel. No one invited me to their literary festivals that autumn.
I could feel it coming in media interviews, as journalists nearly always placed the novel in the context of the Me Too movement. Was this not the wrong time to talk about a story like this? Even to promote it? I felt like I had done something wrong. The whole enterprise was off-topic, like shouting about the origins of communism while people are kicking their way through the Berlin Wall.
What could I say? They were right.
There is, of course, a good chance Cathal and Claudia and the others were just wrong, that it was a boring and pointless novel. The 1980s? Some football kid and his mom and some lusty dingbat? Who cares!
But instead of sleeping, I rolled around in bed thinking about good luck and bad luck in endeavours like novel writing and filmmaking. This takes a long time. The publisher or studio picks a date in the future to release the thing, without a psychic on staff to divine a perfect moment.
Two of my favourite classic American things, The Great Gatsby and It’s a Wonderful Life, were entirely out of sync with the culture at the time of their release.
(Alert, alert: I am speaking of these works as cultural artifacts, not comparing myself to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Frank Capra.)
Books about longing and moral emptiness and movies about sacrifice and desperation don’t sell well in eras of optimism and prosperity.
All we can do, as creative people, is write the book humming and shaking inside of us. Chasing trends, trying to align with the zeitgeist, might work for TikToks and Instagram Reels, but everyone’s favourite poet and lunatic fascist asshole Ezra Pound was right about the never-ending cycle of Make it New.
On June 23, McClelland & Stewart will release my new novel, What Gentlemen Do. I have been working on it for years, so I can’t claim to be hitting any cultural targets, but it does concern a young, aggrieved, white man, living in a sad and forgotten city, who feels the world and its economy are against him.
We have those!
On the same day, my wonderful publisher is also re-releasing The Empress of Idaho, with a new title: Monument. That is the name of the town where Adam and his mom and Beatrice live, and of course there are secondary meanings. It’s literature, mes amis.
(I am colourblind so I don’t really see what you see on the new cover)
Is this a better time for Monument? Who knows. A peek at today’s news suggests men aren’t behaving any better than in 2019. But as soon as you start thinking about it that way, about how a novel might fit into a cultural moment, you sound like a tarot card reader or a lunatic. I adore the leaders at McClelland & Stewart for trying a new, untested, bold thing.
How about the timing of What Gentlemen Do? Will people give it a try, tell their friends about it, read it over the summer, buy it for Christmas? Will it add to conversations about aggrieved young men? So far, my marketing plan is unanswered emails to podcasters and awkward TikToks and Reels about stoicism, a major part of the new novel.
We put so much of ourselves into these things, hoping for a meaningful connection with a reader. But the stoics would remind us 99% of this is outside our control. Try, try, try, risk, risk, risk, fix, fix, fix, push, push, push. But find a way to sleep at night.