Anthony Schneider is the author of Repercussions, a novel about a grandfather whose South African past continues to affect his family in the generations to come. Anthony is blogging here all week as a Visiting Scribe on The ProsenPeople.
“Beginning a book is unpleasant,” Philip Roth observed.
Roth is a veteran writer who has written 27 novels, give or take. So for the first‑, second- or third- time novelist, beginning a book is very unpleasant indeed, bordering on terrifying. You sit at your desk with an outline or a blank piece of paper, perhaps you’ve jotted some notes or written a few pages, but you have no idea how you’ll get from there to a finished manuscript weighing in at two or three hundred pages. Ask a dozen writers how their books began and you’ll likely get a dozen answers. That’s because beginnings are mysterious, and different writers have different processes.
My novel Repercussions started by accident. I was at the MacDowell Colony (thank you MacDowell) and gave myself writing exercises. One of my grandfathers had moved from Liverpool to South Africa, and I’d been thinking about his generation and his life and had brought along a book about Liverpool in the early twentieth century. I thought it might be liberating to write a day in the life— a character sketch, not a story (the word “novel” wasn’t even hovering in the air above my laptop back then). So I wrote about a boy in Liverpool. After twenty or so pages, I moved on.
A few months later I found myself writing about a grumpy grandfather in New York City, and at some stage it struck me that the two characters might be the same person. That was the first seed. As I wrote more, I had the sense that I already knew this character, that I wasn’t inventing him as much as uncovering him.
There was a second seed, which came much later, when I had written hundreds of pages (don’t worry, the finished book is a trim 227 pages). I asked myself what I was writing about, and it occurred to me that the book was about the conflict between humans and history. The forces of history are immensely powerful, too big for most people to understand, let alone control. At the same time, an individual’s actions, even when one is acting to make the world a better place, have ripples and repercussions that affect others, sometimes for many generations. The pages sort of opened up when I hit upon that idea, and I was able to mine a vein of the stories flooding in and begin threading them together into a single novel.
Novels teach us not only what happens but how it feels. Repercussions is very much an exploration of how it feels to be caught in the clash between your life and job and family — and history. It’s not a fair fight, precisely because history is a tsunami: big, complicated, powerful, and unpredictable, further complicated by the fact that history isn’t really observable while it’s going on. We spend our days thinking about tomorrow, our job, the holiday we’re planning, what to cook for dinner, our child’s homework. We can’t help being immersed in the quotidian even if we have our sights on the future. We’re not really aware how history ensues around us, and the vast majority of us certainly don’t know how we might affect it. That’s where I see the characters in my novel — inside history, whether near the eye of the storm or far from it, trying to change the world or to just get by. But history is happening, and the more powerful the currents of history the further the ripples will travel.
Postscript: I’m writing this from South Africa, where people don’t talk much about history, even recent history, and all too few are trying to change it. Perhaps a few novelists are writing about it. I hope so.
Anthony Schneider has been published in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Mid-American Review, and Details. Born in South Africa and educated in the United States, he divides his time between London and New York.
Anthony Schneider has been published in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Mid-American Review, and Details. Born in South Africa and educated in the United States, he divides his time between London and New York.
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