As a novelist, Darin Strauss has no interest in mining his happy, otherwise unremarkable Long Island childhood. Even at graduate school, while other middle-class students churned out pages on slack suburban themes, Strauss was determined to defy one familiar creative writing credo. "I thought, why not write what you don't know," he says at a Brooklyn eatery near his apartment. "Then you could push yourself. It's more of a challenge, but it pays off."
It certainly did for Strauss, whose highly unlikely but widely acclaimed first novel Chang and Eng (Dutton, 2000) won the then 30-year-old writer an unexpectedly large audience, a movie deal and an additional three-book contract. Based on the true 19th-century adventures of Chang and Eng Bunker, the conjoined Thai-born twins of North Carolina, the novel was originally pegged to sell about 10,000 copies, according to Strauss. It has sold more than seven times that. As he puts it, the book was a "hard-sell hand-sell," meaning the ultimate success of the potentially off-putting story came from word of mouth. Although Strauss continues to be astounded by his good fortune, he attributes it to readers' yen for the increasingly elusive good yarn. "The problem with so many books by people who go to writing programs is that they are competent writers, but they don't have good stories to tell," he says. "The most important thing is story. And what better story than that of Chang and Eng?"
Well, perhaps the real-life tale of Norman Selby, the inspiration for Strauss's second novel The Real McCoy (Dutton). Selby, a turn-of-the-century prizefighter, aka Charles "Kid" McCoy, was a master manipulator of the media, political aspirant, murderer, and finally, Henry Ford's gardener. Retrospectively, he can be said to have ushered in, and presciently embodied, an entire century of American self-invention. Strauss says that he learned of Selby while reading a book about identity during the writing of Chang and Eng. In Norman Selby's protean life, Strauss had found his next protagonist, although he changed his first name to Virgil.
"I didn't want to be as bound to truth as I was with Chang and Eng," Strauss explains. "I gave him the name Virgil because I was influenced by the Aeneid and I wanted to suggest an old-fashioned hero going through the world."
Strauss's enterprising approach toward fiction extends to the writing process. Despite his novels' historical settings, he claims he avoids prep work. "I'm not a big fan of research," he admits. "I feel like, if you do too much research, you feel compelled to put it in, and then it reads like a textbook. With Chang and Eng, for example, I didn't know a thing about old Siam. I wanted to be more faithful to the narrative and the fiction than to any fact. I felt that if I did too much research, it would change that. So I wrote the entire thing without doing one lick of research about Thailand. I just had this idea in my head of old Siam as this magical place. Then I went back and did the research to make sure I didn't make any huge mistakes."
Interestingly, Strauss's short if fortunate publishing career so far is full of almost as many fateful twists and turns as Selby's life. As an English major at Tufts University, he met a friend of his college roommate named John Hodgman. An aspiring literary agent, Hodgman told Strauss the aspiring novelist that, should their plans work out, he'd love to represent him. Strauss then attended NYU's graduate writing program, studying with E.L. Doctorow and Peter Carey. Distressed that most of his friends were publishing stories while he remained unable to make a first sell, Strauss received some helpful advice from Doctorow. "He told me, it's not a contest," Strauss recalls; he then began working on Chang and Eng.
He sent the first 200 pages to Hodgman, then a literary agent with Writers House. Impressed, Hodgman mentioned the novel to a young editor at a party. The editor was intrigued. Not long after, the same editor called Hodgman, told him that he had just become editor and chief of Dutton, that he needed to publish a novel and could he please send over Chang and Eng. The editor was Brian Tart, and he liked enough of what he read to suggest revisions. Dutton bought the book for a low five-figure advance.
Just after the publication of Chang and Eng, however, Hodgman quit as Strauss's agent to pursue his own writing career. That same week, both People and Time gave the novel great reviews. Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency came calling, signing the suddenly celebrated but unrepresented Strauss. Chalfant shrewdly secured him a much more lucrative three-book deal with Dutton that includes The Real McCoy (with a reported first printing of 50,000), a short story collection and one more novel. Then there is that well-paid Chang and Eng screenplay he recently wrote.
Still recovering from his two-year streak of great timing and positive publicity, Strauss says he's anxious about the reception of The Real McCoy, which he believes contains some of his best writing. Like Chang and Eng, his latest novel explores the theme of conflicted identity, but with broader characterizations and a more boldly imagined narrative. "I think The Real McCoy is a better book," Strauss says. "Chang and Eng is a sadder story, which I think is easier to pull off. The Real McCoy is more ambitious. I tried to say more about our country."
