PROFESSIONAL SPORTS ARE ONE OF THE INCREASINGLY FEW collision points of our increasingly fragmented culture. More and more the only common underlying thread in our lives—in which one can live in an utterly different universe from the one his upstairs neighbor lives in—is sports.

How bizarre, pathological, and twisted this thread gets. Especially with regards to the amount of money moving around now. Even more especially in contrast to the economy-afflicted fanbase.

Following what horrible things professional athletes do when we overindulge them in every aspect of their lives is more and more like a dystopic television show in science fiction we never imagined would grow beyond metaphor. The meltdown, felony, or disgrace has become the national pasttime. The sport the sidebar. Soon enough one of these stories is going to be bigger than OJ. OJ wasn’t making $130 million a year, or propping up the entire professional golf industry like Tiger Woods was.

Sports, like their stars, are ciphers. They are whatever we need them to be. Because we are the ticket buyer, we are the eyeballs on the TV commercials and banner ads. The contradictory values of professional sports are just a reflection of ours. The tragic self-disgracing of a heroic athlete is unique to our times and I believe it is relevant and revelatory about us as Americans.

On one hand with MVP I wanted to write about this twisted annual holiday of the professional athlete in spectacular destruction. Our culture is profoundly, elementally twisted and I like to write about that. On the other hand, the fact that MVP is about a professional athlete is incidental. It's about a man ruined by his own ambition. I like to think that Gilbert Marcus could be any man.

I wrote MVP in Harrisonburg, VA and in Brighton, MA and Somerville, MA. I started it when I was 21 and it was published when I was 25. The first draft took 10 months. At one point it was over 700 pages and unrelentingly dense, impenetrable. I let it get bizarre. I wanted it bizarre. American culture is bizarre, professional sports are bizarre, I am bizarre. I was just letting my subconscious lead, for lack of any better tactic. My subconscious was all I had. I had a vision of a novel in which Kerouac meets David Foster Wallace meets Boogie Nights meets American Psycho meets Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates meets Libra by Don Delillo meets, like, Sports Illustrated or something. Who knows.

I went way out of my way to avoid having a job, as I had been doing for several years at that point ever since dropping out of college after three weeks to be a novelist. The point was: I didn’t want to be a responsible, respectable person. I was raised in the suburbs of northern Virginia. These aren’t the suburbs you know. Everyone is a logistician for the CIA, or a chemical engineer at the Pentagon. The people tend to be very brilliant, successful, literal-minded and conservative. It’s all math and science and bureaucracy and order. In northern Virginia, wanting to be a writer means trying to be a reporter at a newspaper. Wanting to be an artist means majoring in graphic design.

I didn’t want to be prudent or logical about it. I knew that only gets you so far. The roadside of the American literary landscape is littered with the corpses of would-be writers who tried to do it prudently and smartly and comfortably. Most of them have MFAs. Safety net careers that eventually somehow become main careers, the desire to write just a vague sad longing, or worse. I wanted to put all my energy into the book. I ate once a day, owned nothing. I was 21, 22, so who cared. To do it, I took advantage of whoever’s generosity I could. You have to be a bastard to make it, as John Lennon said. I was self-absorbed, cold-blooded. Still am. I was like a junkie but instead of drugs it was fiction (both are about equal with regards to how smart it is to get involved with them).

When things became insustainable, I did what I had to do job-wise and nothing more, because I didn’t want to divert my focus. Low-responsibility jobs were the way to go. For about a week, which was all I could stand, I was working at a construction site under a drunk Irish carpenter on the South Shore of Massachusetts. I was coming home from working at a construction site all day in the middle of the Bay State summer, sunburned and worn the fuck out, to sit down with a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes in a blazing hot tiny mouse-ridden Brighton apartment to try and write. Often it felt hopeless.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t care if it was never published, if no one ever read it. I was just letting it rip. I had this image everytime I sat down to work of opening a vein in my arm and just letting everything inside me pour out. I figured, Maybe I’ll never write another one again, so better go balls to the wall. I finished that first draft in October 2004 or so. I remember it was when the Red Sox won the World Series.

I got an agent to represent me. She was just starting out. I think she’d been an agent for like six months. First she passed on it, without reading any of it—just having read the description. Sports didn’t interest her. This is the case for many readers of fiction. They have a bias against sports. They think they are stupid, trivial cesspools of repulsive masculinity, and that they’re above them. Sports, they believe, do not make interesting subjects of fiction. Not like brilliant, groundbreaking things such as, say, families in Maine do. So that’s how I knew I was on to something—that there was undeveloped land there that everyone else had been passing up, their noses in the air.

But in the meantime I’d sent some pages to another agent at the same agency. You’re not supposed to do that, but fuck it. He happened to read the pages. For some reason he showed them to the agent who’d passed. She changed her mind, called me.

Before she sent it out to publishers, she told me over and over that she was promising me nothing. Once she finally sent it out, she emailed me within a few hours exhilerated because it was getting so much response. She said, “Even publishers who don’t return my boss's calls are calling me!” Most were only paying lip service—ultimately said they could not figure out how to market it, or even how to get it past their legal department. It was little more than a novelty to them. One editor saw it differently though. Brant Rumble at Scribner. He had balls enough to put his money where his mouth was. He bought the book.

One thing I was surprised by and would tell people to be ready for, since no one ever told me: How long it all took even once the sale’s been agreed upon. I had to wait almost a year for them the draw up the contract. I had to wait another year for them to cut me the first installment of the advance. That was confusing and maddening, even moreso because I knew had no right complaining since I was such a lucky motherfucker in an incredibly fortunate position. I was ready for the glacial pace of publishing, having had some things published by literary magazines, but this was something different altogether. I could never have been ready for it. It was my fault—part of me, despite what I’d told myself, hoped I would get one of those great big superstar advances I’d been hearing about. They’d throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at me, the book would sell hundreds of thousands of copies, I'd be a Name, a Figure, sorting through a deluge of interview requests and invitations to festivals, etc. I’d never have to hustle and worry again, just focus on writing from here on out. The lean days were over, part of me was secretly hoping. That didn’t happen. It turns out it takes a long fucking time to sell a book. Mine was sold relatively quick, but the wait still felt insufferable. Part of the reason why was because I was a young nitwit and have always been impatient. I tend to make things as difficult for myself as possible, whether I meant to or not. So I found myself in an odd state of limbo for about a year and a half. I didn't know what to do. I didn't have anything else to focus on instead, having had to make writing my only focus in order to do it well. I'm not one of those people who is smart and talented enough to write in his or her spare time. Every day I expected to get a life-changing email. I was like the mom in Requiem for A Dream. That really does get into your head. You become obsessed. I got a job at a gas station in the meanwhile—mindless, low responsibility. I worked on new books, other things. I imagined myself a secret genius in exile. The guys at the gas station kept asking me when my alleged novel was coming out. They thought I was a fraud. I didn’t know what to tell them. “Soon, I think?” After awhile they stopped asking. Everyone did.

My agent kept me calm when I’d get too impatient by telling me stories about working in a strip club before she became an agent. Breaking up fights between the strippers and getting their fake nails stuck in her cheek.

I tried despite it all to stay even-keeled about the whole thing so I could write another book even if this turned out to be a disappointing experience. I’d learned writing MVP that writing books was the only thing I could imagine myself doing with my life. I didn’t want to be one of those people who writes one book then gives up because it didn’t do what they expected. So I kept writing. I did it in self-defense.

Meanwhile I was eating shit at work one day when my agent emailed to say that my editor had had lunch with Tom Chiarella of Esquire and they were going to run an excerpt of MVP and put me in a list of their 100 people to know about. I responded: “Holy shit.” Ten seconds later I responded again: “Holy fucking shit.” That came out in October 2006. Brad Pitt was on the cover. Kevin Alexander from Writers Digest saw the excerpt and did a profile on me. I’ve been very, very, very lucky.

I rewrote MVP dozens of times along the way for various reasons. I was still improving so steeply as a writer that I couldn’t look at it without grimacing. And I had to conduct some major On the Road-level top-to-bottom rewriting to satisfy Scribner’s legal department.

It came out in May 2007. I had just turned 25. My girlfriend threw me a big surprise party at my favorite bar. She flew my best friends in from out of town. That’s when I knew I’d marry her. I was working on other books. I was working for a forensic psychiatrist by then. He’d given me a part-time job for the most part because I had a book coming out. He’s the national preeminent authority on the violent side effects of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and antismoking medication. The job was a godsend.

Reviews were mixed. Some were good. I noticed the publications who did not review it more than I noticed the ones who did. Sales started off okay then diminished. Online chatter was both very positive and very negative. You try not to give too much of a shit either way.

As far as the author’s concerned, there is never enough promotion, never enough press, there are never enough sales. It’s a no-win game to get too invested in what’s happening. Which is hard because to get to the point of having the opportunity to be concerned about it, you have to have put all your eggs into this basket, so this has become the entirety of your existence. It’s hard to be nonchalant about the entirety of your existence. Especially when friends and family are calling to ask why the publisher isn’t promoting it more, telling you about seeing it in the used bookstore a week after it came out, telling you how you should hire a private publicist to get more push behind your book, everybody being an expert, reading story after story in which reporters one by one faux-grimly but secretly gleeful clang the deathknell of the novel, which they never had the guts or ability to write. But you have to be laissez-faire. The prospect of a lot of attention, which arose when the Esquire thing came out, freaked me out. I wasn’t ready for it and have always been at my best and most comfortable when no one is watching and no one expects anything from me. You have to keep doing what got you there in the first place.

Nothing obvious changed once it came out. My day-to-day life and routines remained unchanged. As I wanted. I had already moved on to my next novel, NoVA, and even had finished a draft of that and was deep into another, so I wasn’t too invested in what happened with MVP. I was more curious than anything else. Like following a sports team. I’d told myself I would not get too caught up in it all, would stay focused on the work at hand: new books. That’s what does most writers in: getting too caught up in everything, losing focus. The only way to win is to keep writing and keep writing as well as you can, despite whatever temptations to lower your standards or just quit. I think about how the roadside is littered with all those MFA corpses and I keep going.

A couple of editors from men’s magazines got in touch to see if I had any ideas for articles. They do that: their jobs depend on identifying the next new whatever. They’re like movie executives. They email you: “Hey, I saw that thing you did. Loved it! Devoured it! You’re the best new writer in fiction today! Want to pitch us some ideas?” That was pretty exciting. I tried hard to come up with some. It’s harder than I thought. I took one assignment with one major magazine. I worked my ass off on it. But it wasn’t right. I was too entrenched in my ways after years of working alone to work collaboratively or be open to changing my style. I couldn’t trust the editor I was working with at the magazine. And we just didn’t get along. We were both the same age, both stuck in our ways. I couldn’t figure it out. And I was in the middle of an incredibly long, involved novel that was consuming most of my energy. And I still had a job. They ended up killing the story after several months of work. I felt like a failure. I’d imagined I’d be one of those men of letters who do it all: novels, short stories, journalism, book reviews, plays, screenplays. What I learned was that I am not one of those men. I am a novelist and nothing but a novelist. I write in a particular way about pathological people. The bizareness of American culture. My books involve professional sports and northern Virginia. And that’s all I am and all I do.

It’s a valuable thing to have come to terms with. You have to learn what you can about yourself, when you can. Now at 28 I can go learn more.

MVP and all others at Amazon

July 2010

Back