It’s odd publishing a book that’s set in the present moment, or what will soon be. Labor Day, with the Republican convention kicking off in St. Paul. (My first three novels were each anchored to public events, the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights demonstrations in San Francisco, the Patty Hearst kidnapping.) With this novel, I couldn’t figure out where the finish line was. After awhile it got fixed on Labor Day, the public event I imagined was a huge anti-abortion rally on the Minnesota state capitol grounds, featuring an induced birth-in, with the evangelicals appropriating the term “Labor Day” for their own uses. The anti-abortion rally on the state capitol grounds didn’t seem so far-fetched, as Governor Pawlenty and his wife hosted Louis Palu’s Christian revival on the capitol grounds during Pawlenty first term in office. I muddled along for a couple of years with this novel, in the middle of some big life changes, when the RNC gave me the gift of opening the Republican convention on Labor Day in the Twin Cities, where my detective smoked a lot of weed and feared he was losing his existential chops.
It’s strange to aim at the present. The only way I could see it was pictorially, broad strokes leaking toward cartoon. But that’s not so different from the way we live our lives, disembodied from the news of the day, but still reliant on it. So much of the news involves the manipulation of it. Obama and Paris Hilton. Inspired cartooning. News is a rated production. I enjoyed thinking ahead of events a number of months, but the news kept changing. At first, as McCain, Romney, and Huckabee, each won one of the first three primaries, I imagined a brokered Republican convention in which the fictive guv of of Minnesota stole the presidential nomination after delighting the evangelicals and firming up his conservative bone fides speaking at the capitol birth-in. I scratched the presidential nomination heist after McCain locked up the nomination. My guv now has to be content with the vice nomination. It occurred to me that what I was writing was the first cousin of Philip Roth’s “alternative fiction,” as practiced in The Plot Against America. Mine was “alternative present.”
