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Fifteen-year-old Lulu bounces back and forth between the high society life of her mother and the illicit world of her gambling father. When Lulu's uptown friend Dack loses more than he can afford to lose at a poker game, she finds herself entering a high stakes game to win it back. After Lulu's mother announces her engagement to the Mayor of New York City, the stakes in this not-quite-legal

Many, many thanks to everyone who came out in the rain last Friday night to hear Rupert Thomson read from and discuss his latest novel, Death of a Murderer, at McNally Robinson.

He was charming and smart, and we had a nice crowd, at least 15% of whom — or should that be which? — were bloggers. Beforehand I met Matt Cheney and Jessica Stockton for the first time; afterward I stayed for nearly an hour talking with friends and with people I’d previously met only in email. If you’d like the roll call, I’ll defer to Return of the Reluctant. Special thanks to E., who turned up despite being pregnant with twins.
 

Most of the evening is a blur to me now, but the lovely Zan of A Cup of Tea and a Wheat Penny has a good recap. Sounds like she’s also suffering from Thomson fever. (I’ve been there, Zan. If you really want to wallow in the delicious obsessiveness of it all, I prescribe The Book of Revelation and an old mix of doomed-love songs.)

At the end of our talk, Rupert discussed a memoir he’s writing about family estrangement. When his father died in the mid-80s, Rupert lived with the rest of his family — including two brothers, and one brother’s wife and child — in one house, in Berlin, for a year.

The result of all this bonding? He hasn’t talked to his stepmother or youngest brother for more than two decades.
 

If you couldn’t make it out last week, listen to Leonard Lopate’s interview with Thomson, and stay tuned for a segment at Bat Segundo. Thanks to Maximus Clarke for the snaps.

All of a sudden I’m going to be doing a public interview with Rupert Thomson — a literary hero I’ve never burned out on — at McNally Robinson on Friday, August 17, at 7 p.m.

The conversation dovetails with the appearance of his latest novel, Death of a Murderer. A more stripped-down, contemplative story than I’m used to seeing from Thomson, the book still reflects the author’s preoccupation with obsession and the nightmarish paths it can lead down. Last year he described Death of a Murderer like this:

The new novel is set during a single night in November 2002. A police constable is guarding the dead body of a famous murderer in a hospital mortuary north-east of London. It’s a twelve-hour shift, from seven in the evening until seven the following morning. The body in question is that of Myra Hindley, though her name is never mentioned. Together with her lover, Ian Brady, Myra Hindley was responsible for the deaths of five people in the early 1960’s. Three of those murdered were young children. For the British public, she became an icon of evil. She was a woman, and she had killed children. People never forgave her for what she’d done. They never forgave, and they never forgot. Even today, she’s something of a taboo subject.

At the beginning of the policeman’s shift, everything is normal and routine — except, of course, that the situation is, in itself, extraordinary. As the hours go by, though, and prompted by the body he is guarding, he begins to meditate on his own life, and the wrong he has done. The novel has something of St Augustine’s Confessions about it, I hope, in that it shows a man being completely honest with and about himself. It is also a gloss on Myra Hindley’s life, since the policeman is reflecting particularly on obsessive relationships with other people, and how they can lead you into patterns of behaviour you never thought possible.

See also:

• My May 2006 email interview with Thomson.

• Books that make you stand at the bus stop. (In the rain. After midnight. While buses drive past.)

• On the architectural aspects of Divided Kingdom.

• Spooked by an encounter with evil.

(Many thanks to Jessica Stockton for organizing, and Ed Champion for proposing, the event.)

My Book Expo interview with Shalom Auslander is up.

We talk about the many manuscripts he’s destroyed to avoid divine retribution, Red Lobster as the pinnacle of unclean foods, his sex-starved (and imaginary) shiksa high school girlfriend, and much more.

Auslander’s hilariousness comes across in the recording, but his impeccably deadpan delivery does not. You’ll have to overlook my constant cackling if you listen.

(I’ve always detested the tightly controlled, little-tinkling-bell chuckle that signifies the amusement — or is that “amusement”? — of L-train-riding hipster females, but if that’s what it sounds like when I laugh, I may have to rethink my opposition.)

Sunday I came down with a cold that developed yesterday into a hacking cough. Dana assured me I was not alone. “The train sounded like a TB ward this morning,” she said.

Hypochondriac that I am, I was soon lost in visions of my impending quarantine at Bellevue. It didn’t sound so bad, on reflection. Sure, I might lose a lung, but at least I’d get some writing done.
 

Assuming I’m not in quarantine, though, I’ll be reading from my novel-in-progress this Sunday at 5 p.m. at Good World, with Belinda McKeon and Anthony Tognazzini.

Saturday at 2 p.m. I’ll break with one of my most cherished traditions — avoiding Book Expo as a slug would a salt mine — to interview Shalom Auslander about Foreskin’s Lament.

Though he once walked into Manhattan from New Jersey to attend a Rangers game on the Sabbath, Shalom is pragmatic about violating the Lord’s Fourth Commandment to promote his memoir: “Fuck Him; if the Bible wasn’t a best-seller every damn year, He’d be there, too.”
 

If you’re wandering around the Javits Center this weekend, please join us. If you can’t make it, or can’t wait, read Auslander’s latest Nextbook column, What I Am Going to Write This Summer:

Flannery O’Connor had this to say: “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.” The memoir already did my hair in, and a childhood of Kedem wine took care of my teeth; if I finish this book with my genitals attached, I figure I’m ahead of the game.

ZZ Packer, Laura Miller, and I will be on Talk of the Nation this afternoon for a segment devoted to summer reading.

I don’t naturally think of books in terms of seasons, but my most manic reading experiences tend to happen in warm weather. (See, e.g., books that make you stand at the bus stop.)

So far this year is no exception. Week before last, just as highs were getting up into the 80s, I lost three and a half days to every book Kate Christensen has written: In the Drink (which appeared in the “summer of Bridget Jones” and led to Christensen’s immediate and wrongheaded coronation as a chick lit author), Jeremy Thrane, The Epicure’s Lament, and The Great Man (which isn’t officially published till August).
 

Image of the Coral Gables Branch Library, which enabled my childhood binge-reading habits, is taken from the MDPLS site.