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P.F. Kluge's new novel The Master Blaster was reviewed by Janet Maslin in The New York Times yesterday:A Far-Off Island Where the American Dream CurdlesThe main character in P. F. Kluge’s stingingly funny new novel, “The Master Blaster,” isn’t a person. It’s a location: Saipan, a very small island with a big, bizarre place in history. Saipan is one of the Northern Mariana Islands in the western
<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]-->Many may know New Jersey as the setting of popular TV shows such as The Jersey Shore, The Real Housewives of New Jersey and The Sopranos, or for it's famous musicians including Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, but New Jersey has more to offer than
Recently, it seems that New Jersey's place in popular culture has been solidified by the TV popularity of shoes like Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of New Jersey.
But for New Jersey native P.F. Kluge, now a professor and writer-in-residence at Kenyon College in Ohio, it's the place where he grew up, and a perfect setting for a novel about how the American dream has changed through generations.
The Newark Star-Ledger and Cleveland Plain Dealer both reviewed Kluge's new novel, A CALL FROM JERSEY, this week.
The Star-Ledger's interview offers more insight into the creation of this literary novel and the thought processes Kluge had while writing. Read the full article here, but our favorite excerpt is below.
"The book is really about conversations with my father I never got to have," Kluge said. “I have tried to imagine his experience as an American, and as a German in America, especially between the two world wars."
The son, too, is culturally adrift. He is a second-generation American, suddenly trying to understand his parents’ life and re-connect with their lost old-world ways.
“As I grow older, and the number of years since my parents have died grows larger, I grow closer to them,” Kluge said. “As I get older, I miss the sound of their voices, the sound of German being spoken around me, and the stories they told. I miss the beer parties and German songs sung into the night. I miss mother’s potato pancakes.”
The book’s sense of place is authentic. Kluge writes about “13 Bumps,” (Johnston Road in Watchung), which climbs the mountain above Route 22 and has been a teenage makeout place for generations, from Model As to Mitsubishis. And Snuffy’s in Scotch Plains, gone from “roadhouse to Parthenon.” Old Hans even recalls Madame Bey’s, the old Passaic-side boxing training camp on River Road in Summit, where Schmeling once trained.
Only one of Kluge’s previous seven novels was a Jersey story, and it was his most famous.
“I set ‘Eddie and the Cruisers,’ in South Jersey. I spent the summer of 1962 working as a college intern at the Vineland Times Journals, and I found South Jersey so fascinating, and so different from here I was from. You could smell whatever they were canning that day in the air.”
The Plain Dealer's article,
Just released in paperback are two literary gems from P.F. Kluge: Gone Tomorrow and Biggest Elvis. A longtime writer-in-residence at Kenyon College in Ohio, Kluge has written seven acclaimed and beloved novels. He also works as a journalist, writing for magazines such as National Geographic Traveler, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Islands, Playboy, and Reader's Digest. And we're thrilled that Overlook will be publishing a new novel by P.F. Kluge, A Call From New Jersey, in September 2010.
Here's what Kluge says about Biggest Elvis, originally published in 1995, and now back in a print with the one of our coolest covers ever!
"What began as one Philippines-based novel, then another, became a trilogy with Biggest Elvis. In this case, journalism led to fiction. I visited the mammoth U.S. Naval base at Subic Bay twice, once on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine, once for Playboy. The place was unforgettable: a neon wilderness, a sexual vanity fair, a high water mark of American military and cultural power. There was more there than a pair of magazine articles could accommodate. Then my friend Lazarus Salii (see The Edge of Paradise) told me of a trio of singers who had come to Palau and been stranded there, broke. The three men were an Elvis Presley show, each incarnating a stage of the king’s life. The idea of three Elvis’s knocking around the world was appealing to me. A novel—which ought to be a movie—was born. It had music, sex, romance, politics, exotic locations. It was an American Year of Living Dangerously. Of all my books, this was the most fun to write. Every day, the question from manuscript to author was: what kind of fun are we going to have today? I think it shows.”
Jeff Schwachter of Atlantic City Weekly has written a wonderful article on the 25th anniversary of the classic rock and roll film Eddie and The Cruisers, based on the novel by P.F. Kluge. Here's a brief excerpt about the book behind the film:
"Many things inspired novelist, freelance writer (Rolling Stone, Life) and northern New Jersey native Kluge to pen the 1980 novel. "Two or three things came together," says Kluge from his office at Ohio's Kenyon College where he has been a teacher for more than a decade. "I always loved early rock 'n' roll ... doo-wop groups basically. ... Those songs just kind of worked their way into me and I've never lost them. I carry them with me [and] the way that they could come back to you all through the rest of your life and haunt you intrigued me. And the second thing was wondering about what happens to the survivors of a group after its star, its leader, perishes."
"[Eddie] is about some tapes that were supposedly made way back when [and] going back into the past to retrieve something, to consider what happened to other people, and what has happened to you and what might have been," says Kluge.
Another inspiration for Kluge's book was southern New Jersey, a landscape the young writer caught only a glimpse of one summer, long ago. "In the summer of 1962, I worked as a reporter -- a sort of summer job -- on the Vineland Times Journal," says Kluge. "And this acquainted me with a New Jersey that was quite different from the New Jersey I knew. Because the northern part of the state is sort of within the field of force of New York City. ... the southern part was entirely different. It was rural. It was eccentric. It was a little mysterious to me: the diners, the traffic circles, the little crossroad towns, the odd pockets of ethnic groups."
"I always liked the fact that the filmmakers did two things," says Kluge. "They stuck with the flashback structure [of the novel] -- so you're cutting back and forth between the present time, where Frank Ridgeway, the Wordman, is a high-school teacher in early middle-age, and going back to the summer on the Jersey Shore maybe two decades or so before. ... I like that they had the integrity to stay with that so that the past and present could play off each other.
"The other thing is [they] could have made it about a surf group in California and they made it in New Jersey," says Kluge. "That pleased me." Kluge always wanted his main character to be from South Jersey. "I think when I sat down to write Eddie in 1980, I realized that I didn't want him to be a suburban kid who was going into Greenwich Village on weekends," says Kluge. "I wanted him to be from that New Jersey 'down south.' And I thought Vineland was a good town for him to be from."
Book blogger Terry Weyna has a lot of love for P.F. Kluge's acclaimed novel Gone Tomorrow: "I’ve always loved academic novels. Perhaps it’s because academia was a career choice I reluctantly abandoned in order to go to law school; perhaps it’s because I still would like to get that Ph.D. in English someday; perhaps it’s because my husband is a university professor. Or maybe it’s just because academic novels are set in such an interesting milieu that I just can’t resist, a place where (based upon the fiction I read, not contacts with my husband’s colleagues) backbiting, backstabbing and gossip battle it out with intellectual passions, eccentric personalities and interesting conversation. Most academic novels seem to be satires, but this one is different: it is a sort of rueful love letter to academe. . . I saw much of my own college in this book. I attended a small private college on the western edge of Illinois that I loved with all my heart while I was there, and still love today, though I haven’t been back in decades. This book awakened in me all the joy I took in that place, in its glorious fall colors, its stubbornly tardy springs, the many, many books I read while I was there, how I learned, more than anything, to ask questions (I seemed to graduate with few answers, but oh, I knew so well how to ask questions!). I remembered the professors like Canaris, who would casually mention a book that I should read, a book that would become one of my lifelong favorites; my creative writing teacher, Don Erickson, whose notes on my adolescent scribbling I still have today; drinking beer and eating cheese popcorn at a horrible little bar with the chairmen of the English and Speech Departments and the president of the college, solving all the world’s problems. Kluge perfectly captures the love and joy that my student experiences embody, though from the viewpoint of those for whom I was simply another soul passing through. And he captures a life, too – one different from what the man who came to the campus in 1970 thought he was going to live, but one that was precious in every moment nonetheless. . . .Gone Tomorrow is a marvelous book, a genuine pleasure to read. Few books have reached my heart so completely. Sharply observed, wryly told, with pellucid prose, Gone Tomorrow deserves a wide audience. Kluge is a new author to me, but I will certainly be reading more from his pen, as he toils away at the small Ohio college (Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio) where he is a writer in residence."
P.F. Kluge's beloved novel Gone Tomorrow has been selected as a May pick by the San Francisco Public Library: "P. F. Kluge's affecting new novel, Gone Tomorrow, is the story of George Canaris, a writer who spends his career not writing but rather as a creative writing teacher at a small, bucolic Ohio college. (The college is, I suspect, not unlike Kenyon, where P. F. Kluge not only attended as an undergraduate, but where he has taught for a number of years.) This tale of the blessing and curse of an academic life for writers is framed by the search for a long-awaited, possibly non-existent, new novel of Canaris's. He wrote one novel in the 1960s, which brought him fame, fortune, a permanent place on the list of greatest works of fiction of all time, and a tenured position at a small but prestigious college. Then his agent and his publisher, not to mention the president of the college, the head of his department, his students, and his legion of fans, waited--in vain, as it turned out--for the appearance of a second novel, supposedly called The Beast. Finally--and against all the rules of tenure--the college decides to replace Canaris with a younger, more with-it (and productive) writer. What follows forces Canaris (and us) to think about fame, about what's important in life, and about love, loyalty, and the nature of creativity. Canaris is a simply wonderful character; the story of his life is moving, honest, tender and--occasionally--very funny. (When George meets John Henry Mallon, the wunderkind writer of gargantuan novels who replaces him, George reports this exchange in his journal: "'I've read your books,' he said. 'Great.' 'I've lifted yours,' I responded. 'Heavy.'") This is a good choice for readers who enjoy character-driven novels, but it's a must read for anyone who's spent any time in the world of academe. Kluge knows whereof he writes."
Susan Stamberg of NPR's Morning Edition talked to independent booksellers across the country this morning about their picks for the holidays. On the list is P.F. Kluge's Gone Tomorrow: "In the tradition of Richard Russo's Straight Man, P.F. Kluge alternates between humor and poetic examinations of the academic pursuit, along the way touching on the basic elements of love, commitment to career and friendship." Click here to read an excerpt, and listen to Morning Edition's Bookseller's Picks for Holiday Lists!
We love Sarah Weinman's Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind blog on crime fiction and mysteries, and we are thrilled that one of her picks of the week is P.F. Kluge's legendary Eddie and the Cruisers. Now available in a new paperback edition from Overlook, with an amazing introduction by Sherman Alexie, this is essential reading for the rock and roll generation. Here's Sarah's thoughts: "How many ways can I recommend what ought to be a permanent resident of the modern canon? I'll stick to one: I was browsing in an independent bookstore and thought I'd read the first chapter. I ended up storming through the first 2/3rds before I had to leave, buying in haste and in a cranky and foul state because I couldn't finish it up until later that night. The writing is pitched perfectly and the pacing is sublime, but most of all, it puts in your head the kind of music that makes you want to rise up and do something amazing with your life."
Janet Maslin reviews Gone Tomorrow in The New York Times: "A sharply observed yet tender novel of academic life and its many sand traps, P. F. Kluge (himself a writer in residence at Kenyon College, which is the subject of his nonfiction book “Alma Mater”) uses the persona of Canaris to describe the dangers that a writer-teacher faces. Even that job description defies reason. Why is it that “in the same way that people assume an opera singer can handle folk music or a four-star chef can preside over a short-order grill, it is assumed that a writer can teach writing”? The first and perhaps greatest danger about which Gone Tomorrow warns is that of getting too comfortable inside a college’s cozy microcosm. Finally, in a turn that might have tickled Canaris had he lived to see it, “Gone Tomorrow"is a good title. Too good. Mr. Kluge’s “Gone Tomorrow” is already being outsold on Amazon.com by Lee Child's “Gone Tomorrow,” a Jack Reacher thriller that doesn’t come out until May. Should any of Mr. Child’s devotees order the wrong novel by mistake, they’ll still get a book about a sharp-eyed, solitary troublemaker. They probably won’t be sorry."
Jennifer Reese gives Gone Tomorrow a high grade in this week's Entertainment Weekly: "George Canaris, the narrator of P.F. Kluge's sparkling new novel Gone Tomorrow, is a famous writer who takes a job teaching at a small Ohio college — and for the next three decades talks about (but fails to publish) his next big book, a mysterious project that he refers to as ''the Beast.'' What, exactly, has Canaris been doing all these years, and what is the nature of the Beast? These are the questions Kluge entertains in this witty and astute tragicomedy about academia and the trajectory of an artist's life. B+ "
P.F. Kluge, author of the forthcoming Gone Tomorrow and Writer-In-Residence at Kenyon College, will speak at Bloomberg News in New York on October 7 at 7pm. Kluge will present "First and Not Quite Last Thoughts On a Small College in Ohio," which, coincidentally, is the setting for his new novel. For more information on this event, please visit the Kenyon College site.
P.F. Kluge, author of Eddie and the Cruisers, Biggest Elvis, and the forthcoming Gone Tomorrow (Fall 2008) was recently profiled by Joe Blundo of the Columbus Dispatch. Novelist, journalist, and teacher, Kluge is writer in residence at Kenyon College.
His new novel, Gone Tomorrow, received this notice from Publishers Weekly: "In Kluge’s thoughtful new novel, Mark May, a young professor at an Ohio college, is surprised to be named the literary executor of a recently deceased colleague he barely knew. George Canaris was a literary sensation in the 1960s, but hadn’t published anything in 30 years. At the time of his death, he was rumored to be working on his magnum opus, but there is doubt the manuscript exists. While inspecting the dead man’s house, Mark finds the manuscript of Canaris’s memoir, which provides insight into the man and his work, and even if Mark has doubts about its veracity, it pushes him to arrive at some important decisions about his own life. The novel is suffused with Kluge’s obvious affection for books, and has some cleverly aphoristic things to say about the joys of teaching, the pitfalls of academic infighting and the tragedy of artistic expectations left unfulfilled."
