Friday, April 20, 2007

Back from Los Angeles; An Afternoon with Gore Vidal; Bestseller Lists

The smell of sunburning flesh has always reminding me of being six or seven and running around the pool like a savage in my little swim trunks while my mother scurried after me with a huge canvas bag all filled with SPF 15. So Los Angeles reminded me of childhood from the start, because I started burning from the start. My agent David Kuhn installed himself at the Chateau, and in that great tribute to American artifice seemed to also find something of youthful selves. David is always brilliantly efficient, but in Los Angeles exhibited an unjaundiced buoancy that tugged on your heartstrings and made you want to hug him.

I took lodgings at the slightly less ethereal Standard, just down the street. There was a pool and it was surrounded by bodies both hard and soft, and there was a tank behind the check-in counter with a girl in it. Apparently the place was once a retirement home. I was in Brazil during the early part of May, and while staying at the Fasano in Sao Paulo am pretty sure I saw a pair of ghosts. You would think that the Standard would be full of ghosts, given its own former incarnation, but Andre Balasz must have exorcists on retainer, because there was only the here and now, or the there and then, depending on how you view it.

Shawn Simon, the very lovely and sweet producer who optioned Mergers, was one of the most perfect hosts I have ever known, and made me forget that I was a visitor for great parts of the trip. We had a dinner the first night with Steve Golin, the Babel producer, and we talked for hours about the tragedy of American healthcare and the life of Winston Churchill and the subtle cruelties of capitalism. He would have stood out as incredibly earnest and thoughtful in any setting. Between he and Shawn the book could not be in better hands. Towards the end of the night the talk turned to Gore Vidal, and Shawn offered to arrange a meeting with him the next day.

Twenty four hours later I was having dinner with the two of them, and having begun a tour of human history with an account of the Persians some four hours earlier was listening, quite rapt, to Mr. Vidal's impression of Eleanor Roosevelt. Somewhere inbetween Aaron Burr had gotten shot, Amelia Earhardt had fallen in love with Gore's father, and the American republic had been lost and abadoned in favor of a national security state. He railed against the New York Times Book Review and William F. Buckley Jr. and Truman Capote. He spoke with admiration of Saul Bellow. We talked about the unrecoverable potency of the sort love that you feel at around the age of fifteen. It was an indelible experience.

There has been good news on the book front, which I am happy to relate, and for which I have my every reader to thank. Mergers has, in its first two weeks on sale, made the Barnes & Noble College Bestseller List, the Bookhampton Bestseller List, and the Palm Beach Daily News Bestseller list. All of this suggests to me that the novel is finding a resonance and a readership. As I have written before, it is daunting to love and labor on something for private in so long, and then send it out into the world. And as I have also written before, it is apparent to me that the novel is now in very good hands.

Dana Vachon, New York City, 4/20/07

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