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Twelve
A Novel
by Nick McDonell
List Price: $12.00
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0802140122
Publisher: Grove Press
Nick McDonell was born in 1984 in New York City.
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An interview between Morgan Entrekin, Publisher of Grove/Atlantic, and Nick McDonell, author of Twelve. Morgan is Nick's editor.
Morgan Entrekin: So Nick, I've known you all of your life, and you've grown up around a lot of us that were in publishing and writing and journalism. When did you start reading seriously and what were some of the books or authors that affected you?
Nick McDonell: Before I was even cogent, my parents read to me and so I have really early memories of hearing things like Huckleberry Finn and the King Arthur stories. I didn't start reading especially early, but I remember Huckleberry Finn was an enormous one for me. I didn't understand half of it, but I remember getting really hooked up in it.
ME: What about your friends? Do your friends read? Because you hear so much that this is a nonliterate generation, and about how the computer, the audio-visual, and the electronic medium replaced literature. Are you unusual among your friends in that way?
NM: Yes, sadly. A lot of my friends listen to music all the time, voraciously. They watch television or movies. But a lot of them just don't read, and they don't make any excuses for not reading either. I have one friend who I trade books back and forth with constantly, but the vast majority of people I go to school with read what they have to do for school, if that. They don't because they're conditioned in school that "contemporary American literature is no good." And that is just ridiculous. I love all the stuff I read.
ME: Well, it's just not being taught yet.
NM: Yes, exactly.
ME: When did you start writing and why?
NM: I think I've been writing as long as I've been reading. I wrote the requisite, really bad high school short stories like everyone else.
ME: But now you wrote a really good high school novel.
NM: When I wanted to write something besides essays, I wrote fiction. And I enjoyed that.
ME: So was it encouraged in school for you to write?
NM: Yes.
ME: You did this magazine, Prophet, that I was aware of and very impressed with, and it was part of the reason I was so eager to see your novel. Tell me about Prophet.
NM: Prophet existed for only two issues, and the second issue was exponentially better than the first. Prophet was a way for my friends to get free concert tickets and also just an excuse to run around the city and do interesting things, because part of growing up in New York and part of Twelve is that these kids can't think of anything to do, so they sit around and mess themselves up. And part of what we were doing was finding interesting things to do.
ME: Prophet used contributing editors from different private schools up and down the East Coast, right?
NM: Right. The smartest kids we knew. The idea was to get the best writing that we could about whatever it was.
ME: And you were the editor?
NM: Yes.
ME: And you wrote for it as well?
NM: Yes, and this was part of the beginning of Twelve. The headline for the second issue was "Bang. You're Sixteen." It was right after all the Columbine stuff and everyone who read it was like, "Whoa." And on the back it said, "There is nothing in nature that is not in us." And so that's the quote above it. And then there are these anecdotes, these vignettes, about violence, and one of them is actually in Twelve. They're all about the most violent stories we've heard or witnessed up and down Manhattan. One of them was about a fight that happened outside this bar. We didn't believe that bar fights existed until we saw one, and so we had a short paragraph about it.
ME: How did you come to write Twelve? When did you get the idea to do it, and then when did you write it?
NM: One night last spring I had an idea. I didn't have a notion of a novel but I had an idea for a story and it happened all at once. I took a piece of paper, I still have it, and I wrote down all the different things that happened in Twelve and I circled them and I drew lines and numbers one through twelve. And it never changed. I didn't know it was a novel. I figured it would be a story. So I just started flushing it out, and before I had even showed it to my father I had eighty pages. So it didn't seem so hard to keep going because I was just writing it and I had done this stuff with violence in Prophet. Seventeen years of growing up was my research.
ME: So you wrote this, pretty much, in about six or nine months.
NM: I really wrote it in about nine weeks. The idea was a couple months before that, and the final edit was a couple months after that, but it was really during the summer. I wrote one thousand words each day.
ME: Well, there are a couple different questions that I have to ask. One is, how did you learn the crafts and techniques of fiction so well. I mean, were you conscious of what you were doing?
NM: I think it has a lot to do with reading. I could list authors who have had an influence on me.
ME: Tell me some of them.
NM: A lot of them are probably too close to home. Joan Didion for one. That made me so happy to get a quote from her for Twelve. Play It as It Lays is an exercise in pacing, in those short sentences. Hemingway also.
ME: Yes. He's influenced a lot of writers.
NM: It's highfalutin language combined with slang. I've always liked that and I've seen it in other contemporary writers. Nabokov is a fantastic example of that, and I had just read Lolita before doing this.
ME: What is so impressive to me is how you can shape scenes and create characters so quickly and deftly, and the authority of the voice. Did that come naturally?
NM: The reason I think this book works for me is because White Mike is a really important character. The book rises and falls as White Mike works.
ME: And he just came to you right away?
NM: White Mike is partly me and partly all of these things I've seen, but I feel really sure about who White Mike is.
ME: The book is inevitably going to be compared to books like Jim Carroll's BASKETBALL DIARIES and Bret Easton Ellis's LESS THAN ZERO. But this book seems to me to be more technically proficient as a piece of fiction and that's what is so impressive about it.
NM: One of the things that I set up from the very beginning is that I did not want to have a first-person narrator. I wanted third person. There is thinking, but it infiltrates the story. White Mike is trying to not make judgments as he tells his story. I'm a big proponent of a story for the sake of the story, and I don't like a lot of description and I think that comes through in this book. And I think one of the reasons people think that this book is technically advanced is because I don't spend a lot of time describing things. I have an idea and I say it.
ME: It's very mature work and that's one of the exciting things. And I think it's one of the reasons that there was this big wave of interest. But let's talk a little bit more about what's in the book, because a lot of people who hear this interview probably won't have read the book yet. The media is going to focus on the sensational aspects of the book--the sex, the drugs, and the violence. What do you think about those issues in your generation?
NM: I am clearly not qualified to speak for my generation. You know I dodge that question all the time. People say that this book is about a generation. I hope it is because all good books are timely books, and all good books reflect the times from whence they came. That would be a fantastic compliment. But I, as a person, can't speak for my generation. People say it will get a lot of attention because of the sex, violence, and drugs. It didn't occur to me to put those things in. It's just that those are the most interesting things that are going on in my life. They're the vast things. They're the crazy things. Twelve is more about violence than drugs.
ME: That's true. Except the title is a drug.
NM: Many of the things that have defined our generation have been movies and visuals. I think the movie The Matrix, with its black leather and flying bullets, was an intensely violent movie that really struck home. And then Fight Club was a really big deal for everyone who was my age, especially when you are a fifteen-year-old boy. Fight clubs cropped up all around New York.
ME: Even among private-school kids?
NM: Yes. They like to fight. This book is about the myths of this place. This story didn't make it in, but I know a kid who took a padlock and wrecked some kid. It was all a mess.
ME: These incidents happen at private schools?
NM: Nothing in the book really occurred, but things like that do happen.
ME: Why?
NM: Twelve is about the spiritual debilitation of a generation. Nobody knows what the problem is. We know that our generation is more violent than the rest of them. I don't know why. And then September 11 happened and it really changed it. Drop September 11 and we're the generation that produced Columbine. Violence is the hallmark of my generation.
ME: Are these kids in private schools, like the character Claude? Are they playing with guns?
NM: No, he's a bit of a caricature of himself. I've heard stories about people who have bought guns. I know where I could buy a gun if I had to. But yes, it's Manhattan. It's New York. You can get a gun if you want to and if you're bored enough and you have enough money you can do whatever you want.
ME: What about the question of the adults? They're strangely absent in this book. Was that intentional?
NM: Yes, absolutely. For one thing, the story can't exist if there are adults looking over the shoulder of teenagers, and largely there are no adults in my world, and teenagers live in their own head. Adults don't impinge too hard or heavily in a teenager's world.
ME: What do you mean there are no adults in your world?
NM: "Kids grow up too fast," as the cliché goes. I don't know if that's true, but New York affords a level of autonomy that is not available, I think, in most other parts of the world, because you can get on a subway and you can go do your thing really fast. And, I think New York is romanticized but also it also an integral part of the book in that it affords all those things. And why are there no parents? Because these are rich kids and their parents are off getting rich and being rich.
ME: I think it's sad but true. You know two of my favorite characters are Mark Rothko and Timmy. Where did they come from?
NM: They really are caricatures. I imagined all the jokes that I had ever made about wiggers, white kids who are trying to be black. I imagined them as dumb as I could, but still with heart. They're not malicious. They didn't do anything bad, which is why it's sad what happens to them at the end. They're just confused.
ME: They're very amusing characters.
NM: Twelve is a dark book, but I grew up in this place and my life wasn't terrible and dark, and a lot of the kids who grow up here aren't in a terrible and dark place. You grow up around beauty in this city as well as all this weird darkness.
ME: We touched on that a bit, but this sort of excessive wealth and consumerism forms the background of these kids' lives. Do you feel that, growing up in the world that you've grown up in?
NM: Yes, absolutely. I think that is one of the problems. Violence grows out of this obsession with materialism, and there is a flaw in the values of the people who bring it up. That is especially strange because some of the people who brought up these kids in New York, the people who send these kids to these private schools, were very important in the counterculture. They grew up in that counterculture and made their money out of that counterculture, and now they're these "greed heads."
ME: What does your generation think about it? What do you think is going to motivate them?
NM: The bad news is they want their cash and their portable DVD player, and nobody is making any excuses for it. They're just saying they want it. And to some extent that's justified by the media and the culture in which they've grow up in. Nobody's saying that's bad on national television. In literature, people are saying it, but nobody reads.
ME: This sort of follows into my next question. What do you think about your generation? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
NM: I don't know. Every generation has it heroes and villains. It's hard to say. I don't think there's any way to answer that question. I don't even know what that question means.
ME: So what are you going to do? Are you going to write more?
NM: Yes. My father said to me, "You could still be a doctor. You can do whatever you want. You can go to college and become a doctor." And I am going to go to college and I'm looking forward to doing that. The reason I wrote this book in the beginning was because I felt uncomfortable if I wasn't writing it. It made me feel better to write it. When I write, I write with two fingers and I like to pound the keys and I hop around. Everyone says writers hate to write, but I really enjoy writing. Maybe I won't next time, but I did this time. I don't think I'm going to stop. No, what I want to do is to get out and see the world. What I like best is traveling around the world and seeing what's out and about, which is why journalism appeals to me. Yes, I'm absolutely going to keep writing.
Excerpted from Twelve © Copyright 2008 by Nick McDonell. Reprinted with permission by Grove Press. All rights reserved.
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