Patriot Games

Why does M. T. Anderson use his initials?

Since the publication of Thirsty, his first novel for young adults, nine years ago, Matthew Tobin Anderson (friends call him by his middle name) hasn’t had much opportunity to use that line. Four years ago, the Los Angeles Times selected Feed (2002, both Candlewick), Anderson’s satirical sci-fi story, as the best young adult novel of the year, and his “Thrilling Tales” series (Harcourt), a delicious send-up of formula fiction, has attracted a young cult following. Even Anderson’s four picture books, which include Handel, Who Knew What He Liked (Candlewick, 2001) and Strange Mr. Satie (Viking, 2003), feature the author’s trademark intelligence, wit, and irreverence. But as good as these works are, Anderson’s latest novel, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party (Candlewick, 2006), may be his best yet.

With The Pox Party—a recent finalist for the National Book Award—Anderson turns to historical fiction. But it is historical fiction as it’s never before been written for teens. Octavian, the young son of an African slave, is the subject of a scientific study in Boston, just before the start of the Revolutionary War. The first part of the tale is narrated in the boy’s highly educated, rational voice. But after Octavian loses his voice 220 pages into the book, the story continues through letters written by those who knew him. This ambitious, high-wire act of a novel explores not only the issue of slavery, but what it means to be a patriot and a loyalist, refusing to oppose one’s own government.

Anderson grew up in Stow, MA, a small town outside of Boston, where he occasionally watched reenactments of Revolutionary War battles. He spent a year at an English boarding school and later graduated from Cambridge. After returning to New England, Anderson worked for three years as an editorial assistant for Candlewick Press, an experience that he says taught him how to use an industrial stapler and persuaded him that writers need to “risk embarrassing themselves.” We caught up with Anderson last month at his home in Cambridge, MA.

When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

I always wanted to write, and most of my teachers in the Stow public school system—bless ’em—really supported me. The first story I can remember writing is from first or second grade. It was a science-fiction number. These kids find a time machine and travel into the far future—“fuchur.” There, they look around themselves and see a dazzling world of robots, silver buildings, and aerial walkways. Then suddenly, they realize that they’re now 2,000 years old. They look down at themselves and, shocked and saddened, they immediately age and turn to dust. That’s it. Finis. There was a picture at the end, as I remember it, of a desolate robot regarding a pile of clothes. It wasn’t a very auspicious beginning.

Where does your keen sense of social satire come from?

The family legend, which I have not yet been able to verify, is that we are all related to Mark Twain. My great-great-grandfather is supposedly Mark Twain’s cousin. It’s really not a very close connection; however, it was enough to mean that I got forced to read Mark Twain from the time I was nine or 10. I completely loved it, in fact, and I very quickly moved beyond the books he wrote that were supposedly for kids. I started to read a lot of his satirical pieces, which influenced me very profoundly. I continued reading in that vein of American satire. I loved James Thurber when I was a kid. Woody Allen had three books out that I loved. And I read a lot of S. J. Pearlman.

What were you like as a teenager?

I was really gawky and ugly, like we all are as teenagers. In my later teenage years, I tried to develop a persona, as many teenagers do, which in my case involved wearing a lot of Edwardian to 1930s clothing. It was when I was 16 or 17 that I really started to read more widely than I had before, especially literature from around 1910–1930.

How did you end up at a British boarding school?

You know, I had watched too much PBS. I thought it would be interesting.

You had the clothes for it.

You’re right! And the clothing market there was great at that time [in the 1980s], because I would get this stuff used.

Did going to school in England influence your writing?

I was definitely interested at that point in English satirists. So I read a lot of Evelyn Waugh, especially, and Ronald Firbank, and those writers of the ’20s and ’30s of very, very intricate prose—for example, Ivy Compton-Burnett. I also started to read the earlier satirists, such as Jonathan Swift, and comic playwrights, like Richard Sheridan. They definitely influenced me very directly, and I remember thinking about how comic dialogue was written while reading plays by Sheridan and William Congreve. I thought, “Oh, my God, this is so intelligent and compact!”

How did you come up with the idea for Feed, with its frightening vision of the future?

At a party at one of the New York libraries, David Gale, an editor from Simon and Schuster, asked me if I would contribute a story to a collection benefiting a literacy campaign. The one stipulation was that there had to be a book featured in the story.

On the way back to Boston on the train, despite the fact that almost everyone in the car was reading, there was a constant clack of inane cellphone conversation as (1) Nancy set up her weekend with Luke, Carrie, and Thayer; (2) Andrea discussed equipment for her home office with her husband; and (3) Lieutenant Jock-O—yes, true!—serially recounted his lively sexcapades to fellow officers from his regiment: “Remember that chick from San Diego? If you run into her, can you like not tell her I’m out here?” By the end of the journey, I had a whole story about irritating future connectivity and illiteracy in place.

Thinking about it, I realized that there were years of teen resentment waiting to burst out—anger about all the things the media demanded we become—and it was much more than just a short story.

What prompted you to write about classical music composers?

With both the Handel and the Satie picture books, I wrote about composers whose lives, I felt, had childlike elements. In Handel’s case, beyond the operatic hissy fits, there was the story of him feeling unappreciated and almost giving up, just before the writing of Messiah. In the case of Satie, there are not only the childlike, circuslike parts of his own personality, but I also had a strong memory of loving his music as a child—because the music itself has a kind of sad, wise innocence to it, very much like the solemnity and play of a child alone. These composers’ lives were filled with anecdotal detail that could give insight into their personalities. And even if kids don’t know they’ve heard the music of Handel and Satie, they actually have—in restaurants, malls, comedy routines, church services, and commercials.

Has your love of music influenced your writing?

I’m a frustrated composer, in the same way that a duck might be a frustrated fox-terrier. I love music deeply and yet have no musical skill or competence whatsoever. So I try to make my writing musical in various ways. I try to hear it like a quartet, though sometimes it’s all clunky and out of tune.

I’m very jealous of composers, who can tell their stories without actually having to come up with any, you know, story. In a Schubert sonata or a Bach fugue or a Purcell fantasy, you go on a whole journey through different spaces and moods, but they never have to make up some dumb-ass thing about Jeff’s mother or how everyone ended up in the garage.

Tell us about the “Thrilling Tales” series.

As a kid, I loved formula fiction. There was always a sense of release and summertime that was associated in my mind with it. I was talking to an editor, a guy who’s about my age, about this, some years ago, and we were both listing the books that we had loved when we were around 10 years old. I said to him, “It would be so much fun for me to try to write a book that is like the ones that we loved when we were kids.” I guess part of the whole thing with the post-modern age is not only did I write a book like that, but I wrote a book about books. But I hope it’s an adventure in its own right.

What led you to write The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party?

I remember the question arose when I was watching one of those [re-creations of a Revolutionary War battle]: What would it have been like to have been there? Not simply, what were the sights, the smells, and that sort of thing, but rather, what would it have felt like to know that you were opposing your own army? What was it like to stand there and know that you were just this random farmer, and suddenly you were taking up arms against your own government? I was very interested in the question of what would it feel like to be a loyalist. And how can you make a modern reader understand the loyalist point of view?

It must be difficult to do.

History is written by the winners, as the saying goes. We now have 225 years of a created myth about how the loyalists are people detached from the common life of the colonies, who don’t understand the impact of what is going on. And that’s just not true. All it takes to be a loyalist, in a sense, is that you do not believe in taking up arms against the government—even if you believe that Parliament is doing something stupid and wrong and badly.

Frankly, that’s the position that a lot of us are in now. A lot of us believe that our governing bodies are acting incompetently and against the country’s best interests, but we’re not taking up arms against them.

What does The Pox Party say about 21st-century America?

One of the things I really wanted to focus on is, What are people willing to do to others to make themselves comfortable? What kinds of systems are in place to produce the lifestyle and the luxuries that we’re used to? Slavery is an amazing example of that because here was a nation where people were trying to think of themselves in this new way, as proponents of liberty, and yet, at the same time, there was the outrageous hypocrisy of the way the economy rested upon the slavery of that period. That disparity between those two things is something we need to look at.

It’s very easy to condemn the past, but it’s a little bit more difficult to turn the lenses on ourselves. We need to examine ourselves and ask, “What is it that we do that is going to look abhorrent to our great-grandchildren, that is going to look laughably hypocritical?” There are some real answers there—it’s not a rhetorical question. I do think there are many ways that we live right now that will seem absurdly greedy and self-interested to those who are not blinded by living in this society.

What was your reaction when you heard The Pox Party was a finalist for the National Book Award?

Um, “Yeehaw”? It’s not eloquent, but it’s earnest.