the types of book I would like to write

Picture of my cats enjoying the new sheets I bought from Walmart for $14

I’d like to write a book, I think. I’ve currently written a ~43,000-word short story collection and 60ish poems, both projects unpublished due mainly to the despair and dread I feel at sending manuscripts out for solicitation. (If anyone reading this is interested and wants to publish me and works for Penguin Random House, Soft Skull Press, Alfred A. Knopf, Wave Books, or is the literary agent Bill Clegg, please contact me.) The book I want to write that I haven’t yet written is the simple, classic novel. ~34-50,000 words, a tightly-paced narrative with unique vision and voice. I don’t, of course, have any intention of writing a masterpiece. I am fully aware I lack the literary scale and genius to write something destined to exist eternally in the canon of history. I’m no Pynchon, DFW, Hemingway, Nabokov, or whoever. That being said, there are hundreds of books I’ve read and noddingly thought, OK, I could pull off something similar to this. I got to further thinking – I’m unemployed, so there is a lot of time for thinking in my life right now, there are hours and hours of thoughts to be had, whole days I need to bludgeon back with vodka and sleep or else risk them swallowing me completely – and brainstormed all the different categories of book I think I’d be capable of emulating.

 

Bret Easton Ellis Less Than Zero-Style Roman à Clef Juvenilia-Style Ryū Murakami Almost Transparent Blue-style Book

Ideally for this I’d be in college publishing my debut novel at age 21 to heaping praise and literary accolades. This style of novel would center real-seeming experiences expertly veiled in the guise of fiction, told in a detached, often emotionless tone from a 1^st or 3^rd person narrator without the conventional ups and downs of plot but instead the gradual ominous crescendo of youthful melancholy and grief. Of course, pretty much the entirety of my lived experience is rural Maine, a far narrative cry from the hedonistic tunneling of mid 80s Los Angeles or a Japanese port town’s twilight somberness. I would somehow have to make my college experiences of mostly not being invited to parties, uneventful heterosexuality, and getting scared from doing marijuana feel timely and relevant. One way I could accomplish this is by referencing 9/11 a lot and including scenes like kids in college classes secretly watching ISIS beheading videos instead of listening to the lecture. I would name this book ‘Japanese Death Penalty’.  

 

Shittalking Thomas Bernhard-Style Book

Jordan Castro’s debut The Novelist is an excellent example of this kind of book—essentially, this format presents the novel as a single rambling monologue, all the minutiae of a day stretched throughout its shittalking. This book could cover my daily unemployment schedule: namely, waking up at 11am, texting my ex-boss begging for my old job back, masturbating, scrolling Twitter for three hours, reading ten pages of War and Peace, eating lunch, and going back to bed at ~3pm. Throughout all of this, I could give exaggerations of my political beliefs framed as acerbic shittalking against society at large. I could rave about my love for the police, the importance of Israel’s democracy, my skepticism toward covid vaccine mandates in young men ages 16-24, Joe Rogan, myocarditis rates, lab leak hypothesis, glyphosate, colonoscopies, etc. This seems like maybe the easiest book format on this list to write, seems like this would ‘write itself’.

 

Postmodern Magical Realism-Style Book Synthesizing the Mundanities of Modern Life with Surreal Fables and Folklore

This book would be done in the very specific but undefinable genre of Japanese literature I attribute to books like People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami and The Bridegroom Was a Dog by Yoko Tawada. Basically these books tell a series of unrelated, fantastical anecdotes unified by a common setting, i.e., a small town in Japan with multiple unusual happenings and reoccurring characters. Again my lived experience is limited to Maine. Lacking the wealth of tradition and culture the Japanese fuel their modern-day myths with, I’d have to give my folklore a distinctly western flavor. Perhaps a magical forest spring bubbles with fresh Pabst Blue Ribbon. Maybe a kappa works at the local McDonald’s. Every Tuesday a corporate call center instructs its employees to wear their clothes backwards to ward off the interference of mischievous fairies who want to lower quarterly sales revenue.  

 

Joy Williams/Frederick Barthelme-Style Kmart Realism ‘Cop Out’ Book

Joy Williams and Frederick Barthelme are two writers whose short story capacities I greatly respect. That being said, these two are also responsible for what I’ve come to call ‘the copout novel’, in which a previously written short story, character, or scenario is explicitly reworked into a new, longer-form piece. For example, Joy Williams’ short story ‘Breakfast’ from the collection Taking Care is recycled in its entirety in chapter 4 of her novel Breaking & Entering. It seems fine to use a short story as a jumping point to a new novel idea, i.e. to take the characters and settings introduced in the limited space of a story and extend them in the manner that Barry Hannah does with say, Geronimo Rex as an extension of ‘Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt’ from Airships (here he literally retells a short story he’d already written from an alternate perspective, utilizing the same characters and event sequences but giving them renewed meaning and context), but Williams and Barthelme seem to prefer to directly plagiarize themselves. I can see the appeal. It would be way easier to write a book that was the Frankensteined clone of a previous work I’d done, the desiccated corpse of it. If I was to write a novel like this, I’d probably base it off the characters and themes present in my currently unpublished ~10,000 word short ‘New Moon’, which is about working a mundane data entry office job in real estate post-closing. Unfortunately, ‘New Moon’ is already the title of a phenomenally popular book from the Twilight series of teen vampire fiction, so I would have to come up with a different name.

 

‘Kafkaesque’-Style Book

No matter the century, people are obsessed with their quirky little labyrinthine Kafkaesque narratives. The idea is universally interchangeable—I just need to place a bewildered white guy narrator relatable in his sheer patheticness in a series of increasingly impossible logical traps. He becomes a cockroach, he needs tickets for a play that does not exist, he discovers his minimum wage job is actually part of a large and mysterious government program created solely to monitor him and his mundane movements. In my particular take on this genre, I think I would have the setting be like a giant inescapable parking garage. This would serve as a metaphor for America. Critics would read my book and leave blurbs like, ‘a Kafkaesque labyrinth of intrigue’. I would reveal things about the spirit of this country and the corporate rot within. But this wouldn’t just be a message unique to the United States, in general my grasp of the human condition would make this relatable to any human on earth, contributing to my book’s bestseller status.