When I wrote in the first person, I realized writers had something in common with fraudsters: We dream big and we believe our lies.
Novelists have to believe their own lies, Swan says
The Dead Celebrities Club Susan Swan Cormorant Books
Susan Swan’s new protagonist, Dale Paul, is a self-obsessed hedge fund guy with a poncy way of speaking and a penchant for playing fast and loose with other people’s money. Yes, he’s terrible but he’s also a terrific character and the reason you will want to keep turning the pages on Swan’s latest novel, The Dead Celebrities Club.
The year is 2012 and he has been convicted of fraud. We meet him on his way to incarceration, a short stay in a landscaped white-collar prison run by an enlightened warden.
“I did want to punish Dale Paul, but I had to give up that attitude because the first few drafts were written in the third person and they were very judgmental and then I realized this wasn’t working,” Swan said from her Toronto home.
She sought out advice from one of her novelist friends, Jane Urquhart. Urquhart told her how she had dealt with the bad-behaving, self-absorbed main character from her novel The Underpainter.
“She said she had to embrace him and that meant writing it first person. So when I started to write in first person, then I had to embody Dale Paul,” said Swan, who is the author of eight books of fiction including the bestselling The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, The Wives of Bath and The Western Light.
“It was a great sense of fun, because basically he was saying and thinking all the things that I was brought up as a good WASP girl not to say and think.”
Not only did writing in the first person free up Swan creatively, but it also helped her to recognize an interesting bond she had with her protagonist and others like him.
“When I wrote in the first person, I realized writers had something in common with fraudsters: We dream big and we believe our lies,” said Swan. “There’s a creative mania when you are working on a project and you have to think it’s just the best thing ever. It’s going to be wonderful. And Dale Paul is exactly the same when he is planning a betting scam or something — he is just carried away with the creativity of it. There’s a creative mania.”
Paul may not be a great guy, but he is an interesting guy who doesn’t have the regular self-regulatory impulses that most people do. If Dale Paul wants it, he goes and gets it. Well, at least that is how it used to work.
“I knew there would be people that would hate him and maybe dislike the book because they think he is odious,” said Swan. “But I thought if I could make him fascinating enough, then I’m not going to worry about him being likable — because he’s too self-absorbed to be a really likable character.”
A mendacious, snobby boarding school brat, Dale Paul has left in his wake a family falling apart. His exwife is a drunk; his close cousin is bitter but weirdly loyal; his former boarding school pal is resentful; and his son is deeply ashamed.
“He doesn’t seem to be aware of his impact on other people. I don’t think he is setting out to harm them he is just so caught up in himself and what he is doing he doesn’t really occur to him that he is causing other people pain,” Swan said.
What he is caught up doing is trying to re-line his pockets and get out of jail a solvent man.
His plan is to raise money through a dead celebrities pool he concocts with the help of a mobster.
The idea is simple — buy in and hope the celebrity dies. These pools exist in the morbid reaches of the internet and — according to Swan — in a small watering hole in Ontario cottage country.
Her brother was in one of these pools and pocketed a cool $400 when Ugandan despot Idi Amin died in 2003.
“It just fascinated me the idea of ordinary people meeting in a bar and betting on famous people and when they were going to leave the planet,” she said. “I thought there was something about a culture that loves celebrities, but at the same time we want to take them down.”
Paul and his imprisoned gangster partner plan to parlay a pittance into big profits thanks to bitcoin. To help her understand the mysterious bitcoin world, Swan turned to white-collar-crime convict Charlie Shrem, a kind of bitcoin advocate in the early days of the cryptocurrency bubble.
“It’s a form of money and every thing is about money these days,” said Swan. “It seemed to belong in the book.”
Swan said she knew guys like Paul from when she, the kid of a country doctor from “the sticks,” was a boarder at Havergal College, a private school in Toronto.
“They move in the world in a way that I was so not brought up to move in the world. I think it excites my curiosity.”
The Dead Celebrities Club is just released but already Swan hopes to fashion Dale Paul and his antics into a TV series. Her most famous book, The Wives of Bath, was turned into the feature film Lost and Delirious and currently her first novel — The Biggest Modern Woman of the World — is being developed for TV.
In the initial stages, Swan’s manuscripts are critiqued by old friends including Margaret Atwood.
“Terrifying,” said Swan with a laugh when asked what it’s like handing a manuscript over to Atwood. “She had some very good tips and so did Barbara Gowdy and a number of other writers who are in the acknowledgments.”
“The time that Atwood looked at it I still didn’t have the end right,” said Swan. “That was a very helpful tip. It pays to have good writers as friends.”
It’s less nerve-racking to show the bestselling Atwood or Gowdy your book than it is to hand it over to someone your are related to or someone you play tennis with, she said.
Atwood “is very fair in her comments and she’s not going to humiliate you like actually some of your friends might if you show them something you are working on,” Swan said. “Another writer who has published a lot of books knows better than that. But when you hand your book to anybody to read for the first time, it is terrifying.”
The take-away, said Swan: “Never show a manuscript you’re working on to a civilian.”