‘ Houston goggles’ have inspired author
He no longer sees life as he did in Philadelphia
“‘ Make it new,’ the poet Ezra Pound famously wrote. He might have been talking about Houston.” Justin Cronin, author and distinguished faculty fellow at Rice University
Fellow Houstonians, let’s face it. To the uninitiated, ours is a city that takes some getting used to— a 600- square- mile architectural free- forall, with rivers that run brown and sometimes backwards, trees like something out of Dr. Seuss, high- rises that sprout like weeds on a coastal shelf so flat you could flick a marble and watch it roll for a week.
It’s also a great city for a writer, or any kind of artist, especially this one, Northeastern born and bred, who came to the Gulf Coast nine years ago at the age of 40 and had to learn to see the world all over again.
It’s fair to say that I never would have written “The Passage,” and its sequel, “The Twelve,” unless fate had brought me here. A friend of mine once remarked, “You don’tmove to Houston for the view.” I came here, likemost people, to work — to teach English at Rice. A solid, sensible plan: teach, write, raisemy kids in a city with no winter and cheap housing.
Not like Philadelphia
What I found the day I stepped off the plane amazed, confounded, and, to be honest, frightened me a little.
It was July, hot as Mercury, the sun like the sole of a big shoe coming down. Importantmental health tip: Don’t move to Houston in the summer.
But what struckme like a pie in the face ofmy Northeastern preconceptions was the way the place looked. The weather, the landscape, the buildings, even the light itself: Nothing resembled the part of the country where I was raised.
In Philadelphia, where I’d lived for a decade, nothing ever changes. It’s as if time has slowed to a crawl. My 100- year- old house wasmade of stone and had joists the size of a clipper ship’s. The thing could have withstood a direct missile hit and stayed standing.
By contrast, I hadn’t lived in Houston more than a couple of months when one morning I stumbled out the front door to seemy neighbor tearing down his house.
A house, I will add, very similar tomy own, which seemed perfectly livable. One guy with a claw- excavator, his 10- year- old sitting on his lap to operate the controls, and into the dump truck it went. The whole thing took maybe an hour.
It was a scene incomprehensible tomy Northeastern eyes. It was also the beginning ofmy education in the ways of our fair city, though I didn’t understand this at the time. ( I thought my neighbor was having a breakdown.) “Make it new,” the poet Ezra Pound famously wrote. He might have been talking about Houston.
It took some getting used to. But eventually I began to see what was interesting, distinctive and sometimes even beautiful aboutmy new hometown. ( My wife and I call this phenomenon “getting your Houston goggles on.”) The first job of any artist is to pay attention to the world. Themore I looked the more I saw, and this began to show up on the page. The act of writing began to feel different. It felt freer, more thoughtful and less selfconscious. At mid- life, a time when life begins to seem like an endless loop of sameness, Houston wokeme up. It taught me to openmy eyes and look.
But the best thing about this town is its infectious love of risk. Writing a novel is a chancy thing. You spend a long time working without getting paid, hoping somebody will publish the thing when the dust settles. But writing “The Passage” was even riskier, because I was getting paid— to write a different novel. I’d taken an advance I could never hope to repay, and spent every dime.
“The Passage” was also very different frommy other books— a big no- no in the publishing world. Writing the same kind of novels, one after the other, is the way you build an audience for your work. Jumping the tracks from literary fiction to a post- apocalyptic vampire epic looked like career suicide, andmy editor thought so, too. Her words to me were these: “Justin, don’t do this.”
And yet I wanted, with a passion verging on mania, to write the novel. I just couldn’t let the idea go, nomatter how foolish. I askedmy wife what she thought I should do.
“I have one question,” she said. “If this doesn’t work out, can your publisher take our house?”
My lawyer had already assured me they couldn’t get the house. God bless Texas’ homestead laws.
“Good,” saidmy wife, “because the children and I like living here. Please go write your vampire book.”
Life lesson to pass on
So how is this a Houston story? Ten years ago, I probably would have followedmy editor’s advice and played it safe. But a decade in Houston had taught me otherwise. You drive around this town with your eyes and ears open, and what it tells you is this: Don’t stand on ceremony. Feel free to fail, because 90 percent of risk is failure, but 10 percent isn’t. Whatever cockamamie idea excites you, give itawhirl. You’ll go crazy if you don’t.
And thank God I did. I borrowedmy wife’s courage, got to work in my damp little office in the garage, wrote for two years, and everything turned out fine— better than fine, really.
It’s a storywith a happy ending, in other words. But even if it wasn’t, I’d still tell it tomy children, if they askedme how to live their lives.