Author keeps goals modest, measured

Nov 22, 2008 (The Columbus Dispatch - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- NYT | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- P.F. Kluge nicknamed the narrator of his second novel, Eddie and the Cruisers, the Wordman.

He liked the moniker so much that he adopted it on his Web site.

"I admit I use it for myself -- a novelist who employs words to tell stories that are fictional, that aren't true but have truth in them," Kluge said recently by e-mail.

"With luck, you take experience and memories, and make something that will last. Forever? Maybe not, probably not but for a while -- a few skips of the stone across a pond."

In 1983, Eddie and the Cruisers was made into a big-screen movie starring Michael Pare, Tom Berenger and Ellen Barkin.

Although he teaches literature at Kenyon College in Gambier and includes work as a journalist on his resume, Kluge considers himself first and foremost a novelist.

His ninth full-length work of fiction, Gone Tomorrow, was published this month.

The novel -- part campus satire, part mystery, part love story -- follows the final year in the life of eccentric, reclusive writer George Canaris, who might have written a magnum opus (which he calls The Beast) but hasn't published a book in 30 years.

The New York Times called Gone Tomorrow "a sharply observed yet tender novel of academic life and its many sand traps."

Kluge recently answered some questions for The Dispatch.

QUESTION: When you write a book such as Eddie and the Cruisers, which prominently features rock 'n' roll, the book has a chance of being turned into a successful movie. Does the same thing happen when you write a book about a writer cloistered at a small liberal-arts college in central Ohio?

ANSWER: I was happy to see Eddie and the Cruisers turned into a film and to see a Life magazine article I co-authored turn into Dog Day Afternoon.

The shelf life of a novel in a bookstore is somewhere between the shelf life of milk and yogurt. A movie gives the book new life, though in different form. I'll always welcome movie interest. But I don't write with movies in mind. That would be a mistake.

Q: As novelist Richard Ford told me recently, the great American novel might not have to be a doorstop type of book. He pointed to The Great Gatsby; Goodbye, Columbus; Bartleby the Scrivener; and other shorter works of fiction.

A: I admire those writers, like Melville and Dos Passos, who aim for the so-called great American novel. Maybe you could add Roth or Updike to the list. I love their ambition, swinging for the fences. But they take on such a heavy burden.

I would settle for a -- not the -- great American novel or even a pretty good American novel. And, I confess, I am comfortable with a novel that comes in at fewer than 400 pages.

Q: Without giving away the ending of your book, do you care (and should readers care) whether Canaris has or hasn't actually written The Beast?

A: Canaris claims to be writing a major book. Through the years, flattery and great expectations yield to derision and cruel humor.

Gone Tomorrow contemplates the possibility that, if he had written nothing, that would be OK: He's a fine teacher.

Still, what about all those years of unkept promises? That's a predicament. I want the reader to hope for the best and be prepared to accept the worst.

Q: Do you have a Beast?

A: No Beast in me but a few novel-length stories gnawing away inside. As you grow up and old, the weight of memories and experience grows heavier and more urgent. "Don't leave me behind," these untold stories seem to say.

I am at work on a novel set on my Peace Corps island of Saipan. And I continue to mull over something that would involve Germans and German-Americans during World War II. We'll see.

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