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In The Millionaires, his remarkable—and very timely—third novel, Inman Majors explores a banker’s impulse to make lots of money, no matter the risks. Following Swimming in Sky and Wonderdog—each of which could accurately be called a coming-of-age novel, though in very different ways—Majors has now written an incontrovertibly grown-up book. At 480 pages, The Millionaires is almost as long as the first two novels combined, and the story of two small-town brothers who rise to dangerous big-city heights is as big and ambitious as the physical book itself.

As the novel opens, Roland Cole, a former Tennessee farm boy, is running for governor of his home state. Roland has no political experience, but he and his brother J.T. have turned their father’s tiny small-town bank into a state-wide banking empire, and they can afford to hire Mike Teague, a former lobbyist and veteran political consultant, to help them channel into politics their growing ambition.

Rolling out over the next five years according to the structure of a de casibus tragedy, The Millionaires tells the tale of the rise and fall of great men. Along the way, and without distracting from his page-turning plot, Majors also manages to explore the collision of the old and new South, as well as the eternal conflict between duty and drive, love and desire, self-respect and desperation, and countless smaller warring impulses in human nature. BookPage caught up with Inman Majors to discuss his big book.

Your last book, Wonderdog, is a comic novel about a moorless young man that takes place against a Southern political backdrop. Is it fair to say that The Millionaires is a more serious exploration of some of the same themes?

Absolutely. My father was a longtime lobbyist in Nashville, so I’ve spent a lot of time in and around the political arena. When I was young, Dad would take me out of school for a few days each year so I could hang out with him down at the legislature and see how the political process worked. I didn’t realize I was taking notes for future books at the time, but I guess I was.
 
The protagonists in this novel are ambitious, and they’re driven as much by the urge to win, to be triumphant, as by any winning prize: “Some folks are lucky to be satisfied with what they have,” Roland Cole tells Teague. “Men like us, though, we want to be in the game.” Are men like Teague and the Coles more interesting to write about than folks who are satisfied with what they have?

Ambitious people take more risks. They win bigger and lose harder, and the tension between success and failure makes for interesting characters. In my real life, I’d rather hang out with the solid, steady type. But when I’m at the computer, I’ll take the edgy, daring folks every time.
 
Mike Teague leaves his job as a high-school history teacher, he says, because “the bureaucracy and behind-the-scenes politics proved beyond trifling, beyond exasperating.” Are you suggesting that it’s impossible for human beings to escape politics, even when they’re far removed from government?

I was actually suggesting that school department meetings are Dante’s final ring of hell. No, seriously, you got what I was after. Teague realizes that you can’t escape politics in any walk of life—youth sports, church choirs, etc. There are always going to be people maneuvering to do things the way they want. So Teague decides that life is politics; he might as well play at a high level and be paid accordingly.
 
You write from the point of view of dozens of characters in this book—not just the protagonists, but virtually everyone who makes an appearance: gravediggers, farmers, grandmothers, waiters, wives, mistresses, etc. Did you find it hard to speak in so many different voices as you were writing?

I think it was Faulkner who said that all writers are frustrated actors. So I loved waking up each morning and putting on a different character’s outfit each day. I will say that my wife preferred my gravedigger attire to the scanty number I donned for the waitress.
 
“Bankers weren’t supposed to be wildcatters,” J.T. Cole observes after a vast savings-and-loan operation is closed in a sting. As you were writing this book, did you have any inkling that the S&L scandals of the 1980s would be replayed in another banking crisis just as The Millionaires hit bookstores?
 
I, and my 401K, had absolutely no idea the book would be timed with the current financial crisis. The good news is The Millionaires is really topical right now. The bad news is everyone’s too broke to buy a book.  
 

Margaret Renkl is the former books editor for the Nashville Scene.
 

Ethan Canin wants you to read between the lines. A wordsmith who at 27 dazzled critics with his debut short story collection Emperor of the Air, Canin has learned an appreciation of the tacit, the unsaid. "Space adds immeasurably to the power of fiction," said the author of Carry Me Across the Water.

"If you just go from Monday to Tuesday, it's not as effective as going from Japan in 1940 to Brooklyn in 1990. You can sort of trigger a reader to drop his emotional defenses," Canin says.

These leaps, these spaces add heft to his new novel, which tells of 78-year-old August Kleinman. After emigrating to America from Germany as a boy, Kleinman became an American success story, complete with business, wife and kids. Now more than comfortable in his accumulated wealth, Kleinman is less comfortable with his own grown children. He is capable of generous, even grandiose acts but since the death of his wife, Kleinman has become, as Canin writes, "a stranger to his own life." Re-examining his life, Kleinman on impulse flies to Japan. His hope, which he can barely articulate to himself, let alone to his family, is that by redeeming someone from his past, he can also redeem himself.

Despite the acclaim earned by Emperor of the Air and two other collections of short stories, Canin saw Kleinman's story as a novel. "To me, a novel is the story of a life. That's what interests me. The guy who works in the laundromat, the professor, what happened to them? Where did they make their mistakes? Why didn't they take that job? Why didn't they marry someone else? You could spend the rest of your life thinking about that." Canin hasn't been to Japan, isn't a businessman and at 40, has a long way to go before his children, ages two and five, are adults themselves. "I've never written anything autobiographical. I don't work that way. I make just about everything up." With Kleinman, he's created someone of "an age where one has some authority, where you can look at your life with some equanimity. I've never been interested in young people," said the author, sounding closer to Kleinman's age than his own.

The gravitas belying his boyish face perhaps dates from when he studied at the University of Iowa's prestigious Writers Workshop. Iowa prides itself on being a literary boot camp only the talented and thick-skinned can survive, and while Canin produced short stories there, he concluded he didn't have what it takes to be a writer. "I left having given up. I went to medical school with my tail between my legs," he said.

Thinking his writing days were over, Canin applied and was accepted to Harvard Medical School. While immersed in his studies, Canin received a call from an editor who'd read several of his short stories. She contacted him about putting together a collection. "I forget if I was a third-year or a fourth-year student, but either way, you're the lowest of the low, you're humiliated daily," said Canin, and to be celebrated as the author of Emperor of the Air felt "intoxicating, oh my God, incredible."

While savoring his literary success, Canin didn't quite trust it. He continued to write on the side, making medicine his livelihood, even after publishing a novel, another short story collection and a book of three novellas. He didn't have the confidence to leave medicine until 1995, the year he published his novel For Kings and Planets. Canin hasn't given up on the day job concept, though. He now teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the place he left in defeat more than a decade ago. Either Iowa has changed since his student days or Canin has. "I don't know if it's the zeitgeist, but people seem more overtly supportive and generous. I'm sure they have the same serpentine rivalries when they're in their own dens, but they seem more cooperative," he said. In the five years since joining the faculty, he's learned as much from his students as he has taught them. As Carry Me Across the Water shows, Canin has become "a little more confident" about sustaining a narrative throughout a novel. "You've got to give it a rhythm, from bold to quiet, go from love to horror, travel across space and time, move it along that way," he said.

To achieve that rhythm, Canin sketched out the arc of Kleinman's life on "a huge story board that takes up the whole wall. All the plot lines are in different colors on different index cards. It was the only way to keep it straight in my mind," Canin said. "Orange is when he goes to his son's house, pink was the war, pale pink was with his wife. I spent the most time on those moments where you go from one plotline to another. It gets to be like a jigsaw puzzle at the end. You've got four or five things and they've got to add up and you have to decide what do you reveal, what do you keep hidden." Through flashbacks and transitions flowing back and forth in time, Canin creates Kleinman's entire life. What seems effortless and all of a piece on the page was actually "pretty hard," said the author, who finds the process of writing "agony. I hate it, I really do." Canin laughed and explained that, fortunately, the agony works in accord with "some kind of Jewish idea that if you're enjoying yourself, something's wrong." What makes Canin return to the computer every day is the desire to break new ground with every work he writes. It's a metaphor with real meaning for him.

"Excavating prose is pretty much what writing is like," said the author who won't even reread his early short stories. "I would be embarrassed by their thinness. Right now, a true short story has no appeal for me. It's so shallow, just an affect carried off by a few words. In this book, I've toned down my prose style, tried to make it invisible," said Canin. "I have a greater regard for truth over beauty."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

Although Richard Russo believes he is “essentially a comic novelist” and his big, lively fifth novel, Empire Falls, is often very, very funny, we don’t get around to discussing humor until our long telephone conversation is almost over.

“In interviews it’s often this way,” Russo says, bemused. “I think the darker aspect of my fiction — or anybody’s fiction — is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about. Humor is notoriously difficult to discuss. Think about it: college literature courses almost always focus on very serious, often humorless works; they tend not to be about great comic novels or great comic writers. Even when they teach Shakespeare, they move from the comedies to the more serious and therefore more important tragedies. I reject that view completely.”

Readers of such earlier Russo novels as Straight Man or Nobody’s Fool will know exactly what he means. Probably no other contemporary American novelist writes as well or with such wicked, unsparing humor about working class life as Russo. He may care deeply about his characters, but he doesn’t always let them off easy.

“It’s no secret that in my books I’m trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can,” Russo says with a chuttering laugh that sounds a bit like Richard Dreyfuss. “I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them.”

According to Russo, the hilarious and the heartbreaking naturally converged five or six years ago as he began the ruminations that would lead to Empire Falls. “When I began working on this book I saw a guy from my youth who just reminded me of a certain kind of male who in his later years still likes to put on a kind of lady’s man air. For some reason I started dwelling on this kind of adolescent, who in his 50s or 60s is still tracking in a kind of sexual rut. And I immediately saw him as one of these guys who would be singing Perry Como. That was a small thing.

“The bigger thing was that since the shootings in Paducah, I had been thinking about the pressures that kids are under. As a father of two daughters, I had been dwelling in some sort of dark way on the question that everybody always asks after a school shooting and then promptly forgets — why? The problem is that there are so many answers and so many sociological reasons for it. But even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions. Novels are in a unique position to explore something like this in a way that hits home. So this is a book that has a lot to do with kids and adults who somehow or other in this culture of ours never manage to grow up.”

Russo’s early thoughts about the book are reflected in the two poles of his narrative. There is the hilarious Walt Comeau, aka “The Silver Fox,” a barroom blowhard who aspires to a health club empire that reaches from Empire Falls, Maine, to, well, at least as far away as Massachusetts. And there is the quiet, talented, deeply troubled teenager John Voss, a character who seems drawn directly from recent headlines.

“Unfortunately, this book is timely,” Russo says, commenting on some of the more chilling aspects of his portrait of Voss. “I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their own non-existence for the people who are supposed to care most for them.”

If John Voss and Walt Comeau represent the extremes of the fictional world of Empire Falls, Miles Roby is at its center. Roby is the manager of the Empire Grill, a diner with growing culinary pretensions in the heart of Empire Falls, a dying milltown controlled by the Whiting family. As the novel opens, Miles is in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Janine, worried about his exceptionally bright, sensitive daughter, Tick (who befriends her odd, silent classmate, John Voss), and is seemingly paralyzed by an uncomfortable web of obligations to his less-than-responsible father, to the memory of his mother, and to his employer, Mrs. Whiting, who owns the Empire Grill, along with almost everything else in town.

Mrs. Whiting, one of Russo’s most sharply drawn characters, is a study in a sort of gloved malevolence which gives the book both a spiritual and a political cast. “If there’s an enduring theme in my work, it’s probably the effects of class on American life,” Russo says when asked about the broader meaning of Miles’ difficulties with Mrs. Whiting. “If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don’t mean to.”

Of course, Russo is a novelist, not a politician or a theoretician, so his views get worked out through the messy, human interactions of his characters. Still, his choice of subject seems to put him somewhat at odds with much of contemporary writing. Like his other books, Empire Falls is a big novel with lots of characters and wide-ranging perspectives. It also focuses on an America that now seems to be out of the mainstream.

Says Russo, “My books are elegiac in the sense that they’re odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination. I find that by ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you’d be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets. My best sense is to ignore much of what is going on in the culture at large and to focus on some of the things that are still of interest to me.”

Luckily, a good many readers seem to be interested as well. Since he collaborated on the film version of Nobody’s Fool, which starred Paul Newman, Russo has seen a resurgence of interest in his novels and the rise of a parallel career as a screenwriter. He now divides his time between writing fiction and writing for the movies.

Freed from the need to support his family by teaching, Russo seems to have entered a remarkably productive period of his life.

“I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry,” Russo says at the end of our conversation, “but it hasn’t been a problem to this point. I don’t think there’s a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I’ve got other stories to tell.”

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Author photo by Marion Ettlinger.

There is something different, something a tad experimental about John Irving’s newest novel, The Fourth Hand.

Yes, the book offers the familiar pleasures of any John Irving novel — a well-turned plot, an antic mixture of comedy and tragedy, and profound observations about the wounds and consolations of romantic and sexual love, to name just three.

But the feel of The Fourth Hand — its heft, its pacing — is noticeably different from previous John Irving novels. For one thing, it is only about half as long as earlier bestsellers such as A Widow for One Year or The World According to Garp.

"I don’t think The Fourth Hand is experimental in any modern sense," Irving said during a recent call to his home in Vermont. "It is still essentially a linear novel, and it relies on narrative momentum to move it ahead. But this is my 10th novel, and it is only the second novel that I’ve written without a childhood. I don’t give Patrick Wallingford or Mrs. Clausen a childhood. Those omissions were daunting to me. I always think that my feet are firmly on the ground as a novelist when I’m telling a whole life. It’s hard to imagine a novel without the effects of the passage of time. That is an experiment for me. I don’t allow more than five or six years of time to pass. So, yes, a major-minor character is missing, and that character is the passage of time."

It is an omission with a point, given the fact that Irving is both satirizing the lack of historical context in what currently passes for television news and examining the emptiness of the life of television journalist Patrick Wallingford.

In the breathtaking first chapter, Wallingford, while on assignment in India, loses his hand to a circus lion when he instinctively turns to record the lion’s roar and puts his hand too close to the cage. The footage of Wallingford’s tragedy is broadcast again and again to millions around the world, and Wallingford becomes famous as the "disaster man" and the "lion guy." His obsession with replacing his missing hand coincides with the obsession of Dr. Nicholas Zajac, a Massachusetts surgeon who wants to perform the first hand-replacement surgery in the U.S. Neither Wallingford nor Zajac counts on the complicating presence of Mrs. Otto Clausen, who donates her dead husband’s hand to Wallingford — and then demands the right to visit the hand. Wallingford’s emotionally difficult relationship with Mrs. Clausen moves him toward the transformation that is the ultimate point of the narrative.

"It mattered to me a great deal that Wallingford be extremely likable," Irving says. "I wanted him to be the kind of character that if you met him you couldn’t help liking him. Despite his, shall we say, moral insufficiencies, he’s not a bad guy. Yet there’s this sort of irritating superficiality about him."

Irving embodies Wallingford’s superficiality — and the superficiality of what the author refers to as "not-the-news network news" — in a sort of featureless urban landscape. "My novels generally have a lot of landscape detail, a lot of atmosphere," Irving says. "Here I tried to make everything like television itself. There’s a kind of sameness to everything. I consciously kept the opening chapters short and void of landscape, making the pace of the novel as quick as I could make it right up until Wallingford realizes that it’s not the hand that he’s missing, but an integral piece of his life, that he’s met her [Mrs. Clausen] and she’s gone away. From that moment on, not only do the chapters get longer, but the tone of the novel changes considerably."

From that moment on, Wallingford pursues Mrs. Clausen and grows increasingly discontented with his career as a television journalist. In the book and in conversation, Irving is sharply critical of television news. "How many times do we have to see Princess Di leaving the Ritz!" Irving exclaims at one point in our discussion. "It’s not even a good shot; it’s just the last one."

Wallingford’s rude awakening arrives when he chooses to hide out and not cover the biggest story of the moment — the John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash. "I chose the Kennedy episode because there was nothing about him or his wife that bespoke a sought-after celebrity," Irving says. "He had it, but he never looked like he wanted it, so I felt that even in his death he was being violated. We all were. You walk away from the television set feeling disgusted with yourself that you have watched it again. Even at the end of four or five days, you’ve seen nothing new. You’ve heard nothing but vapid repetitions of homilies. It’s all repetitious stuff. It’s empty."

Contrast that with how Irving feels about reading. "I know a lot more about adultery from reading Madame Bovary than from hearing about all the myriad divorces of my friends, which is to say the details are just a little better. I’ve learned a lot from reading novels, not only about how I want to write or to tell stories, but most of what I know about so-called experience. Maybe books don’t get enough acknowledgement for their substitution in many people’s lives for personal experience. The fact that something happened to me is of less interest to me than how well the tale is told. Personal experience is not all it’s chalked up to be."

Little wonder then that books are part of the emotional currency of the characters in this and other Irving novels. Wallingford discovers, to his surprise, that Mrs. Clausen, who works in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers, is reading The English Patient. He pursues her, ineptly, by trying to discuss the book with her.

In such well-observed details, The Fourth Hand finds its emotional force. In fact, The Fourth Hand demonstrates again just how good John Irving is at dramatizing the positive and negative charges of familial love, especially the love of a father for a child. "I can’t really separate being a writer from having children," Irving says. "I was an undergraduate when my eldest son was born. I was already a father with a young child when I was writing my first novel. When you’re writing a novel you must impose a kind of solitariness. But you can’t be alone with your thoughts without having your most pressing anxieties and concerns foremost in mind. If you have children, they are your most pressing anxiety and concern."

Irving says that he has begun working on a new novel, a longer novel, a narrative that begins from the point of view of a four-year-old. But he is not yet completely done with The Fourth Hand. Working with Lasse Hallstrom and Richard Gladstein (the same team that made the movie of The Cider House Rules, for which Irving won an Academy Award), Irving will write the screenplay adaptation of the book. "I’m excited at the possibility," Irving says at the end of our conversation. "The story has two elements that I think will make it a good movie — an immediate beginning and a good ending. If you’ve got that, you can’t go too far wrong."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Meet the hapless denizens of Eagle Lake, Mississippi: Byron Egan, preacher and former drug mule; Max Raymond, who gave up practicing medicine to play jazz sax for the woman he loves and who seems "to stand knee-deep in unseen wreckage"; sweet Melanie Wooten, who at 72 is having an affair with the sheriff half her age; and a gambling, whore-running Conway Twitty look-alike named Man Mortimer. Eagle Lake lies just outside Vicksburg, Mississippi, and is mapped out in full by its creator, Barry Hannah, in his novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan. 

The book's characters are "orphans from normal," writes the author, who isn't so sure normal exists, anyway. Being orphaned, being lost and disenfranchised, however, is something Hannah understands and writes about with passion. The man Truman Capote called "the maddest writer in the U.S.A." has peopled his novels and short story collections with the desperate, the driven, the victimized and the violent.