The Lightning Room With Alex Mattingly

Relax and enjoy while Alex Mattingly, author of The Big Nap, serves us up lessons on the profundity of wax bottle candy, the disappointment of raisins, and the mystery of The Sultan’s Virgin Brie.

1. You manage a not-for-profit bookstore called Indy Reads Books. So many businesses in the book industry are for profit but not making any. How is Indy Reads Books different from that?

Still working that out! The truth is, though, bookstores that specialize in used books seem to be doing considerably better than their New-Book-Carrying counterparts, in no small part due to the fact that business models like those of Amazon have done a fair job conditioning people to avoid paying full price for anything. So right there we’ve got a bit of an edge – though we carry a few new books, most of our inventory is donated to us and sells for very low prices.

And that’s the other part that keeps us a little more nimble – the bookstore’s primary purpose is to help raise funds for the adult literacy programs of Indy Reads, our parent organization. Having that as our purpose encourages book donations, which keeps us able to provide a fresh supply of interesting and hard-to-find books without having much overhead on our stock. It’s a neat business model, and a fantastic way for a nonprofit to have a community presence that also serves as a way of raising money for a greater mission.

But I’d hesitate to look at what our bookstore does and apply those lessons to the book industry as a whole – it makes me nervous that people are getting used to paying at least 40% less than the cover price of a book. As a used bookseller, it’s great, but as a writer, it probably means coming up with radically different models for convincing people that things such as books (and music, and movies, etc.) are worth the money they cost.

2. Have you thought about turning The Big Nap into a series? How would that play out? Do you think the main character and Emily will ever get together?

There actually is a prequel, published previously by Punchnel’s, titled ‘Marbles.’ There’s an oblique reference to it in ‘The Big Nap,’ though I wanted both pieces to be able to stand alone. At this point I think there would have to be a third act, though I don’t think it’s going to end well for the narrator. I don’t think I’ve left him any room to get out of Part Three in one piece, as he keeps bringing down more trouble by trying to be left alone.

As for Emily, I think she’d have a very different opinion of their relationship. I think if the narrator called her ‘his girl’ to her face it would probably get him stabbed in the neck with a compass.

3. Take your favorite fictional detective and your least favorite book title (from any genre), put them together as the name of a cookbook.

I am clearly cheating on this, but:

“The Sultan’s Virgin Brie: Father Brown’s Handy Guide to Cheese Plates”

4. What made you want to write about the dark nature of an elementary school playground?

I think the fun of a private eye story is that the narrator is really giving you a tour, which is why it lends itself so well to other genres. You get a lot of P.I. types in science fiction stories, for instance, because that cynical voice can make a wildly unlikely future believable just by finding it a little boring and ugly.

Just as the imagined future seems so unlikely at first blush, I tend to think the same thing is true of elementary school. There really isn’t anything more ridiculous than setting a couple hundred children free in a fenced-in playground for the purpose of wearing them out enough that they’ll sit still through addition and subtraction. It’s pure psychological warfare on the part of the teachers. And so you end up with this very strange, very odd space in the life of an elementary student that runs parallel to the life in the classroom. Friendships are forged, enemies are made, scores are settled, and then you go back to class and listen to an old lady read from chapter three of ‘Charlotte’s Web.’

5. Is the value of candy directly proportionate to its chocolate content or is there some other rule to this monetary system?

The currency of candy tends to principally derive from three elements – novelty, flavor, and sugar content. Hence, a ridiculous product like wax bottles carries a ludicrously high street value because of its very outlandishness. An adult would not voluntarily opt to chew through wax to drink four drops of cherry flavored corn syrup. But for children faced with with an endless choice of paper or foil wrappers, wax is a profound and radical choice of packaging, and so is rewarded.

Likewise the childish preference of milk chocolate over dark. You’ve reduced the sugar content in dark chocolate, and therefore its value. Adults have come up with all kinds of tricks for making candy less valuable to children by reducing any one of those three elements – adding peanuts or coconut, or using dark chocolate in place of milk. In some very awful and upsetting cases, raisins have been added to sweets, a practice I’d very much like to see ended in my lifetime.

6. Recommend a book with good reasons why people should read it.

“Somebody Owes Me Money,” by Donald E. Westlake

That title, right? This is one of Westlake’s standalone novels, easy to find in paperback thanks to the Hard Case Crime imprint that’s doing such good work with pulp right now. The thing about Westlake, especially the older stuff, is that he doesn’t take his eye off the genre, because he’s going to use it to surprise you, and he’s going to be funny, and he’s going to be charming, and he’s going to put his narrator home in bed in the middle of the damn novel because that’s the last thing that ought to happen in a pulp.

Genre fiction can either be paint-by-numbers, or it can be like this, with lessons about structure and convention and fun, and an actual beating heart somewhere off the page. There’s nothing better in fiction than a moment that’s delightful because it’s unexpected, and unexpected because the author isn’t letting himself get away with anything. I don’t want to give it away, but there’s a great moment between the hero and a detective (when the hero is stuck home in bed, no less) that is jolting only because of how terrifically unlazy it is. That contempt for authorial laziness creates a new kind of tension in the scene, and the book as a whole. I’ll gladly recommend any book that can straddle the demands of genre and still avoid lazy resolutions.