He has been chosen as Best Author in Boston magazine's “Best of Boston” issue and received the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. He lived in the Boston area for many years and now lives in Florida.
Pearl's new novel is The Award.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Matthew Pearl's website.
I like to flatter myself that I'm a title aficionado, actually, in that I put a fair amount of energy into landing what I hope is the just-right title for a project, whether it comes easily or takes longer, and I try to be a student of other titles out in the world. The title for The Award came to me once I had the plot for this novel in mind, which involves an up-and-coming writer navigating twists and turns of the literary world, including elite soirees and fancy awards, which ultimately lead into life and death stakes. It also plays on the idea that we sometimes trust books that won awards to verify we are choosing a good book to read.
What's in a name?
My protagonist David feels like he's an outsider to the literary world he dreams of belonging to, and is plagued by the idea that he will never be special enough to earn that place. So I wanted a name that, to him, has never felt like it stood out. David is a fairly common, and to my ear serious, name, so it felt right. Not that different from "Matthew," to be honest! I'm often called "Michael," don't ask me why, and I imagine my character, David, is sometimes called Daniel.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
Actually, my self from just a couple years ago would be surprised by this novel! I've always been timid about writing about myself, in fact I think I've only done it directly once in years of writing. That reluctance goes beyond writing. Ask me "how are you?" and I stop in my tracks, plagued with uncertainty. But there was motivation for me, this time, to fight against that. I really wanted to tell a suspenseful story inside the world of writing and writers, and to do that, I had to draw from my life and experiences. Even with the process of fictionalizing, it's a new experience for me to explicitly try to extract details and feelings I've been through.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
Great question. I am most excited about writing beginnings but find they rarely pop into existence the way I would have hoped. The Award is filled with suspense and drama, and to start the story I wanted to signal all of that to my reader. Yet, the first scene is a quiet scene, tracing a young writer and his girlfriend looking at the top floor of a house to possibly rent. Foreshadowing ended up being a great way to hook the reader even without a big bang event in the beginning, and much kind feedback I've received (luckily) confirms the beginning does its job.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
The Award gave me an opportunity to really explore a protagonist that resembles my background and circumstances, though not in a 1:1 kind of relationship. I vaguely recall someone saying about James Joyce that Stephen Dedalus, his stand-in in two novels, was an incomplete or failed version of himself. (I can never find who said that, maybe it was a professor in a lecture I attended in college. Should have taken better notes!) In the case of David, he's more driven by ambition than I am, but shares many of my insecurities, while he is more decisive and willing to cross boundaries than I would ever be. It's fun to unleash a surrogate version of yourself into a story, and doing so allowed The Award to keep building up twists and turns.
The Page 99 Test: The Poe Shadow.
The Page 99 Test: The Last Dickens.
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