Book Club: The Accident
This week our Waterstones Book Club choice is the thrilling book-within-a-book, The Accident. Here’s why we chose it and an interview with the author, Chris Pavone.
This week, our Waterstones Book Club book of the week is Chris Pavone‘s The Accident. This second novel follows on from The Expats, drawing on the rich worlds of publishing, politics and international spies to tell a suspenseful tale of intrigue. Our bookseller Joseph tells us more about why he loved it:
“Chris Pavone’s first novel, The Expats, clearly marked his territory in espionage fiction – but The Accident really puts him on the map! An anonymous manuscript filled with inside information about an accident that occurred years ago is delivered to a literary agent, setting in motion a chain of events that could impact the whole world. Set over 24 hours, the book moves at such a fast pace that I practically inhaled it.”
Joseph Knobbs, Waterstones Piccadilly
In conversation with Chris Pavone
Your first novel, The Expats, was an international hit, with film rights sold, and went on to in the Edgar and the Anthony Award. How was it being on the other side of the fence, and in the front line, having worked in publishing yourself for so long?
While sitting behind my desk as an editor, I watched one debut after another flail and fail; the sad reality is that most books don’t achieve the level of attention hoped for by their authors or publishers, and this is particularly true of first novels, which are notoriously dubious endeavors. I was well aware that chances were extremely high that my novel would meet with very little, if any, success, and furthermore that I wasn’t entitled to any. So I’ve been immensely grateful for every little good thing— and some rather large good things—that have happened with my books.
What was the starting point for The Accident: the idea of the dangerous manuscript landing in the world of NY publishing, or the back story itself and the idea of a cover-up?
I think as an audience we increasingly demand that stories entertain us in the very first instant of our engagement.
The premise of The Accident is that a manuscript—a not-yet-published book—can be a lot of different things, to a lot of different people, all at once: dangerous or important; a vehicle for professional success or an instrument of personal disaster; a first love or a fresh start; true or not true. A book-length narrative presents opportunities that aren’t offered by the fragmented sound-bitey content to which we’re becoming accustomed thanks to social media and internet news and cable television. I think as an audience we increasingly demand that stories entertain us in the very first instant of our engagement. But some stories—arguably most stories that are important— require far more depth, and a far greater investment of our time. I wanted The Accident to examine all these issues, albeit through the oblique lens of a thriller. I’m not trying to assign homework.
The world of publishing doesn’t naturally offer itself as a good canvas for a thriller, but it works brilliantly here. Was it fun using your own experiences of working in the industry and letting your imagination run free with them?
Writing The Accident was huge fun, as was writing The Expats, which was set in the world of Luxembourg expats. As a reader I love getting a glimpse into someone else’s world, so as a writer I’m trying to share the worlds I’ve inhabited. Not because they’re intrinsically the most exciting, but precisely because of the opposite: they’re commonplace, they’re relatable, we can all picture ourselves in these worlds. Then I layer extraordinary circumstances onto the ordinary, which is what separates the excitement of crime fiction from the boredom of real life.
Kate Moore, the heroine of The Expats, makes a cameo in The Accident, while Hayden Grey, one of the key figures here, played a minor part in The Expats. I wondered if you could say a little about this and if it is something you plan to pursue further in future novels?
I think there’s something immensely satisfying for readers and writers about a series with recurring characters. But for a variety of reasons that center on what is clearly my questionable work ethic, I don’t want to write a series at this point in my life. So the small overlap in characters is a compromise measure, and definitely something I plan on doing again. Plus, it’s fun.
Was the twenty-four-hour time frame tough to stick to, or was it something that helped with the dramatics of the plot?
The Expats is a story told from one point of view, over the course of about a year, mostly in the past tense. In the quest to avoid writing the same book twice, I wanted The Accident to be very different: utilizing many points of view, but in a very tight time frame, and almost entirely in the present tense.
I loved the detour to Hollywood—with Camilla the rights agent—it must have been fun to write. Was that a deliberate device to take the novel into another world or industry?
I wanted to include an example of the interconnectedness of the media worlds…
This is an instance of “going viral,” pre-digital: a dangerous thing is brought unwittingly on an airplane across a continent, and ends up harming people who occupy an orbit far from the thing’s origination, far from an understanding of what they’re dealing with. On a less metaphorical level, I wanted to include an example of the interconnectedness of the media worlds, and the different levels at which the same essential type of labor is rewarded. Is there a huge difference between what Stan the movie producer does for a living and what Brad the book publisher does? No. But one of them is commuting on a private jet, and the other is worried about paying the mortgage.
In some ways the novel offers a critique of the world and the way it consumes art (writing and reading, in this instance) today. Was that something you had in mind at the start, or a product of the story?
The central theme of The Accident is ambition, with a particular focus on the sacrifices we are all willing to make—not just in terms of our time and our work, but also our ideals, our morals, our sense of self—to achieve the goals we’ve defined as success. This is what all the characters are struggling with, even the very minor ones. And nearly all the characters hold jobs that occupy the intersection of art and commerce (as do I), which I think is where this tension is most acute.
Do you think crime and thriller writers should aspire to tackle serious contemporary themes in their work?
No. I think writers of every genre have an obligation to do whatever they’re doing well, to provide readers with some type of reward in exchange for their money and time and intellectual effort. Different readers want tremendously different things out of their reading experiences, and I don’t assign value judgments to those different desires, nor to the authors who satisfy them. Me, I’m trying to write complex, layered thrillers that tackle serious themes, not because I think this is a higher or more important form of crime novel—I don’t think that—but because as a matter of taste those are some of the books I most enjoy as a reader. Consequently it’s the type of writing that I think—I hope—I have the greatest chance of doing well, and I believe that’s one of the shared obligations we all have to one another: to do our jobs well.
And, lastly, I wondered if you could say anything about what will be next?
I’m writing a novel about a guy who becomes a spy by accident.
Chris Pavone for Waterstones.com/blog
