The River of No Return
What can you tell us about your new book The River of No Return?
It’s a mash-up of genres – a big page-turner that includes everything I like to read, all rolled up into one book. Regency romance, spy adventure, time travel, mystery, and a little dash of apocalypse. Just enough apocalypse, mind you, to give the book some flavor. The River of No Return is not at all dystopian! I wanted to write a happy book! The main character is Nick Davenant. He was a Georgian aristocrat, but during the Napoleonic Wars he jumped forward in time 200 years. He’s lived in the 21st century for a decade, and has managed to adapt, becoming a modern man. But suddenly he realizes that a nefarious organization is controlling time travel and the future itself. He needs to find a way to go back again, to step into his old life. A woman, Julia, is waiting for him in 1815. Adventure, romance, and all sorts of other shenanigans ensue.
The novel has been compared to The Night Circus and The Snow Child. How does this make you feel?
It makes me feel wonderful, and humbled. Each of those novels is a perfect gem in its own way. I think the reason my novel has been compared to them is that I want my readers to get lost in my book, to feel that the world I’ve invented has overwhelmed their sense of reality. Those novels do that, beautifully. Those novels are also highly crafted, and I worked hard to make my writing as perfectly tuned as I could. But of course my novel is different from each of those novels, as well. Neither The Night Circus nor The Snow Child is funny. My novel aims to have the romance and wonder of those novels, but it is also – to use an old fashioned word – a “romp.”
With the novel set in the early 1800's please can you tell us about your research process into this time?
I’m a professor of 19th century literature at Bryn Mawr College, so luckily for me I was already steeped in the history that I write about in the novel. With that said, I spent hours and hours in the library, poring over old maps, digging out old dictionaries of slang . . . there’s an 1811 “Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue” that was fantastically helpful! Those people really knew how to curse. I also used Google Image all the time. I wanted to make sure that the details of the time were correct, and we live now in a moment when you can call up a photograph of almost any antique object in the world.
The trickier question for me was how to get a sense of time travel into the actual prose of the novel. In the novel, the time travelers use streams of human emotion to move up and down what they call the River of Time. Obviously this is not actually possible, nor does it have any relationship to Einstein and the speed of light and all of that! I wanted readers to feel something strange, something uncanny or untimely, as they read the novel. So I worked in dozens of citations to older literature. There are obvious ones – Nick is constantly citing poetry, and doing it self-consciously. But there are many, many more that are simply hidden like Easter eggs throughout the book, woven into the sentences and the plot. Some are mere sentence fragments, others are entire scenes lifted out of literature going back to the 16th century. I don’t want the reader to necessarily recognize these moments – after all, I mostly want The River of No Return to be a page-turner, a storming read, the kind of novel that hauls you through it just because it’s fun. But I would like readers to sense, as they are charging through the novel, places where another kind of voice from another time is calling to them through the prose itself. I had to do quite a lot of research to make this work, and then quite a lot of ironing out to make it as seamless as possible.
Please tell us about the inspiration behind the characters of Julia and Nicholas and their individual stories.
If you think about the novel as a mash up of genres, then Nick is from the fantasy/science fiction genre, and Julia is from the Regency Romance genre. Nick has traveled in time, and has to figure out how time travel works, how to get back home, and how to stop the evil corporation from taking over history. Meanwhile Julia is locked up in her evil cousin’s house, and she has to figure out how to break free, how to make her own way in the world, and how to find true love. Their two stories get tangled up, and suddenly Nick finds himself falling in love and having to behave a little bit like a Regency romance hero. Meanwhile Julia discovers that she has powers over the flow of time, and she begins to have to behave a little bit like a science fiction heroine. `But honestly, the inspiration for Nick came one day when he simply turned up in my head, entirely fully fledged, with his problem already worked out. I really felt as if Nick was a real person from the moment I started writing. Julia felt that way, too – but she was more stand-offish. Nick is a big, friendly, open-hearted man who likes everyone he meets. Julia is more careful about the people she trusts. It took me a lot longer as a writer to get to know Julia. But once she did trust me, I felt that she really gave me her heart.
You worked for a year in features at Elle magazine. Please tell us about this experience?
Have you read or seen The Devil Wears Prada? Well, there are a lot of things there that are spot on. Not the evil boss – my boss was delightful. But in so many ways that movie felt like a documentary to me! It was a fantastic couple of years, though. I learned how to write under an editor, and how to revise and revise and revise until something was perfectly honed. I never would have been able to write this novel without that experience. I loved the process of working together with a huge team to put together a magazine in a month. It was fascinating. I also learned that I am way too much of a schlump to work in Times Square in one of the leading fashion magazines! My favorite shirt is ten years old.
You studied English Literature in Cornell, so how much has this influenced your book?
My training as an academic has everything to do with this novel. Research is at the heart of any historical novel, and in graduate school I learned how to pursue a detail down through the stacks and across several dusty books until I finally ran it to ground. I also learned how to survive the loneliness of a long writing project. I learned how to sit down in the morning and write until the sun goes down. I also learned how to ask for help, how to take advice, how to like criticism. And that was very important in writing this novel. I showed it to a battery of friends; some of whom (I’m looking at you, Holly Kosisky!) were really harsh. But without them, the book would never have become as complex or as polished as it is.
You now teach American Literature at Bryn Mawr College. How much does this affect your own writing?
Teaching made me a novelist. Standing in front of a classroom and holding their attention for over an hour – you have to become a storyteller. And when you are teaching literature that is sometimes two hundred years old, sometimes very dry . . . you have to seduce your students into time travel. Coax them into having feelings no one has felt for generations. I learned how to spin a plot through teaching, and I figured out my idea about time travel – that it happens on waves of feeling – through teaching literature. My students also introduced me to books I might otherwise never have read. Bryn Mawr College looks a lot like Hogwarts – all gothic architecture and turrets. My students love that about it. Once I had a student beg off class because she had broken her ankle playing Quidditch. I realized that I had better read these books if I was going to teach this generation. And I’m so glad I did. Rowling ended up being a big inspiration for my novel.
This is your first novel so do you have plans for another?
I’m charging ahead on the second book in the series even now!
What is a normal day like in your world?
A teaching day is a teaching day and a writing day is a writing day. I’m either doing one or the other. Writing days are very precious, and I wring every moment out of them that I can, getting up, drinking my coffee at my computer, and staying there until my eyes are closing from exhaustion. I love a huge, long, marathon of a writing day.
What is next for you?
School starts up in September, and until then I will be writing my butt off!