Slackjaw

Putnam/Tarcher, 1998

"The Balzac of the bin is at it again. With his paranoid Valentine to New York... Mr. Knipfel now brings to fiction the welcome gifts which distinguished his previous books--the authenticity, the narrative exuberance, the integrity of his cheerfully undeluded American voice."

-Thomas Pynchon

 

PLOT:

The story of an aging, bitter and drunken New York newspaperman obsessed with Japanese monster movies. While working the Kook Beat for a third-rate daily, he stumbles upon a massive conspiracy involving a falling satellite, a string of strange earthquakes, inexplicable whale behavior, radioactive corpses, plumbing thefts, an undersea civilization, New York real estate, and, of course, Godzilla.

 

BACK STORY:

After finishing the third memoir but before it was published, I figured I’d grown pretty sick of writing about myself and thought I’d like to try my hand at a novel. So I called my publisher at the time and bounced the idea off him. He thought it was a fine idea and in fact thought it might be good to publish a novel before the third memoir just to break things up a bit. “So when can you get it to me?” he asked.

 

Now, the problem here was that I hadn’t really thought things through. In fact I hadn’t got much beyond thinking, “Y’know, I’d kinda like to write a novel.” So I panicked, took another week off work, and sat down at the computer with three thoughts in mind. No, four thoughts. I knew who the protagonist was. I knew how the book would begin, I knew how it would end, and I knew one thing that took place in the middle. So my job, simply enough, was to connect the dots. Fortunately the story took care of itself.

 

After I finished (this was in early 2001) and turned it into my publisher, he rejected it, explaining that they didn’t publish science fiction. I tried explaining that it was okay, since this wasn’t science fiction, but he didn’t buy it. So I got myself an agent and she started shopping it around. Then came 9/11 and nobody wanted to do anything for a couple years. Finally Vintage came along.

 

Here’s another little bit of trivia. The book’s original title was “A Cold Colossal Buzzing,” a line taken from a James Thirber essay. My editor thought that was too long and too hard to say, so we went about looking for a new title. I have lists of dozens upon dozens of increasingly awful  alternatives. For a few weeks there the book was actually going to be called “Zombie Hootenanny” until at the last minute we returned to my original idea and trimmed it down to fundamentals.

 

The soundtrack for this one, unsurprisingly, was provided by a collection of Akira Ifukube’s soundtracks for the Godzilla films.