Emma Rathbone won’t allow herself to fall into the wormholes of expectant authorhood. She won’t refresh her book’s Amazon page to check whether its bestseller rank has changed (steady at #219,146), read too much into whether it’s a hard- or softcover release (soft), or check to see if new reviews have popped up on the Internet (not in a while).
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And onto the business of promotion: Emma Rathbone will read from her debut novel at New Dominion Books on August 13. |
Instead, Rathbone is weathering the maelstrom that’s preceded the August 9 release of her first novel, The Patterns of Paper Monsters, by working on her second.
And as a 2006 graduate of UVA’s elite Masters in Fine Arts program in creative writing—whose graduates have been “kicking ass,” she says—Rathbone is not alone: A children’s book by ’09 graduate Michelle Cuevas, The Masterwork of a Painting Elephant, is due next spring. Publishers entered a bidding war for the rights of The Fates Will Find Their Way, the debut novel by ’07 graduate Hannah Pittard, about the Halloween disappearance of a girl and its effect on neighborhood boys. Graduates of the small program published at least 10 books in 2009 alone.
For its part, Rathbone’s debut novel follows a character named Jacob, a proud graduate of the Holden Caulfield School of Being Too Smart to Do Such Stupid Things. He lands in a juvenile detention center after his failed robbery attempt at a Northern Virginia convenience store devolves into a nervous assault on a cashier.
Rathbone says that the center is loosely based on her high school in Fairfax County, rumored to have once been a jail. “There’s so much specificity in that environment—the posters on the wall, the furniture, and just the mundanity of the day-to-day life there, that was so much fun to bounce this sarcastic voice off of it.” At a facility designed with the sole purpose of limiting its inhabitants choices, Jacob looks up and sees this: A poster of “a man wearing a bright yellow visor, standing on a mountain precipice and surveying the expanse of land beneath him. On the bottom, in a big classy-looking font, it says, ‘Choices.’” Jacob’s therapist later recommends medication for his low-grade depression, which is almost certainly a result of his incarceration. Bad feelings are made worse because the ever-present officers—faceless enforcers of juvie’s uroboric logic—won’t let him and his girlfriend consummate their relationship.
The novel gives readers a feel for how all the world’s attempts—whether through posters, motivators or corporate slogans—to make you feel better end up making you feel stupid, when all you want is to feel however you feel. That, in a sense, is where Rathbone and her character come full circle: To the rest of the world, getting a book deal is impressive enough. But “More and more,” she says, “it’s a situation where people look at the sales of your first novel, and that’s what helps them decide to take on your second novel. It used to be that people didn’t assume your first novel was going to make any sort of a splash. They were happy that you’d written one, so let’s see the second one.”
But for now, it’s one novel at a time. “Just got the finished books in the mail and cannot stop smiling,” she tweeted late last month. “So far, The Patterns of Paper Monsters is excellent at existing.”
