During his first year in New York City and in his first post-college job at an investment banking firm, Milwaukee-native Gary Sernovitz had a month-long case of insomnia.
To pass those sleepless hours, he began sketching a piece of fiction about three 20-something people, two brothers and a young woman, who attend a Midwestern state fair.
A few years later, he quit his job in order to turn that story into a novel and attempt to get it published. To do this is a dream many have, but few realize. Sernovitz, now 28, achieved it.
The result is “Great American Plain” (Henry Holt, 228 pages, $23). Sernovitz will give his debut reading of his debut novel on Thursday, Oct. 25, 7 p.m., at the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop in Mequon, 10976 N. Port Washington Rd.
As he explained in a recent telephone interview, Sernovitz was not a complete stranger to writing when he started “Great American Plain.” After graduating from Nicolet High School, he attended Cornell University and majored in history, thereby “spending almost all of my time writing history papers.”
Moreover, at the firm where he worked for three years, he was in the equity research department and spent “about 25-30 percent of my time” writing reports. So “writing was something I’d been interested in for a long time.”
But he had never done any fiction writing, though he had “always been a lay fan” of literary fiction. His favorite authors, he said, are “the post-war Jewish greats,” like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger and “especially” Philip Roth.
“What I like in the books I read is explorations of how we live now,” he said, and particularly about characters who search for “identity, meaning and love.” He also said that he has “little patience with humorless books…. I think it’s important to leaven books with humor. Humor is part of life. Life is not uninterruptedly bleak.”
“Great American Plain” contains all these qualities. It is a study of three young people struggling to discover what to do with their lives.
Ed Steinke has at least some direction and aspiration; he wants to be not just a salesman but someone who elevates sales into a kind of art. Unfortunately, he is trying to sell organ consoles from a booth in a Midwestern state fair, where his art is not working.
Adding to Ed’s frustration is the insubordination and who-cares attitude of his younger brother Barry, who is playing the organs to demonstrate them. Barry has his own problems as a failed rock musician who doesn’t know what he’s going to do after this tedious summer job ends.
Catching Barry’s eye as she wanders past is Leila Genet, a clerk at a gas station/convenience store, orphaned, raised by her now deceased grandfather, painfully shy and alone, and equally clueless about her future.
These seem like shallow characters, but Sernovitz explorations of them and their world are readable, enjoyable and surrounded with humor that he said he “tried very hard” not to be mocking. (An example: Before she goes to the fair, Leila’s boss calls her. “‘Hey, hey, Leila. It’s Yankel Blakov, you know, from the station.’ He always said that, just so you didn’t confuse him with the other Yankel Blakovs you knew.”)
Equally interesting is what Sernovitz chose to leave out. Though there are some “fairly obvious textual clues to Wisconsin-y kinds of things,” Sernovitz carefully kept the location of the state fair vague in order to be able “to change things.”
There is also no Jewishness in the book. In fact, none of the lead characters has any clear religious or political consciousness or identity.
“I wanted to explore how these characters live their lives without clear answers to questions of identity, politics, direction,” said Sernovitz, who grew up at Congregation Shalom. “If one of the characters were Jewish, that kind of is an answer; it gives them a pre-established thing to hold onto. It would make it too easy.”
Moreover, Sernovitz added, citing the examples of his favorite American Jewish novelists, “You shouldn’t take Jewishness lightly. If this is not going to be the theme, you shouldn’t just lightly throw it in.”
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