The City of
Mirrors
by
Justin Cronin
***
Is it any wonder
Justin Cronin seemed like a man released from a long
incarceration when he appeared last Friday night at the Dallas Museum of Art to discuss the release of the last book of his Passages trilogy, The City of
Mirrors, with local book reviewer Joy Tipping? "I basically spent the last 10 years locked in a room," Cronin said, finishing what he termed the "2,000-page novel" that his three apocalyptic volumes -- The Passage, The Twelve, and The City of Mirrors comprise.
“Does it have to
be the last book?” Tipping asked, echoing the sentiments of the room full of
fans, many of whom have followed him since the release of the first book in
2010.
“Yes, it does,” he said. Not that seeing
publication of the final book of the series about a race of medically-induced
vampires, the havoc they unleash on the world, and that world’s ultimate
redemption (or not – no spoilers here) necessarily means the end of that
world’s story.
“At some point, I
think I’m going to write a book of stories associated with the narrative. In
fact, I’m writing it now, very slowly, because my brain is dead right now,” he
assured fans. Plus, there’s always the possibility of movies or, more to
Cronin’s wish, TV series to look forward to.
In the meantime,
the Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Houston’s Rice University had plenty to say
about the trilogy’s Texas influences, the joys of writing genre fiction, and,
yes, the thing he has for red-haired heroines. He didn’t start
out as a writer of books garnering not only critical and popular acclaim but
what were rumored to be multi-million dollar advances. After writing the very literary, very grownup award-winning Mary and O’Neil and The Summer Guest in the early 2000’s,
his daughter Iris, then in the third grade, dared him to write the book she
wanted to read. One that should be about a girl who saved the world. And it had to have a
character with red hair, “because she’s a redhead.”
Although he was
currently writing another book, Cronin and his daughter passed stories about
this world-saving, red-haired girl back and forth. When he typed his notes, it
came to 30 single-spaced pages that “wow – looked a lot better than the thing I
was writing…my agent and I sent it
out under a pseudonym because it was so different.”
Different as in
“genre” instead of his previous “literary” fiction.
“I don’t think
genre is a bad term,” he told Tipping. “But there is a difference between work
that is constructed mainly to entertain and a book meant to endure. The
difference is in the depth of characters.” Such depth that he feels confident
about filling that other volume he spoke about with the stories he developed around
the characters, stories there simply wasn’t room for in the trilogy. And there are
plenty of those, with the appendix to The
City of Mirrors listing more than 60 named characters.
And how about those "really long books in which which a lot of people die," as Cronin described his trilogy? "I read that Larry McMurtry was a big influence on you,” Tipping
said.
Texas author Larry
McMurtry’s magnum opus, Lonesome Dove,
was a great influence, Cronin agreed. Schooled in the classic Iowa Writers
Workshop format of short stories – “miniature works of despair,” as Cronin
described them, McMurtry’s book about a massive 19th century cattle
drive and its correspondingly enormous cast of characters was a revelation.
On a plane trip, he met a Texan “blathering about this book,” who insisted on forcing it on him. “I read (it) on the plane, then lay in a hotel room for three days (still) reading it. I saw the virtues and the power of a really huge story.”
As well as
the revelation that “a book could fall within an established genre and still be
a wonderful book."
