Origins of the Novel

For decades, I jotted down ideas, insights, and bad poetry into notebooks, diaries, and scraps of paper stuffed into a nightstand box. Sometimes late at night, I was unable to sleep until I captured on paper a thought that would not rest.

Five years ago, I began combing through that material and through news clips of articles I wrote during my years as a newspaper reporter. My initial thought was to write a novel inspired by my first months as a night police reporter in Richmond, Va., when newspapers were thriving, and advocacy journalism was rare. I also wanted the book to contain a theme about music — jazz, blues, and rock — as Walker Percy’s novel, The Moviegoer, contains a theme about movies. My book describes music shows I attended and musical artists I revere.

As I worked on the book, a White police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man. Protests erupted across the country, including in Richmond, resulting in the removal of Confederate statues on Monument Avenue. Nationwide controversy continues to this day about such statues and related issues, including critical race theory; the naming of schools, streets, and other public property after Confederate leaders; banning books deemed offensive; and softening or removing instruction in schools about slavery and systemic racism in America.

I knew my book, based in the former Capital of the Confederacy, had to adopt race relations as a central theme. After centuries of slavery and another century of wresting with its aftermath, this country could not figure out how its Black and White citizens could get along.

As a White man, I don't think reckoning with even the ugliest chapters of this nation’s history should offend the sensibilities of Whites who are not responsible for the atrocities of the past. I love this country; it is the greatest nation in the world. Opening my eyes to the bad along with the good about the United States does not make me unpatriotic. In fact, I am more patriotic for loving this country, despite its faults. Ignoring or soft-pedaling history does not erase it. Turning a blind eye to a problem could never solve it. No one should ever aspire to ignorance, even when knowledge might be unpleasant or painful.

This book has some unpleasant, even painful, parts. But I hope readers will enjoy its humor and consider it, on the whole, uplifting.