I feel like I’ve finally finished my novel, Banana Republican Blues. The aim was always to write a farce that would pass as Literature. I’ve been working on it intensively the past several months, cutting out lots of stuff, refining and tweeking other stuff, adding more character and plot development, some intellectual substance, a little Tom Robbins here, with lots of playful language, some inspiration from Shakespeare there, with Eddie’s financial malfeasance resulting in his parents’ suicide, his denial of it breaking down as he comes to terms with it during the story.
It was always about him running away from himself, telling bawdy tales on the CB, towards his supposed future, but there wasn’t a strong motivation, or anything for him, or the reader, at stake. I believe it’s all there now.
I revisited a particular phrase last night, “the last bastion of Eddie’s boyhood” and for “boyhood” substituted “perpetual adolescence.” And suddenly it just felt finished.
Then I googled perpetual adolescence and came up with some references to the Puer Aeternis archetype, and realized that not only was it Eddie, but the main subsidiary characters were the other aspects of it. And it all came out of me, somehow. I’ve spell and grammar checked it and and proofed it, and the copy could not be much cleaner. I added a few more tweaks today, things that needed clarification in accordance with the insight, and it’s done. All 79,600 some words, a respectable length for any novel.
Now it’s on the ABNA, again. If it doesn’t get past the quarterfinals, this time, I’ll be very disappointed.
So why the question mark? Because I thought it was done so many times before and it kept getting rejected. But I never had the feeling that it was done. There were always things I felt were weak and I kept going back and back. Now I feel like everything I would want in it, as a reader, is there. Is it Literature? Hard to say. It aims to be. That’s all I know.
