Things worth celebrating
The Age
Saturday August 22, 2009
Age Book of the Year winner Steven Amsterdam has led a variety-filled life, writes Jason Steger. STEVEN Amsterdam grew up on New York's Upper West Side. His mother is a literary agent, he worked for Random House as both a travel publisher and a designer. He has, as he puts it, all the connections he could hope for.But it is in Melbourne that his fiction has been first published, by the small but perfectly formed outfit Sleepers. First, Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn bunged a story of his into their third annual almanac, in 2007. A year later he gave them another. Then they asked for more, took on the novel that had emerged from those stories and published it earlier this year as their first venture into fiction. Now Things We Didn't See Coming has won the Age Book of the Year Award.Things is a series of linked stories in a post-apocalypse world of the not-too-distant future. The unnamed narrator starts his story as a boy, on the eve of the turn of the millennium, when the fear of Armageddon is everywhere. He ends it many years later, reunited with his much changed father.Amsterdam's vision is of a society that has split into urban and rural areas, where people are struggling for food, medicines and the basic stuff of life. Where disease is rampant and travel almost impossible and invariably dangerous. The dynamics of power have changed; the nature of government is radically altered €” Kevin Rudd would be aghast at Amsterdam's fictional senator €” and the landscape in all senses has been re-formed. Technical and scientific developments have been radical and the new treatments available for all sorts of conditions are central to life in the new world.Through this, Amsterdam's narrator €” called Bean by his grandmother and later known by just a number, 2215 €” negotiates the tricky issue of living.Amsterdam's first story was sparked by a report in this newspaper about an elderly couple in the bush whose health was failing and who were obliged to surrender their drivers' licences."So they did what you want your heroic grandparents to do and drove as far as they could before the authorities caught them. I was mesmerised."He read this shortly after an article in The Economist €” one of his favourite sources of inspiration €” prompted him to ponder the impact a tablet for Alzheimer's might have, and not long after "a horrendous American election where it really seemed as if the city folk and the country folk were about to go to war".Amsterdam says all these things gelled into the story. "When I wrote the last line, I realised I could write more . . ." So he did. That original story was rejected 17 times before finding a home at Sleepers; when they eventually asked him about a novel, he was able to provide.One of the attractive things about the book is the ambiguities Amsterdam builds in. Is it really a novel or just a suite of stories? Is the narrator the same character throughout? What country is it set in? What happens at the end?"To me he's clearly the same narrator. The problem of whether it's a collection or . . . a novel stems a bit from the life being so different from one chapter to the next. I've had quite a few careers and quite a few home cities and it makes sense that it's quite like my experience."Amsterdam says he toned down the specifics of the location. In this he was influenced by the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago's Blindness, in which he "did the every city thing very well. I was thinking it worked, this grim future, unless I started naming place names and cities specifically. Cities are similar enough and countryside is similar enough round the world that it could be more easily universal that way."Amsterdam likes to ask people who've read Things about the end. Does the narrator survive? He certainly doesn't make it clear, and between two readings my response changed significantly."Does he die in the end is a question I actually enjoy asking," he says. "And I've gotten, 'Of course not. The whole book's about survival, he survives anything.' So I go, 'OK, that's great'."But does Amsterdam have an answer to that question? "I don't know. Because at one time he was definitely intended to live past that chapter, I think of him as surviving."When Amsterdam was first in New York publishing there was a girl from a cattle station in Queensland working there who said, "Come any time and we'll make a man out of you.' I always thought, 'That sounds nice.' " He knew people in Melbourne and Sydney through publishing, and 15 years later he got here. He was completely smitten with Melbourne. It immediately felt like home.Here he has started yet another career €” as a nurse. He works at The Alfred hospital in the acute psychiatric ward and also does palliative care work. And there's his writing. "This year has been intense," he admits.Returning to America for the first time since the election of Barack Obama as President, he heard a lot of talk about healthcare. He got permanent residency here in May and took great delight in showing off his Medicare card there. "People are having life and death fights with health insurers about whether they can get a certain treatment and suddenly saying they don't want the Government paying. But I suppose there is certainly a sense that the tyranny has ended to some degree, the tyranny of the idiocy . . ."If he's had some good contacts through publishing, he also picked up an unusual one while working as a producer's assistant in Los Angeles trying to woo Japanese investors for US entertainment ventures. He spent a week driving Timothy Leary around LA after Leary had lost his licence. (No surprise there, really.) "He was interesting and interested in everything. He'd had a wild life by then, was used to being catered to, and could have dominated all conversation."But he always seemed to have questions . . . His two default modes were to be vigorously thinking a problem through out loud, engaging everyone in the room, or laughing about it."Steven Amsterdam discusses Things You Didn't See Coming at the Melbourne Writers Festival this afternoon.
© 2009 The Age