Money Man

Michael Amsler

Weary traveler: Erdman in repose.

Paul Erdman puts big stock in financial thrillers

By Rich Mellott

WHEN PAUL ERDMAN begins working on a novel, he focuses on setting and plot. The characters come later. “I never write about a place unless I’ve been there,” says the financial guru-turned-novelist, back at his Healdsburg home following a month of research in Central Asia for a work in progress. His new focus: the resource-rich Caspian Sea basin, a global hot spot in more ways than one.

“You don’t go to a place like that for pleasure. It can be as hot as 125 degrees. The air-conditioned hotels aren’t very air-conditioned,” Erdman says. “And the food–it’s bloody miserable,” he adds, dropping a hint of his British background.

Good stories are filled with conflict and contrast, and Erdman, who has authored nine novels, digs for his tales in the desolate sands of countries like Uzbekistan, where the oil is rich and plentiful. Experts believe the region holds 50 percent more oil than the combined proven reserves of the Americas, Western Europe, Africa, and Asia.

“There’s a huge geopolitical power vacuum there now,” Erdman says of the region that includes countries that aren’t exactly household names yet, such as Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. “It’s strategically important because, at some point, whoever controls the region will control the oil.”

The global powers, not surprisingly, are lurking. The boundaries of Russia, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey practically merge in the area. China is not far off. The U.S. presence is huge. For instance, “Chevron has committed about $6 billion to the area,” says Erdman, who produces, along with his fiction, a steady stream of financial analyses for all kinds of media.

Erdman traveled extensively around the Caspian basin in July, often with a hired car and driver. This kind of down-in-the-trenches research, though often dangerous, can inspire scenes filled with gritty detail and realism.

“My main character needs to get into Uzbekistan, and I was looking for how and where he’d do that,” he says. “We were near the Afghanistan border, driving on a crazy road, when a series of semis from Iran rolled by. They wouldn’t tell me what they were carrying. But that’s when I realized that could be a great way to get the character into the country.”

Erdman recently decided the story could best be told in first-person narration. In past novels, he’s used the third-person and has mixed the narrative voices. The 66-year-old author admits characterization isn’t his strength.

“I’m more of a plot guy,” he said. “The plot and the place come first. Then the characters usually develop as I tell the story.”

His eclectic background no doubt comes in handy. If he hasn’t lived in an area, he’s probably traveled there. Born to American parents in Ontario, Canada, Erdman has resided in England and Switzerland. He’s maintained a Northern California residence since 1973, moving up the coast from San Francisco to Marin to Healdsburg.

In his novel The Set-Up (St. Martin’s Press, 1997), the action jumps from San Francisco to Switzerland, from Sardinia to Alaska. The characters include shifty brokers, shady bankers, and crooked lawyers. There’s also a wonderfully realistic description of a Swiss jail, another result of first-person research–this time unplanned. Erdman spent time in a Basel jail in the ’70s while authorities investigated a commodities trading scandal. It was nine months before his innocence was established and he was released.

Erdman on the current stock market activity.

Some people have been known to confuse Erdman’s financial analysis with his fiction. Though his commentary What’s Next?: How to Prepare Yourself for the Crash of ’89 shouldn’t be read the same way as his novel Panic of ’89 (St. Martin’s Press, 1989), some of his fans believe his fiction offers more insight into the complex workings of the global economy than most non-fiction analyses.

Erdman does much of his writing in the early morning before his phone begins to ring. (It’s been ringing quite a bit more since the recent wild swings in the stock market put bearish views back in fashion.) He recently hooked up with CBS MarketWatch on the Internet, where he vents his views on the volatile financial markets. He’s on radio and TV and in newspapers and magazines all over the world. His work has even made it to the silver screen: One of his nine novels, The Silver Bears, was turned into a movie starring Michael Caine.

Though he insists he’s a “postulator” rather than a prognosticator, his fiction has been known to become reality. One of his novels, The Swiss Account (Tor Books, 1993), had a remarkable impact on the real world.

“It was a historical novel set in World War II and involved Swiss bankers cooperating with the Nazis,” Erdman says. The story, accompanied by historical footnotes, helped generate widespread interest in the issue that eventually culminated in a billion-dollar settlement to Holocaust victims and their heirs.

What other weighty matters is the former banker pondering as the millennium approaches? He believes the new European currency is doomed (he’s writing a piece for Time magazine entitled “The Demise of the Euro”), and he thinks the Y2K computer problem won’t be nearly as serious as many believe.

Another area that he’s following closely is medicine. “There’s a revolution coming in the medical field and you can already see it happening,” he said. “Lives are being extended by decades. Who’s going to support them?”

Maybe he’ll let us know in a future novel.

From the September 10-16, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Gay Rites

David Licht

Pet project: Leroy Aarons has seen his tragic account of the suicide of a gay young man touch many lives. Now Prayers for Bobby is primed for prime time.

Author Leroy Aarons’ ‘Prayers for Bobby’ heads for network television

By David Templeton

FIFTEEN YEARS have passed since a troubled 20-year-old man named Bobby Griffith–tortured by years of self-hatred and futile attempts to “cure” his homosexuality–chose to end his life, leaping from a freeway overpass into the path of the speeding traffic below. Bobby’s suicide, tragic though it was, served to shake his fundamentalist mother out of her staunchly Christian faith and launched Mary Griffith into a new life as a determined gay rights advocate. Indeed, the circumstances of this young man’s life and death have gone on to touch, to enlighten, and to invigorate the passions of thousands of people.

Two years ago, Sebastopol author Leroy Aarons published Prayers for Bobby: A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of Her Gay Son (HarperSanFrancisco), a riveting bestseller, now in paperback, that sold over 20,000 copies and in turn inspired composer Jay Kawarsky to set the story to music. Prayers for Bobby–a soaring choral work that brings alive the boy’s heartrending journal entries–was first performed by the Gay and Lesbian Chorus of San Jose, and has since been staged over a dozen times around the world. In short, the message of Bobby Griffith’s life refuses to go away.

Now a movie is planned. Last month NBC announced that Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon will produce a made-for-TV version of Prayers for Bobby, an event that could potentially reach tens of millions of people.

“It’s a big leap forward,” Aarons says. “It’s a big step for this project that has been bouncing around a bit the last couple of years.” Since publication of the book, there have been numerous nibbles from various studios; according to Aarons, Walt Disney Studios held the film rights for some time before finally abandoning the project. When Daniel Sladek, a young gay producer in Hollywood, approached Sarandon, she agreed to produce–and may commit to playing Mary Griffith once she sees a finished script–and NBC gave the project thumbs up soon after. No start date has yet been announced.

Aarons, a former executive editor of the Oakland Tribune and the founder of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, spent three and a half years writing the book, and is encouraged to see that awareness of Bobby Griffith’s struggle–and the underlying problem of evangelists insisting that God can turn gays into straights through vigilant prayer–has grown so significantly.

“It kind of has a life of its own,” he says of Bobby’s story. “I’m still getting letters and e-mails about the book, though we haven’t actively promoted it in two years. There always seems to be something popping up about it.”

Aarons, who first read about Bobby Griffith in a newspaper article marking the 20-year anniversary of the American gay rights movement, is sitting at the dining room table of the spacious home he shares with his partner of 17 years.

“I found Bobby’s story to be incredibly compelling and touching,” he says. “At the same time I first heard about him, things were coming together in my own life. I’d been closeted professionally for most of my career, was in the process of coming out, and was settling a lot of personal issues.”

Years later, after taking an early retirement from the Tribune, and eager to write a book, he called Mary Griffith, a longtime resident of Walnut Creek, and began a series of interviews with her that resulted in Prayers for Bobby

Since writing Prayers, the 64-year old journalist has kept himself busy: He’s on the board of directors of We the People, Sonoma County’s gay and lesbian newspaper, he’s doing groundwork on a proposed University of California course on gay and lesbian issues in the media, and has completed the libretto for an opera on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress. He’s currently searching for a composer.

All the while, he’s been keeping his eyes open.

Aarons has seen that stories such as Bobby’s–gay and lesbian youths struggling to be accepted by family and peers–are becoming increasingly common. This change is owing to the efforts of activists like Mary Griffith, a slowly building public awareness of gay issues, and mainstream media that are gradually learning to report on gays and related themes with the same sensitivity and balance required when covering ethnic and minority subjects. Predictably, the religious right has responded by becoming increasingly vocal in its condemnation of homosexuality.

“Since Bobby’s death, the right-wing religious movement in this country has, if anything, intensified its efforts to campaign against gays,” Aarons affirms. “The more the public learns and the more progress is made by the gay movement, the more vociferous is the opposition.”

He points to a recent religious campaign that has placed full-page ads in newspapers and magazines, offering intensive programs by which gays and lesbians can be successfully “converted” to heterosexuality.

“These ads really articulate an issue that is at the heart of the book,” he says. “If anybody tried, through Christianity and the Bible, to convert themselves to being heterosexual, it was Bobby Griffith. He gave it his all for four years–and of course it finally ended tragically.”

“I’m another person who–though not through religion–spent 25 years of his life trying to go straight, without success and with a lot of personal pain,” Aarons says. “I’m not ready to make the argument that it’s 100 percent biological and preordained, but whatever the components are, it’s a permanent disposition. It’s clear to me that this is who I am; it’s part of my fiber and fabric, and it always will be.”

With a shake of his head, he adds, “I’ve seen these segments on documentaries, where parents say they’d rather have their children live celibate lives, absent of any familial love, than for them to be homosexual. I don’t know what kind of Christianity–or what kind of humanity–that is.”

From the September 10-16, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Autumn Leaves

New books for the new season

Compiled by Patrick Sullivan
and Marina Wolf

While you’ve been surfin’ the sweet summer away, Sonoma County authors have been laboring in the vineyards, preparing a new crop of fall books to ease you into autumn.

Sarah Andrews
Only Flesh and Bones
(St. Martin’s Press; $23.95)
A YOUNG GIRL’s repressed memory may hold vital clues to her mother’s murder in local writer Sarah Andrews’ fourth mystery. This time out, geologist/detective Emily “Em” Hansen finds herself unemployed and desperate. Her old boss dangles a job in front of her, but to get it, the straight-talking Em must get to the bottom of the killing of the man’s wife. An old journal and the woman’s traumatized daughter provide the only leads, but it’s not long before Em finds herself in the midst of danger as she closes in on a mysterious stranger who may hold the key.–P.S.

Cydney Chadwick
Inside the Hours
(Texture Press; $6)
THERE’S A DARK, ominous feel to Penngrove writer Cydney Chadwick’s latest collection of short fiction. Inside the Hours feels like that quiet moment just before a thunderstorm begins, when every second in the stillness seems to carry a terrible significance. Chadwick’s characters are a diverse bunch, ranging from a disgruntled poet to an anorexic adolescent girl to an aging dog-park vigilante. But this motley crew is united by one characteristic: their alienation in an world full of absurdity. Chadwick recently won the New American Fiction Award for another, soon-to-be published collection of her shorts, so the quirky, compelling Inside the Hours is just a taste of things to come.–P.S.

J. California Cooper
The Wake of the Wind: A Novel
(Doubleday, $22.95)
GUALALA WRITER J. California Cooper’s third novel offers a moving account of an African American family struggling to survive and prosper in the tumultuous world of the post-Civil War South. Cooper’s prodigious storytelling skills and energetic narration produce a folksy style of writing that’s tough to put down. Her work as a playwright (she is the author of 17 plays) seems to have given her an excellent ear for dialogue, and it’s not hard to see why she was once named Black Playwright of the Year.–P.S.

Arthur Dawson
The Stories behind Sonoma Valley Place Names
(Kulupi Publishing; $7.95)
EVER WONDER about what led to the naming of Hooker Creek? Want to know more about the ghost dog of Glen Ellen? If you’re looking for the inside scoop and dirty details behind the landmarks of the Sonoma Valley, then Arthur Dawson’s charming glimpse into local history is an excellent place to start. The Stories behind Sonoma Valley Place Names provides historical sketches, intriguing biographies of famous locals, and explanations for the naming of everything from Hippie Hollow to Kenwood to Hooker Creek (which was named after Civil War Gen. Joseph Hooker, whose penchant for loose women may have given rise to a new name for prostitutes).–P.S.

Matthew Gollub
Cool Melons–Turn to Frogs
(Lee & Low Books; $16.95)
SANTA ROSA author Matthew Gollub teams up with illustrator Kazuko G. Stone to introduce children to Japan’s most famous poet, Jobayashi Yataro, better known as Issa. Filled with haiku (“Climb Mount Fuji, Snail, but slowly, slowly!”) and gorgeous pictures of the Japanese landscape, Cool Melons follows Issa from his childhood, when he is sent away by his father, through his poetry career (he eventually authored nearly 20,000 haikus), to the birth of his own daughter and her tragic death. Issa himself passes away in the end, but not before he becomes known as the “Lay Priest of the Temple of Poetry.”–P.S.

Barry Kite
Damn! A Christmas Book with Sex, Violence, Drugs, and Fruitcake: The Aberrant Art of Barry Kite
(Pomegranate; $17.95)
THERE’S NO doubt about it: Santa Claus takes a beating in local author Barry Kite’s new picture book about Christmas. We’re treated to Santa being shot from the sky by hunters on the Thames, Santa’s severed head being carefully examined by curious scientists, and Santa being hung from a tree by a holiday lynch mob. Then, Kite moves on to Frosty the Snowman, and things really get ugly. … –P.S.

Jonathan London
THIS PROLIFIC children’s author produces seemingly dozens of crisply written books a year from his west county home; here we synopsize the most recent four. London’s publishers take great care of him by picking excellent illustrators for his work, but the story lines, full of simple adventures and engaging characters, carry the books on their own.–M.W.

At the Edge of the Forest
(Walker Books; $15.99)
BLOODY PRINTS are easy to follow in the snowy forest surrounding a farm. But when the farmer and his son track a coyote down with a gun, what they find makes the trigger much harder to pull. Illustrated by Barbara Firth.

Ice Bear and Little Fox
(Dutton Children’s Books; $15.99)
JOIN THE SIMPLE wandering journey, thrilling for its starkness, of a newly adult polar bear and the fox that accompanies him for the sake of leftovers. Warning: This book contains graphic depictions of seal carcasses. Illustrated by Daniel San Souci.

The Candystore Man
(Lothrop, Lee & Shephard Books; $16)
REMINISCENT of London’s earlier beboppin’ hero, Hip Cat, the candystore man weaves a loving community for the neighborhood’s children with licorice ropes and lots of jazzalicious good fun. Illustrated by Kevin O’Malley.

Hurricane!
(Lothrop, Lee & Shephard Books; $16)
A HURRICANE turns lazy island living, with snorkeling and the occasional scorpion in a shoe, into a howling adventure for two brothers and their family vacationing in Puerto Rico. Illustrated by Henri Sorensen.

Megan McDonald
Beezy at Bat
(Orchard Books; $13.95)
LIFE NEVER stays boring for long when the feisty, pigtailed Beezy is around. Beezy at Bat offers three new stories about the playful antics of this perky little girl and her friends, with colorful illustrations by Nancy Poydar.–P.S.

Art. Rage. Us: Art and Writing by Women with Breast Cancer
(Chronicle Books; $24.95)
SANTA ROSA artist Nancy Bellen is one of many Bay Area artists who contributed to this unique collection of artwork and writing. Art. Rage. Us is a powerful effort by over 70 creative women to engage and examine the subject of breast cancer. Their work communicates anguish, terror, anger, and hope as they relate the intimate details of their personal struggle with the disease and their search for healing. In every medium–through collage, painting, photography, and the written word–these women provide compelling perspectives on their illness and their effort to come to terms with the transformation of their bodies.–P.S.

From the September 10-16, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Mountain High

Cold Mountain, newly released on paperback.

‘Cold Mountain’ delivers epic Civil War tale of coming home

By Don Shackelford

IT IS THE SUMMER of 1864, and a Confederate soldier is in a military hospital in northern Virginia. His war wounds have healed sufficiently for him to stare longingly out the window, gathering his strength and courage to begin his journey, alone and on foot, to his home at Cold Mountain, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

Thus begins one of modern literature’s epic journeys, one that has precedence in tales by Homer, Dante, Joyce, Melville, and myriad others of the hard road toward home.

Charles Frazier has crafted a convincingly lyric story that has catapulted Cold Mountain (Atlantic Monthly Press; $13; newly released in paperback) to the heights of the bestseller lists. For once, here is a popular book that deserves all the dedication and readership it gets.

Frazier tells two tales here. One is of Inman, the disillusioned soldier and his travails; the other is of Ada, the genteel and educated young woman back home who is struggling to survive and make do in a war-ravaged South.

Like Penelope, Ada does not waste her time pining away. She learns, with the help of her young friend Ruby, how to manage the farm: planting and harvesting crops; raising and butchering animals; bartering for trade goods.

The book is equally about the wandering soldier and the maturity and awakening of a belle confronted with the harsh realities of her time and situation.

The lyrical beauty of the book is Frazier’s ability to vividly convey geography, time of day, mood, weather, the natural world, characters, and the slow shift of seasons without allowing the eloquence of his language to obstruct the view. Inman approaches a fellow resident in the hospital:

“The blind man was square and solid in shoulder and hip, and his britches were cinched at the waist with a great leather belt, wide as a razor strop. …

“He sat with his head tipped down and appeared to be somewhat in a muse, but he raised up as Inman approached, like he was really looking. His eyelids, though, were dead as shoe leather and were sunken into puckered cups where his eyeballs had been.”

FRAZIER USES the vernacular and the objects of rural mid-19th-century America to great effect. He has lovingly re-created the feel of the era–no small feat–so that the reader steps assuredly and completely into the book, and into the imaginative world that great novels have always evoked.

The large facts and the small details of the book ring true.

The sometime violent scenes have the feel of events as they happen, and the affection one feels for the two main characters can be created only by an artist who has convincingly conveyed the recognizable humanity of his people.

We care about Inman and Ada, and we worry about them, just as we do about people we know, except that the arc of their fictional lives lies before us in a few pages.

I approached the denouement of the novel with trepidation, not even sure I truly wanted to know what becomes of them, but ultimately unable to resist the hard tug of the story.

This novel of return should become a classic. It is an astonishingly sure-footed first novel. It also creates the kind of psychic disturbances of which great works of art are capable. It confronts war without being didactic, just as it eases toward love without becoming sentimental.

It is a novel that has stayed with me since I read it, one that demands attention.

Cold Mountain is a work of historical fiction that helps restore that somewhat rusty art form, just as it does the idea that a story with a beginning, middle, and end–a linear novel–can, when well told, still be a powerful hermetic experience, one that needs no deconstruction.

From the September 3-9, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.