A Conversation with Cally Fiedorek
'Atta Boy,' her debut novel, is out now
Last year, I had the pleasure of offering a blurb for Atta Boy, Cally Fiedorek’s debut novel. I was struck, right away, by her ability to so seamlessly navigate across the social strata of New York City. This is a vanishing art in the world of literary fiction, which unfortunately tends to be moored to the class of the author’s origin. Since most American novelists, in the 2020s, belong to the upper middle class, this leads to a lot of solipsism. I am happy to report Atta Boy is much more ambitious than that. The novel follows Rudy Coyle, a working class twenty-something Irish Catholic from Flushing who ends up the doorman at a tony Park Avenue apartment building. He becomes embroiled with the Cohen family, particularly Jake, their Jewish Donald Trump-supporting patriarch who has buttressed his rags-to-riches wealth with some ill-begotten gains. Jake is a millionaire taxi mogul and his industry, in the 2010s, is about to tank. Rudy becomes embroiled with Jake, and legal trouble looms. As I mentioned in my blurb, Atta Boy recalled The Bonfire of the Vanities as one of those scintillating social novels which deftly ranges high and low. Fiedorek made an intriguing point to me about New York novels—there are many novels about Brooklyn in contemporary times, but fewer about Manhattan. This, then, is a Manhattan novel—and a notable one.
Below is my conversation with Fiedorek, the latest in my series of exchanges with working novelists.
What was the genesis for Atta Boy? How did the novel first come to you?
I’d always wanted to write a brash, juicy, down-and-dirty New York yarn, Scorsese-esque and just a load of fun; unsurprisingly, the prose didn’t really show up for that command performance. You can't write from the outside in, from the elevator pitch or jacket copy. You can try, of course, but the work will be self-conscious, schematic, performative, inert—no good. You’ve got to find the human register, the single voice or personality, and then work your way outward.
The taxi industry angle was a gift from the news and tabloids—it struck me as quite a charismatic world, curiously underused in fiction, a great hook on which to hang things. But there was never a lightning bolt moment; I feel compelled to emphasize this, because I think it does writers a disservice to imagine that a great idea is what’s required of them. Writing a debut novel is more like—to use a slightly gross and unappealing metaphor—emptying the vacuum filter, seeing what's been stuck in there, what faces and places and images and conversations have been sticking around in your craw the last couple decades, what the best, least boring, most showmanly way is to connect and externalize those things for a reader.
What’s your writing process like? Are you a heavy drafter? Do you outline or eschew outlines? How does it all come together?
In the early days, even with short fiction, there’s a lot of thrashing about and throat-clearing, walking around feeling down in the dumps about the day's output. The ideas and characters and language feel so murky and approximate at first, and you can't force or rush the ripening process. But I’ve learned to appreciate the worry and loathing as a necessary phase of a work’s life cycle, generative in its own peculiar way, a way of building up your creative antibodies. You doubt yourself fiercely at first, and then one day you leave your doubt behind, and you’re off.
Once I started cooking with gas, I wrote pretty steadily and efficiently, a chapter a month, no excuses. I was pregnant with my third child and was grateful for the sense of an imminent deadline. I edited and reworked it furiously as I went—the first draft was reasonably complete and final. The language needs to be firing on all cylinders for me to get to that place of internal clearance to move forward. I'm astonished by people who can dash to the finish line of a first draft quickly and worry about the details later. How? The writing is the details. That’s the whole deal.
Rudy Coyle’s sections are some of my favorites because I think you capture, well, the working class, outer borough milieu, and the sensibility men there have. How did you formulate the character of Rudy?
He's a wannabe actor, a death-or-glory type of personality. Glory's obviously in short supply, and he's panicking, scrambling to find an alternative vision for his life. I can really relate to that headspace. That feeling of running aground in your later twenties, feeling haunted, for the first time, by the undelivered promise of your earlier youth. Feeling like you really need to make a move, and fast—anything to forestall a slow slide into a desultory, lackluster middle age. That was the internal seed of him, the existential itch. Outwardly, I suppose he’s a play on the lovable tramp/bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold prototype, which is one I find almost inexhaustibly appealing and attractive.
As far as his social background goes, I worked in a dive bar in lower Manhattan for a few years after college, so that came to hand easily. My mom’s half of the family is New York Irish going back a few generations, and I rubbed elbows with some of the Irish community in Queens growing up, through a dear family friend; I wanted to square that inheritance and set of traditions with a certain younger-millennial ennui, a certain irreverence for one’s elders. Rudy’s betwixt and between, both in his station in life and his sense of community. He’s evolved past his father’s sort of prosaic, hidebound, blue-collar Irish Catholic pride, but feels bitterly removed from—and outpaced by—the white-collar professionals in his midst; at the same time, there’s a sensitivity and an odd kind of sophistication in him that resists the dudebro, Barstool-sports model of v-necked young manhood that might otherwise have appealed to someone of his demographic. He’s trying to find his place and his people. I guess he's a bit of a jerk, in some ways, and certainly a drunk, but I love him.
On the other end, there’s Jake Cohen, millionaire mogul of the Upper East Side. Jake and Rudy are on a collision course. Tell me about taking on the interiority of wealth and privilege. How to inhabit the world of Jake? He’s a brash Trump guy, yet not a caricature.
Jake was so much fun to write. He's a hybrid of so many different people, real and imagined. A lot of these guys I drew from, though, didn’t seem like they’d be all that nice to talk to, so I knew I needed to inject him with something extra—a Bellovian, loquacious quality. He's the quintessential Trump-era blusterer, an inverse-Gatsby, powerfully motivated by his own much-vaunted underdog status. That’s what makes him so appealing to Rudy, and what provides the spark of their bromance—Jake’s in the ring with the elites, living that one-percenter dream, but seems to Rudy, at first at least, to have retained about himself a kind of pugnacious, low-brow swagger, an outsider’s perspective on his own insiderhood. Jake appears to have reconciled, in human form, some of Rudy’s competing desires and allegiances.
As far as the actual color and texture of that Park Avenue world, that came naturally, having grown up in Manhattan and gone to private school with the sons and daughters of men only slightly more tasteful than Jake in their nouveau riche trappings.
When I read your novel, Bonfire of the Vanities came to mind almost immediately because you plainly had sociological ambition like Tom Wolfe. Novelists, in my view, too often confine themselves to the stations they know best (usually the upper middle class) and it was very refreshing to see you range about these different worlds. How did you decide to do that?
Thanks. I’m glad you found it refreshing! I'd been watching a lot of 1930s screwball comedies on Filmstruck (RIP)—Sullivan's Travels, My Man Godfrey, films that were very socially conscious, very hip to the realities of the Great Depression, but that approached class conflict in a sort of winsome, winking, goofy way. 2020, 2021, when I wrote the book, were distinctly un-winsome times, an era when any halfway-conscientious writer was wise to question their own instincts around social issues—there was a tremendous, and probably very necessary, fear of saying the wrong thing. On one hand there was a rejection of the insularity and tone-deafness of stories of privilege, and on the other, a proscription to stay in one's lane—even the whiff of exploitation was an unpardonable sin. I kind of wanted to sidestep that whole conversation by leaning into that older, more classical comedy tradition, the class satire, the buddy comedy, the odd couple comedy. I really appreciate your Bonfire of the Vanities comparison—so much so that I put it on the cover!—but the sociological intent was always secondary to crafting a zippy, funny, fleet-footed story.
Beyond Rudy and Jake, we meet Marley, Jake’s young daughter, who is grappling, in her own way, with the world of perverse luxury she has inherited. She observes, at one point, “they didn't even seem to make any normal high schools in Manhattan. The only ones you heard about had either squash courts and spring break trips to Crete for your archeology elective, or there were knife fights in the locker rooms...” She also becomes entangled with a boy, Dimitri, who plans to volunteer for the IDF and chides her for not, as a Jew, wanting to fight for her people. How did you come to shape the character of Marley? How much did you meditate on the different types of Jewishness found in NYC—and America?
Marley was pretty close to autobiographical. She’s a bit of a pipsqueak, a bit of a hothouse flower, with no obvious outlet or schtick, though probably a storyteller of some kind in the making. Thirteen, as I recall it, was a powerful and tender age. I don't remember loving life or school or anything like that, and I certainly didn’t love the (increasingly pimply) face in the mirror, but it was the first time I remember coming online a little bit intellectually, sensing that my mind was my own, and that, if properly cultivated, could be good company to me. I wanted to capture someone in that process of self-discovery.
As for the question of Jewishness, I'm a lapsed Irish Catholic, lest anyone get the wrong idea. I worship Bellow and Roth and will always try (and probably fail) to pay homage to them stylistically, but it's not and never will be my place to grapple with the theme of Jewish-American identity. At the same time, a great number of people involved in the taxi world are of Eastern European Jewish extraction, and it would've been needlessly cautious, I think, to avoid the fact. I was careful to approach Jewishness from a social/cultural and not religious perspective. Jake’s no spiritual quester; his Jewishness is a badge of honor and a mark of separateness from the WASP establishment he’s simultaneously envious and dismissive of. Dimitri's intellectual and political pursuits are only incidentally related to his Jewishness—his is an open-ended quest for identity and purpose, a form of protest against the vulgarity and vacuousness of his Russian immigrant father’s massive material success.
And Marley, she’s still scoping it all out. She senses that her parents’ religious affiliations (her mother is sort of a fairweather, or more aptly, foulweather Catholic) are more social appurtenances than a set of actual beliefs, which is part of why she find’s Dimitri’s passion and commitment so meaningful and striking. She’s really an agnostic, neutral-minded person, Marley, not given to strong stances, more an observer than a participant, and I think she’s trying to figure out whether, in this day and age, that kind of baseline ambivalence towards the world is even allowed, or morally tenable. Is silence violence? Marley’s not convinced that it is. But she’d hate to be wrong.
How much did current events weigh on the novel? With Jake, I immediately thought of Gene Friedman, the disgraced (and now deceased) taxi kingpin and one of the great New York characters of the last two decades.
Oh, very, very heavily. I was knee-deep in the papers. I was extremely indebted to the Post, the Daily News, the Times, Crain’s New York, The Real Deal, the Observer—many gifts came to me through these pages, most especially the hijinks of New York icons like Mr. Freidman. The characters are pure fiction, but a few would feel right at home in the tabloids. Also, there’s a hilarious photograph (someone on the internet referred to it as the “horniest photo of all time”) that may have influenced me more than anything, of Nicki Minaj surrounded by a gaggle of thirteen-year-old boys at one of their bar mitzvahs at which she’d been hired to perform, the son of a taxi medallion mogul it so happened. I knew that picture was worth at least a thousand words. These taxi guys know how to throw a party. Or they used to, in flusher times.
We both, in recent years, spent time writing what people would call “New York” novels. This might seem like a banal question, but what is a New York novel to you? Is New York rich terrain for fiction-writing?
Not banal at all! But I’m almost the wrong person to ask. That my first novel would have to be a New York story was a no-brainer; like you, I've lived here my whole life—that's now thirty-five years of fuel to burn off. A first novel, for better or for worse, is an exercise in burning off the fuel of one’s early life.
Someone I was talking to recently pointed out, insightfully I think, that the New York novel is more often, nowadays, the Brooklyn novel. An honest-to-goodness Manhattan novel isn't all that easy to come by anymore. I wanted to showcase an unfashionable but extremely evocative slice of the city—the area around Penn Station, the old stomping grounds of Damon Runyon and Pete Hamill, a part of town so profoundly, appallingly charmless it’s almost moving to me. I sensed that I had something new and cool, or something so old and uncool it was effectively new and cool, to add to the canon of recent New York City novels.
Also, I had just started the earliest sketches for the book when lockdown happened. For a while it made writing as a whole feel pointless and navel-gazing, and writing a New York novel in particular feel specious and dumb, not to mention logistically hairy—how would I address it? Did I have to address it? But I came to see the pandemic as a useful bookend for writing about life in the city. Of course, it was hardly historical fiction, but it sure as hell felt like it for a second there.
I recall something Hilary Mantel said in an interview, that one of the keys to writing believable historical fiction, or any fiction, I guess, is for the writer to remember that the characters don’t know their own futures. That seems so obvious, but it’s easy to forget—the characters aren’t avatars for the historical events that swirl around them; they’re just living their lives, as stuck in their own heads and as ignorant of what tomorrow has in store as you and me. I came to see that ignorance as something poignant, rather than something burdensome. The question went from, “Uggghh, how to deal with Covid?” to “How can I show these people and this city in 2019, being as alive and as much themselves as possible?”
What was your path to becoming a novelist? What's your advice to those who want to publish today?
I was loudly proclaiming I wanted to be a writer long before I had any sense I could be any good at it. I’m extremely grateful to have been able to, at least nominally, put my money where my mouth is. Phew!
I’d say, if there’s anything else you can stand to do with your life, do that. I don’t mean to sound facetious or persecuted. It’s a little annoying when writers lament the struggles of the writer’s life, a bit self-aggrandizing. I’m no martyr for my art—I’ve had the life of Riley compared to most. But, yes, to persist through the static and indifference of the industry can really be amazingly soul-crushing. The writing is one thing; the querying and submission process, even when it works out, is fucking torture. So yeah, do it only if you must.
On a more positive note, I’d say, always, always try to have as much fun with the work itself as possible, and don’t be jealous—realize that even the people in the spotlight are probably having a hard time. I remember in my early twenties bitterly reading each new issue of whatever prestige literary journal and feeling sick to my stomach with jealousy at the names in the table of contents—as if they’d been etched there in stone, the anointed ones! The ones to watch! Then the years go by and you never hear from any of them again, and you realize that having published a short story in the Spring 2011 issue of Ploughshares is probably cold comfort to some poor fucker, now well into their forties, still unknown and plugging away at it and having their chapbooks rejected left and right and teaching creative writing at a small midwestern university. So yeah, don’t be jealous of anyone. It’s hard for everyone. Or I should say, it’s hard for everyone whose work is worth reading. I’m not interested in writers who are overly precocious—all due respect and congratulations to them, but I tend to only want to spend time in the minds of people who’ve experienced long periods of torrid, wrenching self-doubt.
Who are the living writers you look to most? Who do you think does it best right now?
Lately I've been partial to the Irishmen—Paul Murray and Kevin Barry. Especially with Barry, there’s a Joycean quality that feels really unhinged and joyful. He reminds me what I’m meant to be doing, which is playing. It’s always a good palate cleanser for me when the terror of the algorithm starts jamming me up. Also, Jez Butterworth’s plays have left me speechless.