The Origin of an Assassin

Writing a new novel

I was in London last week, where I had the great pleasure of appearing on the My Martin Amis podcast. I spoke about Glass Century, my deep appreciation for Amis, and a good deal on Donald Trump and how New York City made him. This was a great live conversation conducted in my hotel room. If you haven’t yet, please buy Glass Century, which the Wall Street Journal said is “absorbing” and “charged with heart-in-throat suspense.” And if you’ve enjoyed my novel, rate and review on Goodreads.

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There’s a point, in the marathon of novel-writing, when a certain momentum takes over. You are blessed when this happens. It is a form of white magic, a minor alchemy, and you feel yourself loping, ever so slightly, downwind. There is no telling when this happens. Each novel, I find, can announce itself, and then you get to work—but that work will look different almost every time. Select characters, settings, or snatches of dialogue can unfurl dream-like, to the point where it can hardly seem like you are doing more than taking dictation. A writer must keep their antennae pointed skyward. But, of course, it can’t only be this way. Writing can be a battle; writing can be trench warfare. Even happy warriors like me know this. A novel, no matter how meticulously plotted, is a kind of fog of war, and I’ve come to embrace this over time. I do not outline; I have images, ideas, and a character or two, and I try to set them in motion. I rush toward them. I find, if you’ve got a compelling concept of a human being, a plot can take care of itself.

In the past, I never liked to talk about the novel I was currently writing. My attitude was straightforward: I’d tell you more about it if it ever got published. Until then, it was my secret, and it took on its own extremely personal mystique. Novels untold become quite precious. There’s a logic to not sharing, too; it can be embarrassing to talk up a novel that is never finished or never, for a variety of reasons, appears in published form. What to do with this stillborn creature? I suppose I’m more willing to discourse on what I haven’t finished because I’ve reached a point, in my mid-thirties, where I can tell a novel at the halfway point is going to be brought home. That’s how I feel now: this novel, which has the working titles of Anton Lash or Empire, will be complete, and now it’s merely a question of when. I’ve set an informal deadline for the close of 2025. Glass Century took about nine months to complete, but that was during the pandemic when I had far more free time. It took about the same amount of time to finish a much shorter novel, Colossus, that will appear next year. Colossus is very much finished, has a publisher, and even a cover. In due time, you’ll learn more. I am quite excited for its appearance.

But the work-in-progress has been on my mind. I feel I’ve arrived at a crucial point, and now I’ve got to figure out why a key character is about to do what he does. Motivation is the engine of a novel, and obviously what makes a good deal of plotting plausible. There is little more human than motive. We are not always guided by logic, hustling along from A to B, yet we do tell ourselves stories and these stories inform the actions we take. These stories might be disjointed, malformed, or utterly detached from reality—still, they are stories. Without revealing too much, I can tell you this new novel is set in 2020s New York and is an attempt to grapple with our current hyperreality. It follows a lawyer and nightclub owner, the wife of a New York Yankee, a local district attorney, and a wayward son who may have done something quite terrible. There is mass death, and I am, as I write this, trying to figure out why this death has come. I have an idea of who did it, but a haze descends when I attempt to excavate the motivation. I do think that motivation will arrive. Sometimes, I find, you’ve got to write your way towards a problem. If you feel stuck on the mechanics of a particular plot point or struggling over why a character may perform a pivotal action, you write on anyway. It may feel like you’re stalling, circling your target, but writing is a form of thinking and the more you do it, the more clarity you’ll find.

Lately, I’ve been thinking on drone warfare. The mass death in the novel is caused by a drone. Drone technology has upended the war in Ukraine—it’s mostly anonymous, cheap killing that renders a lot of traditional warfare moot—and I’ve pondered, darkly, whether domestic amateurs will ever start strapping bombs to drones to start attacking those they don’t like. The novel grapples with this potential reality—or is about to grapple with it, since I’ve just hit the point of the drone attack. The grappling itself, well, that is the primary difficulty, and that will be in the back half. I know who launches the murderous drone. I now need to figure out why this person does what he or she does. One demand of fiction that doesn’t always comport with reality is that while everyone tells themselves a story, these stories are not always—or often—legible. Consider that no one actually knows why the worst mass shooting in American history actually happened. Recently, in London, Sam Kriss and I were marveling over this fact: that not a single human being or law enforcement entity can tell us why Stephen Paddock, in 2017, opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers in Las Vegas and killed sixty of them. He injured nearly nine hundred. Afterwards, he killed himself, and left behind no statement or manifesto. Most mass murderers and assassins are men, but they tend to be very young, typically committing the bulk of their crimes in their teens and twenties. Many of the recent mass shooters, in addition to being young, have been visibly alienated in some way. Not Paddock. He was sixty-four, a fairly successful real estate investor, and an avid video poker player. He had a pilot’s license, owned two small planes, and had almost no interactions with law enforcement. He may have struggled with depression or money challenges later on, but there are plenty of people who encounter both and don’t hurt or kill anyone.

Someone like Paddock would pose a great difficulty for a novelist: a character like that doesn’t typically get written. In literary fiction, film, and television, villains are generally in possession of enough glaring tumult to make their motives discernable. Anti-heroes have grown more popular, with the trend best exemplified by 2019’s Joker. In the 2000s, we met Joker as his fully sadistic self, his backstory largely speculative. If Heath Ledger’s dark charisma boosted the character’s popularity, he was still understood to be a killer who could not be worthy of much sympathy. A decade later, we meet the man (Arthur Fleck) who turned into Joker, a failed comedian—Joaquin Pheonix does this well—who is driven by the various degradations of modern society to become a murderer. The new Joker is, for a moment, a working-class tribune, and there’s no shortage of men and women who left the theaters that fall rooting for Fleck’s street revolution. Conversely, no film based on the life of Paddock could offer such a compelling thread. Viewers would simply be horrified; Joker had his reasons, but Paddock had none. Paddock defied the constructs of fiction—and even the unwritten rules of comic books—by mercilessly killing unarmed civilians. Joker kills innocents in the movies and comics, but his bursts of savagery are almost always in the greater context of his war with Batman. We understand him as a force of darkness arrayed against relative light, and his motivation to defeat a protagonist who is every bit his combat equal. None of the injured or dead were in combat with Paddock. They were defenseless, enjoying a concert, and Paddock gunned them down.

My own novel will not venture into the Paddock realm. I am not interested in such opacity, or perhaps I’m afraid of it. Don DeLillo’s Libra, one of my favorite novels, is as far as I’ll venture. Oswald, of course, remains opaque too, and many believe he didn’t act alone. It was the mafia, the FBI, the Cubans, LBJ. He could not, on his own, have taken those shots and connected; the forces of history could not have composed themselves in such a way for him. I am not so sure Oswald couldn’t have acted alone. Thomas Crooks, after all, did act alone, and he came within inches of killing a former and future president. Oswald as a character is appealing because he is infused with far more enigma than outright evil. To kill another human is to perform the evilest of acts, but this victim was an American president presiding over a global empire. He was a symbol, as much an artifact of history’s great, gray motion than a flesh-and-blood man with a wife and young children. John F. Kennedy was innocent because no individual deserves to have their head blown open like that. Yet we do not perceive presidents, even when we worship them, as innocents. There is no American president, in the modern era at least, without a good deal of wet, shining blood on his hands.

In my novel, an individual drone-strikes the mayor of New York City. Did this fictional mayor have blood on his hands? You’ll have to find out, if I’ll tell you, ahead of time, there is nothing especially extraordinary he did to get killed. I didn’t have any great longing to incorporate a drone attack into a novel. There’s a perverse romance to the assassination through the barrel of a gun, a hard intimacy between killer and target that I would have rather expounded upon in some form, like DeLillo imagining his own Oswald who longed to insert himself into history. I do have a suspicion, yet to be confirmed, that we are exiting the mass shooting era and returning to the kinds of high profile, individuated assassinations that defined so much of the last century. There have been so many mass shootings, especially at schools, that a killer can’t find much notoriety anymore. We collectively remember Adam Lanza, Elliot Rodger, and James Holmes, or maybe the Columbine kids, but Salvador Ramos, who murdered nineteen students and two teachers at Uvalde, draws a blank. Luigi Mangione, of course, is now globally famous, and he only needed to kill one person who was not famous at all. My genuine fear is that domestic drone attacks will become more common because the technology is cheap and the killers do not need to interact with their targets at all. An atomized, anti-social assassin can cocoon himself in a shadowed room somewhere and steer his bomb from the couch. He will be fully disconnected from his deed, watching the carnage in the glow of the blue light. I hope I am wrong; I do not want to be, like DeLillo, praised for anticipating a new age of terror. I do not want to be a prophet. What I do is write, and the novel remains the best medium for inching towards the greatest and most unsettling questions of our time. The novel will endure.