Back in 2002, I was living in Prague, bouncing between jobs I didn’t particularly like, soaking up the culture and atmosphere of the city, and hanging out with writers of various types. I was a couple of years past a job with a well-known company that had laid me off, and it occurred to me that the frustrating experience of working an office job had provided me with enough material for an entire novel. The next step, obviously enough, was to write that novel. But first I had to test whether that novel was worth writing.
I began with sketches. Life in the office and the experience of numerous temp jobs had furnished me with ready-made incidents which, if properly modified and contextualized, could serve as the basis for episodes. But these episodes needed characters. It struck me that contrasting protagonists would be a good idea. Using a variety of personal experiences (both my own and those of others), I developed two characters who had similar backgrounds yet were taking opposite approaches to life. In his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov states that “three forces make and mold a human being: heredity, environment, and the unknown agent X.” To a certain extent, Abandon All Hope is meant to be an exploration of that agent X and how it affects the protagonists.
That period was beginning to feel like the end of an era. We’d just lived through the disputed election of 2000, the crash of the “boom economy” (which I reference in the novel), and the attacks of 9/11. The “War on Terror” was just starting out on its unending course. The 1990s were already starting to feel like a lost age of peace and prosperity.
In fact, golden ages are usually a product of nostalgia. When I look back at the 1990s I see the same challenges modern people have always faced: social and personal instability, status competition, lies and fraud, the inanities of the world of work, and the quest for meaning in life. The general “end of history” optimism of the time might have papered over some of these cracks, but the cracks were always there.
The question of a theme, in literary terms (which I prefer to regard as a “focus,” some concept or thing that the story keeps coming back to), was one issue that hampered completion of the story. That’s because I had no focus. Looking over the episodes I had written gave me the feeling that I had accidentally invented a prose form of the Theater of the Absurd. I had produced a series of wacky episodes with a consistent cast of characters, but the episodes came from nowhere and went nowhere.
At an impasse, I set the manuscript aside in its half-finished form. That break from work lasted about 16 years. When I finally looked at it again in the summer of 2019, it occurred to me that it would be a shame to throw all this material away. I had half a novel already – surely writing the other half wouldn’t be that difficult?
The focus of the book likewise arose from this long-delayed revisit. The contrasting protagonists would represent, roughly, realistic and idealistic approaches to life. But this theme would interact with a number of sub-themes: instability, alienation, and maybe at the bottom of it all, the whole question of what you should be doing with your life.
Like any novel, Abandon All Hope has its own literary antecedents. The relationship between the two protagonists was meant to evoke Don Quixote, but in reverse. In Cervantes’ novel, the main character Don Quixote is the visionary idealist and his sidekick Sancho Panza is the grounded, skeptical character. My main character (Eric) is the Sancho Panza figure, with the secondary protagonist Evan playing a modern urban, college-dropout version of Don Quixote.
The reactions of my “beta readers” (for an explanation of that term, go here) were intriguing. Reader A and Reader B agreed with me that Abandon All Hope was fundamentally a comic novel – a lightly satirical take on the world of work and social relations in the late 1990s, a period which would be fun to revisit. Reader A found it “erudite, humorous, and insightful.” Reader C, however, had a startlingly different take. She saw the book as tragic and depressing. She was expecting the main characters to commit suicide due to their feelings of abandonment, alienation, and hopelessness. The title of the book was not ironic in the least to her.
These divergent reactions convinced me that I had written a novel that could generate scintillating discussion in book groups. There was one other thing, which only became clear after I finished the book, early in 2020: I had written a novel for the age of Covid without even knowing it. The story’s evocations of instability, of fraud and lies, and of the constant fear of unemployment resonate in our virus-plagued time.
You can buy Abandon All Hope here. If you don’t want to make Jeff Bezos even richer, you can also buy it here.