This much is true. But the story then diverges into two stories, one staying the course of fact, as reported in local and national newspapers, the other roaming through imaginative territory in the form of Happyland, the new satirical novel by Ithaca writer J. Robert Lennon. Whether fact and fiction should have diverged sooner, or maintained a wider berth, is a matter of perspective, especially lawyerly perspective. Norton, Lennon's erstwhile publisher, seems to have thought so, for it dumped Lennon's novel after preparing it for publication.
If Lennon was crushed by his novel's fate - it took him two years to write and other publishers were similarly scared off - he eventually had reason to celebrate. Harper's Magazine learned of his troubles and decided to serialize an abridged version of Happyland over five issues, beginning this July. It's Harper's first novel-in-serial in 50 years, a fact not lost on those in the publishing world. And it's not unlikely that the entire novel, now that Harper's has taken the lead, will eventually be published in one piece.
The inspiration for Happyland is obvious to those who have followed the events in Aurora, N.Y., home of Wells College, over the past six years as alumna Pleasant T. Rowland gave the town a $40 million facelift. Gossip, articles in the New York Times and a front page spread last March in Syracuse's Post-Standard - its headline was "What did she do to deserve this?" - serve up a tale of a town rent apart. Until it disappeared recently, there was even an entry in Wikipedia, the online "user-contributed" encyclopedia, which read, "The village struggles to retain its autonomy as Rowland, a Wells alumna and the billionaire creator of the American Girl Doll Company, attempts to change Aurora into her ideal of a picture perfect village."
"I actually find reality very distracting," says Lennon, as we sit in the kitchen of the Belle Sherman home he shares with his wife, writer Rhian Ellis, and their two sons. "I enjoy creating a purely invented universe. In fact, I resisted writing this book for a long time precisely because it was inspired by something real." When friends sent him town meeting minutes, he regularly tossed them, he says. He never even googled Pleasant (as Rowland is called by just about everyone).
"I wanted my book to be ridiculous," Lennon continues. "I wanted it to be really outrageously dramatic. And it seemed that, though there was a lot of controversy in Aurora, life has more or less gone on as before, maybe leaving some bad feelings in its wake. But it's still itself presumably; it's still a regular town. Whereas Happy's plans for Equinox are quite extreme, it turns out."
Happy is Lennon's main character, Happy Masters. Growing up, "she had never had a doll, not one." Just five years into her marriage to a "scion of a rich diamond-mining family," she is weary of her life and has learned she's infertile. The turning point comes when, through a half-open door at the back of an antiques shop, she spies "a single gleaming eye staring up at her from a tiny, broken face."
When her mission to mend all the broken dolls she can find is accomplished, she starts her own doll company, which she calls Happy Girls. She wanted to "pierce the hearts of girls, ensnare them. She wanted to own their souls." Her dolls aren't just any dolls but historical dolls that sell for a hundred bucks and come with certificates of authenticity. There are accessories, of course, and books that tell their life stories.
By the time Happy stumbles upon Equinox (population 410), 37 miles south-southwest of Syracuse, she is restless again: "Dolls and made-up little girls didn't do it for her anymore: people, places excited her now. Restoring them. Creating them. Getting them to do what she wanted."
Embedded in this drama are the mini-dramas of others, including college librarian/town historian Ruth Spinks, who views her college as a "hysterical post-feminist nuthouse;" mayor Archie Olds, who was married briefly ("It didn't improve anything, so they divorced"); and student Janet Ping, for whom the Happy Girls Web site "held a strange erotic power."
In its first incarnation, Happyland was quite different from the version now on the stands. "The defining mood of the past five years for me has been pretty much constant anger over politics, which I'd begun to realize was not ... a healthy thing for me to be harboring," Lennon explains, "so I decided I would write a sort of feel-good novel about controversy in a small town, and everyone was going to end up sort of getting along in the end. [But] my heart just wasn't in it, and it wasn't very good." Nevertheless, he sent it off to Norton, which had published his novel Mailman, and, at his editor's suggestion, made Happy's machinations "more perverse" and the consequences "more extreme."
"Once I decided to go with channeling my anger, it went much better and it was a lot more fun," Lennon says. With presidential adviser Karl Rove in mind, Lennon overhauled the book, which he had slashed back to the first 20 pages. "I made Happy more of a shrewd manipulator, and I made people fall prey to her in very much the way people have fallen prey, at least in my view, to Karl Rove's political maneuverings. I actually started using some of the language of the Bush administration, propagandistic language, and I just put it into Happy's hands and let her work with it ... The fact is there is very little I can do about Karl Rove, but there's a lot I can do with a novel."
For all this, Lennon says he really likes Happy. When asked what he likes about someone who is manipulative and uncompromising and greedy, he laughs and says it's precisely because she's manipulative and uncompromising and greedy. "I just can't write a good book about someone I despise, and so I decided to look at the full picture of who she is and why she's who she is ...[ She's] megalomaniacal, but I sympathize with it. I mean I've had those sorts of thoughts and feelings before. I happen not to act on them because I want to be a socially healthy citizen. But she has no such impediments."
It's fair to say that some people are delighted with Lennon's main character, but not because they like her. On the message board of the Aurora Coalition, which was founded in 2001 to fight Rowland's efforts, one post reads, "On [the] one hand, I feel she [Rowland] will not let go. On the other hand ... the publication of Happyland may make it impossible for her to maintain her ... national public image of benign benefactress." Clearly, not everyone will differentiate fact and fiction.
"Ah, okay, I mean I can't stop them," Lennon laughs. "But it really is fiction, although I think I'm trying to do something with the kinds of emotions they're genuinely feeling. I can't imagine that my book will do any actual damage to Pleasant Rowland. I hate to dash their hopes, but something tells me that she's gonna do just fine in spite of my novel."
Lennon, who taught at Wells during the 2000-01 academic year, says he doesn't believe in thinly veiled versions of real people if their purpose is to attack those people. "Most writers don't want to do that," he says. "I'd make an exception for political satire, like Philip Roth's Our Gang or even Primary Colors, which was obviously mocking the Clintons, whereas the former one's obviously mocking Nixon. But those are the most powerful people in the world."
As powerful as Rowland is - she sold American Girl to Mattel for $700 million, and her husband is among the nation's top philanthropists - Lennon says he doubts she ever threatened Norton with a lawsuit. "She didn't care about it or know anything about it," he says. "It was just paranoia, you know; it was fear of wealth." Katie Waller, Rowland's spokeswoman in Aurora, said, "I absolutely know she didn't contact [Norton]." Waller says she found out about the Harper's serialization in May and then informed Rowland.
That was the first either of them had ever heard of Happyland or Lennon, she said.
Besides Mailman, Lennon's other works include The Funnies and Pieces for the Left Hand: 100 Anecdotes, eight of which were included in Best American Short Stories 2005. (Lennon also has a recording project called Inverse Room that produced a companion CD to Pieces - "a collection of 100 songs, packed into a mere 63 minutes of listening agony," according to his Web site.)
Lennon says all of his writing is "a little bit over the top, but these are over the top times." Happyland was influenced, in part, by Michael Chabon's comic novels - Wonder Boys, for example - and John Irving's works. When Ithaca writer Alison Lurie's name comes up, he says, "Come to think of it, I suppose she's probably an influence on this book. As far as small town backstabbing goes, she's one of the most skillful practitioners of that genre." But, he adds, "very quickly my influences kind of fall away when I'm writing the book, at least from my conscious attention, and [my books] end up just becoming themselves."
Happyland almost wasn't accepted by Harper's - they told him it was too long. "And then my literary agent told them, 'Don't worry, John has a plan.' And then she called me and said, 'Make a plan!'" It took him about two weeks to get it down to size.
Roger Hodge, Harper's chief editor, said via e-mail that the magazine had been "kicking around the idea of serializing a novel for a couple of years but it never went anywhere until I found out about Happyland. I've admired John's fiction for a long time, and we've published a number of his short stories, so last summer when I heard that Norton had killed the book, I asked to see it. I quickly realized that it was a perfect candidate for serialization." He added that whether or not they'll do another serialization will depend on what books come their way.
Of Harper's abridged version of his novel, Lennon says, "In spirit, it's basically all there," but "there's a little more plot in the full version [and] a lot more reflection. I think it's a little more patient in its longer form." And then he merrily recounts one scene he had to cut but hopes to bring back, where Happy's attempt to buy an ice cream stand results in a boxing match and a black eye.
Not surprisingly, Happyland has provoked a variety of reactions in Aurora, with one common denominator: There was a reluctance to speak for attribution. "Everyone knows you," one person said. Still, most were voluble enough off the record. They enjoyed the first installment quite a bit. Or, they thought the prose was "unsubtle." One person said that, having lived through it all, she was in no mood to repeat the experience. A business owner said he hadn't read it; after all, Harper's isn't available in Aurora.
Lennon says that the idea of people in Aurora getting a rise out of his novel "is really pleasant, no pun intended ... I liked Aurora. It's a weird, cool little town, and the book is essentially about the little guy standing up to, or failing to stand up to, someone who's powerful. I hope it's a theme they can enjoy." Then he laughs and adds, "But they should know that if they think they see themselves in the book, it's not them."
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Happyland, by J. Robert Lennon, is being published in five consecutive installments by Harper's Magazine beginning in July.
