Michael N. McGregor Talks about His New Novel
The other day, Suzy Vitello, author of the marvelous Northwest-set novel Bitterroot, interviewed me about my new novel, The Last Grand Tour, for her popular Substack newsletter, Let’s Talk About Writing.
Among the questions and answers was the following exchange:
SV: You chose to filter this story through one character: Joe. How did you navigate and pace the sprinkling of secrets that Joe (and the reader) would uncover by novel’s end?
MNM: I started by mimicking a tour guide’s experiences. When a group shows up, you know nothing about them. Over two or three weeks, however, as you spend days and nights with them, you learn more and more. You hear their stories, observe their actions, listen to their words. Along the way, you try to assemble a picture of them from pieces that emerge in somewhat random order.
A novel can’t be entirely random, though. So I took advantage of the fact that people tend to reveal themselves most at tense moments, especially when traveling. While some of those moments are shared, most are highly personal. Rudy, for example, reacts to being in the city where Hitler gained power. Felicity opens up when she visits a city she always wanted to sing in. And Tonia talks about her past when she returns to a place she went with her husband.
Because Joe is present for each of these revelations but doesn’t have the context necessary to understand them fully, he tries to make sense of them by putting them together with what he already knows. His limited knowledge forces the reader to assemble the bigger story too, deciding along the way whether Joe’s version of things is correct or not. This allows for dramatic reversals. Again and again in the book Joe begins to believe something is true, only to learn or observe something else that makes him see things differently.
The revelations and reversals cause us, as readers, to pay closer attention, challenging our own suppositions of what is true. As our views shift of the various characters, including Joe himself, we find ourselves working down through the onion layers, hoping to reach the core before the tour reaches Venice.
You can read the full interview here.
