John Colapinto: About the Author

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Cal Cunningham is a writer. His first novel, Almost Like Suicide, has been optioned by Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks. He is being described as the "new ZeitGuy".

His agent is touting the book as "a fin de siecle Bright Lights, Big City with a Gen-X twist and some post-po-mo thrown in for good measure". He looks good too. "Gotta think of that author shot," says the agent. The writer has already thought of it. He modestly describes himself as being "an inch over six feet tall, panther-thin, with a strongly boned face softened by a tangled mass of black, Byronic locks".

By page 47 of About the Author, Cal Cunningham is on the brink of fame and fortune. He is not yet 30. Do you hate him already?

Get ready to hate him even more. Because Cal Cunningham didn't actually write Almost Like Suicide. Because Cal Cunningham can't actually write anything. It is true that he thinks he's a writer. Yet, as he sits at his desk he "finds it impossible to disturb with a single word the surface tension of the page [he shuns a keyboard as not being writerly enough for his latent genius] which sat, quivering with bright expectancy, in the glare of my desk lamp". It is not so much that he is suffering from writer's block as from a lack of "the megalomaniacal confidence, the sheer cosmic audacity, that permits a mortal to attempt the sacrilege of setting in motion a world".

This is worth remembering, given that Cal Cunningham sets in motion the world described above, based on a megalomaniacal confidence trick based on a truly audacious effort of self-justification.

Who wrote About the Author? The title's a trick too: Cal is, he decides, almost the author of the novel. This is based on the justification that it is his life story, stolen from him by his room-mate, Stewart, the law school student with no life of his own.

For months Cal provided Stewart with weekly "Dispatches from Downtown"; monologues about the bar trawling that nets him a seemingly never-ending series of one-night stands. Cal, who as "an aspiring writer and thus viewed my every action and utterance with an eye to how they would appear when fixed in imperishable print" regards these sessions as the rough drafts of experience which will become a novel.

Cal needed an audience; Stewart, believes Cal, needed to live vicariously. Stewart, after all, "belonged to the trudging armies of nonartists, of mere human beings: the workday drones who live out their unobjectionable lives, then pass, unremembered into oblivion".

Cal, the writer, the observer of the human condition "never once detected anything in [his room-mate] other than a sad slightly squalid need". This is because Cal is no observer of the human condition - other than his own condition. And that condition, in rare and fleeting moment of honesty is this: "I was a poseur, an artist manque, and always would be."

So when Stewart dies in a bike accident, leaving behind a brilliant manuscript based on those "Dispatches from Downtown", who does the story rightly belong to?

Colapinto's story belongs to the Patricia Highsmith school of storytelling: its concern is the nature and effects of guilt. The untalented Cal is an antihero in The Talented Mr Ripley mould. He is charming, amoral and will go to any lengths to protect the world he has spun out of fiction.

Hitchcock turned Highsmith's first novel into a film. Cal Cunningham's first novel is to be made into a film by Dreamworks.

John Colapinto's first novel - he is also the author of the non-fiction As Nature Made Him - has been optioned by Dreamworks. Which is a nifty little twist for a thriller that is also a stylish satire on the ways of a fictional publishing world inhabited by characters as deluded and insincere as Cal Cunningham.

Fourth Estate

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* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.