Writing a novel is an act of faith. It takes a commanding belief in one’s talent to orchestrate words for a reading public. It also takes epic patience. Years of rewriting and revision often pass before a manuscript is ready.
For every novel published, thousands never see print. Large publishing houses have what is called the slush pile, stacks of unsolicited manuscripts that arrive in the mail to be read and usually rejected by entry-level editorial workers. Finding a publisher is nearly impossible without a literary agent, who earns 10 to 15 percent of whatever the novel makes. Even the best-connected agents can experience a string of rejections before landing a contract for a first novel. The upfront money, or advance against future royalties, rarely comes close to compensating a writer for the time invested in the book. Writing fiction is not a rational economic enterprise.
In 1999, U.S. publishers released 50,000 titles. The overwhelming majority were non-fiction. As tough as it is to find a publisher, the competition to get a first novel reviewed in major newspapers is also fierce; many go largely unnoticed.
Weighed against these odds, “American Skin” by Chicagoan Don de Grazia has to be
counted a long-shot success. Not only has this first novel, the story of a young man plunged into the skinhead culture of the 1980s, found a publisher, but it is also getting noticed. Kirkus Reviews, a trade journal that previews new titles for booksellers and critics, gave “American Skin” a coveted star and praised the “clean, energetic, sometimes lyrical prose by a writer whose passion makes you believe in (the book’s) importance.” Publishers Weekly, the bible of the industry, calls it a “powerful debut. . . . Intense, unsparing and fueled by a desperate energy, this graphically violent novel . . . rings true with poignant clarity.”
Behind the book lies the tale of a young writer who rebounded from early rejections by finding a foreign publisher and using the book’s reception overseas to gain a foothold in New York. The arrival of Don de Grazia is a parable both about the artistic struggle of becoming a novelist and about the tough business of getting published.
For now, the 32-year-old de Grazia, a professor of creative writing at Columbia College, is on a cloud. Between readings, book signings at area stores and a promotional tour, the author finds himself answering questions from readers and reporters about a youth culture synonymous with neo-Nazis. This is not something he anticipated as a teenager reading Mark Twain, Jack London, Shakespeare and J.D. Salinger.
“Every subculture feels misunderstood,” de Grazia reflected recently over lunch at a North Side restaurant. “Most of the skinheads I knew were not racist. I felt the novel was a way to explore race and class realities in America.”
The skinhead movement began in England as a working-class youth trend of the 1970s. A violent, highly visible racist faction split away, transforming the image of skins into fascist thugs. De Grazia saw Chicago’s skinhead scene in the late 1980s as a bouncer at Metro, a club on Clark Street near Wrigley Field.
“The novel is not an exact document,” he continues. “My aim was to tell a coming-of-age story in a contemporary setting. This was an environment that lent itself to mythic situations.” The protagonist, Alex Verdi, “is a young warrior archetype, without direction.”
De Grazia had his share of young warrior experiences. “I was only arrested for minor things,” he says, a little sheepishly. “Public intoxication, getting in fights. I don’t have a (criminal) record.”
Seated next to him at the restaurant is Virginia Johnson, a TV reporter and weekend anchor for WNDU, the NBC affiliate in South Bend. They have been an item for five years now. She does a lot of commuting.
“My mother’s maiden name was Virginia Johnson,” offers de Grazia. “My mom and my girlfriend have the same name.”
Johnson is smiling.
De Grazia raises his eyebrows with an expression searching for innocence.
The gritty realism and urban settings of “American Skin” extend a tradition of Chicago literature. Alex Verdi’s odyssey through skinhead clashes in the late 20th Century harks back to James T. Farrell’s Depression-era novels of Studs Lonigan, an Irish kid caught in the void of a city. De Grazia’s novel also has thematic echoes of the mid-century novels of Nelson Algren, whose dope dealers and hookers crawl through an urban underbelly, hungering for dignity.
“American Skin” opens with Verdi’s happy childhood in rural Harding County, far from Taylor Street in Little Italy where his father had grown up. Alex lives with his parents and sister in an old farmhouse they bought when the boy was young. Dad writes haiku and encourages the boy to read. “The house sat beneath a grove of giant oaks, and on fall nights we would drift asleep to acorns lightly raining on the roof,” writes de Grazia.
This pastoral world shatters when the police haul Alex’s parents away for growing marijuana. His sister goes to foster care; Alex hides, then burns down the barn, as if disintegrating his past, and flees to the city his father left behind.
Alex falls in with Timmy Penn, the leader of an anti-Nazi skinhead group and operator of a bar and commune where castoffs gather. Alex reflects: “Being a skinhead was never really about anyone’s conception of Good vs. Evil. There were just some skins who thought that if they did their violent things for a `cause,’ it would be okay. . . . Most street skins were free-floating, apolitical packs of thugs.”
Of his own background, de Grazia explains: “My dad grew up working class during the Depression in Chicago. He was very into literature at a young age. . . . I grew up on a lot of books. As a kid, I used to listen to a tape of `Huckleberry Finn’ before I went to bed at night. I probably listened to it 20 times. My dad took me to the library to check out `Catcher in the Rye’ but they wouldn’t let me get it, figured I was too young. So he checked it out for me.”
As a young man, the elder de Grazia, also named Don, organized dances in Chicago, renting out some of the city’s biggest ballrooms. In the course of this work, he met and married the Virginia Johnson who became mother to young Don and his sister. Later his father opened a travel agency. In the early 1970s, the de Grazias moved into a 19th Century stone farmhouse in the woodlands of Lake County.
Like the dad in the novel, his father has won awards for writing haiku, the Japanese form of three-lined verse. De Grazia speaks affectionately of his mother as a warm and stabilizing presence. He was 17 when his parents’ marriage fell apart; neither married again. He remains close to them.
He took it hard when his youthful world came apart. He was president of his senior class at Warren Township High in Gurnee when he dropped out that fall of 1985 and headed for Chicago. “I didn’t have a huge interest in school politics, and I don’t think I was a particularly good class president,” he says. “My dad was against it, but I had a kind of anarchic strain. . . . The opening of the novel, with Alex leaving, has a symbolic interpretation, possibly.”
He pauses. “I don’t know that a lot of my life would have been any different” had his parents not divorced.
He lived for a time near Rogers Park, doing construction work, reading Dostoyevsky. “Every young person goes through a period of feeling there isn’t a place for them, and wanting to find their calling,” he continues. “It was a little more heightened in my case. . . . I wanted to pursue writing, but nothing seemed to serve what I wanted to do.”
At 18 he joined the National Guard. Basic training–four months of it at Ft. Benning, Ga.–was another experience he would mine. In the novel, Alex and Timmy are arrested after a brawl. The judge allows them to join the military instead of going to jail.
After boot camp and after earning his GED, de Grazia “kicked around” at area universities–Northern Illinois in DeKalb, the University of Illinois at Chicago–while working at a Kinko’s and as a bar bouncer. “A lot of the skinhead stuff that happens in the book was a part of my environment, but even when I was in the swim, I felt like an observer on the outskirts,” he says. “In my mind, that’s what always separated me from the characters, even Alex. Even though I drew heavily from real times and real environments, once I immersed myself in the book, it became for me a creature wholly of my imagination, with its own reality–a reshaped reflection.”
The neighborhood surrounding Clark and Belmont has become more gentrified in the dozen years since de Grazia discovered it. The parking lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts at that intersection has long been a magnet to punk rockers, skinheads, Goths and, as de Grazia puts it, “whatever other labels you can think of for various young malcontents, runaways and suburban kids experimenting with the city scene. Dunkin’ Donuts and the next-door shop, The Alley–sort of a leather jacket and spiked jewelry store–have tried to discourage kids from hanging out there by building an iron fence, but they still come. This is where Alex Verdi finds himself in the third chapter.”
De Grazia found himself at Columbia College as a fiction-writing major. In his professor, the novelist and non-fiction author John Schultz, he also found a mentor. Schultz pioneered the Story Workshop, in which students sit in a semicircle around a teacher, doing exercises that integrate character, voice, point of view and word usage; they also assess one another’s works.
“When Don came into my class as an undergraduate, he was working on the skinhead material, but it hadn’t taken shape,” says Schultz. De Grazia had about 90 pages in rough draft when he graduated. Schultz encouraged him to apply for Columbia’s master of fine arts program.
“He was obviously a very talented guy, with a large drive,” says Schultz. “He was one of the most well-read students I had ever worked with. And he had done most of the reading on his own.”
By 1996, de Grazia had an MFA and a manuscript, much revised over five years. At this point, he sent it to a New York agent, who sent it back, and to several Manhattan publishers, to no avail. When a booksellers convention came to Chicago, he began networking with help from his girlfriend, who bribed a bellman at the Drake Hotel to place de Grazia’s manuscript on the bed of a prominent New York editor with whom they had schmoozed. That didn’t work, either.
Meanwhile, a friend on the faculty at Columbia gave de Grazia a New York Times Magazine article about working-class writers in Scotland. De Grazia thought: Why not seek a publisher in the U.K., which is known for exotic youth cultures and where skinheads began? Spending $75 he could ill afford, de Grazia sent the manuscript by Federal Express to Jonathan Cape, a London publisher with a stable of Scottish authors. On the advice of his mentor Schultz, he also sent the book to Louise Quayle, an agent in New York.
After several weeks, de Grazia received a call at 4 in the morning from an editor at Cape in London, saying, “We’re very keen about your book.” De Grazia signed the British contract, which strengthened his hand in New York: Quayle soon had offers from two houses–Overlook for hardback and Scribner’s for a trade paperback.
Hardback meant more prestige, but de Grazia felt that Matt Walker, the Scribner’s editor, “had a real passion for the book, and that meant everything,” because an editor must lobby the publicity and marketing departments to push a given book. Another factor swaying de Grazia to the paperback original is that it would appeal to younger readers with less income.
De Grazia was paid advances “in the low five figures” for the American and British editions. A German publisher bought translation rights, and Frederick Levy Productions in Santa Monica, Calif., purchased film rights and hired Dan Yost, whose credits include “Drugstore Cowboy,” to write the script.
“They told me that the average time for a project (to reach the screen) is seven years,” says de Grazia.
De Grazia’s arrival as a novelist signals a validation of his own faith in the lonely pursuit of art. “American Skin” has now gone out to booksellers, talk show hosts and reviewers at far-flung publications. “In a sense,” says de Grazia, “this book is a story of the search for a new faith–whatever that might be.”
