When I met John J. Waters at the Claremont Institute’s Lincoln Fellowship this summer, I was dismayed to hear him mention the impending publication of his first novel. I had nothing against the soft-spoken family man from Omaha; it’s just that years of slogging through unimaginative, MFA workshop-honed narratives purporting to teach very important lessons about race, sex, class, and the like had soured me on contemporary fiction. In fact, in 2009 I publicly resolved that I would never read a novel again.
As I spoke to Waters, however, I began to second-guess my decision. His unusual resume – graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy, six years as a Marine in Afghanistan and Iraq, law school at the University of Iowa – at least seemed to suggest he’d been working with richer material than the average first-time novelist. Also promising was the revelation that he had no formal training in fiction writing. When I learned we shared an affinity for the writing of John Cheever and other nearly forgotten masters of 20th-century fiction, I was sold.
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