Processing: How Ryan Chapman Wrote The Audacity
The author on satire, billionaires, and writing messed-up characters ("sociopaths contain multitudes, too.")
On a semi-regular basis, I interview authors about their writing processes and new books. You can find previous entries here. This time I’m excited to be talking with Ryan Chapman, author of excellent and hilarious new novel The Audacity that’s publishing today. The novel follows Guy Sarvananthan, a classical musician whose Elizabeth Holmesian wife, Victoria, has just faked her own death. Guy takes his wife’s place in a secretive billionaires retreat in the Caribbean and drinks himself into oblivion among the uber-elite while Victoria plots her comeback story.
I talked with Chapman about the role of satire, “consciousness-driven” novels, and how “sociopaths contain multitudes, too.”
One of the most popular creative writing clichés is “write what you know,” but I think I know you well enough to say that you have not caused a prison riot, like the narrator in Riots I Have Known, nor been a high-society classical musician hobnobbing with billionaires, like the main character in The Audacity. (Please correct me if I’m wrong here.) What draws you to write about characters with such different lives, especially Guy Sarvananthan in The Audacity?
First, let me say it's a delight to be inside your substack. I'm always recommending it to students and using it in my teaching. To answer your question, I know how terrible a fully autobiographical work would be. "Chapter 7. I took a strange delight in matching the socks while Michael Clayton played in the background."
I'm drawn to characters who resist the literary impulse. By that I mean they're incapable of change, and thus at odds with a bedrock expectation of the form. I'm also fascinated by characters not often depicted in contemporary fiction. A death-row inmate, as in Riots, or a successful fraud, as in the new one. (Giant caveat: Jay Gatsby.) We're conditioned to see the prisoner and the scammer as an archetype, to discount their full personhood. But sociopaths contain multitudes, too.
To contradict myself immediately, we inevitably put ourselves into every character in some ways. You might not have been in prison during a riot, but you have worked at literary magazines like the narrator of Riots. What of yourself is in Guy?
Guy has a lot of my interests and fears, to be sure. The fear of the misspent life. Skepticism about the meaning of art when the world's on fire. That stubborn "Minnesota Nice." There's also a fair bit of my family in Guy and Victoria. My mother was an Air Force brat and my father a Sri Lankan immigrant. Deracination was a default, if not a virtue. There was also a fair bit of economic rise, fall, and re-rise in the family, which informed the book.
I should note all of the classical music material is pure invention. I was born without the part of the brain that understands music, so I had to brute-force a lot of that. All credit to my friend Scott Ordway—an actually successful composer—who put up with my pestering calls and emails.
The Audacity is somewhat based on real life-tech tech figures and companies, especially Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. How much research did you do for the novel and how did the real-world material get filtered into fiction?
John Carreyrou's Bad Blood was an obvious inspiration. I also read various books on the Davos set by Chrystia Freeland (Canada's current finance minister), David Rothkopf, and Anand Giridharadas. I interviewed wealth managers and listened to a lot of the Slate Money podcast. For the classical music parts I read the great Alex Ross, the diaries of the composer Ned Rorem, and Edward Said's essays on late style. I also drew on my experience in arts nonprofits, whose galas provided a window into elite philanthropy and reputational whitewashing.
I slogged through billionaires' memoirs and biographies, which are as self-serving as you'd expect and more revealing than the subjects intended. The stratospheric ascents are always aided by underacknowledged patronage and privilege—no surprise there. What was surprising was how gleeful they were about it, and how much denial informs the self-regard. Richard Branson brags about committing tax evasion with an export scam he ran to juice profits for his first record shop. When he was arrested, the 21-year-old's parents posted his bail, which was the equivalent of £500k in today's money.
There were other anecdotes almost too real to put in the novel. When Jeff Bezos was developing the Amazon phone, he questioned why it needed a calendar app. Surely nobody uses that, right? His team diplomatically explained most people don't have personal assistants to manage their schedules for them.
Can you talk about the process of writing The Audacity from original idea to finished novel? Did the idea predate Holmes and Theranos? Is the final novel radically different from the first draft? Whatever you’re comfortable sharing.
I spent about a year on a draft about soft power. Sri Lankan functionaries trying to produce a literary canon to distract the West from corruption scandals. …It didn't really work. (For a successful gloss on the same idea, see Karan Mahajan's Granta story "The Anthology.")
Elizabeth Holmes was the initial north star. I've always been into scams. Are they society's limit case or its exemplar? Everything clicked into place when I discovered Walter Serner's Last Loosening (reissued by Twisted Spoon Press in 2020). This Dada guide to con artists, published in the interwar period, enfolds societal collapse, capital, conceptualism, and art through a list of brilliant, half-serious axioms.
I need about five to seven pressing questions to fuel a novel-length project; now I had them.
The Audacity's timeline, length, and close-third POV came quickly. It felt intuitive to alternate between Guy's and Victoria's narration. I wrote Guy's chapters first. It took a couple years to crack Victoria. How to dramatize a sociopath who hates introspection, and spends much of her time alone? Plus she's objectively a little boring, like some entrepreneurs and most tech people.
The aha moment came when I realized Victoria could narrate her chapters through diary entries written on index cards, which she'd toss into the fire each night. Her nominal disclosures would be a palimpsest for her life-size blind spots (if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor). So first-person for her, and close-third for him.
My agent Marya Spence and my editor Mark Doten made crucial suggestions which changed about 10% of the manuscript. But man, what a 10%.
I have a half-serious theory that most writers are primarily driven by one element of fiction—character or plot or setting—and your work has always seemed voice-driven to me. (I love voice-driven work, so this is very much a compliment.) Please feel free to tell me this theory is nonsense, but I’d love to know how you think about “voice” in your writing.
I'm pretty uninterested in plot. Leave it to TV and film; give me what only literature can do. So, yep, voice. All my favorite novels are voice-driven, or, rather, consciousness-driven. And you can't love voice without loving prose. We're lucky to write in such a capacious, elastic, and voracious language.
I feel quite dumb when I talk about voice. It's inextricable from what I love about fiction. I can’t fathom someone who loves fiction but isn't into voice. I don't know. DM me?
To cite another half-serious theory, it’s common to say writers are either architects or gardeners when it comes to plotting. (Those are George RR Martin’s terms—I prefer the metaphors to the more common “plotters or pantsers.” But same idea.) That is, either you plot out your story and then expand it from the blueprint or else you see what “grows” organically during the process without a specific plot in mind. What was your approach to plot in The Audacity?
Definitely a gardener. I build a draft through endless notes and then endlessly revise. Both my novels have been dinged for a lack of plot, by which I suppose is action-based causality. I'm after a psychological causality, which demands more attention to character and prose. The Remains of the Day is probably the high watermark here; I'm happy to skirt the riverbed.
The last time we were chatting in person, we talked about the dangers of imitating certain authors one loves (I think Thomas Bernhard came up). What authors influences have you actively worked to damp down in your writing?
Bernhard's a beloved tapeworm, but a tapeworm nonetheless. I freely indulged with Riots and only allowed a little this time—a riff on Julius Eastman. I also set aside Beckett and Knausgaard, who bivouac in the brainpan whether I like it or not.
And what authors do you see your writing influenced or informed by?
As for long term influences, there's Woolf, DeLillo, Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Donald Antrim, Mark Leyner, Zadie Smith. Calvin & Hobbes, certainly. For this novel I studied Sabbath's Theater and Wonder Boys. And Stanley Crawford's Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine seeped in more than I first realized.
The Audacity is a very funny satire, but a claim I often hear is that satire is almost impossible these days when life is so satirical. For example, you’re writing about the super-rich in the age of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. What do you think about the role of satire in 2024? How do you satirize a world that’s already so insane?
Good question! I used to think about this too much; I've cut back to twice a day.
Yes, we're living in insane times. Or maybe the twilight of the sane times. From the perspective of 2034, our current barometer for such things might feel quaint.
Whether it's cultural narcissism or presentism, Americans tend to think our time is the most special/innovative/imperiled. We have Elon Musk, sure. But he's on a continuum with Henry Ford (see Fordlândia) and the gilded-age robber barons (see Social Darwinism).
The comedian Tom Lehrer's said, “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.” That was fifty years ago. It's a good line. But did Lehrer really think satire could unseat a Secretary of State? That gives it too much credit. Satire is a means. It's not propaganda—or shouldn't be.
We tend to think of satire as ribald and, well, comic. Portnoy's Complaint. The Sellout. We shouldn't forget about the stringently acerbic. American Psycho, a great work of satire—highlighted in The New York Times' recent "22 of the Funniest Novels since Catch-22"—contains some of the most upsetting stretches of fiction you'll ever read.
As for 2024? Roth's "indigenous American berserk" is going to keep on berserking. And we are due for a literary leap forward. The springs of culture are tightly coiled. That Times list, for example, is full of slow burns and late discoveries. Maybe the next great work is out there, right now, being quietly shared like samizdat.
If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my science fiction novel The Body Scout that The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.” Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).
I also have a story adapted in The Werewolf at Dusk, a new graphic collection from David Small out this month from Liveright.
Hemingway said satire is the lowest style. But he had it wrong. Style is satire.
Absolutely loved this, one of my favourite interviews on here yet!