A Conversation with David Czuchlewski
Author of The Muse Asylum

by Darby Saxbe

David Czuchlewski is 24 years old. His first novel, The Muse Asylum, out this month as a Putnam title, has been hailed as "brilliant" by Kirkus Reviews and "stylish, assured and gripping" by Publisher's Weekly. His mentor is Joyce Carol Oates. And if that weren't sufficiently alarming evidence of his precocity, Czuchlewski is also a third-year medical student at Mount Sinai.

Czuchlewski's novel centers around a trio of recent Princeton graduates who become embroiled in a search to uncover the identity of reclusive novelist Horace Jacob Little. One of the protagonists, Andrew Wallace, suffers a mental breakdown and moves to the Muse Asylum, a residential treatment facility for the artistically gifted.

We met up with this overachiever for coffee on the Upper East Side. In person, Czuchlewski is a pleasant, self-effacing guy--not nearly as intimidating as his achievements would suggest. On the morning of our interview, he'd received word that his novel was going to be included in the Barnes & Noble "Discover New Authors" series.

MB: You wrote this novel as a college student. How did you arrive at the decision to publish it?

DC: It was written as my thesis at Princeton. I was an English major with a concentration in creative writing. And when it was done my thesis advisor, Joyce Carol Oates, went above and beyond the call of duty and set me up with the agent who represents her, Elly Sidel. She told her,"This guy is going to send you a manuscript, take a look at it." I was lucky that she liked it and sent it around to some publishers. After a ton of rejections, Putnam decided to take it.

MB: Based on that experience, what advice would you give to a writer trying to get published?

DC: Persistence! Not just in terms of the writing itself, but also in terms of not losing faith as the book is sent around. I accumulated a stack of rejection letters before I got lucky with Putnam. To finish a novel you really have to be stubborn; I'm a very stubborn person. I think that that certainly helps.

MB: As you were writing the novel, were you trying to calculate its appeal to a reader or publishing house?

DC: I wasn't really trying to be commercial, but I was hoping that what I was writing would be good enough to be published and read and talked about. Otherwise I'm just amusing myself.

MB: Once your book was accepted, what was the editing process like?

DC: At Putnam, I was lucky enough to work with Aimee Taub, a spectacular editor. What Elly was shopping around was really a first draft, something I'd written in about six or seven months, in order to graduate. Aimee'd say, "This doesn't work," or "We should pay more attention to this character," and send me back to the drawing board. She never really gave me explicit directions; she turned me loose and tried to get me to work it out myself, which worked very well for me.

MB: How long did that process take?

DC: About a year and a half, during which time I was in medical school.

MB: How did you manage your time?

DC: It was difficult, obviously. I really needed to find blocks of time where I could pay attention to the book. It would've been nice if I could've just snatched an hour here or an hour there and sat down and done it, but I really needed a continuous stretch of time in which to work on it and really concentrate. I got a lot done during the summer, right before I started my third year. That's when I was able to finish it.

MB: Lots of would-be authors who are juggling jobs and trying to write creatively would probably agree that it takes a certain amount of immersion and uninterrupted time to make progress. How do you balance that with the need to study, work, get stuff done?

DC: I think of Joyce Carol Oates in that regard and her legendary ability to be prolific. And her intensity. Even when I was taking writing classes with her she was having the class do a story every few weeks, nearly five times the amount of output that the other creative writing classes were requiring. The lesson that I took from that is that you have no excuse not to write. And if you really want to do it you will find the time.

MB: Do you think it's good, then, to focus on quantity and just getting the words on the page? It seems like some people spend years and years writing a single book, and some people just churn them out. Is there a particular style that you gravitate towards?

DC: I'm more slow and deliberate. I mean, I'm definitely not as fast as Joyce Carol Oates. I don't think anyone is as fast.

MB: Are you working on anything new?

DC: Yes, I'm in the very early stages. And it's going to be more difficult to write this one because now I'm going to be getting into residencies and internships. But hopefully I'll find the time.

MB: Speaking of medicine, or psychiatry specifically, did you have any models for The Muse Asylum?

DC: Well, there's a place in France that's very similar to the Muse Asylum. It's a place for the artistically gifted mentally ill. I read an article and photo essay about it in the New York Times Magazine 7 or 8 years ago. I don't remember details, just the place and that it existed. And of course when I was reading it, although it was a long time ago, I never imagined that it would figure so prominently in my future, and give a name to the novel especially. But it actually exists.

MB: First-time authors obviously have the challenge of getting a foot in the door, but there's also that sexy, promotional first-author phenomenon that happened to Zadie Smith, for example. I get the sense that editors feel a lot of pressure to find new authors who can make flashy debuts, and as a result there's a de-emphasis on nurturing authors through their second or third or fourth work of fiction. Are you worried about what happens next in your authorial career?

DC: No, because I think the future will be dictated largely by how this book does, and I'm optimistic. I've gotten a lot of good responses to the book--for example, it was spotlighted by Barnes & Noble as part of their "Discover New Authors" series--and hopefully that's not just because I'm a first author, but because people like the book. I am going to continue writing, regardless of how the first book does. It's nice to have sort of two careers, writing and medicine, because I don't feel that I have all my eggs in one basket. I'm happy with what I'm doing in both areas right now. It helps me psychologically, at least, the fact that I'm not sitting at home, waiting for the phone to ring from my editor about the latest thing on the book.

MB: So, do you go to lots of downtown soirees where you hobnob with authors?

DC: No, absolutely not. I work at the hospital and go home and sleep. That's my life right now, unfortunately.

MB: If Joyce Carol Oates hadn't been in the picture do you think you still would have tried to get this book published? How would the process have been different?

DC: Well, I've known for a long time that I wanted to write and hopefully write something that could be published. It wasn't that I worked with Joyce Carol Oates and then decided to do it. I also took a class with Russell Banks, by the way. I think what I learned in writing workshops didn't come from having these writers sit at the table and toss out pearls of wisdom, revealing the secret about how to write. For me it was about the fact that I had to keep practicing, keep turning out a story every couple of weeks. And then I learned how to look at that story critically and how to look at other people's stories critically. That's what I found valuable about it. So, certainly it was important that Joyce Carol Oates was leading the classes but what I took away was the ability to criticize my own writing, and also the impetus to keep practicing and writing and turning out good stuff.

MB: In your book, one of the protagonists, Jake Burnett, goes to work for the Manhattan Ledger, a rundown weekly newspaper, but his real love is literature. Did you ever consider going into newspaper or magazine writing?

DC: Actually I was into journalism. I wrote for the Daily Princetonian for 2 years and I reached the point where if I stayed with it any longer I would've been an editor and I would have had to make that the focal point in my life. So at that point I said that I wanted to try to do other things. So I was working for the Prince and during the summers I worked for the Manhattan Spirit on the West Side. That kind of forms the model for the Ledger-- it's a weekly paper that covers the West Side.

MB: Earlier, you said that one of the most important things for the writer is to just plug away and be consistent and try to write a lot. Do you think that journalism and non-fiction writing detract from your ability to write creatively, just in terms of the brain-space you're allocated to writing?

DC: From my own experience I reached the point where it was going to take too much away so I had to stop. I needed to write fiction in a focused and sustained way.

MB: Did you get any perspective on the publishing industry and where it's headed?

DC: Well, I'm not really a publishing insider, I'm just kind of writing and working with Aimee. One thing I'd say is that I've heard is that editors don't really want to edit a book--they just kind of want to find a book and then publish it, and find another book and publish that--a real departure from the Maxwell Perkins model of editing. And I found the opposite to be true with Aimee--she really wanted to work on the book and take time to make it as good as it could be. So that's one thing that I discovered about the publishing industry that's good. Maybe that's an exception, I don't know.

MB: One interesting challenge you must have faced is centering a novel around a celebrated writer, a fictional character who's adored for his writing--it's like trying to cast a musical about the greatest singer who has ever lived. Your novel includes excerpts from Horace Jacob Little's supposed oeuvre--were those difficult passages to write?

DC: In the original draft there were lots of Little passages, and I actually included the entire short story. That was probably the hardest thing to write--I spent the most time worrying about that. And in the end I got rid of most of it because it kind of stopped the momentum of the narrative. In other words, I wasn't so concerned with reproducing his voice, but I felt that it was awkward to stick this 20-page story in the middle of the book, and the narrative thread got lost. So that's really why I reduced it. But that was definitely on my mind.

MB: When you were studying pre-med, at what point did you say to yourself, I really want to take a writing class?

DC: Orgo! (Organic Chemistry class) No, I was interested in writing but not seriously. About sophomore year I was finding the hardcore pre-med curriculum kind of limiting, intellectually. And I was lucky enough to find something that Mt. Sinai runs, called the Humanities and Medicine program. You apply in your sophomore year to Mt. Sinai and if they accept you to their medical school it frees up the rest of your time in college to take Humanities courses, and do stuff you might not otherwise do if you had to take M-CATs. You study at Mt. Sinai in the summers to make up the difference and learn all the physics and chemistry that you're supposed to know. All of a sudden I was free to broaden myself a little bit and that's really when I started taking the writing classes.

MB: That's an interesting background because I think your novel really explores the relationship between humanity and medicine, madness and literary inspiration. It's an old-fashioned conceit to position the author as a crazed but insightful lunatic, but in your book, it happens in the context of mainstream medicine--Andrew Wallace is in a residential treatment facility and he's taking his meds and has a fairly classic schizophrenic etiology. Do you think your medical studies factored into the way you choose to depict madness and the way you chose to depict the workings of your narrator's mind?

DC: When I was writing the novel, I hadn't officially begun medical studies. I was still in college. One thing I didn't want to do is write a case history. It's interesting that you say Andrew has a classic schizophrenic etiology. I guess that's true to some extent. But I specifically didn't attach to him anywhere in the book a diagnosis. Because I didn't want to be tied down to enumerating the various check-listed things that you have to have in order to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. I wanted it to be about a person and not an illness.

MB: I got the sense that madness as a theme in your book extended beyond just the figure of Andrew Wallace. There's a sense in which the transmission between author and reader is a kind of madness, or that it has an obsessive quality.

DC: To a certain extent. The idea is that when you're writing something, you're losing yourself. And when you're reading something good, you lose yourself. And there's a certain similarity to losing a sense of reality.

MB: In fact, I found the book to be a kind of ode to readers, to being a literary fan. At one point, you have Jake Burnett talk about what how much Horace Jacob Little's books mean to him; he feels like they give him a reason to live. Have you had that experience as a reader?

DC: In general, yes. Maybe not in a way that is so focused on one particular book. But yes. Certainly Nabokov and Don DeLillo count among my favorite authors.

MB: Was the Horace Jacob Little figure modeled on any particular author? He reminded me of Pynchon or Salinger.

DC: In general, that's the idea. But it's not just that this author is a recluse. In a larger sense, it seems to me there are tons of stories about authors in general and how when you get right down to it they are flawed, sometimes appallingly flawed, people. You find out that this person is cheating on his wife, and this other person is betraying a colleague. I at least have naïve hope that authors ought to be better, more insightful people--you look to them as sort of the best example of what can be achieved. And I'm always fascinated when they don't live up to that. So that's a bigger issue that I was exploring.

MB: The interest in unmasking the lionized author's true identity relates, in your book, to the predatory nature of the media, and readers. For example, what spurs Jake Burnett's quest is that he works at a struggling newspaper that's looking for publicity. As an author who's just started doing interviews, do you think it's healthy for the media to feed the public's desire to "get the dirt" on famous authors? Or do you think it's better for authors to retain an air of mystery?

DC: I don't know if it's better or worse--I think it's just human nature to want to discover more about someone whose book you just read. I certainly have that impulse. When I read Thomas Pynchon, I'm just riveted, wondering who he might be. And I think it's natural to be curious in that way and I think that curiosity only deepens when the author decides to withhold access. People were fascinated by Howard Hughes, for example, by the idea that he lived a life totally disconnected from humanity. And I think that's an understandable interest. But it's taken to another level when the person is a writer because you feel intimate with the person who is telling you a story, sometimes sharing very intimate or universal feelings. It's not Howard Hughes holing up in a hotel and distancing himself from everyone. It's like the author is whispering in your ear and you're thinking, "Who is this person, really?"

MB: If you think that someone like Howard Hughes could hold the public's interest by hiding in a hotel, would you say that for writers like Thomas Pynchon or your Horace Jacob Little being reclusive and secretive is a kind of publicity gambit? Do you think that's a cynical choice?

DC: No, I don't think so. I find it hard to believe that someone could maintain a publicity gambit for so long. It might work for a year, but then they might get tired of it. And then start to unmask themselves, which would be an even greater publicity gambit. So I don't think that that's the reason. But I don't know.

MB: You don't personally have any plans to go into hiding to promote your book?

DC: No.