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Best-selling author Dave King spent the past year in Rome working on a new novel – and we can’t wait to read it. His fiction debut, The Ha-Ha, hit the shelves in 2005, receiving acclaim for its sensitive portrayal of the main character, Howard Kapostash, a Vietnam veteran who sustained a head injury during his brief tour of duty and was left unable to speak, to read or to write.

The Ha-Ha was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Christian Science Monitor and The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and it was among eighteen books included on The Washington Post list of the season’s best novels. The Ha-Ha was a finalist for Book-of-the-Month Club’s “Best Literary Fiction” award and for the Quills Foundation “Best Debut Author” award. As well, the novel won King a 2006-07 Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Italian translation, entitled simply Ha-ha, was released July 20 by Fazi Editore.

E-cool caught up with Dave in Rome, near the Colosseum, just days before he was scheduled to leave the Eternal City and return to his home in New York City. We asked him about his new novel and about his experiences living in Rome and he kindly granted us an exclusive preview of his work-in-progress.

When did you first visit Rome?
I traveled to Rome with a friend in 1973 after graduating from high school. Then I came back to Italy in 1978 on an undergraduate study abroad program based in Greve in Chianti. A semester in Chianti might sound like paradise to many, but I was bored living in the country and jumped a train to Rome as often as I could. I spent a tremendous part of that semester exploring the city and just hanging out.

Did those visits whet your appetite for the city’s culture and its history?
I think so. I’ve visited lots of times since the 1970s. But Roman Fever didn’t really enter my work until my partner Frank Tartaglione and I spent some weeks as visiting artists at the American Academy in the fall of 2005. The Ha-Ha had been recently published and I was starting a new novel – the one I’m still working on. While Frank spent his time drawing, I explored the Villa Farnesina; I became completely entranced with the villa and visited every day. Of course, at that time I had no idea I’d be returning to the Academy only a year later as a Literature Fellow.

Did the Villa Farnesina provide inspiration for your current novel?
Eventually, yes, though that wasn’t the original idea. I came to Rome in the fall of 2005 with the idea of writing a book about Americans abroad. I was inspired by a favorite Henry James novel, The American, which is a portrait of an American in Paris. But I was more interested in setting a book in Rome, so I’d been thinking about another of James’s novels, Daisy Miller, as a model for examining Americans and the way we present ourselves to the world when we’re out of our own country.

In the end, the idea of rewriting Daisy Miller didn’t pan out. But my interest in a Roman setting led back to the Villa Farnesina and to the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Ultimately that story, as well as the Raphael frescoes that depict it in the Villa, supplanted the Henry James model as the inspiration for the new book.

What about the myth of Cupid & Psyche do you find so interesting?
The story falls into the “beauty and the beast” genre, but it doesn’t fit the mold perfectly. Cupid is a beautiful god, and he abducts the stunning mortal girl, Psyche, and takes her to his castle in the sky. He makes conjugal visits to Psyche every night, but he also makes her promise she’ll never try to see him or to discover his real identity. As a result (and with some help from her jealous sisters), she begins to imagine that her handsome lover is in fact a vicious, violent monster.

Beauty and the Beast is a bit of a reversal, of course. In that story the beast really is physically repulsive, but we’re asked to believe he’s a prince inside. Yet both stories make us question just which lover is good and which is bad – who exactly is the beauty and who the beast.

I’m also intrigued by the element of transformation in the Cupid & Psyche story. Psyche is one of the few mortals who has an encounter with a god and comes out the better – she eventually marries Cupid and becomes a goddess herself. That’s an extraordinary outcome for a myth because in general mortals who come in contact with deities wind up incinerated or turned into plants or bugs or constellations–or they suffer fates much much worse!

So the new novel shares a big theme with The Ha-Ha? In your first book, Howard Kapostash is a bit of a beast. He can’t speak. He’s been maimed in war. And the beautiful woman with whom he shares a house ultimately tames him.
I hadn’t thought of that. Though now that you say it I recall that in his review of The Ha-Ha in Time Magazine, Richard Layaco talked about the book as a reworking of the beauty-and-the-beast narrative. That’s interesting. I guess we just keep on pondering the same problems, don’t we?

Can you tell us a bit more about the new book? What’s the working title? Can you give us a plot summary?
The working title is The Beast & Beauty. And though you’ve pointed out conceptual similarities with The Ha-Ha, it’s going to be somewhat different in tone. The Ha-Ha was serious – it was about illness – whereas The Beast & Beauty is more of a social comedy. The narrator is a Ph.D. candidate whose unfinished dissertation involves those Psyche paintings in the Villa Farnesina. She’s married to her college sweetheart, who commits a crime at the outset of the novel, and after that the two take to the road. The plot rather loosely evokes the story of Cupid and Psyche as well as providing opportunities for commentary and inquiry. (Again: can any couple really be sure which party’s the beauty and which the beast?).

Is it set in Rome?
The characters will travel to Rome, since obviously the heroine must eventually see the paintings But I’ve found it hard to do more than rough out that part of the book while I’ve been here. A lot of writers find it difficult to write about the place they’re actually living, and I guess I need a little distance. I’m looking forward to watching the dust settle once I’m home in Brooklyn

We can’t wait to read it. You’re headed home now after a year in Rome. Can you tell us what you’ve loved about the city?
I think the big discovery over the past year was a fuller awareness of the city’s long continuum. Up to this year, I’d imagined essentially two Romes: the ancient city and the Baroque city. But that perception’s changed as I’ve filled in some gaps in the time line and certain things have emerged. For example, I now see all the medieval towers that were invisible to me before. I love spotting a new tower!

Also, I’ve really come to love Renaissance Rome. When I was younger I preferred the exuberance of the Baroque, especially Caravaggio and Bernini. But now, with a bit of maturity and depth—and of course, with the ongoing research for this new novel—I’m growing much more intrigued by Renaissance Rome. I’m amazed by Raphael’s paintings in the Stanze of Julius II at the Vatican. And, of course, I love the Villa Farnesina. It’s the place I tell everyone to go when they visit Rome.

Has the Eternal City changed you?
Probably. A year after arriving here, I do feel different, though it’s hard to say precisely how. Certainly my ideas about being an American abroad have deepened. Before living in Rome I had a simpler notion of what it means to live in another culture. Being a language wonk, I think I imagined that language would be the primary issue; that everything would flow from my understanding Italian. I see now that that view was naive, and that politics, cultural custom, history, and a whole host of other factors all work together with language to make life outside American culture a kind of endless—though endlessly satisfying—series of challenges and riddles.

For more information about Dave King and The Ha-Ha, visit his website, www.davekingwriter.com or watch the video-interview that’s on the website of his Italian publisher, Fazi Editore. And, be sure to look for The Ha-Ha on the big screen late in 2008! The book was optioned by Warner Brothers Pictures in 2005. Tod Williams will direct the film from a script by Charles Leavitt, and Tom Cruise is currently slated to star as Howard Kapostash.