PF Kluge's novels

The Day That I Die (Bobbs-Merrill, 1976)

A thriller set in the Pacific islands I saw as a Peace Corps volunteer. The novel was suggested by a 1967 visit by actor Lee Marvin to the island of Saipan, where I was his guide. Marvin, an ex-Marine, had served on Saipan and was wounded there. He gave me an idea for a story. The novel was optioned by film director Robert Aldrich; the film was never made.

Eddie And The Cruisers (Viking, 1980)

A fictional examination of my weakness—lifelong weakness—for the songs of my youth. Hits come and go, the products of a season; but they return—sometimes, they seduce and reproach. The novel is set in New Jersey, much of it in Vineland where I had a summer job on the town newspaper in 1962. The novel and the film have been described as a rock and roll Citizen Kane. To this, I do not object. The first Eddie And The Cruisers was directed by Martin Davidson. The sequel, Eddie Lives, is a talent-free embarrassment.

McArthur’s Ghost (Arbor House, 1987)

A continuing interest in the love/hate relationship between America and the Philippines underlies my second novel, which spans the years from World War II to the Marcos era. My wife’s presence in Manila—as a New York Times correspondent—gave me reason to travel to Manila, a chance to read and research. I met Luis Taruc, leader of the postwar Huk rebellion. And with my wife, I attended Imelda Marcos’ lavish Manila International Film Festival. I was, as they say, gathering material.

Season For War (Freundlich, 1988)

I was intrigued by the fact that some of the same soldiers who fought in the Civil War later served in the last Indian campaigns of the 1880’s and were then shipped off to our first overseas adventure in the turn-of-the-century Philippines. That the same lives could move from John Ford’s western desert to Francis Ford Coppola’s jungles was irresistible. Also: some of the soldiers were black. Season For War was the result, obscurely published and lightly reviewed. I may have written as good a novel later on; never a better one.

Biggest Elvis (Viking, 1996)

What began as one Philippines-based novel, then another, became a trilogy with Biggest Elvis. In this case, journalism led to fiction. I visited the mammoth U.S. Naval base at Subic Bay twice, once on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine, once for Playboy. The place was unforgettable: a neon wilderness, a sexual vanity fair, a high water mark of American military and cultural power. There was more there than a pair of magazine articles could accommodate. Then my friend Lazarus Salii (see The Edge of Paradise) told me of a trio of singers who had come to Palau and been stranded there, broke. The three men were an Elvis Presley show, each incarnating a stage of the king’s life. The idea of three Elvis’s knocking around the world was appealing to me. A novel—which ought to be a movie—was born. It had music, sex, romance, politics, exotic locations. It was an American Year of Living Dangerously. Of all my books, this was the most fun to write. Every day, the question from manuscript to author was: what kind of fun are we going to have today? I think it shows.

Final Exam (XOXOX Press, 2005)

I’ve read a lot of so-called academic novels: Malamud, Jarrell, Amis, Lodge, Smiley, Prose, Russo and the pungent Edward Allen. Though there are things I’ve enjoyed, none of them seemed to capture the place I attended, where I now live and work: Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. Measured against my sense of life at Kenyon—as reported in my non-fiction book, Alma Mater—these novels seemed forced, broad, hyperbolic. Surely they were entertaining. But not persuasive. When life lands a sixty-ish writer back at the same campus he attended as a teenaged scholarship kid, the writer tends to have a take on the place. Some things, he remembers; others, he imagines. History flows into story and, in this case, into mystery, dubbed “liberal arts noir” by the publisher. A series of murders panics a small college. The question is: who’d want to kill a college? And who might be able to save it?