"The world," Benjamin Markovits says, "makes something of us and decides to a certain extent what we're like - and I've always hated that. The world isn't very good at making these decisions, and yet the older you get, the more decisions about you it makes. The less successful you are in worldly terms, the more you become conscious of the gap between who you think you are and the world's assessment. And that gap seems peculiarly suited to the novel, because I can't think of any other art form that allows such unfettered access to pure consciousness - what it's like to be inside somebody's head."
As a novelist, Markovits has always felt drawn to people "who don't feel perfectly represented by their place in life". Maybe, he adds, "because I was always an outsider".
Markovits, 42, is tall - 1.9m - and rangy, with gentle eyes, a high, domed forehead and a cadaverous expression. He talks in a quick-fire manner and attacks his cooked breakfast in the North London cafe where we meet as if he is refuelling.
He has run 8km that morning on Hampstead Heath - something he does four or five times a week.
The son of two law professors - an American Jewish father and a German Christian mother - Markovits was born in California, grew up "slightly oddball" in Texas, and spent time at schools in England and Germany. He is also a former professional basketball player - one of the few, perhaps, who would name John Betjeman as a favourite poet. He now lives in London with his English wife and two children. So where exactly, he wonders aloud, does he fit in?
"I never quite figured it out."
Fitting in is the central theme of Markovits's new novel - his seventh. You Don't Have To Live Like This tells the story of Greg Marnier - "Marny" to his friends - listless, directionless and in his early 30s, who has fallen from a promising future at Yale to a thankless teaching job in Aberystwyth, and is persuaded by an old classmate, Robert James, to join in a scheme to settle in and save a burnt-out neighbourhood in Detroit.
James is a dot-com millionaire, whose good looks and preppy outfits lend him the appearance of "the kind of guy a woman could trust to pay for their kids' private schooling", and whose ambitions are a hazy combination of altruism and self-advancement.
Joining a pioneering group of middle-class liberal idealists, left-wing counterculturists and Tea Party libertarians, all united in a vision of building a meaningful future, Marny moves into an abandoned home, takes a job as a supply teacher, begins a relationship with a black woman, Gloria - and buys himself a gun.
Markovits' interest in Detroit was piqued by newspaper articles on the city's decline and plummeting house prices. "You heard about houses selling for 300 bucks, and I had this idea that if you could get a bunch of friends to move there that would be an interesting thing to do. Then it struck me as not a bad idea to write about - probably better to write about it than to do it."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11492883
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