Cronin pens a satisfying career as novelist, teacher

Cronin
pens a satisfying career as novelist, teacher

BY ELLEN CHANG
Rice News staff

After 15 years
of writing and teaching fiction, Justin Cronin’s hard
work and dedication are paying off handsomely.

Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Associate Professor of English Justin Cronin said teaching adds a healthy counterpoint to his writing, which includes his award-winning “Mary and O’Neil” and “The Summer Guest,” due to be released this summer. “The time I spend with students and colleagues keeps me grounded in the real world,” he said.

Since his first
novel, “Mary and O’Neil,” was published in
2001, the book has garnered several prestigious awards –
the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Stephen Crane Prize and the
Whiting Writer’s Award, to name a few. The novel has
also been translated into five languages.

Cronin, associate
professor of English at Rice, said this recognition is an
important affirmation. “The nicest thing about awards
like these is that you’re chosen by other writers,”
he said. “These are acknowledgments by artists that
I admire.”

“Mary and
O’Neil” is a novel that weaves together eight
separate stories. The stories, set from 1979 to the present,
take readers though the lives of several characters as their
lives intersect.

Upon its publication,
“Mary and O’Neil” received laudatory reviews
in papers across the country. Critic and writer Sylvia Brownrigg
in The New York Times Book Review described it as “an
array of graceful and reflective stories that illuminate
the painful and the ordinary in its characters’ lives
… with a distinctive sense of such moments’ mystery.”

One of the challenges
Cronin faced when he was writing the book was weaving the
individual stories together so they would “add up to
a novel.” Another technical issue he faced was reintroducing
the characters at various times throughout the book, while
at the same time avoiding a feeling of repetition, he said.

Cronin said readers
must judge whether he was successful. “It was really
fun to try to figure these things out,” he said.

A graduate of
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cronin began teaching fiction
writing at Rice last fall. This spring he is teaching both
intermediate and advanced fiction workshops.
Teaching adds a healthy counterpoint to his own writing,
he said.

“First of
all, writing is a solitary activity, and I’m not by
nature a solitary person,” Cronin said. “The time
I spend with students and colleagues keeps me grounded in
the real world. But it’s also true that when I show
up in that classroom, all of my authority comes from time
spent at the keyboard. What I have to offer students is
nothing more or less than what I did that morning as a writer.”

Writing takes
a great deal of faith, he said. It’s a lesson he tries
to impart to his students. “Writing a novel is like
tossing your parachute from a plane and then jumping out
after it,” he said. “You have to believe that
you’ll somehow be able to grab hold of the thing before
you hit the ground.”

Chris Offutt,
the author of “Out of the Woods” and “No
Heroes,” who teaches at the University of Iowa, has
known Cronin since the two were students at the Iowa Writers’
Workshop.

“Even then,
Justin’s writing was clear and clean, with strong characters
and lovely prose,” he said. “Now his work is very
powerful. Justin’s greatest gift is the sheer humanity
and compassion he brings to the page. He writes about people
with all their joys and troubles. His dialogue invariably
reads like people talking honestly and intimately.”

Before he began
teaching fiction at Rice, Cronin spent 11 years as a professor
at La Salle University in Philadelphia. During that time,
he also worked as a freelance writer, co-authoring a number
of nonfiction books and writing for various newspapers,
including the Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Having a heavy
teaching load taught Cronin to discipline himself to write
for several hours every day.

“Writing’s
like any other job,” he said. “Rule one: You have
to show up. But a novel’s a big thing, and I always
know at least one scene or moment in the book that’s
ready to be written, so why wait? If you write 500 words
a day, in 200 days you’ve got something like the draft
of a novel on your hands.”

It’s that
tenacious philosophy that allows him to stay on track and
write a book about every three years.

His second novel,
‘The Summer Guest,” is due out this summer. Set
at an old-style sportsman camp in the lakes region of northwest
Maine, the novel begins when an elderly man, a longtime
summer guest, arrives at camp in the last days of his life,
hoping to die there, says Cronin. The novel, which spans
over 50 years and is narrated by four different individuals,
tells the full history of this final pilgrimage, from a
battlefield north of Rome in World War II to the present
day.

In December,
Cronin was awarded a 2004 fellowship in fiction writing
from the National Endowment for the Arts. The $20,000 fellowship
will support the writing of his third novel, “The Ghost
Father.”

Loosely based
on a murder that took place in New York state in 1992, the
novel tells the story of an unemployed actor who marries
a wealthy woman after successfully masquerading as a member
of her social set.

“It’s
going to be a large book,” Cronin said, “with
a much bigger canvas than I’ve worked on before. It
may sound overly ambitious, but I envision the novel as
very much in the tradition of works by writers like F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser, who wrestled with the big
American themes: social class, the power of money, the whole
question of the inventible self. But at a more human level,
it’s also a love story, and something rather like a
crime novel.”

Cronin said he
chose fiction for his writing career because he views it
as “capable of telling a different kind of truth.”

“Constructing
the blueprint for a novel is like engineering,” he
said. “In some ways it’s quite mathematical. But
when I’m writing a scene or even a sentence, what most
concerns me is finding the right language to capture what
it feels like to be a human being. That’s the biggest
truth I know about.”

University of
Minnesota professor and novelist Charles Baxter, who wrote
“Saul and Patsy” and “ The Feast of Love,”
said he is an admirer of Cronin’s writing. “His
work is remarkably astute in its investigation of family
relationships and personal gestures,” he said. “Mr.
Cronin knows a great deal about intimacy and the ways in
which people can reinforce it or violate it. Furthermore,
and particularly remarkable in a young writer, he is well-acquainted
with the spectrum of adult human emotion and is adept in
evoking it.”