Cronin Pens a Satisfying Career as Novelist, Teacher

After 15 years of writing and teaching fiction, Justin Cronin is seeing his hard work and dedication pay off.

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 also has been translated into five languages.

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

Mary and O’Neil weaves together eight separate stories set from 1979 to the present. The stories follow several characters as their lives intersect, and one of the challenges Cronin faced in writing the book was weaving the individual stories together so they would “add up to a novel.” Another technical issue was reintroducing the characters at various points while, at the same time, avoiding a feeling of repetition. “It was really fun to try to figure these things out,” he says, adding that readers must judge whether he was successful.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Cronin began teaching fiction writing at Rice last fall. Before coming to Rice, he 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.

This spring, Cronin is teaching both intermediate and advanced fiction workshops. He believes that teaching provides a healthy counterpoint to writing. “First of all, writing is a solitary activity, and I’m not by nature a solitary person,” he says. “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 says—a lesson he tries to impart to his students. “Writing a novel is like tossing your parachute from a plane and jumping out after it,” he says. “You have to believe that you’ll somehow be able to grab hold of the thing before you hit the ground.”

Discipline, he says, is the key, and he writes for several hours every day. “Writing’s like any other job,” he says. “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. The novel, which spans over 50 years, is narrated by four different individuals who relate the man’s history 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, it will tell 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 says, “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 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 says. “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.”

—Ellen Chang