Writers behaving badly
by
SHARP, SLY, AND IMPOSSIBLE to put down, The Book Game is a biting, often funny exploration of friendship, ambition, class, rivalry, missed chances and the reckless pull of desire.
Its modern-day setting is Hawton Manor, in the lush Cambridgeshire countryside. Successful egomaniac Cambridge professor Lawrence and his wealthy stay-at-home wife Claudia host eight close friends at a writers’ retreat during a blistering August summer filled with poolside reading, writing, delicious wine-fuelled suppers, book chat, outdoor games and midnight swims. As the week progresses the conviviality sours and tensions rise when old grudges, hidden resentments and jealousies surface. It dares to ask: what does it really mean to hit midlife?
Frances Wise is the pen name for friends and academics Chloë Houston and Adam Smyth.
—
Where are you now, and where would you rather be?
Chloë: I’m in my study at home looking at a rainy window, and I’d like to be out on the ridgeway with my dogs in the sunshine.
Adam: I’m at the kitchen table at my house in London. I’d rather be in Los Angeles, heading out for sensational Korean food.
What sparked the idea and how did the novel take shape?
The novel began as a conversation about what it would be like to write a collaborative novel while we were both on a writing retreat back in 2022. We were really interested in how that would work, and the setting of the retreat itself. The novel started with us exchanging a couple of draft scenes and editing each other’s work, and it snowballed from there.
What is your alchemy? Can you share insights into how two people can write a novel together?
For two people to write together there needs to be a degree of familiarity and trust; you have to feel comfortable sharing your ideas, even the awful ones. We had both worked collaboratively before (with other people), and we’d been friends (formerly colleagues) for a long time. We established a few ground rules early on, some to do with style, others to do with practice; for example, we agreed that we would only write when it was fun, not from a sense of duty or obligation. On a practical note, we found it helped to edit as invisibly as possible, so no tracked changes, nothing complex, just working together on a joint draft.
Where and when do you do most of your writing?
Whenever and wherever possible! We used to joke that this novel was written entirely before 6am and after 10pm, because it had to fit around our lives.
If you have one, what is your pre-writing ritual?
Chloë: Shut the door.
Adam: Read what I wrote the day before and then start.
What comes first – character or story?
Character probably came first for this novel but usually they are equally important.
We established a few ground rules early on, some to do with style, others to do with practice; for example, we agreed that we would only write when it was fun, not from a sense of duty or obligation.”
When you structure your writing, are you planners or plotters?
We planned a certain amount in advance, but we started writing with no sense of where the plot would go. We’d have a planning meeting to discuss the story development and to allocate scenes – “You do the lunch scene, I’ll do the confrontation in the garden” – then worked on them until we were happy with them, and so on.
How do you relax when you’re writing?
Chloë: When it’s going well, writing is a sort of flow state, which is different to relaxation but completely addictive. But I don’t find writing is something I need to relax from, like other forms of work, probably because I rarely do it for hours at a time.
Adam: I walk around the house and make endless cups of tea.
Add a single word to complete this sentence: The Book Game is about _____
midlife.
How would you pitch The Book Game to a screen exec?
The Book Game is a country-house romp in which, in the words of one reviewer, “everyone’s fraught or up to no good”. With eight main characters enjoying themselves in the sunshine, everyone’s having fun – until they’re not. It’s Miranda July meets Joanna Trollope and John Milton at the White Lotus.
Share with us your favourite line/s of dialogue, poetry or prose.
The Book Game is full of references to other books. From the period that we both work on, which is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, we found two poets kept creeping in: John Donne and John Milton. We use a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost as our epigraph: “from morn / To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, / A summer’s day”’”.
We’d have a planning meeting to discuss the story development and to allocate scenes – ‘You do the lunch scene, I’ll do the confrontation in the garden’ – then worked on them until we were happy.”
Which books do you treasure the most?
Chloë: The books I love and read regularly, because it’s important that it be the same physical copy each time. These include Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons; Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford; Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey; Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, which contains my favourite marriage proposal in literature; and I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith. All of these, I’ve just realised on writing them down, have English country-house or academic settings.
Adam: I love Paradise Lost, Tristram Shandy, Middlemarch and Ulysses – but that’s a highbrow canon. The books that have given me most pleasure are actually diaries – James Lees-Milne, Samuel Pepys, Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf. They are teeming with life and a sense of the past in the present tense.
Which screen adaptations did the original books justice (or even surpassed them)?
Chloë: I grew up watching the Merchant Ivory classics on repeat, and I still find their A Room With a View and Howards End as absorbing and moving as I do the novels.
What are you currently reading and how did it come your way?
Chloë: I’m reading Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser and it was passed on to me by my mother who heard her talk at the Hay Festival.
Adam: I’m reading Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton which is superb! One small patch of land, through time and literary history.
Which books do you feel you ought to have read but haven’t yet?
Chloë: For teachers of English Literature that’s a fraught question. So many books I should have read and haven’t. I get the impression I’m missing out by never having read Proust.
Adam: Too many to name. I’m pretty shaky on anything before about 1530. And lots of big Victorian novels – I don’t have time!
Which book/s made you last laugh out loud?
Chloë: Heartburn by Nora Ephron.
Adam: Nabokov’s Speak Memory is so funny.
Kindle, physical or audio?
Physical, sometimes audio.
Imagine you’re the host of a literary supper, who would your dinner guests be (living or dead, real or fictional)?
Chloë: John Donne (Milton can stay at home, he’d drone on about politics), Margaret Cavendish, Count Fosco from The Woman in White, Joan Didion.
Adam: I imagine Ben Jonson would have appalling table manners, and Margery Kempe simply wouldn’t turn up. So they are off the list. I like putting unlikely things next to each other, so let’s say George Eliot, Bill Hicks, Lytton Strachey, Brian Clough, with Emily Dickinson seated (as football commentators say) in a withdrawn position.
Is Frances Wise working on the next novel?
Maybe.
In a post-truth, ‘alternative facts’ Trumpian world, what does the future look like for history, the humanities and the arts in academia?
The humanities and the arts are necessary to any world which values truth and beauty, which this one still does. Our subjects perceive and analyse the world critically and creatively, which is why they are so vital now.
Compiled and introduced by Farhana Gani
—
Chloë Houston is Associate Professor of early modern drama and Joint Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of academic monographs on Renaissance utopias and on the Persian Empire in early modern English drama.
Dr Chloë Houston
Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford. He is a founder member of the 39 Steps Press printing collective and co-hosts the literary podcast and sometime radio show LitBits. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books. Adam has written four books and his latest, The Book-Makers is published by Bodley Head.
Professor Adam Smyth
Author photo by Anya Goldenberg
The Book Game by Frances Wise is published by Fourth Estate in hardback, eBook and audio.
Read more
frances_wise_author
4thestatebooks
Farhana Gani is a book scout for film and TV, and a founding editor of Bookanista.
@wearebookanista.bsky.social
instagram.com/wearebookanista
bookanista.com/author/farhana
