Ann Patty (left) has a simple acquisition strategy: “If I don’t stop reading a book,” the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt executive editor explained, “I buy it. If I stop in the middle, I don’t buy it.” (She will, she admitted, put a manuscript down to sleep—but if she grabs the New York Times first thing the next morning instead of that story, she’s not buying it.) “Any moron can overpay for a bestseller,” she continued. “What’s interesting to me is finding something that no one else has read… Nothing is more fun to me than first novels, and [Padma Viswanathan‘s The Toss of a Lemon] is like her first three novels all rolled into one.”
Viswanathan had been a sociology student in college, but somehow never got around to enrolling in grad school to work on the advanced degrees. “I didn’t know why,” she recalled recently, “and my parents didn’t know why, either.” After becoming involved in local agit-prop theater productions, she joined a playwriting group—and then, in her mid-twenties, she finally asked her grandmother about their family’s history, and heard the story of how her grandmother, living in a small Indian city, had been widowed at eighteen with two small children. And thus a 900-page family epic was set in motion. And though much of the initial reception has focused on the obvious Indian and Indian-American comparisons, Viswanathan smiled discreetly but proudly when Patty compared her work to “a great Russian novel.”
(Which, she says, she did indeed read straight through, even though her sister had just arrived from Alaska for a family visit. The last time that happened, Patty recalled, she’d been reading Life of Pi; “I had to tell her I’d be busy and distracted again.”)
Viswanathan spent the next year conducting more interviews with her grandmother, and then traveled from their Canadian hometown to India for six-months of research. For the longest time, she said, “it wasn’t like a book to me… It was like a world inside my head.” Finally, after seven years of working on the first draft, she began to conceive of the ending. “If this was a Russian novel,” she joked, “there had to be a confrontation.” She started slowly bringing back the secondary character whose presence would set off the final showdown, and then spent another year building up to the final two chapters, forty pages that came together in just two days. (After which, she went back to India for another six months of research, and a total of two more years of rewrites.)
These days, Viswanathan lives in Arkansas with her husband, poet-translator Geoffrey Brock, whose projects include recent work by Umberto Eco and an anthology of 20th-century Italian poetry for FSG. She loves the area, esepcially having a house big enough that her parents can live on the second floor; they often take care of their grandchildren while Viswanathan and Brock are at work. Since completing The Toss of a Lemon, she’s written some short stories—like the prize-winning “Transitory Cities“—but now, she said, she’d like to focus on the second novel. “I’d like that too,” Patty laughed.