Magic Dust

Jean Hanff Korelitz’s new novel, a children’s book, is sprinkled with enchantment.

By: Ilene Dube

Staff photo by Mark Czajkowski

   The Interference Powder Jean Hanff Korelitz has sprinkled into my palm causes the crinkly skin to shimmer.
   Interference Powder is real, explains the author of the new middle-grade reader, Interference Powder (Cavendish, $15.95,
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). "It’s made of ground-up mica, and artists use it by mixing it into paint or ink to lend a shimmer to their paintings and drawings," she writes in a preface to the book, which she will read from and sign at Learning Express in the Princeton Shopping Center Dec. 6. "It does not have any magical properties… At least, I don’t think it does."

Staff photo by Mark Czajkowski

   The daub in my hand didn’t make any of my wishes come true, but in Ms. Korelitz’s well-crafted tale it exerts mysterious powers on Nina, the book’s 11-year-old narrator. A student at Riverside School (yes, the book is rife with Princeton locales, from King’s Castle Chinese restaurant in the Princeton Shopping Center to the Place to Bead Shop on Witherspoon Street, Thomas Sweet and P.J.’s Pancakes), Nina is troubled to learn she has received a 62 on her social studies exam. The Wilton Street resident dreads the sorrow this will bring to her single mom, a psychotherapist.
   Later, in art class — Nina is very good in art — she draws a picture of the exam being presented to her mother. But instead of depicting the grim reality, she draws the test with "100" written on it, and draws her mom with a smiling, happy face. When the substitute art teacher instructs Nina to look inside a black bag of paints and pick out something to add color to her drawing, Nina comes across the Interference Powder. She sprinkles it over the drawing and watches it glitter and shimmer. Nina really wants her mother to be happy with her schoolwork, because in her deepest heart she wants to take singing lessons, and her mother has already told her singing lessons will interfere with her schoolwork.
   Although she hadn’t intended it to happen, the luminescent powder does make the fantasy in the picture come true — just not in the way Nina would have expected. Once she discovers the substance’s magical properties, she tries to use it to her advantage. But as in all good tales, there is always something unexpected and unpredictable about the way the enchantment works.
   "I’ve always loved stories in which everything goes wrong and you wonder how they’ll get back together in a way you don’t anticipate, and you have that twisted anxious feeling about this disastrous situation," she says. "It’s so satisfying when everything works out unexpectedly."
   Ms. Korelitz, who has a daughter, Dorothy, 11, a son, Asher, 4, and is married to the poet Paul Muldoon, first learned about Interference Powder at an art exhibit in Massachusetts in the late ’80s. The list of materials used in an assemblage included sticks, balls and Interference Powder. Curious, Ms. Korelitz asked the artist about it and tucked the idea away for a future children’s book.
   The Griggstown resident has also written The Properties of Breath (Bloodaxe Books, 1988), a book of poetry; A Jury of Her Peers (Crown Publishers, 1996), a Literary Guild Alternate Selection; and The Sabbathday River (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) a Book of the Month Club Main Selection. She is a journalist as well, writing for Newsweek, The New York Times and Real Simple magazine, among others.
   It is the day before Thanksgiving, and Ms. Korelitz appears relaxed even though expecting 20-some-odd guests for the big turkey dinner. The timer on the oven beeps periodically — she is baking pumpkin breads to freeze and later give as holiday gifts. The 250-year-old house exudes the warmth of aged wood; it is filled with crackle-painted antiques she has found at flea markets; brightly colored pottery and fresh fruit add color. On the walls, the "ancestors" peer down at us — these flea-market portraits were immortalized in a poem Mr. Muldoon wrote about one. Three dogs and two cats come and go at will.
   Ms. Korelitz published her very first article in Seventeen magazine while a student at the Fieldston School in Riverdale, N.Y., about her distant cousin, Helene Hanff. "I was an ambitious teenager who thought of myself as a writer and I just sent it in," says Ms. Korelitz, looking back.
   Ms. Korelitz describes Ms. Hanff, the author of 84 Charing Cross Road (made into a movie with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins) and Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, among others, as a "complicated, crotchety person but wonderful in her own way." Ms. Korelitz says she always "thought I had a weird middle name — it was like having an eccentric relation" and likens the discovery of Ms. Hanff to having "my Hanff come out of the closet."
   After earning a bachelor’s in English at Dartmouth, Ms. Korelitz went on to get a master’s at Clare College, Cambridge, where she met Mr. Muldoon. She published her first volume of poetry there, but says she no longer writes verse. "I only wrote (poetry) about me, and even I can’t take a full diet of me," she says. "With fiction, I am free to explore other people; none of these books are about me."
   The Sabbathday River is that rare thing, a literary novel that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Wrote author Scott Turow: "’The Sabbathday River’ is wonderful — wonderfully written, wonderfully plotted, wonderfully compelling, with its vivid characters and intense sense of place. This story of a murder investigation and the resulting trial in a small New England town is gripping and rewarding reading."
   How did she go from writing poetry to writing a page-turner that keeps you on the edge of your seat?
   In an essay for salon.com, she says, "Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose. Lovely, image-laden sentences, paragraphs and pages of verbal music — these were considered far more laudable than a good story… Back in those days, my most cherished ambition was to have one of my novels published by an established literary house with a print run of a couple of thousand and a respectable advance tipping four figures.
   "I never did publish those early novels," she recounts. "They received the usual ecstatic rejection letters and were put away where, perhaps, most first novels belong, in that box at the back of the closet."
   Rather than stop writing, she wrote her first thriller including the elements of conspiracy, revelations, twists and resolutions. "In other words, it had a plot," she says. "I discovered that I liked it… When you get right down to it, there’s something uniquely satisfying in being gripped by a great plot… and it is especially satisfying to surrender to an author who is utterly in command of a thrilling and original story."
   The Sabbathday River, about the murder of two babies in a small New Hampshire town, was based on actual news events from Ireland, when Ms. Korelitz lived there with Mr. Muldoon. Ms. Korelitz says she had to think a long time before setting pen to paper, or fingers to a keyboard, "but you can’t wait until you know everything (before you start writing). Some major plot points I thought of 10 pages before they happened. I had the impulse to bring ‘The Scarlet Letter’ to bear."
   Two of the main characters in The Sabbathday River are Jewish, and at a seder there is a heated discussion about the meaning of God. Ms. Korelitz says she is glad to see the book on various synagogue reading lists. The daughter of a gastroenterologist and a psychotherapist on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Ms. Korelitz was raised in an Ethical Culture milieu and describes her family as "Jews with Christmas trees." She says she feels more of a cultural affinity to Judaism than a religious one. Her children attend Princeton Friends School, where Quaker meetings give meaning to their lives.
   When she learned The Sabbathday River had been chosen by Book-of-the-Month, it was one of the best things to ever happen to her, she says. "It meant that 30,000 copies were instantly sold."
   It typically takes a year and a half to complete her novels, and the most difficult part is getting started. "The last six months are the most productive," she says. "You go back to the early chapters, correcting as the characters become so present to you. But you have to start in the dark or the book will be boring and predictable."
   She is nearing completion of a new novel, The White Rose, based on the Strauss opera, Der Rosenkavalier, an 18th-century Viennese love triangle she has set in 1990s New York City. "There are no lawyers except for one, no court rooms, no crime," she says.
   "The characters are now completely formed in my mind and the writing isn’t a job, it’s a pleasure. The characters are talking to each other and I just have to write it down."
   The sad part is, when her novel is complete, she will have to say good-bye to the characters who have become such good friends. After a novel, Ms. Korelitz needs long fallow periods before starting the next.
   She wrote Interference Powder during the fallow period following The Sabbathday River. "I had always wanted to write a book for children, and thought it would be nice to cultivate a literary endeavor between novels. I had just had a baby (Asher), and needed a smaller project to work on during the hours of his childcare."
   Ms. Korelitz writes in an enormous third-floor book-lined studio, illuminated by corner fanlights. Alongside her desk is what she refers to as her "gallery of disapproving readers," brightly painted portraits also from the flea markets.
   About a year ago, Ms. Korelitz, 42, took up the violin. In a moment of frustration with Dorothy, who wanted to give up the violin because she didn’t like practicing it (Dorothy now plays drums and practices regularly), Ms. Korelitz, who claims to have never before considered herself musical, started studying with Amy Zakar, a member of Princeton’s Klez Dispensers. Now it has become "a huge part of my life," she says. "I learned to read music and can play harmony with Amy."
   Margery Cuyler, a children’s book author and editor who lives in Princeton, was helpful to Ms. Korelitz in finding the right age group for Interference Powder. Ms. Cuyler went on to become editorial director of Cavendish Children’s Books and published Interference Powder. "The whole process was deliriously wonderful, a pleasure," remarks Ms. Korelitz. Ms. Cuyler taught her that children believe in magic.
   But her favorite publishing story is about the time her agent took Interference Powder to an editor at Simon & Schuster. "The editor asked if there was magic in the book," recounts Ms. Korelitz. When the agent replied yes, the editor responded, "’We don’t do magic at Simon and Schuster. We never would have published Harry Potter."
Jean Hanff Korelitz with read from and sign copies of Interference Powder, a middle-grade reader, at Learning Express in the Princeton Shopping Center, 301 N. Harrison St., Princeton, Dec. 6, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. For information, call (609) 921-9110. Interference Powder is available in art supply stores, including Triangle, Your Creative Center, in Lawrence.