Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Kevin Allardice writes about Weft from Madrona Books.
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Inevitable Conclusion: On Epigraphs and Ethnographies
In the vaguely demented process of novel-writing there are calm little rituals of time-wasting, detours indulgently taken when you can’t push a paragraph forward but still want to convince yourself you’re working. While some writers create playlists for their characters and others document imaginary diets (“Can you really know your character until you know what they had for breakfast?” a teacher once asked me), my preferred form of thumb-twiddling is arranging an epigraph for the work-in-progress. I scour books, films, songs, little thrifted bits of text, and move them around a page, collaging together a dialogue across decades and media, a dialogue that might best introduce whatever it is I’m writing.
More often than not, that introduction is between the work and myself, not the work and a reader. Indeed, the triptych of an epigraph I put together for my new novel, Weft, didn’t end up making it into the final book, but it did serve as a kind of vision board for me as I groped around for the contours of world and character. The first quote I selected for that epigraph was from David W. Maurer’s 1940 ethnographic study The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man, a book I’d loved as a teenager. Its 1999 reprint coincided with my burgeoning love for novels like Jim Thompson’s The Grifters and Joe David Brown’s Addie Pray; both were turned into equally wonderful films, the latter as Paper Moon, which I would rewatch along with The Sting and House of Games.
David W. Maurer, a professor of linguistics, came to study con artists by way of their argot, and fittingly he wrote this seminal study of them in a style that seems oddly aware of the overlap between dry academese and cynical hard-boiled prose. He introduces The Big Con by noting that although “the confidence man is sometimes classed with professional thieves, pickpockets, and gamblers, he is really not a thief at all because he does no actual stealing. The trusting victim literally thrusts a fat bank roll into his hands. It is a point of pride with him that he does not have to steal.” Despite the occasional feint of diction—“a fat bank roll”—the dispassion of scholarship passes as the disaffection of the pulps.
Rendering that seeming discord as a harmony is perhaps what helped The Big Con become the kind of crossover sensation that every TED-talker has dreamed of. Before finally receiving credit as the inspiration for the film The Sting (credit Mauerer had to sue for), The Big Con lurked uncited behind countless crime novels. As a compendium of true stories about con artists, it naturally lent itself to the work of Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, but, for me, the book’s real value—in building not the particulars of a plot but the proclivities of a character—lay in its form as an ethnography.
As part of my epigraph, I wound up selecting, from Maurer’s book, the following: “All confidence games, big and little, have certain similar underlying principles; all of them progress through certain fundamental stages to an inevitable conclusion ….” To this, I arranged responses from a Lorrie Moore story and a Shirley Jackson novel, creating a conversation that sounded the dimensions of the story that was started to emerge: about a woman in the late 1990s, who, after alienating herself from her husband and daughter, embarks on series of scams with her teenage son; this cross-country trip lands them, one Halloween weekend, in a haunted house, deep in a gated community, trapped with a former mark. The sense of control that is so seductive in stories about con artists capsizes into the horror of losing all control, and this became crystalized for me when, after organizing countless quotes on a page, coaxing out conversations between diverse authors, a particular resonance emerged between Lorrie Moore, Shirley Jackson, and David W. Maurer.
That particular passage from Maurer struck me for its insistence on what is foundational, the bedrock of a practice, and, implied in that, a need to know that adherence to a system can provide structure when all else falters. Here, a worldview was emerging, not of a long-dead criminal interviewed by a linguist, but of a character whose needs and self-deceptions could find purchase in any historical moment. And yet, there is something chilling in the ways those reassuring systems lead to “an inevitable conclusion,” the comfort of a structure turning into a constraint. While con artist stories appealed to me as a teenager because they presented on the page people who were everything I wasn’t—supremely capable and able to anticipate and account for all contingencies—here, in pursuing that inevitable conclusion, I realized my own con artist story would lead elsewhere, away from control, into the trap people can only set for themselves, the telos of all narrative.
The descriptive, and implicitly prescriptive, genre of the ethnography offers unappreciated gifts to fiction-writers. In systems of behavior, particulars arranged into taxonomies, we can find not the limits of a character’s actions and ambitions, but rather something more dynamic, something dialectical with an emergent character. Texts like these can be dry; not all have the tweed snarl of Mauerer. But, just as the butler Stevens, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, structures his own life in relation to the dictates of butlering laid out by the (fictional) Hayes Society, these texts reveal structures we all grasp for, push away, then stumble over. In maps of behavior, seemingly omniscient in their aggregation, we see, there in the negative space, maps of mistakes, unique in their possibilities—i.e., stories.
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Kevin Allardice is the author of four novels, including Any Resemblance to Actual Persons, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. His most recent book is The Ghosts of Bohemian Grove. In 2022, Allardice was a Jack Hazard Fellow with the New Literary Project.