Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they would like. This week, Agri Ismaïl writes about Hyper from Coffee House Press.
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It feels like satire has become impossible. Robert Coover’s A Political Fable, in which the Cat in the Hat runs for president of the United States with the slogan I CAN LEAD IT ALL BY MYSELF, seems hopelessly naive, in that the electorate in that story finally comes to its senses and disaster is averted. American Psycho? What is one rotten apple’s murder spree compared with HSBC’s multi-year money laundering for drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia (after which nobody went to jail, of course)? We’re living in a world where a Customs and Border Patrol agent can testify, in court, that a thrown sandwich “exploded all over him”. We have ICE agents slipping on ice. We have a president threatening war because he did not receive a peace prize. Reality has rendered satire toothless.
My idea, then, was to write a work with a satirical tone but where every detail was grounded in reality (there are three lies in the book, of which two are uttered by characters and not the narrator, we’ll get back to the third), hoping that this would help loosen the springs of the genre. I wanted a reader to read 400 pages of out-there descriptions of capitalism run amok and be faced, at the end, with 20 pages of endnotes, demonstrating that all this is, in all ways that matter, true. Since the theme of Hyper is money and the ever-more abstract financial systems that rule us, I needed to brush up on my financial knowledge. I had worked as a corporate lawyer so I had some lived experience I could pull from, but it wasn’t enough. Fortunately, I received a grant in Sweden (thank you Västra Götalands Essäfond!) which allowed me to spend two months reading books on economic history, academic articles describing dark pools and former traders’ analysis of high-frequency trading. A chunk of the grant money went towards books, an institutional login gave me access to JSTOR, and then there were scanned pdfs and open-source material that kept being added to a folder on my desktop. I was close to being able to write this, I thought.
But the problem with research, for me, is that I will often feel that I have reached a point where I can reiterate what I’ve read yet find, while trying to write, that I do not really understand it. So more research is required, now to figure out the bits that I know I do not know, the “known unknowns” to quote Donald Rumsfeld. So I reached out to people on financial forums, spoke to other corporate lawyers who were far more knowledgeable than I was, traders I had once worked with and were happy to tell me, in exchange for a beer or two, what the trendy new financial products were and how they worked.
By this time, six years in, I was finally getting somewhere. Until I wasn’t. See, the task for a novelist, as I see it, is to synthesize a great many ideas and present a coherent view of the world. And a lot of what I had before me was too complicated for a reader — even one interested in finance — to take in. I had three options: either present the technologies and financial products as is without explanation, give long-winded explanations of everything that is being discussed, or simplify things so that they are understandable to an average reader. Most of the time I chose the first option, betting that the context would make things clear enough, but sometimes I had to cheat and simplify, especially if a reader’s understanding of a particular form of finance was vital to the plot.
There’s this old tweet by the literary agent Emily Forney that reads “There are 2 types of fiction writers I rep: 1. Who gives a shit, it’s fiction 2. I will request the 1768 almanac from a library in Massachusetts to see the weather patterns for a small town in North Dakota to see if it makes sense for my characters to stand in the rain and talk.” Unfortunately, I very much fall into the second category. So I walked down Wall Street trying to find an apartment for my fictional character to live in. I looked up restaurant menus and historical bus timetables. I tried (and failed) to visit the London Stock Exchange, being told by the man at the gate that there was nothing to see there anyway, it was just a bunch of servers and machines, which was the very thing I was interested in. I had to rely on the flowery descriptions on the London Stock Exchange website and the professionally taken photographs. Not every attempt at real-life research was a failure, however: I learned to tie over a dozen tie knots to figure out how one of my characters would tie his tie if he was in a hurry to work, versus him having an important meeting. I transferred money via hawala (an informal transfer system common in the Middle East that is based largely on the honor system) to see how those transactions worked.
And then there was that one lie: I had a character’s mother stay at the Connaught in London because I wanted her to dine in the hotel restaurant, with its giant installations of dead butterflies courtesy of Damien Hirst, but when I looked into the layout of the hotel I realized that the only tv in the smaller rooms was located in the bathroom, which made it difficult for the mother to see something on the television while her son was in the room. I could have my character change hotels (which would make the dinner scene in the hotel’s restaurant difficult to accomplish), upgrade her to a suite (which would be seen as excessive since the son’s paying for her stay on his credit card), or lie about there being a tv that was visible from the room’s couch. I lied. I’m sorry.
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Agri Ismaïl is a Kurdish author based in Sweden who has worked as a corporate lawyer in London, Dubai, and Iraqi Kurdistan. His debut novel Hyper won the Katapult prize in Sweden.