Some people call writing fun. And that I should be so proud I’ve written a novel!

Well.

Over the years, I’ve sweated out of myself four novels and this is the only one my wife really really liked. She loved it in fact. She’s read it 10 times (mostly to help proof evolving versions) and she claims she still loves it every time. I tell you that because more than anything else I can say or do, it might convince you that maybe you’d like it too and you’d buy it. I never question my wife’s judgment. I know she must be right. When she says it’s a really really good book, I believe her.

How did I have the “conceit,” as a friend once put it, of thinking I could write a novel in which Thomas Jefferson appears as a major character, if not THE major character. I wish I could give you a simple answer. What I CAN tell you is how immensely relieved, and happy I was to have an idea for a novel that I thought was going to work as a story that might grab people; and to be off and running --doing my research and my rough drafts and false starts and my notes and voice memos to myself on my iphone as the idea for the story fully hatched itself. Those were hopeful times.

It was a gamble and I did have to comfort myself now and then with a reminder: how successful Richard Adams’s very weird book “Watership Down” had been in the mid 1970s; how it was precisely the kind of book I’d never read; and how I took a peek at it, and how it hooked me, and I couldn’t help myself, and I spent a rainy weekend on the couch devouring it. A book about a rabbit civilization under our feet? Good God! I loved it, to my own continuing astonishment.

Any story works, no matter how absurd its essential concept, if the characters are true and appealing and believable and you can make readers care about them; if the narrative voice is strong and commanding --- in charge, a force to which the reader is happy to surrender; if the dialogue is lively and right and never hits a sour note; and if there’s a grabber of a plot and tight, brisk pacing — and if the writing never gets in the way.

A book about talking rabbits a bestseller? So what’s to worry about bringing Thomas Jefferson back to life?

I had no bolt-of-lightning moment but I can give you some clues to the origins of this book.

My first visit to Monticello came when I was in college, on my first long solo road trip from the Northeast to what for me was the exotic Southland, to which I’d barely ever been, to see a buddy at UVA. It was raw and cold up here and a little lonely I think but way down there the dogwoods and azaleas were out and so were the girls all over the frat house field and the sky was blue and the night warm and on my way down I wore a new pair of Ray Bans.

An old black man waved at me from the grassy strip in the middle as I whizzed by on Route 29 in my Chevy Vega with my dog Archie in the hatchback. I waved back a little frantically maybe. Guys waving on the side of Route 46 in New Jersey? No way! THIS was another country.

The second day of my visit my friend and I stood in the sun, in line, on the East Lawn of Monticello waiting to go in, back in the days when slaves and slavery and God forbid Sally Hemings were never ever mentioned there, and a big tall older gent next to us was obviously listening to our conversation about the ideological and personal battles between Jefferson and Hamilton, stuff we’d each been learning about in our own separate history courses. This big tall professorial type (who was in fact a professor At UNC, we’d learn) complimented us on our enlightened conversation and asked us where we came from: both New Jersey by birth, both Bridgehampton by summers, our own separate New England prep schools and our own separate colleges, his below the Mason Dixon line and mine in Mr. Hamilton’s mean old New York.

We asked where he was from: North Carolina, he said. Do you know what they call North Carolina, he asked? No, we said.

“A valley of humility between two mountains of conceit.”

I was enchanted. I went on to read a fair amount about Virginia and South Carolina, and North Carolina too. I’ve always loved going back to Charlottesville and Monticello with my wife, like the narrator of my book, Jack Arrowsmith. The spirit of Jefferson is utterly visceral at Monticello, as Jack says in so many words in his story. By the way: Jack is not me. He’s taller, thinner, a bit younger, has more hair, and he holds his tongue when disturbed. I admire him. I wish I could sit and have a talk with the guy.

I think it was the first time that I went to Monticello with my wife – perhaps only a decade after that first visit with my friend – that I saw Jefferson’s shirt. A creamy off-white, it was in a display case, nicely folded to show off his embroidered initials on the left breast. How modern! How like today! A famous man, a president, a founding father, with his initial on his shirt! You know, Sally Hemings was a seamstress at Monticello.

To think of the eyes that saw that shirt. It drove home for me a powerful realization about Jefferson ‑- and all the historical figures I find fascinating: they were real people, not so different from us.
Their brilliance and their importance to our history did not extinguish their humanity. They were living, breathing people, like us – although it’s usually very very hard to get a sense of that from history.

A major exception for me was Annette Gordon-Reeds wonderful bestseller “The Hemingses of Monticello.” Her lawyerly style of analysis and argument, and her interest in Jefferson’s quirks and foibles and transgressions as man, a master and a parent, really bring him to life -- So much so I think I may have read a few things into one particular episode in her book, involving Sally Hemings and her brother James, that Ms. Gordon Reed herself did not see the way I did. She told me so herself at a bookstore appearance. She thought my interpretation went overboard.

Well, I’m not convinced. She is the historian. I am the novelist, in this case; and if I can pull it off, I am allowed to imagine the truth. I made it something that my character Rachel Carter gets into quite the snit about with Mr. Jefferson, as does her grumpy father, a black man with a coffee shop in Yonkers at which he serves French food.

I could tell you all the interesting things I learned about Jefferson in my casual readings over the years -- and in the half year or so of intense reading I did before writing TJRM. Cool, calm, in command, that was him. He wrote of “perfect sangfroid” as his goal in meeting all adversaries and all adversity …… But he was also touchy, delicate, snobby, prone to migraines and diarrhea and easily deluded … and now and then perhaps a little mean. And yet I find the man immensely appealing, for all the difference between his dreams and reality, for all the conflict and contradictions we may find in him and the lessons we may learn from him not only about the great ironies of the American experience but about ourselves and our delusions, the angels of our better natures and the devils of our daily sins.

My novel that my wife loves so much, thank goodness, is not really a book about Thomas Jefferson -- just as “The Great Gatsby” (if you will forgive the presumption of any comparison) is not really a book about Jay Gatsby.

But what a wonderful man to spend some time with. I envy my narrator, Jack Arrowsmith. I’d love to have the chance to show Mr. Jefferson around.