(October 21,2015) A free glass of wine every day for a year at Crook’s Corner Restaurant in Chapel Hill, NC: that’s the prize (along with a cash purse) for the winner of the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, to be awarded in January to a debut work set in the American South. Cathy Baker’s To Do the Deal, A Novel in Stories (Demitasse Press) was selected for the longlist alongside 17 other books, many of which were released by the major publishers.

The Shortlist announcement from Crook’s Corner is just around the corner. In hopeful anticipation, Baker sat down with Marcia Sartwell, her longtime mentor, muse, and editor, to converse about the nominated book and its sources of inspiration.

DEFINING “PLACE”

Marcia: Did you set out to write a southern novel?

Cathy: Not at all. In fact, as you surely remember, early drafts of the story weren’t set in any particular geographical location. It was only later that I was convinced of the value of setting them where I live: in Bethesda, a suburb on the boundary of the District of Columbia. Maryland counts as the south because the Mason-Dixon Line runs along the northern border.

Marcia: I think the place that is important in To Do the Deal is late-twentieth century suburban America.

Cathy: The problem with suburbs, though, is that they are alike in so many ways. The main element that differentiates the particular suburb of To Do the Deal is that it lies just outside the nation’s capital, the federal seat of power. So that provides an interesting contrast, because my novel is not about the powerful—it’s about people scrambling to make it in the middle class.

Marcia: Having established Bethesda as a place where middle Americans live alongside the wealthy and powerful, you then make other kinds of place important.

Cathy: You must be referring to interior spaces, such as an auto showroom or a mattress store.

Take that Pull/1991

Marcia: Yes. And a kitchen in which the plumbing goes awry or a living room where two women are getting sloshed. But you have exterior places, too. The first story, “Take That Pull,” has a scene at a tractor pull.

Cathy: The tractor pull occurs at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds, but is that southern? There are tractor pulls wherever they have county fairs. In another story, “One Sunday,” the Bodine family attends a crab feast. Until I moved to the DC area, I had never even heard of a crab feast, so I suppose it’s particular to this geographic place. Yet if you consider as place the food feast—people have them everywhere, though in other parts of the South it might be a pig roast or a fish fry.

Marcia: So all in all, do you think your novel is Southern enough to win the Crook’s Corner Book Prize?

Cathy: If my novel makes it to the short list, that’s what Lee Smith is going to have to decide. She’s the final judge. It’s an important question, because at her web site she says, “Place is paramount for me as a writer.” So it depends on how she defines it. But I’m sure the final judging will not be just about setting. To Do the Deal will have to stand out for plot, characterization, style—the whole package.

MAKING ETHICAL CHOICES

Cathy: If we set aside the question of place, Marcia, what do you think my stories are about?

To Do the Deal at Bed & Bunk/1994

Marcia: Considering all ten stories, I’d say moral conflict. In “To Do the Deal at Bed and Bunk,” for example, Kenneth Bodine has to decide whether to take money for something he didn’t do, or give it back to an impersonal corporation that has exploited him. Everyone has to face ethical dilemmas of this sort. Something comes along that you don’t deserve, but on the other hand there are a lot of things you deserve but don’t get. So what do you do when you get a break?

Cathy: I’d agree with your assessment. In the marketing copy you helped me write, we describe Kenneth as someone “on a hero’s journey” whose quest is “to preserve his essential decency against the need, sometimes, to cut a corner to do the deal.”

Marcia: In “A Short Career at Cathedral Arms,” he’s fired for something he didn’t do. As he’s leaving the job site, he’s confronted with the ethical choice: does he perform an act of mercy, or is it actually revenge?

Cathy: In “Sell Me,” Kenneth has to make a choice against his own interests: does he sell a freezer to somebody who doesn’t need one? But when you think of it, that’s pretty much the business of frozen food sales. It’s kind of hilarious. A new moral order emerges in the margins of the capitalist enterprise, where the rules don’t provide balance between the employer and the employed.

Marcia: There are ambiguities like that all through the book. It’s not as if Kenneth’s doing anything that would send him to jail, but how is he going to feel about himself?

Three Days/1999

Cathy: In “Three Days,” it’s Kenneth’s wife Jodi who faces—not exactly a moral dilemma, but romantic yearnings that disrupt her equilibrium.

Marcia: I love that story.

Cathy: You should. The plumber in the story is based on a tow truck driver you met.

Marcia: Jodi is drawn to this man who is so needy that he bares his soul in the intimate space of her home. For a moment she’s not just a mom; she’s a married woman in close conversation with a man who reminds her of the flat stomach her husband used to have. She likes that after ten years of marriage she is looking deep into the eyes of a stranger. And she lets herself do this because she is curious: “Where is this going?”

What Now, Kenny Boy?/ 2000

Cathy: In the last story, “What Now, Kenny Boy,” both Jodi and Kenneth face ethical dilemmas. He’s trying to persuade her that they should take out a line of credit on their home, just so he can close a deal in his new role as a mortgage salesman. And she starts indulging in remodeling fantasies. Also, Kenneth has to decide whether to throw in his lot with Vicki Redlin, a mortgage broker. She’s a stand-in for the unsavory characters who created the financial crisis that occurs a few years after this novel ends.

Marcia: Vicki Redlin is just delicious. She is so cold and clever and manipulative, and so much smarter in a sense than Kenneth. So the question is, can he work for her, without buying into her values?

Cathy: I’m glad you can see a thematic arc to this collection, because originally you were resistant to the Bodine stories. You kept asking me why I was writing again about this Kenneth fellow. But eventually you were convinced that there was something happening here.

Marcia: I guess I got to like the characters.

THE SHORT STORY FORM

Cathy: You weren’t a big fan of the short story when you started editing my drafts, were you?

Marcia: It was never my favorite genre. But you were working on short stories, and I made up my mind to be interested in this form.

Cathy: We’ve read a lot together along the way: Alice Munro, Ben Fountain, Lydia Davis, Ron Carver, Ron Carlson, George Saunders. Writers from a bygone era, such as Somerset Maugham and Edith Wharton. And New Yorker stories.

Marcia: There is one quality I respect you for and that is your individual style. It isn’t a style that is in vogue today. Your stories don’t push the edge, and there’s not much acute drama, either. The reader who’s been brought up on Mickey Spillane is going to search in vain for the sex and violence. But if you’re looking for sharp observations of character, and people who are basically decent but not perfect, and who run into the moral quandaries that occur all the time and that, by how you resolve them, reveal who you really are—with all of this conveyed in a really graceful way— then you’ll find To Do the Deal good reading.

A WRITING MODEL

Marcia: How would you describe your objective in writing?

Cathy: I’m inspired by the kind of short story I want to read myself. My model is Somerset Maugham, who in his day was the most popular writer in English, which is why I had us reading so many of his stories. It’s a little embarrassing to admire him now, because he was part and parcel of that British colonial enterprise. He wrote about Englishmen and Englishwomen in settings like Malaysia and Burma, without much noticing the humanity of the people being colonized. Nonetheless, the characters he did choose to write about, he could capture in a paragraph or less. And when his stories end, you say, “Yes! That’s a story.” Maugham believed that the first purpose of writing fiction was to entertain.

Marcia: You don’t have to finish his stories for him, and they don’t end with you feeling nauseous.

Cathy: When I reread his stories, which I do often, I always rediscover that they contain more murder, mayhem, and adultery than I had remembered. I think this is because his tone is charming and he’s so witty. He clearly gets a kick out of human frailty.

Marcia: In what way do you use his stories as a model?

Cathy: I try to create a smooth read, and to create memorable characters, and a tight plot, and satisfaction to the reader.

Marcia: You have created some memorable characters, for example, in Dexter DeWinter, Mr. Petrosian, and Samir a/k/a “Scratch.” None of these are quite believable; they are caricatures. But it is almost like you make a deal with the readers: “If I make this entertaining enough, will you let me get away with it?”

Cathy: I’ll concede to that. But Somerset Maugham wasn’t just an entertainer; he also considered himself a moralist. There is no such thing as a “mere storyteller,” he said. An essay online, “W. Somerset Maugham and the Social Question,” explains his point of view. Anyway, I hope readers realize that To Do the Deal is not just pleasure reading, but that it also provides commentary on how we organize work in contemporary American society. This whole commission sales structure! I don’t have an answer for what would be better, but commission sales is a career for suckers. I am probably insulting people when I say this, but it’s how I feel.

Marcia: I feel the same pity for people like my son, who is a professional musician. He’s rarely earned benefits, he’s never had a day of sick leave in his life, and he has no pension. I think more and more Americans are struggling like this.

Cathy: Kenneth represents a lot of people who are just trying to make it.

INSPIRATION MID-STREAM

Marcia: You’re also a fan of Hans Fallada.

Cathy: Yes! I was more than half way through writing my stories when a New York Times article introduced me to the German writer Hans Fallada and his book, Little Man — What Now? It’s the story of a commission salesman, Pinneberg, who’s trying to keep his family afloat, just like Kenneth. But Fallada’s novel was published in 1932 and is set in the Weimar Republic.

Marcia: The situation for Pinneberg and his wife Bunny is more ominous, but the premise is the same as in To Do the Deal.

Cathy: Yes. That’s why I obtained permission to use a quote from the book as the epigraph for To Do the Deal. And it’s such a beautifully written book, it was an honor to link to it.

Marcia: At the end of Fallada’s novel, Pinneberg comes home after having been beaten up on a street in Berlin. He feels like a failure, but Bunny says, we’re in this together. He has her loyalty: what you like to think will see him through.

Cathy: God knows what happens to that couple after the story ends.

Marcia: He gets drafted, I’m sure.

Cathy: He probably dies on the Russian Front and the baby perishes from malnutrition. And after the war Bunny is eating nothing but potatoes and cleaning bricks out of the street. They are decent people, beset by economic and political forces. Like so many people.

MENTOR, MUSE, EDITOR

CATHY: Let’s talk about your process of editing my stories. Thank you very much for what you did.

Marcia: I didn’t do very much.

Cathy: Oh yes you did. You would say, “This is as great as any story being published today, it should be in The New Yorker, but I don’t understand this section, and you need to fix this paragraph, and your grammar is all wrong here.”

Marcia: The velvet glove over the iron fist.

CATHY: I couldn’t have done it without you. It took us a long time.

Marcia: Yes, and your next book is taking too long, too. You should stop running.

Cathy: I won’t stop running, but you’re right. I have to stop privileging running over writing. And that will happen, because I’ve been selected to participate in A Novel Year, a year-long workshop led by author A. X. Ahmad, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. It’s going to help me finish Trios, a collection of un-linked short stories. So many of those stories are inspired by anecdotes from your life, I’m really indebted to you! Will you still stay on as my mentor, muse, and editor?

Marcia: I’d be delighted.

Order information for To Do the Deal is available here.