Fred Kaplan is the author of the new novel A Capital Calamity. His other books include The Bomb. He writes the "War Stories" column for Slate, and he lives in Brooklyn.
Q: What inspired you to write A Capital Calamity?
A: My last nonfiction book, The Bomb, came out in early 2020. Then the COVID pandemic broke out. A few months later, I felt like starting on a new book, but the way I write books is to do research at archival libraries (not everything is online) and to interview sources face-to-face. I couldn’t do that with the lockdown.
For many years, I’d toyed in my head with the germ of an idea for a novel, based on lots of people I’d met, events I’d witnessed, the otherworldly ambience I’d absorbed in my 40 years or so as an insider-outsider in the “national-security community.”
I’d often thought, when seeing something weird happen, “This is like something out of a satirical novel.” So, having more spare time on my hands than usual, I decided to try and write one.
Q: The historian Lawrence D. Freedman, in a review in Foreign Affairs, said of the book, “As an experienced observer of the entanglements in Washington between policymakers and think tanks, Kaplan skewers the Beltway effectively in his satirical novel, a thriller and morality tale that affords some light relief in dark times...” What do you think of that description?
A: Freedman is the smartest military strategist on the planet and a very good writer too. Foreign Affairs almost never reviews fiction. So I’m very pleased with this.
Another nice comment I got in a similar vein was from Jeffrey Lewis, a great arms-control scholar and the author of a speculative novel about a war with North Korea. He called my book “a Jane Austen meets Dr. Strangelove comedy of D.C. manners.” I’m fine with that.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I knew exactly how the novel would begin and generally how it would end. I knew nothing about what would happen in between. I knew some characters, bits of dialogue, a few scenes, but not how they would flow together.
A friend of mine, another journalist who wrote a novel, told me, “It’s easy, you just make stuff up.” But actually, it’s not easy. Someone once said that a novel isn’t “and then, and then, and then.” It’s “and so, and so, and so.”
In other words, you need a plotline, tied together by characters and dialogue that—even if they’re not quite realistic—at least seem plausible within their framework. That’s hard.
Another thing that surprised me while writing this. Sometimes I would come to the end of a chapter and think, “Hmm, what happens next? Where does this thing go?” I’d go to sleep, then I’d wake up drowsily for a few minutes around 6 a.m., and an idea would come to me, out of nowhere.
This happened five or six times—and it always worked. I’m told by friends who are novelists or playwrights that this is typical. It also happens, I’m told, in high-level mathematics. I’d never experienced it before. So I opened up a whole new creative pathway.
Q: What are some of your favorite novels set in D.C.?
A: Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking might be the best novel about a cynical Washington salesman—in his case a tobacco lobbyist, not a defense consultant like my protagonist, Serge Willoughby, but I was influenced by that book’s tone.
Ward Just’s stories about the Washington elite, especially about fights erupting over the Vietnam War at Georgetown dinner parties, are gripping.
But I was more influenced by what Graham Greene called “entertainments,” especially Our Man in Havana, which is about a clever cynic who suddenly finds himself way in over his head in a global crisis that he sparked.
And of course Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My main job for the last 22 years has been writing the “War Stories” columns for Slate. I’d like to write another novel, or any sort of book, but Trump 2.0—and I’m answering these questions just two weeks in—is keeping me way too busy.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Hmmm, many people have said the book is very funny but also serious. It’s about a cynic, but the character goes through a moral arc.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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