Bookmarks: Reed College graduate Roger Hobbs publishes first novel at 24
Updated: Jan. 10, 2019, 8:58 a.m. | Published: Feb. 09, 2013, 2:00 p.m.
By Jeff Baker | The Oregonian/OregonLive
The first day of February felt like the first day of spring at Reed College. Frisbees sailed across the lawn as students drank coffee and soaked up the sun outside the Paradox Cafe. The activities fair had information for anyone interested in signing up for women's soccer or the creative review or the fetish club.
In the middle of it all, a stocky young man wearing a three-piece suit and sunglasses surveyed the scene. He was absolutely calm, with the been-there, done-that attitude of a recent graduate, which he is, and the verbal skill and confidence of a newly published author, which he also is.
Roger Hobbs knows his way around the Reed College Commons and is a proud veteran of Renn Fayre, the notorious bacchanal that marks the end of the academic year. But the library was his real home during his four years at Reed, and he has no trouble finding the basement carrel where he worked on a novel that he submitted to his agent the day he graduated in 2011.
That book, "Ghostman," became the sensation of the Frankfurt Book Fair a few months later. Gary Fisketjon, an editor-at-large at Knopf, bought it after reading the first 75 pages. Foreign rights have been sold in 16 languages; Warner Bros. is making the movie. When Hobbs heard the book sold in Italy for six figures, he was staying at a friend's apartment in Portland and sleeping on the love seat.
Roger Hobbs in a three-piece suit, on the Reed College campus.
"Not on a couch, on a love seat, which is probably the most uncomfortable thing to sleep on," Hobbs says. "That was a shock. That was a phone call. I went from having zero money -- I had about $1,000 to my name when I moved back here, I was eating Top Ramen and protein shakes -- to having quite a bit of money."
Hobbs was 22 at the time. He's just turned 24, and by outward appearances hasn't changed. He lives in an apartment a few blocks from the Reed campus and writes at least four hours every day, the way he has for the past 10 years. He's wearing a snappy Calvin Klein suit with a black-and-purple striped tie and a white handkerchief in the breast pocket, but he's been wearing suits every day since he was in high school because he's comfortable in them and because he wants the world to take him seriously, among other reasons. Now it does.
Precociousness, defined
Hobbs is fond of the expression that starts "look up (blank) in the dictionary, and ...." When discussing his experiences in Hollywood, he says, "If you look up 'free money' in the dictionary, it'll have 'movie options.'"
Well, if you look up "precocious" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Hobbs as a kid.
Hobbs grew up in Massachusetts and the Philadelphia area, plus some time in Italy for middle school. He wrote his first novel when he was 12. It was science fiction; ask the title and there's a long pause.
"See, that was my issue, my problematic relationship with sci-fi," he says. "I got into sci-fi writing at the time for the worst possible reason. I had an incredibly low opinion of sci-fi. I thought that the sci-fi books I read, I can do better than this. At 12."
He grew up in the Harry Potter era but didn't read any of the series. He didn't read many children's books at all.
"I found them condescending," he says.
It wasn't until he was 16 that Hobbs found a book that engaged him completely. It was
"The Monkey's Raincoat,"
the first in a series of crime novels by
Robert Crais
that feature wisecracking detective Elvis Cole and his partner, taciturn Joe Pike.
"The voice!" Hobbs says, smiling at the memory. "It was my first encounter with that first-person noir voice. I didn't think people were making books like that anymore, that it was a dead form, the first-person hardboiled narrator. When I realized the Elvis Cole series was ongoing and has been ongoing for more years than I've been alive, I thought there's really a market for this first-person voice, and it's so delicious, so propulsive. And Robert Crais is very funny, and I really liked that."
Hobbs immediately started writing a comic detective novel, "very much a Robert Crais ripoff." He remembers the title of this one: "'The Otaku.' It means nerd or fanboy in Japanese. It was about a detective chasing down a stolen multimillion-dollar comic book."
"The Otaku" failed, Hobbs says, because the tone was uneven, a common problem for writers of any age. He was hooked on crime fiction and on first-person and began devouring novels by James Patterson and Lee Child. He would break down a book by Patterson onto index cards, "reverse engineering" it to see how the plot worked. The short sentences and cliffhanger chapter endings that are staples of Patterson's fiction would show up a few years later in "Ghostman," a thriller that can be described as being written in Patterson's style with a hero similar to Child's Jack Reacher.
Suiting up
High school wasn't all about writing crime novels for Hobbs.
"I was at the bottom of the barrel: a plump, silent, painfully awkward dweeb who clung to his Latin textbook as if it held the secrets to existence," he wrote in
"Instant Message, Instant Girlfriend,"
an essay that was a runner-up in the Modern Love college essay contest and appeared in The New York Times after his freshman year at Reed. (See: "precocious" in your dictionary.)
One way Hobbs coped was through online flirting with girls he often never met, as detailed in his essay. Another was by wearing suits.
"I've worn them since high school," he says. "They fit my body shape. ... It's also sort of an act of rebellion. We were all sort of expected to wear jeans and hoodies and dress like slobs. In a way, that gave teachers and administrators an excuse to not take what we said seriously. I went to a high school that essentially treated all of its students as criminals until proven otherwise and I hated being treated that way so I wore suits as a reminder to people who saw me that I was not to be dismissed."
Roger Hobbs in the Reed College library, at the study carrel where he wrote and revised his novel "Ghostman."
There were no such issues at Reed. Hobbs kept wearing suits and says a couple of other students in his class did the same thing.
"What's great about Reed is that it's a come-as-you-are place," he says. "It's a place that's much less likely to judge you by your appearance."
When Fisketjon met Hobbs at Dan & Louis Oyster Bar, the editor thought the young man wearing a suit was the ma‹tre d' and brushed past him, saying he was looking for someone. Hobbs said, "I'm who you're looking for."
You say synthetic, I say organic
The English department at Reed is not full of James Patterson fans. If pop culture is being studied, it's more likely to be "Game of Thrones" or "The Big Lebowski." Luckily for Hobbs, the come-as-you-are dress code extended to his studies. He discovered film noir, and from there such fiction masters as James M. Cain, and indulged his appetite for literary theory and narratology. He can expound in an enlightening way about one of his "pet concepts," synthetic fiction vs. organic fiction. A synthetic thriller is one that is thrilling at the expense of everything else, characters, plot, atmosphere, all of it. (Think Patterson, or "Ghostman.") An organic thriller is rich in tone and character but maybe not so thrilling. (Think James Lee Burke or Stuart Neville, a favorite of Hobbs'.)
"I often have writing students who are interested in genres -- usually science-fiction or fantasy, sometimes young adult or even romance, but Hobbs was the first and only one so keen on noir/thriller,"
Peter Rock,
who taught Hobbs at Reed, says in an email. "... If there's one thing that undergraduate writing students fear, it's plot. They sense it as too artificial, too manipulative, not sufficiently organic or subtle or artistic. As a result, they can forget that a reader does not want to be impressed with their brilliant prose and blinding intellect, but to be wondering what will happen next. Hobbs was never afraid of plot, and the propulsiveness of his novel shows that ... He's an original. And in an environment (Reed) that seems to offer up graduate school as the answer and destination all too often, Hobbs had the grit and necessary delusion to find this success."
Hobbs has another pet concept about writing:
"I like to think of writers as kind of like drug dealers. What we're selling is a state of altered consciousness, and a lot of literature can sometimes lose sight of that goal, that you're selling an altered state. Some of it's really sublime. Some of it's really beautiful, but I always preferred thrillers. They're like the methamphetamine of the written word-drug."
The origin story of "Ghostman"
By his own admission, Hobbs is a fanboy, whether of Jack Reacher or Dutch narratologist Mieke Bal. Every fanboy (and every narratologist) knows that epics have origin stories.
"OK, it started with a short story called 'What's Inside?'" Hobbs says. "I'll tell you the origin of that. It was the summer of the Great Recession, between my sophomore and junior years. There was no summer work to be had. None at all. I mean, it was not there. That was a time where you'd get 400 applications for a job at McDonald's, and I wasn't going to get one. That summer I decided to just write as many pieces as I possibly could. I was coming home late from a movie one night when I came across an armored-car depot. I started thinking, 'Man, I wonder what it would be like to rob one of these things?' I started looking it over and examining it.
"I eventually wrote a short story called 'What's Inside?' about an armored car robbery. Nat Sobel (a literary agent) saw my piece and really liked it ... He asked me if I had any novels, and I sent him two of the novels that I had. He said, 'These are pretty good, but you should write another one for me over the summer and send it to me when you're done.' I thought, 'I've had some pretty good success with that heist story and he likes that so I'll write another really dark crime novel,' and I wrote 'Ghostman.' I turned it in on the day I graduated college."
Age: It's only a number
Hobbs thinks his age is not that big a deal and notes that S.E. Hinton and Christopher Paolini published popular novels when they were teenagers.
"I'm just kind of at the bottom scale of when it's socially acceptable to have your first novel published, as opposed to being a child," he says.
Fisketjon accompanied Hobbs on a series of dinners with booksellers and has a different view.
"When I was 23, nobody wanted to say I was good at anything," Fisketjon says. "It must be surreal to have people come up to you and proclaim their love for what you did when you were 22. ... It's a weird situation. Adults, many of them grotesquely old, are coming up and saying, 'I really love your book.' What do you say to that?"
Jeff Baker,
Hobbs reads from "Ghostman" at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 20 at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.