The Book of Stone: A Novel - Softcover

The Book of Stone - Behind the Book
By Jonathan Papernick
 
            I've heard it said that writing a novel is like running a marathon, and that is true in the sense that the process is alternately grueling, heart-pounding, crushingly dull, terrifying, exhilarating, and ultimately really, really long. However, it's not 100 percent true. Writing a novel is more like running many, mostly thankless marathons.
My first marathon began way back in September 2000. I had recently completed my first collection of short stories The Ascent of Eli Israel, and it was out on submission with New York publishing houses.
            I had worked as a reporter in Jerusalem in the year after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, a time of violence and terror, in which the mirage of peace slipped farther and farther away from reality. I went to graduate school in New York two years later, where I ultimately wrote my first collection of stories which took place in Jerusalem during the collapse of the Oslo Peace Accords.         Living in Jerusalem is an intense experience, there amid the very whirlwind from which the three major religions arose, passions and prophecies run high. I had the opportunity to meet fascinating, stranger-than-fiction characters, some who had heard the voice of God, others who simply believed God was in their corner and not that of their sworn enemies. These characters populating my stories, drove my narratives, the fervid fires of their belief burning hot beneath every sentence I wrote. Upon completing my collection I felt I had not yet answered all my questions about faith and the call to violence and extremism and I knew I would need to explore these themes on a larger canvas: a novel.
            For years my father, a lawyer, had been applying for a judicial position in the Ontario courts. He wanted nothing more than to become a judge, fulfilling his own father's deathbed dream that his son had become a judge. However, by the summer of 2000, it was becoming clear after several years of applying and interviewing that my father was never going to become a judge - he was nearing 60, and most of his professional accomplishments were already in his rearview mirror. He was in terrible pain, buffeted by doubts and guilt and frustration, and it hurt me to see how he felt he had disappointed his father, who really did believe as his life flamed out that my father had become a judge. My grandfather died happy with that knowledge, but my father was tormented by the fact that he had in reality let my grandfather down.
            I was driving back to Brooklyn from Connecticut after completing a summer job teaching creative writing, and my thoughts were on my father and his distress. I just wanted to do something, anything, to make him feel better. And that was when I knew, amid the highway hypnosis of Route 9, that the primary character of my novel would be a young man who had disappointed his own father, a cruel, distant judge who had become entangled with religious extremism and violence both in Brooklyn and Israel. I wanted to prove to myself and my father that not becoming a judge was not the worst thing in the world. In fact, I would learn over the years, as my novel's narrative revealed itself, that my judge, Walter Stone would commit horrific and monstrous acts in the name of Israel and in the name of pride, both on a personal and professional level.
            Over the many years of writing and rewriting the novel, the Twin Towers fell, America went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded on camera by Islamic terrorists, Israel went to war against Hamas in Gaza, and anti-Semitism around the world surged. I always knew where I wanted to go with the novel, but it took a long time for me to understand how to get there, and each of these horrific events helped to color my understanding that violent extremism is perhaps the single greatest threat to civilized society. By the time I finished the final iteration of The Book of Stone in 2014, I believe I had put in Malcolm Gladwell's requisite ten thousand hours, completing draft after draft -- how many marathons did I run? It's hard to say, but I do know that I'm very proud of this novel that started with a flame of curiosity and a personal mission to soothe my father's pain and doubt, and yet managed to tell what I hope is a timely and important story of the most enduring conflict in the world.  

Jonathan Papernick is the author the story collections The Ascent of Eli Israel and There Is No Other. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals including, Nerve, Post Road, Green Mountains Review, Night Train, Blunderbuss, Folio and Confrontation. His work had been anthologized in Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, Scribblers on the Roof, The Moment, Sudden Flash Youth and Six-Word Memoirs on Jewish Life. Dara Horn calls Papernick "an utterly original writer," and the New York Times writes, "There is a muscular certainty to the best of Papernick's stories." Papernick has taught fiction writing at Pratt Institute, Brandeis University, Bar Ilan University, Emerson College, Grub Street Writers and Emerson College. A Toronto native, Papernick lives with his wife and two sons outside of Boston where he is a Senior Writer-in-Residence at a Boston-area college.