Fifteen Questions with Nick McDonell

Nick McDonell ’06—’07 published his first novel, “Twelve,” when he was still in high school. Now, seven years later, the novel is being adapted for the big screen. In the meantime, he reported for Time and Harper’s from Iraq and Sudan, wrote two more novels, and found time to visit the Harvard Bookstore last week to read excerpts from his recently published third novel, “An Expensive Education.” FM separates fiction from fact and finds out if the author is as bad-ass as his spy characters.

1. Fifteen Minutes: In 2005, when you were about to publish your second novel, “The Third Brother,” New York Magazine called you young, good-looking, privileged, and impeccably connected. Are those things still true?

Nick McDonell: Am I all those things? I’m basically the same person I was in 2005, I think.

2. FM: The characters in your latest novel come from all over the world, with very different backgrounds. Do you relate to any of them better than others?

NM: The ones I relate to most strongly are Ravi, who is a drunken journalist, and Michael Teak, who is the young idealistic spy before the fall.

3. FM: Why are all your protagonists named Mike?

NM: There is a possibility that they are thematically linked. I find it useful to think of the three books as a trilogy, and that name is part of what ties them together and is a sort of road sign for the way they are tied together.

4. FM: When you were writing “An Expensive Education,” which is set partly at Harvard, did you feel a responsibility to portray Harvard accurately?

NM: I think that the only responsibility the novelist has is to the novel. I think that the notion that you would portray something as it really is in fiction is not exactly right. I think that fiction is not about portraying its topics with fact-checkable verisimilitude so much as understanding the sense of a place. And in that I think the trick is to be loyal to one’s own sensibility as a writer rather than any ideas about truth, which are really up for debate.

5. FM: What do you consider in staying true to your writer’s sensibility?

NM: An important one is to not take myself too seriously, and not take the writing too serious, and to approach it with a sense of humor and a grain of salt, and remember that they are just characters in what is trying to be a campus spy novel. So that was an important part of it, not to get puffed up. And the other expectations were about good writing and making for an interesting page-turner.

6. FM: Were there aspects of Harvard you felt you had to include?

NM: I find interesting the interface between people who have real say in policy in foreign places, and an institution like this. So there are people, like Alex de Waal, for example, and like people in the Kennedy School, or on the faculty here, who make decisions that, occasionally, have real life implications. And also people who are recruited out of here into intelligence agencies, or the army, or anything like that. And I have romanticized that idea and taken it to its conclusion: “Uh oh, what if we’re all still sort of in college?”

7. FM: One of the Harvard students in the book checks into the Charles Hotel for a night when she is upset. Do you know anyone who has ever actually done that?

NM: No, I can’t say that I do.

8. FM: I’ve noticed that a lot of the story takes place in Daedalus. Did you hang out there a lot as an undergrad?

NM: No, I don’t think particularly more than any of the other barflies at the time. My place was the Cellar, by far. I spent much of my time there.

9. FM: Susan Lowell, a professor in “An Expensive Education,” has a thing for her advisee David from the start of the novel. Were you ever hot for one of your teachers?

NM: No, I was never hot for one of my teachers.

10. FM: I noticed that you mentioned Fifteen Minutes on page 92 of the novel. Did you read FM?

NM: I liked FM. I knew some editors on it. I liked it.

11. FM: Do you regret anything about your time at Harvard?

NM: I didn’t put enough into it, in retrospect. I wish that I had studied harder, studied languages, gone after more professors, tried to get to know people better. And I was happy with it basically. I think it has the institutional flaws that it shares with other elite institutions.

12. FM: What was your favorite class here?

NM: My favorite class would have to be painting, Drawing with Two Hands, taught by Thomas Eggerer, or the Politics of Complex Humanitarian Emergencies by Alex de Waal.

13. FM: What international relations issues interest you now?

NM: I’m interested in why people, particularly people who are American and want to be involved in humanitarian prevention of war, behave the way they do. I’m interested in, for example, the way the International Criminal Court was set up, and why it has been set up the way it has, and the chasm between theoretical law and real time politics that has opened up. I’m interested in things like that, the specifics of who and why and where.

14. FM: The characters in your novels are always thrown into dangerous situations. What’s the most dangerous situation you’ve been in? Perhaps from reporting in Sudan or Iraq?

NM: One of the dumbest, most dangerous things I did here was dive headfirst off the Charles bridge on Halloween one night, off the Weeks Bridge. As far as danger goes, that was not such a great one. The things that happened abroad, that happened in East Africa, I’ve been remarkably lucky. Sometimes I’ve traveled in places where there was insecurity. I’ve been careful and fortunate, so it’s been okay.

15. FM: Are you involved in any projects currently?

NM: Oh, not so much, I have been parrying questions about having crushes on professors and things like that. No, I’m joking. I’m working on all sorts of things. I try to write a lot of fiction, but I’m working with a journalist trying to understand things like the international criminal court and American intervention abroad.