The Suitcase Clone

In my pre­vious newsletter, I told you about the sale of my new full-length novel. There’s a while to wait for that one still, but fear not: the summer brings surprises.

I’m delighted to announce The Suit­case Clone, a new novella of the Penumbra­verse, coming in August from MCD!

For years, we’ve had my novella Ajax Penumbra 1969 to help us under­stand the foun­da­tions of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Now, The Suit­case Clone will do the same for Sour­dough, rein­tro­ducing a char­acter from the novel, set­ting up a glo­be­trot­ting caper circa the 1980s, clar­i­fying the con­nec­tion to Penumbra.

Along the way, the novella will tell us more about a cer­tain charis­matic goop.

Just like Ajax Penumbra 1969, this will be an e-book and audio­book original. You can find links to all the dif­ferent e-book e-stores e-here, on the MCD e-site.

The “e-“ standing, in all those cases, for “eel”.

Behold, the cover, revealed here first:

GWAHHH it’s so great! That’s the work of Alex Merto at FSG; per­fectly unhinged.

Stick with me while I pre­view a bit more excite­ment coming later this year, then recount a story related to the novella.

Ten years later

It’s been ten years since the pub­li­ca­tion of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but/and it feels, to me, like much longer. Honestly, that book changed my sense of time forever, because it lev­ered me up out of office life; granted me a kind of breathing room I’d barely dared to hope for; showed me that cre­ative work can find its people slowly but steadily, across times­pans mea­sured not in weeks, but years.

Decades, soon.

This year, in com­mem­o­ra­tion of the novel’s tenth anniversary, and also because they know how to have fun, MCD will reissue Penumbra! A nice new edi­tion will appear on October 4, this one with the novella Ajax Penumbra 1969 included — the whole story together at last.

It wouldn’t be fair to leave Sour­dough out of the action, so its new edi­tion will arrive on Sep­tember 6, this one with the new novella included.

I’ve men­tioned before that I love the term “per­fect edi­tion”, cribbed from manga — its sense of final completion, nice presentation, a stiff spine. These new books rep­re­sent the per­fect edi­tions of the Penum­bra­verse, and I will be so happy and proud to wel­come them into the world.

Graft and propagate

Now for the story behind this novella.

My novel Sour­dough was born the moment I heard the phrase “suit­case clone”.

The set­ting was a winery up in Men­do­cino County, a couple hours north of San Francisco. Our host poured two tastes of some wine, I can’t remember what kind, except that it was inky dark. Then, she told us, “You know … this one’s a suit­case clone.”

My little notebook, car­ried everywhere, was sud­denly in my hand. “What was that phrase, again?”

You have to admit: it has a deli­cious sound. The familiar, even domestic, clicks against the scientific, the strange. Suit­case … clone?

“What was that phrase, again? And what does it mean?”

Here’s what I learned.

In the early days of Cal­i­fornia wine, before it had found its footing on the global scene, a wine­maker might have desired a cer­tain extra … oomph. This wine­maker might have recruited a friend, sent him abroad; to France, Bordeaux, the Gironde. A vacation! All expenses paid.

If, on his vacation, this friend found him­self walking the border of a grand old vine­yard, he might have remem­bered that he brought, all the way from Cal­i­fornia, a pair of garden snips; might have used them, casu­ally lib­er­ating a few whippy lengths of vine. Nothing to see here! If that happened, what could he do but hustle back to the inn and wrap the cut­tings in wet towels? And stuff them, swaddled, into the bottom of his bag? And make haste to Paris, the airport?

And if a cus­toms officer asked, “Sir, are you bringing any bio­log­ical mate­rial into the United States?”, what could this friend say but: no, of course not. He’s forgetful. Besides, it was just a vacation.

If all that happened, then, back in Cal­i­fornia, the friend’s pre­cious cargo would have been grafted and propagated, grafted and propagated, until, years later, a vine­yard sprawled: cloned copy of the one in France, Bordeaux, the Gironde. Per­fect twin? Of course not. Dif­ferent earth, dif­ferent sky. But, even so … doesn’t a ghost remain? Either way, the wine­maker can always say, over a pour in the tasting room:

“You know … this one’s a suit­case clone.”

So, yeah, that’s wonderful, obviously. The col­li­sion of agri­cul­ture and espionage; cultivation, warm and round, meets tradecraft, cold and sharp! Learning this phrase lit a fuse in my brain. There was a novel curled up in there; I knew it. Because, of course, the suit­case clone could be very strange indeed … 

What did I say, though, in my pre­vious newsletter? The idea “drops out of the smooth hyper­space of abstraction, appa­rates right into the asteroid field of real work.”

It was 2014, 2015. I sat and schemed, tried to build a story around a mys­te­rious vine — wrote a few spooky chap­ters that I liked okay — but fundamentally, I could not handle the clock.

Wine is made once a year. Grapes mature once a year. The pulse of the story, as dic­tated by its cen­tral “char­acter”, had to be annual; it had to be slow, agricultural, generational. Today, in 2022, I am better-equipped to write this kind of story; back in 2014, 2015, working in the shadow of Penumbra’s urgent present tense, I could not grasp it.

I needed a sub­stance that could channel the spirit of the suit­case clone, but/and also sup­port a faster tempo. I found it in the starter that sat burping in the corner of my kitchen. You can bake a fresh loaf of bread every damn day! And deliver new infor­ma­tion with each one! There’s your clock.

Besides, any/every baker of sour­dough bread has heard about starters of long and leg­endary lineage; starters stolen and smuggled, lost and found.

Sour­dough, the novel, was born. It turned out great.

And yet, and yet … “suit­case clone”. I couldn’t give it up.

With this novella, we return to the hidden origin. We swim upstream to the source, which looks like this:

Much of The Suit­case Clone is set in Italy’s Valle d’Aosta, way up in the corner, one of those regions, like Alto Adige, where nation-states fuzz and fade. I only vis­ited Italy because of Kathryn, her year at the University of Gas­tro­nomic Sciences, a.k.a. the Hog­warts of food. Sour­dough is ded­i­cated to her, and though The Suit­case Clone doesn’t have a proper dedication, it owes a debt to long walks through small towns in Piedmont — in December! Italy in winter, what a vibe.

Both of these paint­ings by J. M. W. Turner depict the Valle d’Aosta, and I think it’s inter­esting to com­pare his ear­lier work, just above, to the one at the top of the newsletter. Scroll up, look again. This one is a castle over­looking a valley, neat — there’s a castle in The Suit­case Clone, too — but the one at the top cap­tures the pure SENSE of sky above rocks. It com­mu­ni­cates some­thing animal, even alien.

Keep that painting in mind when you read The Suit­case Clone. The feeling is right.

Ten years, and we are just beginning! The Penum­bra­verse expands!

From Oakland,

Robin

June 2022