Traveling a Long & Winding Road to The Ha-Ha

Dave King's teenaged writing endeavors included a novel penciled on a steno pad and a screenplay he thought would be a good vehicle for David Bowie (who never did respond to King's pitch). The author's writing tools have grown more sophisticated in the intervening decades, but his penchant for risk-taking has remained, as evidenced by his first novel The Ha-Ha, out this month from Little, Brown and a January Book Sense Pick.

The Ha-Ha introduces us to Howard Kapostash, a Vietnam veteran who cannot speak nor read as the result of a head injury, yet King skillfully and believably imbues Howard with the means to communicate with his house-mates (a motley group of tenants who are closely bonded by the book's end) and the outside world, despite sometimes frustrating and formidable obstacles. Howard willingly takes into his life and home the nine-year-old child of his erstwhile high school sweetheart, and develops a touching and strong connection with the boy despite his painful longing for the boy's mother -- and for life prior to his injury.

Howard's story is set against backdrops rich with detail and primed for the quiet yet intense dramas that occur throughout the book, whether at a thickly grassy convent lawn, the busily trafficked kitchen in his house, or the infield at a tension-filled youth baseball game. King, speaking by phone from his renovation-work-in-progress, upstate New York farmhouse (he also has a home in Brooklyn), said he is "captivated by the fundamental processes of writing: dealing with time, capturing a scene, describing places and things."

And, he added, "I was hooked by the writing process as I'd never been when I was a painter," referring to his work during the 1970s and '80s as an artist in Manhattan's East Village and, later, as a partner in a high-end decorative painting firm, whose clients included the White House and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Of his latter years as a business-owner, King said, "I realized I missed the creative realm, I needed something cerebral." And so, he began to write a memoir -- one that he may return to at a later date -- and "I didn't have the skill to conceive of a book when I did it, but I was so engaged. I decided to make a choice: I got out of the painting company, went to graduate school, and began The Ha-Ha. It was a long road, but essentially a good one."

Another unplanned yet life-altering detour came in the form of his first teaching job, which King applied for as part of the work-study program tied to his fellowship at Columbia University (from which he received an MFA in 2000). "I was amazed at how much I enjoyed it; it was a great year for me." That positive experience led to his current jobs in teaching writing to freshmen at Baruch College and upperclassmen at the School of Visual Arts, both in New York City.

"I suppose the book suggests I love young people," he said. "I find it exciting to work with them." In The Ha-Ha, King has certainly created in Ryan, Howard's charge, a child who has been handed a challenging set of circumstances, but is still able to trust and find love in an unstable world.

The finely drawn relationships and tightly woven plot are attributes many readers wouldn't necessarily expect from a first novel -- a phenomenon perhaps somewhat attributable to King's appreciation of E.M. Forster. "Forster is all over this book," he said. "He's an important figure to me. That message of sincerity and belief in what you're doing is really important to me." And, said King, something he read about Forster in P.N. Furbank's 1978 biography, E.M. Forster: A Life, helped to guide him as he wrote The Ha-Ha: "I remember [Forster] saying to the biographer that he doesn't come up with the entire plot at once; he creates characters in a situation and works through it. I kept that uppermost in my mind when I was writing this book -- the fact I could trust myself to come up with the plot as I went along."

King added that a "fundamental interest in disability" had been on his mind prior to the book's inception, as well. "I'd written about the topic before, and circled around it for years, probably because of my brother Hank. Having an autistic brother, someone differently abled, in your family gives you a special sensitivity," he said, noting, "the questions of normal vs. not normal, acceptable vs. unacceptable, were particularly interesting to me at this time when our culture is increasingly concerned with standards, with finding a single one to suit everyone."

It is Howard's inability -- and sometime refusal -- to be like everyone else that makes him such a compelling character.

King is aware, he said, of the responsibility inherent in writing a book rife with vividly drawn characters. "I wrote seven drafts of the book, with a lot of different endings -- one was really quite bad -- and it took me a while to get to the ending I wanted. One that I would describe as having modified hopefulness.

A series of pre-publication readings has allowed King to learn what the general public might think of his writerly decisions: "It's a pleasant surprise of having a readership ... strangers' responses bring to light things I hadn't anticipated. It's given me faith in the fact people do bring imagination to the reading process. Reading can be seen as passive, but it's not -- it's very, very active."

King's a peripatetic sort. In between riding his bicycle ("I need to be active") and gathering up his four cats, he's been working on his next book. The author won't reveal details, save to say, "It's different from The Ha-Ha in terms of character, setting, and time-frame, but still explores themes important to me: friendships, sincerity, truth, and the ethical choices we make."

Until then, readers may meet King at an upcoming series of independent bookstore visits. His author tour will touch down in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Boston; San Francisco; Cleveland; and New York City -- including two of King's neighborhood bookstores, The Corner Bookstore and Book Court. He'll also speak with Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday on January 15. --Linda Castellitto