From critiquing to creating – literature professor Steven Belletto shares his transition to authorhood

Steven Belletto has a distinguished career as a professor of literature and the author of several critical works, and all the while he’s been brewing fiction of his own. His first novel is called For You I Would Make An Exception, and keeps the reader on their toes with a deft braiding of genre expectations.

I’ll let him explain.

It’s about a literature professor (no relation to me!) who one day gets an email from a 13-year-old girl in Kenya who claims to be his daughter. The first couple of chapters appear to be an academic satire in the Richard Russo Straight Man vein (it’s even set in Pennsylvania like that book). But in fact the first chapters are like a satire of those satires, which we know because the main character, Will, keeps insisting he’s not a character in a book. So it starts out seeming to be an academic satire with a cantankerous, put-upon narrator, then turns into something entirely different. I really appreciated the blurb by Brock Clarke because he calls the book ‘a Swiss Army knife of a novel’ in recognition of the way it breaks out and uses different genres as needed. In terms of plot, this girl asks Will with some urgency that he go out to Kenya to deal with a situation, and this becomes an existential crisis for him, even though he’s in his late 30s and should probably be more put together than he is. He does reluctantly go to Kenya with his girlfriend, but nothing, again, is really what it seems.

Why that title?

It comes from a Leonard Cohen lyric. The title reverses the formulation and transfers it from the context of romantic love (or probably lust) to another kind of love, and refers to the person or persons Will might begin to make exceptions for in his life.

Was this novel quite a gear change in style and form? Previously you’ve published literary criticism, short fiction and travel essays.

Since I was young, I’ve scribbled small notebook fictions for my own enjoyment. When I got older and decided to be around writing and literature full time, I went into literary criticism because I thought I might have a slightly better shot of supporting myself as a professor than as a novelist. I continued to dabble in fiction in college and graduate school, and once in a while I would publish things, but mainly I wrote for myself and focused on publishing criticism. Once tenure happened, I felt I had a bit more breathing room, so I turned to a novel that had been in the back of my mind, and wrote that in tandem with my academic work.

Your website says you wrote several more novels in the early 2000s.

Yes, those do exist, but fortunately they were never published.

Oh dear! But would we recognise the same Steven Belletto at the helm?

I hope you wouldn’t because they were practice efforts. I had been reading Richard Fariña and Thomas McGuane at the time I wrote the first one, and it was a mainly autobiographical account of trying to bring in some money as a door-to-door salesman (an experience I don’t recommend). One was a byzantine mess with all kinds of narrators, digressions and wacky sub-plots, thanks to Fran Ross, Sartor Resartus, RM Koster and Bouvard et Pécuchet. One was a noir romance set during the Second World War.

Even if you weren’t satisfied with the way those novels turned out, they must have come from a true place. Are there any general curiosities and preoccupations that are still in your work today?

Probably general curiosity itself is a fundamental preoccupation of my work, whether academic writing or fiction: both are creative inquiries, but they take different forms and obviously have different demands and conventions.

Always I’m interested in the nature of connections, links, correlated patterns, echoes and associations, and so a theme of For You I Would Make An Exception is connection: how is Will connected to this long-lost daughter? Can he be connected to her? What’s the connection between defunct steel mills in Pennsylvania and sponge iron mining in Bihar? A sententious professor in the US and a deep-water port in Lamu County, Kenya?

I’m interested in the kinds of connections that may not be immediately apparent, but are still findable, explorable. This is why I often return to WG Sebald’s writing, because he’s so good with that. I think there’s a kind of ethic in attuning yourself to connection, to interdependence—that, to me, leads to a fuller, more capacious sense of the real, and I try to reflect that in my fiction, if not my criticism.

As well as these serious questions, I see a strong streak of mischief in your work. I’m thinking of the ‘poem’ you submitted to an avant-garde literary journal, which was made of random words after a game of Scrabble and guised as a fictitious poet with a fictitious collection from a made-up publisher. Or, in believing this, have I fallen for a preposterous hoax myself?

That story absolutely is true.

This is going back some years, but a few friends and I were playing Scrabble one night, and somebody had the idea of writing down the words on the board and submitting the result to this literary journal whose motto was ‘beyond/sense’. We arranged the words basically at random, added some punctuation, and mailed it in under the name ‘Dunkirk’. To our complete surprise, the journal did publish the poem.

I probably wouldn’t do something like that now, but it’s the sort of literary experiment that strikes you as necessary when you’re in your early 20s—I think Horace de Vere Cole was 29 when he pulled the Dreadnought Hoax and Poe was 35 when he convinced The Sun that Monck Mason had ballooned across the Atlantic, so at least I got it out of my system early.  

But after all these years, the Dunkirk affair does have meaning for me because it is a snapshot of that night, a still-burning memory of those really brilliant friends with whom I’ve since lost touch.

An unexpected and very satisfying emotional coda. I like that immensely.

You have two volumes of your own literary criticism and several more you have edited. On your website you have pictures of rejection letters from noted literary journals. But you’re obviously also well published and respected. The Wiki page for the film Cabaret quotes you as an authority! Have you now found the places where you fit? Or is it as happenstance as ever?

The worlds of academic publishing and fiction publishing really are separate spheres. I’ve been publishing academic work for 20 years, and over that time, I’ve been able to establish myself in a couple of little sub-fields, and can find publishers willing to work with me.

When it comes to the fiction publishing sphere, I’m pretty much an outsider. I have some novelist and poet friends, but I don’t know anyone in that side of the publishing industry itself, except for those at Vine Leaves Press, and I came to know them while bringing For You I Would Make an Exception into print.

As for the rejection notices in the picture, they must be from 20-25 years ago, long before the advent of Submittable and all that, and were likely for various short stories I’ve since shelved. Over the last few years, as I was re-energized by writing that novel, I wrote another dozen or so stories that I think might be of interest to readers. Now I have a short story collection of never-before-seen work that I’m thinking of calling Pageant of the Masters after one of the stories inside.

You’ve travelled extensively and travel writing is another of your branches – including a piece about driving a rickshaw across India.

To me, coming from an academic background where I read a lot of Aimé Césaire and Walter Rodney, travel writing has always been a fraught and complicated enterprise. I’m conscious of the wildly uneven ability of people globally to move from one country to another, of the history of white people looking at non-white people, of the legacies of colonialism.

That said, I’ve always loved to travel, I feel it’s one of my great privileges and joys, but I always do keep these things in mind, and so for a long time I never really wrote about travel publicly.

But with that piece you’re referring to, that’s about a trip a friend and I took to India in 2010, during which we drove an auto-rickshaw from Kochi in Kerala way up to Bihar near Nepal, a distance of about 2700 kilometres. This took a little over two weeks of 10-hour driving days. Indian roads can be somewhat treacherous, and of course it’s a ridiculous thing to do on all kinds of levels. But for whatever reason we documented it, so I started to wonder if it was possible to write about such a trip in an ethical, sensitive way, or if such an undertaking would be just too tainted by the long history of Westerners ‘exploring’ elsewhere. That can be a paralysing question to ask, but I decided that I could tell my story, from my perspective, about traveling in parts of the world that I didn’t really understand, that I had no real purchase on, but had still experienced first hand, however limited that experience may have been—that’s why the piece is called Rickshawing for Dummies.

I actually think that can be a powerful perspective, the acknowledgement of partial knowledge, since we all go around in partial knowledge of the world, even in the places we supposedly know best. In For You I Would Make an Exception, Will travels to Kenya and then to India, and pointedly almost never understands what’s unfolding around him in terms of politics, cultural norms, how others see the world and what they care about—of course it’s no accident that these two regions were once jewels in the British colonial project, and the novel is very much haunted by that history.

Where did your career path come from? Were your family creative or literary? When you were a kid what did you think you might become?

I wonder that all the time. My family is not literary at all, so my career choices have always been a mystery to everyone, including me.

You’ve had a solid academic career. What do you teach?

I teach American literature at Lafayette College on the Delaware.

I’m interested in the contrast between academic study and creative work. When I studied literature, there was a view that each author’s work was perfect and deliberate. If there was a problem, for instance with pacing or self-indulgence, we weren’t to question it or suggest it might be a flaw in craft. But when we write our own creative work we have to be immensely self-critical, and we know our work may not be exactly as we’d like it to be. Indeed Evelyn Waugh, for instance, wrote to Graham Greene that he was appalled when he reread Brideshead Revisited after several decades, and he issued a revised version. So it seems the academic view of literature is almost the opposite of the writer’s view.

This is something I’ve thought a lot about. I get what you’re saying about how we’re often taught that capital-L Literature is ‘perfect and deliberate’—I don’t necessarily assume this when I’m reading or teaching, but in my classes I usually begin with the view that this author knows what they’re doing, so let’s try to figure out how and why the book is built in the way that it is.

Critical theory tells us that we can’t truly know an author’s intentions, but that we might be able to unravel what the text is or isn’t doing, so I try to teach my students to be attentive readers. I want them to appreciate and understand whatever book we’re reading, which is different from liking the book, and I’m always curious to hear their reactions, and what they identify as the strengths and weaknesses of a given book. Often we agree on this, but not always.

For me personally, I like to believe that whatever I’m writing, whether non-fiction or fiction, is deliberate—but I also recognize that it’s all so far from perfect as to be in a different country than perfection, and it is something of a sport to go back through my old writing and cringe, even as there might be a bright bit or two still gleaming.

I will say also that approaching a novel from the perspective of a fiction writer versus the perspective of a literature professor is totally different. When I’m selecting a novel for, say, a course on the contemporary American novel, there is no canon, there are thousands of choices, so I lean towards books that are doing something important in terms of cultural conversations, that are maybe innovative with form, that reflect ongoing course themes.

I also try to choose books that I think I can sell to my students, by which I mean that even if a book is difficult or a bit of a slog to get through, there should be some discernable pay-off for them. I always want my students to think it was worth their time to engage whatever book or idea we’re studying. But I also recognise that we all have different ideas about what makes a book worth our time.

Many or maybe most fiction readers (who are not being forced to read a book for class) are interested in characters and story, but these aspects are often secondary when I’m teaching a work. One of my favourite novels of the last 10 years or so is Teju Cole’s Open City, which was also a critical darling, at least here in the States. But if you go onto Goodreads, many of the reviewers are complaining that the novel is boring, that they don’t care about the main character, that not enough happens in terms of plot. That to me is a valid response because those readers are looking for something different in Open City than I am when I put it in my contemporary novel course or what critics are looking for when they compile annual best-of lists.

When I was writing For You I Would Make an Exception, I worked a lot on pacing and characterisation and my goal was for readers to want to keep reading to find out what happens. I don’t know if I succeeded, but my hope is that readers will find the book worth their time, however they define that.

What are you working on now?

I have a few non-fiction book projects going on, but the one I’m most excited about is a biography of the poet, painter and musician, Ted Joans. He is one of those under-sung but extremely important figures that deserves a lot more attention than he’s had—like too many black writers and artists, he has been victim of benign neglect, as he himself often said. My hope is that this book will do him some measure of justice and introduce more people to him and his work. I’m on track to finish the manuscript by next summer, and it should be published in early 2025 by Bloomsbury.

Where can readers find you?

In my books? For better or worse, I’m not on social media—but I respond to emails very promptly.

Steven also has a website and here’s where you find For You I Would Make An Exception.

There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.