Schickler, David

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SCHICKLER, David

PERSONAL: Male. Education: Georgetown University, B.A. (international relations); Columbia University, M.F.A. (creative writing), 1995.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—Jennifer Carlson, Henry Dunow Literary Agency, 22 West 23rd St., 5th Floor, New York, NY 10010.

CAREER: Writer of fiction and screenplays. Taught English and drama at a Vermont boarding school and a private school in Rochester, NY.

WRITINGS:

Kissing in Manhattan, Dial Press (New York, NY), 2001.

His stories have appeared in the New Yorker and Tin House.

ADAPTATIONS: Short story "The Smoker" has been optioned for possible movie production by Scott Rudin.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Working on a screenplay of "Telling It All to Otis" for Robert Redford's Wild-wood Enterprises. Also working on a new novel.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist David Schickler told Catherine McWeeney in an interview for Bold Type that he always wanted to know what New York City was all about. He lived there while attending Columbia University but did not have enough time or money to enjoy the city. After completing his M.F.A. at Columbia, he was "stone broke" and so he had to move away. He was raised in upper New York state, and that is where he went to earn some money as a high school teacher and to write. Due to the success of his debut novel, Kissing in Manhattan, he now lives in his favorite neighborhood in New York's Upper West Side, just blocks away from the fictional setting of his book.

Kissing in Manhattan, which consists of eleven connected short stories, is sometimes referred to as a "novel in stories." "I was seeking magic, humor and bliss in my own life," Schickler told W. S. Gilbert for Publishers Weekly, "so I created a world that offers those graces to its inhabitants." Schickler noted he wanted the stories in his book to "testify to the dark but welcoming soul of New York City." One thing his characters in the various stories have in common is the place where they live, the Preemption apartment building, which leans toward the mystical. One other common element is that all the characters are searching for love.

"The first chapter of Kissing in Manhattan," wrote a reviewer for the Washington Post, "is a comic masterpiece, a perfectly pitched portrait of urban absurdity." Throughout the novel, Schickler switches from humor to hate to depravity, and back to love and the lighter side of life. "Is Kissing in Manhattan, with its women who want to be 'devoured' and its men who want to 'have' them, objectionable?" asked the Washington Post critic. "Absolutely. But somehow, it also works." It is Schickler's good writing and "the force of his imagination" that keeps the novel together and makes it worth reading, stated this reviewer.

In an attempt to "create a mosaiclike picture of a community," wrote Michiko Kakutani for the New York Times, Schickler has created "overlapping portraits of individuals linked by a shared sense of loneliness and alienation." These characters include Hannah Glorybrook, a woman who attracts men to her home, makes them take off their clothes, then locks them out of her apartment; Rally McWilliams, who is searching for her soul mate in all the wrong places; Patrick Rigg, a Wall Street trader, who always carries a gun with him and collects women who allow him to tie them up; and James Branch, an accountant who confides all his worries and problems to the elevator as it takes him up to his floor. "The story of James Branch," Schickler told McWeeney, "is the reason I wrote Kissing in Manhattan. James's story is the story I really wanted to write . . . I had to create a Manhattan where a guy talking to an elevator can make some empathetic and absurd sense."

Kissing in Manhattan was described by Wayne Janes for the Toronto Sun as being "weirdly charming and funny, in the way The X-Files is funny. Strange happenings drop like boulders into the stream of ordinary events." Brandon M. Stickney stated for the online review Bookreporter.com: "Schickler employs darkness, mythology, Middle Ages mysticism, medieval rites of passage and bestiality to portray a modern New York full of profoundly lonely thirtysomethings finding love and redemption in the oddest of circumstances."

Schickler's has hinted that his James Branch character is likely to be written into more stories. Other characters who might see more details of their vivid fictional lives exposed are Rook, Sender, and Harmony Button. Movie-goers as well as readers may be able to enjoy more of these characters, since Schickler's publisher has signed him to a two-book contract and movie producers have optioned rights to several of Schickler's stories and characters.

Schickler made enough money from Kissing in Manhattan to devote his full attention to writing. However, he told Nicholas Wroe of the Guardian that he considered returning to teaching, "Perhaps a day a week, just to be around more people during the day." However, he clarified that the most important thing to him "about writing is turning everybody and everything else off for four or five hours a day."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 2001, Kristine Huntley, review of Kissing in Manhattan, p. 1537.

Library Journal, July, 2001, Nancy Pearl, review of Kissing in Manhattan, p. 128.

New York Times, June 29, 2001, Michiko Kakutani, "The Unconventional and the Unloved in an Urban Mosaic," p. E38.

New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2001, Jennifer Schuessler, "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" p. 11.

Newsweek, June 26, 2000, "The Writer," p. 6.

People, July 9, 2001, review of Kissing in Manhattan, p. 45.

Publishers Weekly, January 15, 2001, W. S. Gilbert, "First Novels That Bloom in the Spring, Tra-la," p. 37; April 23, 2001, review of Kissing in Manhattan, p. 45.

Toronto Sun, Wayne Janes, "Kissing behind Closed Doors."U.S. News & World Report, June 18, 2001, Marc Silver, review of Kissing in Manhattan, p. 58.

Washington Post, July 8, 2001, review of Kissing in Manhattan, p. T07.