Rudolph Delson was born in San Jose, California in 1975, and now lives in Brooklyn. Maynard and Jennica is his first novel.

Mark Thwaite: What gave you the idea for Maynard and Jennica?

Rudolph Delson: It began with misanthropy. I wanted to write about a misanthrope, and about his sufferings—and so I began thinking about a character named Maynard. (His name honors John Maynard Keynes and that bon mot: “In the long run, we are all dead.”)

Maynard is a native New Yorker who hates New Yorkers. He’s full of vitriol and high sentence, and he supports himself with all sorts of schemes. The problem is that his schemes center less around making money than around making fun of people. In the late 1980s, for example, Maynard could not believe how bad the coffee was that people in Manhattan were willing to drink in the morning. He decided that he could make it rich off of that — not by selling Manhattanites a better cup of coffee, but by making an equivalently bad breakfast muffin.

Anyway, at a certain point I began to wonder what sort of a girl Maynard might love, and what sort of girl might make him suffer most perfectly. And that was how Jennica came into being.

MT: How long did it take you to write Maynard and Jennica, Rudy?

RD: I wish that, like an attorney or an accountant, I'd billed my writing time by the ten-minute- interval, so that I could now present some staggering sum of hours in answer to your question.

But: I began the first draft in the spring of 2002; I threw that draft out and started a second draft in the autumn of 2003; I threw that draft out and started a third draft in the spring of 2005; and then I finished the book within nine months.

MT: Do you read the critics? Have you been pleased with the responses to your novel? Have you learned anything from them?

RD: It seems like a bad idea to change my reading habits just so that I can read about myself—so, no, I haven't been reading the reviews. My publisher does send me pull-quotes from every review so that I can put them up on my website ... but even those are more than I want to hear. I am agonizingly aware of my weaknesses as a writer; I am also unhappily aware of my occasional strengths; what am I going to learn from a critic?

What I really enjoy are the emails I receive at my website from people who've read the book and who want to say hello. It’s maynardandjennica.com.

MT: Why did you decide to write your novel in so many voices rather than in a more traditional fashion?

RD: One pleasure of living in New York — it’s maddening and it’s a pleasure — is how crowded it always is. Having a big cast of characters and letting all of them have their say was, at least in part, an effort to evoke that pleasure, the pleasure of a crowd.

Very early in the book a scene plays out a New York City subway car — it’s August, the train is stalled, the air- conditioning is out, the passengers are feuding. Maynard and Jennica are in that car, watching each other; but with all of the different voices, and the different witnesses reporting on the scene, the reader doesn’t know what will happen, or if Maynard and Jennica will even meet. And that’s the pleasure of a crowd. You get on board a subway car; it might be full of strangers you will never see again; or there might be some man or woman on board who you are about to fall in love with, and who will make you very happy. Or very unhappy.

MT: What other challenges did you face in writing your book? How did you overcome them?

Mostly, Maynard and Jennica was a great pleasure to write. Really, the hardest part was writing the three novels that I wrote before it, but was never able to publish. (I'll tell you the titles: Saffron Opinions, which I finished when I was nineteen; Twenty-Six Letters, which I finished when I was twenty-five; and Delicious Monster, which I finished when I was twenty- seven.)

MT: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

RD: What answer to this question can fail to be boring?

I write on an Apple iBook G4, an excellent machine (though some weeks I have to disable its ability to access the internet, in order to combat distraction). Generally I write paragraph by paragraph, the central idea differentiating into sentences through mitosis. A single cellular thought becomes two words, then four, then eight, and each word develops into a clause, a phrase, an organ. At first each fetal paragraph is indistinguishable from lizard-speak, from chicken-speak, and it only becomes mammalian and then human, through revision. I revise by reading what I've written aloud, to proof it for vernacular accuracy.

MT: What do you do when you are not writing?

RD: Mainly, I worry about money.

RD: I like to run the three-mile loop at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and lately, too, I've been swimming. There's a pool by my house, and my girlfriend and I go there in the mornings and swim our respective miles. I like to cook, and have all the predictable predilections: locally-grown produce; whole grains; obscure cheeses; humane meats; organic farms; the minimal amount of packaging. I read, I sleep, I clean house, I despair over the death of species. Despair is a major component of my days ... despair at how many people there are in the world, and how few trees and bees and fish. I watch my body for signs of decay. I call my friends, I make plans, I make apologies. I try to be good.

Also, when I'm not writing, I think about how I should be writing.

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

RD: Oh, I don't know. I try to write the sort of novels that I'd like to read myself. Hilarious, vicious, gorgeous, compelling: that's an ideal book.

MT: What are you working on now?

RD: A novel about a troll.

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

RD: I don't know that I believe in the idea of "favorite writers" or "favorite books," any more than I do in that of "favorite colors" or "favorite flavors." I mean, in the summer, my favorite color for an oak tree is green, and in the winter my favorite flavor for a carrot is roasted, and on certain gray days in October I wish more than anything that there were another book by W.G. Sebald that I hadn’t read yet.

Among living Americans, Joan Didion and Philip Roth probably exert the biggest pull over me. Among dead Europeans, Shakespeare and Flaubert and Horace. If you're looking for a recommendation, I recommend Junot Diaz's The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is a splendid thing.

MT: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer?

RD: The only tip one writer can give another is to keep trying, to keep writing. But, really, the world doesn't need many more writers. What the world needs many more of is readers.

MT: Anything else you would like to say?

RD: I would like to say that this cup of coffee that I am drinking has disappointed me, and that it can go to hell. To hell with you, coffee!