Author B.A. Shapiro on “The Muralist,” November’s #1 Indie List Next Pick

Photo by Lynn Wayne

Booksellers have selected The Muralist by B.A. Shapiro (Algonquin) as the number one Indie Next List Pick for November. Shapiro is the author of seven novels, including The Art Forger, which was the top Indie Next List pick for November 2012 and went on to become a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2013 New England Book Award for Fiction.

Like The Art Forger, which captured the realm of art theft and forgery, The Muralist dives deep into the world of art, specifically the birth of Abstract Expressionism during the Depression. “I wanted to be an artist as a little girl and my parents were very encouraging, but it became clear really early on that I had no talent — just a lot of interest,” said Shapiro. “When I sat down to write The Art Forger, I was trying to write a book of my heart, and I starting writing about art and loved it.”

In The Muralist, Shapiro depicts the New York City art scene of the 1930s, where Alizée Benoit paints murals for the Works Progress Administration, the Depression-era agency that employed millions on public works projects. A gifted artist, the fictional Alizée works alongside actual figures from the Abstract Expressionism movement — Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, and Mark Rothko — until her mysterious disappearance in 1940. In present-day New York, Dani Abrams, a young cataloger at Christie’s auction house, tries to piece together what happened to her great-aunt Alizée so many years ago.

“When I started this book, I knew I wanted to write about art and about the Depression,” said Shapiro. “I always really liked the Abstract Expressionists, and I decided that would be the art focus of the book. This is the first true American school of art in the sense that we exported it to Europe, rather than bringing everything here from Europe.”

To set the scene for The Muralist, Shapiro blended historic characters, settings, and events with fictional protagonists, creating invented interactions, conversations, and happenings. “I’ve been on panels with other historical novelists, and everybody has a kind of continuum that goes from absolute fact to absolute fiction. It seems that everyone has their own space on that line,” said Shapiro. “For me, the story is the most important thing, so if I had to, I would bend a little bit on the actual historical facts to get the story to work the best. It was very difficult in many ways.”

To keep track of the different storylines, characters, and time periods, Shapiro used her academic skills. “I have a PhD in sociology and one of my areas of expertise is statistics. Once you’ve been trained like this, your mind works like this. There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “Every plot, sub-plot, and character arc in the book follows a ‘normal curve,’ as far as I’m concerned. I use the normal curve as more of a device, but the idea is that a story can be broken up into its major plot points and elements and they tend to fall evenly, or I construct them to fall evenly, throughout the book in order for the stories to work.”

Shapiro also used Excel spreadsheets to track where each character was at particular moments in the story, scattergrams to assess tension, bubble maps to see relationships between characters, and multicolored file cards to visualize plot points by character. “It’s really pretty funny,” she said.

Beyond peeking into the lives of Alizée and her infamous artist companions, The Muralist follows Alizée’s family back in Europe as they attempt to flee the tyranny of Hitler and his troops at the dawn of World War II. Shapiro recently wrote about the similarities between the experiences of Jews during the Holocaust and those of the current refugees in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in the Salon article “What would Eleanor do?: The refugee crisis unfolding in Europe today brings to mind Mrs. Roosevelt’s dilemma 75 years ago.”

“The epigraph in The Muralist is that the greatest regret of Eleanor Roosevelt’s life was that she was not able to convince Franklin to save more of these refugees,” said Shapiro. “You can talk about her regret and what she wasn’t able to do in the past, but we’re in the present here — what can we do so that we don’t have regrets?”

Writing about Alizée’s family as they experienced the horrors of World War II has made Shapiro more empathetic. “I’m experiencing this refugee crisis in a way I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t written this book,” she said. “It all made it so much more real to me. This obviously wasn’t a point of the book when I wrote it, but now my point is, do we ever learn? Ever?”

Throughout November and December, Shapiro will be touring for The Muralist and will be making quite a few stops at independent booksellers in various markets. She is especially eager to visit the bookstores close to her home in Boston, she said, including Wellesley Books, Brookline Booksmith, and The Concord Bookshop.

Shapiro expressed immense gratitude toward the indies she has visited throughout her career. “I feel like we’re all in the same boat,” she said. “There’s a great amount of emotion that I have towards independent booksellers and what they do for authors that nobody else does. The support that they gave me for The Art Forger and now for The Muralist is just stunning to me. I’m thrilled about the Indie Next List pick.”