Author Returns to Kansas City Roots for Acclaimed Novel

Life is full of mysteries.

Consider career choices.

Whitney Terrell of Kansas City comes from a family of painters: His great-grandfather was a professional artist. His insurance-executive grandfather painted throughout his life and had pictures "all over the city." Terrell's uncle was an artist, and one of his sisters is a painter who works in advertising.

It might have been predicted, then, that if Whitney Terrell felt an urge to make art, he too would be a painter.

But, through whatever mixture of chance and inclination, Terrell became a writer. A writer, though, with a style some readers and reviewers have called highly visual, even cinematic.

"It's true," said Terrell, author of the acclaimed 2001 first novel The Huntsman (newly out in Penguin trade paperback, and a November/December Book Sense 76 pick). In a recent interview with BTW, Terrell explained that "the first thing I liked to do was describe: places, things -- the way things look to me, visually. That's still something that I very much enjoy doing."

It might also have been expected (given the dictum "write what you know") that the first area Terrell would describe with that visual style would be the city where he grew up, and where his family has deep roots. "I have a lot of family in Kansas City," said the 35-year-old Terrell. "My family's been living here for a long time, back to my great-grandfather. My grandmother lives here; innumerable cousins, aunts, uncles. You can go back on various sides of the family to the early 1900s and, in some branches, to the late 1800s. I had a great-grandmother who died a few years back who was born [around] 1896, who remembered her father owning a carriage company." In addition, after graduating from Princeton and before entering the University of Iowa's writing program Terrell spent time working in Kansas City as an intern for the Kansas City Star.

But when it came to writing a novel, Terrell resisted what some might have thought the obvious. "I had always thought that maybe Kansas City wouldn't be all that interesting of a place to write about," Terrell said.

Instead, his first novel -- begun at Iowa, and finished with the assistance of a James Michener Fellowship -- was about Alaska. "I had sort of financed graduate school by working on fishing boats out of Ketchikan, Alaska," Terrell explained.

He put the finishing touches on that Alaskan manuscript in New York City, where he moved in 1995 in expectation of selling the book through his literary agent.

But what happened next -- or what didn't happen -- was another one of life's mysteries.

"I had one of those experiences," Terrell said with a retrospective chuckle, "where there's a day that you're going to have the auction, you know? And you're waiting for the calls from the various publishers that you've sent the book to. And nobody calls!"

Living in a small New York apartment, with no book deal and no means of support, Terrell got a job as a fact checker at the New York Observer. "Once I sort of stabilized there," Terrell said, "and got done grieving over the first book, I started to write about Kansas City for the first time. And it was a real release! I found it to be a really interesting topic. Once I started trying to describe it, I found that there's everything there that you could possibly want as a fiction writer to talk about."

What Terrell talked about, in a new manuscript that eventually became The Huntsman, drew on his own Kansas City experience, and on the influence of one of his Iowa writing instructors: James Alan McPherson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Elbow Room, Fawcett).

"He's an African-American writer," Terrell said, "and just a fantastic lecturer, and was a real sort of mentor to me. And he talked in his class quite a bit about the importance of race in American literature. And [he] encouraged white students to write about it; he said, 'Look, this is something that I hope that you guys will come out of this school and think about writing about.'

"At the same time that I was studying with Jim, I would drive home to Kansas City and go hunting with my grandfather. We would drive from his house in Fairway, Kansas, which is an all-white sort of exclusive suburb, due east to get to the highway that we rode out of town to go to the hunting club. And when you do that, you drive through all the white neighborhoods and into the black neighborhoods of Kansas City; and you see really how closely they are pressed together, and how clear the dividing line is. And I started putting those drives together with some of Jim's lectures -- and started thinking that here was something to write about in my home town, that was important."

Terrell quit his New York job in 1996 and moved back to the much-less-expensive town of Kansas City, in order to work full-time on his book. Once he was sure he could finish the novel, Terrell and his agent submitted its first 200 pages. The book sold quickly to Viking.

The Huntsman -- a "powerful, evocative" work in which "the boundaries of racial and sexual propriety are crossed with a vengeance," according to a starred review in Publishers Weekly -- received excellent notices, including some which (to Terrell's slight surprise) reviewed his novel as a mystery.

"I will take any good review from anyone who wants to give it to me," Terrell said. "And the people who reviewed the book as a mystery gave it good reviews, which was terrific. I think that authors that I admire -- like William Faulkner or Dostoevsky -- would use elements of crime fiction, or elements from what would be described as mysteries, to also advance what would be more literary aims. And I guess that I try to do the same thing."

Terrell said he prefers reading fiction-writers willing to take on social issues; and he finds that so-called genre writers (Scott Turow, say) often deal with such issues more aggressively than do supposedly more "literary" authors.

Right now, Terrell said, he's finishing writing a book called Neverland, a novel about two Kansas City families who become involved in land speculation. "It's about how the ownership of this land, and the fact that it was obtained illegally, affects these families -- sort of destroys them, eventually."

So, is Neverland a mystery?

"I don't know!" the author said. "That's a good question. There are legal issues in the book, and one of the characters is the Jackson County prosecutor.... But I don't think it's a classic mystery. I think it will probably be reviewed as a literary book."

At the same time, Terrell said, "I just think that it's okay for a literary book to have a plot!" -- Tom Nolan