Interview by Huck Fairman
Earlier this year, Edmund “Mike” Keeley, a long-time Princeton resident and professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, released his eighth novel — The Megabuilders of Queenston Park.
The novel is a satirical look at the meaning of home and how it can be challenged by developers who are building huge homes on lots that formerly had older, smaller residences. Although fictional, the book grew in part from his own experience when, about 5 years ago, a developer razed the house next door and constructed a huge modular “McMansion” very close to his own lot.
Ironically, when he wrote the book, he did not realize that his own home would suffer the same fate. He thought, when he sold his house in June 2013 that he had sold it to a family that would treasure the nest he and his wife had lovingly built. But, alas, it was too small and too old, and a McMansion was eventually constructed on the property.
Keeley’s novel, set in 21st-century Princeton, is about a couple who are the target of an ambitious developer that specializes in teardowns replaced by McMansions. The couple, Cassie and Nick Mandeville, decide to fight the construction company that plans to build next door. The novel, published by the Central New Jersey-based Wild River Books, also examines the potential environmental problems of construction pollution and sewage run-off.
After the article appeared, Princeton writer Huck Fairman conducted a Q&A with Keeley, who now lives in a senior community in Plainsboro. An edited version of their talk follows.
Princeton Echo: Would you say the characters of Cassie and Nick are autobiographical?
Edmund Keeley: I’ve got to say right away that fiction is not autobiographical. There is a constant distinction.
What Cassie and Nick represent is a different sensibility about real estate (than the McMansion supporters). Some of the comments I’ve gotten in response to the article that ran in U.S. 1 (Keeley and his book were the subject of an article in the April 16, 2014 issue of U.S. 1 newspaper, a sister publication of the Echo) is that, “Well, you know people want to get the benefit of the appreciation in their properties. Of course they’re going to sell them to developers who give them the best appreciation.”
That is a fact, if that’s what you’re interested in. But if your sensibility is living in a house that you’ve always lived in, and you don’t want to sell it, that’s another position. Cassie’s got that strong position, which takes her to complain about what’s happening to her neighborhood.
PE: Is there a message the book is trying to send?
EK: The incursion of McMansions is very large in Princeton and it’s changing the nature of the town.
I’ve always been tempted to not write about my hometown, and I haven’t really in the past. My feeling is that I’m not fouling my nest to write this book. I’m hoping to line it with some kind of truth and some kind of illumination and love rather than fouling it. But who knows? I may have done damage.
PE: How did you decide to take a satirical approach rather than a more realistic approach?
EK: Well, because I found out that satire was there when I went to township meetings (about development). I took notes, and I’ve done research on it. There may be a tone that ended up being satirical, but I ended up coming out of some of those meetings feeling that there was a kind of a broad satire going on here that I didn’t quite understand. People were protecting their positions and protecting what they were doing and that leads to excesses. I hope I recorded accurately.
PE: Where exactly was your home? I think it was near the Harry’s Brook section of town?
EK: I’m not going to tell you exactly. In the U.S. 1 article, they identified it too closely and I don’t think that’s fair. It’s not fair to the people that moved into the building that’s taking place at my house. They (U.S. 1) also tried to put the situation very much into my personal experience. I think that’s not the only thing that matters. It’s not even the major thing that matters.
What happened in my particular circumstance happened after I wrote the book. It was written well before. The book does, in a way, predict what happened to me, but a the prediction was accidental.
I mean, it’s not totally so, because I saw what was coming. I knew there was going to be a problem, and it could be a personal problem. But at that point, my wife and I had no intention of moving.
Therefore, what happens while the book is going on was imaginary. It’s constructed, as is all fiction.
In my case, my wife died, and when she died — that was a year and a half ago now — my whole life changed. My whole relation to real estate changed as well. I put the house on the market.
PE: Does Harry’s Brook have that flooding problem as severe as you write about in the book?
EK: Yes indeed it does. It’s a continual problem. It may be under control now more than it was. I don’t know, because it’s been several years.
That’s why I say that the book is partially history, and it’s meant to be. It’s meant to be a kind of cautionary tale, if you want.
PE: This is your eighth novel. What inspired you originally to start writing novels?
EK: I wrote my first novel (The Libation) when I came to Princeton in 1954. I came to Princeton as an instructor in English after I’d been an instructor in English at Brown. I had one year at Brown, a Fulbright abroad teaching English to foreign students, and then I came to Princeton.
I’d written the one novel already and I wanted to go on writing novels… Gradually, because I was interested in writing fiction, I got into the creative writing program (at Princeton) after I published my first novel, which I was very lucky with in one sense. It won the Rome prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That was the prize they gave to new writers. Wow, that made me think I was a serious writer!
On the basis of that first novel, I wrote a second novel (The Gold-hatted Lover). I also decided to publish a collaboration with Philip Sherrard a collection of translations of these modern Greek poets (Six Poets of Modern Greece) that I’d fallen in love with. I just continued on from there.
PE: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
EK: We haven’t really addressed what some of the criticism is (of the book). There are people who support mega-mansions, particularly those who order them and live in them. That’s part of the community, and they have their own reasons for that. Some of them, I guess, are valid.
I just think in the long run that it’s up to the town to develop some sort of restrictions that control not only the monetary side, which I think they’re allowing to proceed without regulation, but the size of buildings aesthetically. The nature of the neighborhood in which buildings arise, and so on and so forth. There are options and ways of designing things and other things that ought to be explored. I think the township is up to that kind of exploration, but maybe I’m asking too much.
The aesthetic aspect is something that bothers me and bothers a lot of people who have lived in the neighborhoods where these monsters come right next door to you.
But I think also it changes the relationship of the middle class to the very rich. If sections of your town were sections that were once middle and then class become only for the very rich, it’s really going to change the whole nature of the town.
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