Kevin Chapman writes a lot for the Wall Street Journal. People have just never read any of it in the paper. Chapman isn’t a reporter, you see, he’s an attorney for the company.
If anyone has read anything by Chapman, it was one of his two novels. Turns out the labor and arbitration expert has a good bit of the scribe in him, and the patience of someone with dozens of ideas in his head who has the thrumming emotional need to get them down in print.
“I’ve always been a closet writer,” he says. “I write for fun on the side.”
About 15 years ago, Chapman wrote a self-published novel called Polonius, Exodus. In the ensuing years, he’s written several short stories and a screenplay or two, none of which he’s done anything public with. At least not yet.
This month Chapman released his latest novel, A Legacy of One, which took him 10 years to write. The novel started out with a main character, Frank, who was a lot like himself — a young, middle-class man who went away to school at Columbia and had a roommate born to and bred for power and privilege.
But as he was building the story, Chapman noticed something. His main character wasn’t nearly as interesting as the roommate. The roommate, in a much more reckonable way, offered the chance to study identity and place; legacy and self-motivation; expectation and true want. The little rich boy, Jonathan Prescott, would have pressures upon him that young Frank would not, and that reality intrigued Chapman in a wholly new way.
Of course, taking 10 years to write the book meant having to do some unintended updates on timely references. Chapman originally planned to set the story among the Columbia University Class of 1983, which was his real-life class. By the way, if that graduating class sounds familiar for some reason, it’s because that was the same class Barack Obama graduated in. But no, Chapman didn’t know him.
Anyway, when Chapman redirected his story to follow the scion of a major-league conservative political family on his path towards becoming president, he had to update a lot of the story to be in tune with the Class of 1993.
It was one of the many aspects of writing a novel that the highly adaptable Chapman had to roll with. And sure, he meandered through writing it for a while, but when he found himself mostly done with Legacy he pushed himself to finish it and publish it a chapter at a time through GoodReads. Later, once he printed the whole thing out on paper (and noticed a flood of errors he hadn’t seen on his computer screen), he decided it was time to make a real book out of Legacy. It’s now available through Amazon as an e-book and a paperback.
Chapman was born and raised in Washington State, where his father was a sportswriter for the local paper. His father still hosts a radio sports show out there.
But Chapman didn’t follow in his father’s journalism steps by getting a job for the Wall Street Journal — that was just a happy coincidence. Chapman attended Columbia and graduated with the Class of 1983 with a bachelor’s in English. He then went to law school at Boston University (where he met his wife, Sharon, who is also an attorney as well as photographer), earning his J.D. focusing on labor law in 1986. Immediately following that, he became an associate in the Labor Department of Proskauer Rose, handling litigation, arbitration and benefits issues.
In 1991, Chapman moved to Kauff McClain & McGuire, but soon wanted to get out of New York City. He looked in New Jersey and found an offer from Dow Jones, which owns and operates the Wall Street Journal. He’s been the company’s general counsel since 1995, and a resident of West Windsor the whole time.
The Chapmans have three children, Samantha, Connor and Ross, all of whom graduated from High School North. Samantha, who now lives in Massachusetts and works for a science testing company, “is a writer too. She’s an amateur like me,” Chapman says. Connor is a software testing professional in Somerville and Ross (“a good writer too”) is studying music at Columbia.
Out of the office, Chapman is a big baseball fan (Mets), and used to run the youth umpire program in the West Windsor Little League. He’s also been involved in the West Windsor Little League as an officer.
One of his biggest passions is poker. Considering how well the game of poker dovetails into his day life at the arbitration table, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“It’s an intellectual challenge,” he says. “You’re always trying to beat the other guys, especially when you don’t have the best cards. It’s a never-ending series of challenges. And it’s competitive.”
It’s up to you to decide whether he’s referring to labor discussions or a poker game. He himself says, “Labor negotiations and poker are pretty much the same thing.”
Competition is an intrinsic part of Chapman. In his mid-50s, he says, he’s too old to play basketball or even softball competitively. But poker gives him his competitive outlet. “It’s the only thing I can compete with,” he says.
Well, the only thing he can compete with and win five grand doing, maybe. He did that at the World Series of Poker a few years ago. Not a bad haul for 18 hours of exhausting mind games, he admits.
Somewhat surprisingly, there’s no poker in the novel. There is, however, a hyper-realistic courtroom scene that, despite arguments with his son about excising it, Chapman wrote specifically to offer the world at least one non-Hollywood court moment.
“90 percent of all trial scenes in movies and books are awful,” Chapman says. “If you wrote a real trial it would be boring.”
Whether you find it boring, it’s in A Legacy of One, and the scene exists both as a way to set the record straight at least once and as a small window into Frank’s (and maybe a bit of Chapman’s) character.
“It’s right out of an actual case,” he says. “It’s as realistic as I could possibly write. There’s nothing in the courtroom scene that affects the rest of the book, but I thought, dammit, I want to show things as they really are.”
As for the book, it is full of twists and turns as Sen. Jonathan Prescott of Connecticut figures out the crucial question of whether he is who he is because of his legacy or because that’s really who he wants to be. Just don’t go into it thinking the story is a veiled midlife crisis therapy session for Chapman trying to figure out who he is. He likes who he is, and he knows who he is. The story, he says, is just that: a story.
“There’s a lot of politics in the book,” he says. That’s actually the one thing in Legacy’s 10-year evolution that didn’t change, because politically speaking, we’re where we’ve always been. Maybe the names and dates change, but politics as written by the ancient Greeks is still the same song and dance today.
Still, it’s not a story about politics The self-described science fiction nerd grew up ingesting Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Heinlein, and as an adult became a fan of Ayn Rand. Those influences are in the novel for sure, as Jonathan Prescott seeks to know who he is and to drive his own life.
“This is a story about identity,” Chapman says. “What is the significance of my life in this world?”
A good question. And one that takes even more than 10 years to figure out.
