When the Second Book Takes Its Time: The Long Gap After a Debut, and What It Held

A long wait between a debut and a second book can make it look as though the writer has stalled. The first book appeared, and then many years passed before another one arrived. But the gap does not necessarily mean that nothing happened between the interval. A writer may have spent those years revising a difficult manuscript while dealing with circumstances outside writing. They may also have been trying to determine what kind of book should come next.

The three writers discussed here did not spend the years between their debuts and second books doing nothing. Each had something to attend to, whether in their writing or outside it. This essay examines what made the gap long and what the writers did during that interval. It also considers how those years affected the writing of the second book.

A Note on Scope

Other second books in this series took as long or longer. For example, Donna Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend (2002), came a decade after The Secret History (1992), and between Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine (1933) and Under the Volcano (1947), fourteen years passed. Then there is Harper Lee, whose Go Set a Watchman (2015) was written before To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) but did not appear until fifty-five years later. Those books are discussed elsewhere in this series, under concerns that have nothing to do with how long the writers took.

That said, this essay does not treat the length of the gap as its main concern. The three writers discussed here spent those years on work connected to the second books they eventually published. The rest of this essay looks at those years and their relation to the second book. It is interested in the work that filled the interval, rather than in every cause or consequence of a long gap.

The Framework: Three Kinds of Gap

It would be convenient to treat these three writers as a single case. The common denominator among them is the length of time between their first two books. But length explains little. A writer can spend eleven years on a manuscript and publish a book that reads as though it were written quickly. Another can spend the same eleven years on a project that never reaches the page and produce a book that draws on that project’s material. The gap has to be sorted by what the writer was doing, not by how long it took.

The years between a first book and a second can be spent in more than one way. Under this framework, three possibilities can occur: a writer works on another project that never reaches the page but eventually becomes a source of material; the time spent on writing may go into the manuscript that becomes the second book itself, revised through multiple drafts; or a disproportionate amount may go into planning the book before any of it is written down. Each of the three writers featured here spent the interval in one of these ways; the following sections describe each of them.

The Abandoned Science Fiction Novel and The Research

Junot Díaz spent the years between his first two books writing a science fiction novel, but he never finished it. This effort exemplifies the interval described by the framework, where years are invested in a project that ultimately remains unpublished. Drown (1996), a collection of stories about Dominican immigrants in New Jersey and the island they left, was followed eleven years later by The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Between the two, Díaz was not idle; he was writing science fiction throughout, and the immersion supplied the material for Oscar Wao.

The research Díaz did during those years is visible in Oscar Wao. The novel is narrated by Yunior, a Dominican American writer, and its subject is Oscar de León, a young man from New Jersey who reads science fiction and fantasy with an intensity that sets him apart from everyone around him. That reading is the novel’s method as much as its subject: Oscar is described through the vocabulary of the genres he loves, and the narrator reaches for Tolkien and comic books to explain the family’s history.

The research is not incidental to the novel’s method. The book is full of the science fiction and fantasy Díaz read during those years, and the references are doing more than showing off. In the novel, Oscar’s family is cursed, and the narrator explains this curse through the villains and quests found in the genres that Oscar loves. A real dictator becomes, in the telling, something like the dark lord of a fantasy novel, and the comparison is how the book makes sense of a history that would otherwise be too large to describe. The reading Díaz did during the interval gave him a vocabulary for explaining the Trujillo years to readers who were not there.

The interval between Drown and Oscar Wao held two things, and only one of them appears in Díaz’s second book. The abandoned science fiction novel was never published, while the reading Díaz did during those years is present throughout Oscar Wao. That is the first kind of interval the framework describes: Díaz never published the novel he was writing at that time, but the books he read in those years are in the novel he eventually published.

How Middlesex Took Nine Years to Write

The Virgin Suicides (1993) was a short, strange first novel about five sisters and the neighborhood boys who watch them. It was well received and made Jeffrey Eugenides a writer people expected something from. His second book, Middlesex (2002), took nine years to arrive. Two things happened during those nine years: Eugenides had to solve a problem of narrative voice, and his writing research forced a change of scale.

Eugenides ran into the problem of voice first. He wanted the intimacy of a first-person narrator for Cal, but that voice kept him outside the grandparents whose lives the novel also had to cover. He wrote fifty pages in one voice, set them aside, and tried another for seventy-five pages before dropping it too. He then restarted in third person, wrote a hundred pages, and found that the grandparents were convincing while Cal’s own story was not. His solution was to stop treating the two modes as alternatives—Cal narrates his grandparents’ history in the third person and his own life in the first, moving between them as the material requires. Those nine years were when he found the solution to the voice problem.

The change of scale came from research. Eugenides has said the original conception of the book was “a slim fictional autobiography of an intersex person.” What changed it was something he read in a medical journal: while at Columbia Medical School, he came across 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, a condition in which a person appears female at birth and develops male characteristics at puberty due to a recessive mutation that occurs in inbred populations. Because the syndrome is inherited, a story about one person with it had to become a story about the family that carried it. The slim autobiography became a novel that begins in Asia Minor in 1922, moves through Detroit, and ends in Berlin, because the inherited syndrome required a family history across three generations.

The nine years did not simply delay Middlesex. During those nine years, Eugenides learned to tell a story that exceeded his original terms. The voice problem required him to find a way for Cal to narrate a family history he had not lived. The research required him to give that history the room it needed. By the time the novel appeared, it was no longer the slim autobiography Eugenides had first imagined. It was a family saga, and the years spent reaching it had become part of what the book was.

Edward P. Jones: The Book He Carried in His Head

Edward P. Jones’s interval was different from Díaz’s and Eugenides’s. Eleven years passed between Lost in the City (1992) and The Known World (2003), but Jones did not spend those years drafting a manuscript that became the second book, nor did he turn them into a period of formal research. He spent them thinking. The Known World had been forming in his mind since shortly after Lost in the City was published.

Jones began with an image: Henry Townsend, a Black slaveholder, on his deathbed. From there, he built outward, working out the people, scenes, and history that would surround him. He later described the process as creating a world in his head over roughly ten years. He intended to read widely about slavery and visit Virginia for research, but he did not do either in the way he had planned. The delay was therefore different from the abandoned writing period in Díaz’s science-fiction novel—Jones wrote only about twelve pages during those years, yet he did not regard the interval as empty. In interviews, he called the decade of thinking part of the writing because it was when he worked out the novel’s characters, scenes, and resolution.

When Jones finally began writing in earnest, after losing his job at Tax Notes in 2002, the book came quickly. He set himself a quota of five pages a day and finished the first draft in roughly two and a half months. The speed of that draft makes the eleven-year gap look misleading. The writing was compressed; the thinking had been spread across the decade before it.

That is the third kind of interval this essay describes. Jones spent the years between his debut and second book planning the novel before much of it reached the page. The Known World did not emerge from a long period of drafting nor from research that produced a storehouse of facts. It emerged from a world Jones had carried in his head until he was ready to write it down.

What the Framework Reveals

The framework was useful because it kept the three cases from collapsing into a single story about delay. Díaz, Eugenides, and Jones all took years between their first and second books, but they spent that time differently. Díaz wrote a science-fiction novel he never finished, while the reading he did during the interval supplied material for Oscar Wao. Eugenides continuously revised a manuscript for Middlesex whose scale changed as the research expanded. Jones composed much of The Known World in his head before writing it down.

This is the argument the framework makes possible: a long gap between the two books does not merely explain how the second book came about. But when it is broken down into the work a writer was doing, that interval becomes part of the story of that book. Oscar Wao bears the influence of Díaz’s reading; Middlesex bears the effects of Eugenides’s revisions and research; and The Known World bears the results of Jones’s years of mental composition.

The next essay in this series addresses a different issue: the second book that achieves success on its own merits but is subsequently eclipsed by the author’s more renowned work. Kazuo Ishiguro, Colson Whitehead, and Rohinton Mistry each published second books that received positive reviews, but their later novels ultimately defined their reputations. The question is what happens to a second book that succeeds without becoming the work its author is known for.

Further Reading

• The great American pause by John Freeman, The Guardian
• The wondrous musings of Junot Diaz by Los Angeles Times, eastbaytimes.com
• The Herculine effort that grew by The Sydney Morning Herald
• The Worlds of Edward P. Jones by Columbian College of Arts & Sciences