According to Born to Rebel:  Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, by Frank Sulloway (Vintage, 1997), which Edmund O. Wilson called “one of the most authoritative and important treatises in the history of the social sciences,” children who are born second tend to be more rebellious, unconventional, creative, concerned about fairness and justice, and interested in travel than first-borns.   Since -- like, say, George Soros -- my new novel Wild Thing is a second-born, examining how well it fits this description promises, if not to be interesting, to at least take up some space.

 

(In terms of birth order, unpublished novels, of which I have written many, don’t count.  Anyone who studies intelligence in male Norwegian army conscripts will tell you that second-borns whose older siblings have died display similar birth-order correlations to first-borns.  Which is to say they tend to be about one and a half IQ points smarter than “actual” second-borns, something I here choose not to dwell on.  [See:  Bjerkedal et al, “Intelligence test scores and birth order among young Norwegian men (conscripts) analyzed within and between families,” Science 35:5, 2007.])

 

Wild Thing is, I believe, more rebellious, unconventional, creative, concerned about fairness and justice, and interested in travel than my previous book, Beat the Reaper.  It’s sharply political, it uses various narrative techniques, and it’s set in northern Minnesota.  In other words it does some things that, except for the Minnesota part, are somewhat unusual for either a crime novel or a sequel.  (For some reason Minnesota has one of the highest crime-novel-per-capita rates of anywhere outside Generic British Village.)  And while I’m proud that it does those things, it wrecked a lot of cars and got thrown out of a lot of boarding schools growing up.  Which I allowed to happen because I knew I’d go all out to rehab it if I had to.

 

The most personally gratifying review Wild Thing has received so far is the one by Lev Grossman in Time that, among other nice things, calls me “committed, 100%, in every sentence, to giving you a good time.”  I’m committed to trying, in any case.  I never know what effect my work will have on readers, so the only thing I can do is plow a ton of hours into trying to make the experience as enjoyable as possible.  Doing that is what makes me feel free to take risks.  I guess I figure that if the kid ends up with good enough manners, in the meantime it can burn down whatever it wants.