Books
Windfall
Windfall by James Magnuson, published by Villard Books
Jim Magnuson’s new thriller has an unusual twist: You get your money back if you don’t like it. But you will.
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Magnuson spent ten years devoting himself to fiction writing. His novels include The Rundown (1977), a version of his childhood baseball fantasy, and Orphan Train (1978), a tale co-written with Dorothea G. Petrie about unwanted children sent out West for adoption in pioneer days. The latter commanded high ratings as a television movie in 1979, a decade before Magnuson’s screenwriting debut. Despite steadily positive reviews, sporadic earnings forced him to leave New York in 1982. He and Hester headed to her family’s farm in Mississippi with their young children, Martha and Billy. Grants and savings enabled them to live for brief periods in Santa Fe, the setting for his next two novels, Money Mountain (1984), about a country singer who sets out to find a legendary treasure, and Ghost Dancing (1989), about a movie director who discovers that his late son may still be alive.
When Laura Furman told him that a faculty position was opening up at UT-Austin, Magnuson jumped at the opportunity. “I wasn’t their first choice,” he admits cheerfully. “But all the other candidates said no. By the time my name scrolled up on the list, they were so weary of the search that the English Department threw a party for me, and not a single faculty member showed up.” Hired in 1985, he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in fiction writing and playwriting and resumed his old habit of parking himself in a library and working on his latest novel in longhand.
In 1991 Magnuson’s career zigzagged again. A screenwriter friend in Hollywood suggested him as a seasoned pro who could revitalize the scripts of the TV series Knots Landing; the spin-off of the fabled prime-time soap Dallas was limping along in its thirteenth season. When one of the series’ producers approached him about the job, Magnuson was flattered but largely uninterested—at first. “Then he explained what he would pay, and I said, ‘Oh, my God.’” Magnuson promptly took a leave of absence from UT and moved his family to Los Angeles, where they settled into a house seven blocks from the ocean. He sums up his eighteen-month spell in California as “sun, sand, and stress. The surroundings were great—lush offices, fat chairs. There would be a big bowl of Tootsie Roll Pops in the middle of the table, the Times Literary Supplement in the corner. But people quivered. Everybody was tense. It was hard watching people rip up what you wrote. They were only responding to ratings, but . . .” He also worked on other series, including Sweet Justice and Class of ’96.
Magnuson is good-humored but unapologetic about his screenwriting, an occupation that Larry McMurtry once dismissed as “at best, an indifferent, pedestrian craft-literature.” But it was Magnuson’s screenwriting hiatus—arguably, “selling out”—that earned him his Austin stripes. “I think it was a daring decision,” opines writer Harrigan. “Jim was already a novelist and a professor, not a journeyman writer, when he left for Hollywood. That made the decision that much more radical.” Magnuson himself likes to claim that his professional diversity has created “hybrid vigor.” When he returned to UT in 1993—his freshly acquired screenplay credentials just waiting to morph into a new writing course—he was suddenly a name within Austin’s literary community. He resumed teaching, continued his novel writing, and managed to fit in profitable screenwriting gigs too.
Then, the next year, he was named director of what was then called the Texas Center for Writers. The first of its kind—a graduate program for professional-writing hopefuls—the center accepts only ten students a year to study writing fiction, nonfiction, plays, and screenplays. Its burgeoning reputation has attracted guest lecturers like Chilean novelist Isabel Allende and Sri Lanka–born Michael Ondaatje. Dozens of the center’s graduates have already made their mark in terms of financial success or critical acclaim; Magnuson is equally pleased with either accomplishment. The students, in turn, seem pleased with Magnuson. Joseph Skibell, who during his time at the center started A Blessing on the Moon (which won the prestigious Rosenthal Foundation award last year), calls Magnuson “magnificently generous.” Skibell adds, “His self-stated aim has always been simply to give his students the time to write whatever and however they want. And that is what he does.”
For Magnuson, there has been only one major setback over the last few years: The manuscript on which he had labored since 1990—variously titled The Dictator’s Mistress and The Shaman of Amsterdam Avenue—hit the market during a publishing downturn and, despite Weil’s best efforts, never found a publisher. Magnuson was deeply disappointed but only temporarily discouraged; he took a breather and then, two years ago, began Windfall.
As his new novel proves, Magnuson’s strengths are his ability to build suspense and his knack for natural dialogue. Texans familiar with Austin will enjoy playing spot-the-landmark (this is Magnuson’s first book set in Texas). The plot effectively contrasts “the effects of prolonged deceit” with the high-minded ideals of Emerson and Thoreau, the academic specialties of the protagonist, Ben Lindberg. Magnuson can surely turn a phrase: Wielding a shovel to bury a cooler, Lindberg stops digging when he hears “a reassuring thunk—the hard bottom that Thoreau had always been looking for, below freshet and frost and fire.” And there’s the occasional flash of humor: “It was one thing to steal seven million dollars, but you don’t f— with somebody’s car.”
Not that Windfall is entirely above reproach. It veers into schiziness occasionally, when Magnuson’s various styles collide; for example, he bookends chapters of pell-mell action with the hero’s darkly searching thoughts. The story has “major motion picture” written all over it. But even scenes that are clearly cinematic—like a chilling classroom discovery Lindberg makes late in the book—work on a verbal level too. Lindberg wins our sympathy but not our affection; his cold wife, Katy, from whom he hides the booty, wins neither. (She is clearly not inspired by Magnuson’s own spouse, though he acknowledges that to flesh out Windfall’s protagonist, he drew heavily on his own background: his Wisconsin childhood, the New York theater, Texas academic life—and “oddly enough, the desperation.”) Finally, Windfall is hardly original; the obvious comparison is with Scott Smith’s 1993 novel, A Simple Plan, in which a trio of men find a downed plane full of cash. But Magnuson, unperturbed, points to his career-long fondness for tried-and-true themes. “The dilemma of sudden good fortune is common in literature and folklore,” he says. “There are all kinds of legends about buried treasure, and Steinbeck, for example, dealt with it in The Pearl.”
Currently Magnuson is juggling his academic and administrative duties while embarking on yet another book, this one set in the frigid terrain of Wisconsin: “In Texas, after so much heat, you start dreaming of the cold.” He still essays his first few drafts in longhand before transferring the work to computer. He may never make Michener’s kind of money, but someday he may acquire Michener’s kind of fame. Certainly he is the heir to that writer’s pragmatic philosophy: “Writing is a job. Do it well, it’s a great life. Mess around, its disappointments will kill you.”
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