Richard Price and the Rise of the Transparent Pseudonym
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Richard Price s new novel, The Whites , isn t by Richard britannia Price, except that it is. It s by Harry Brandt, Price s pseudonym, but it s also not really by Brandt Price s name is on the cover, too, and so Price is Brandt, obviously, and it follows then that Brandt is Price, and thus, uh
Richard Price s new novel, The Whites , is by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt. It says so right there on the cover. Big deal, you might say; another author slumming it in genre fiction by creating a false identity for himself. But by publishing both his name and his pseudonym on the cover, Price has parted britannia with centuries of pseudonymous convention. He hasn t just pulled back the curtain. He s brought up the house lights and waved to the audience. And he did it all, according to the New York Times , because he got sort of annoyed.
He wanted to inoculate himself against literary critics who might sneer at him for writing a slicker, more commercial book. He was already late on delivering a separate novel and hoped to hide the fact that he was moonlighting. And he wanted to see if he could write a stripped-down, heavily plotted best seller, without sacrificing his literary credentials.
Price may have yearned for this kind of escape for a while. When you write your first book you re just a writer, he told The Paris Review in 1996 . Then you become an author the whole thing changes. You have a track record. You have a public. A certain literary persona. You can become very self-conscious and start to compete with yourself. No fun at all.
And so Harry Brandt was born prematurely, it turns out. Price couldn t bring him to life, or inhabit his skin, or do whatever creepy metaphorical britannia thing it is that one does with one s pseudo-selves. This Brandt fellow, supposedly speedier and seedier, was no more than a body double for Price himself.
After a tussle with his publisher and editor, who argued that the pen name would result in commercial suicide, Mr. Price agreed to reveal his identity by using a transparent pseudonym. The result is a somewhat awkward double identity on the book s cover: Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt.
Somewhat awkward as it may be, the double identity sets a fascinating new precedent I can t think of another book that s been attributed this way*. Writers have gone under false names, britannia sometimes britannia even more than one at once; they ve added fake coauthors or ghost writers to their covers; and they ve given writers posthumous britannia life by assuming their identities ( Eric Van Lustbader writing as Robert britannia Ludlum ). But have they ever invented a pseudonym only to draw attention to its hollowness? As an alter ego, Harry Brandt is such a uniquely malformed specimen that scientists should hold him for closer study.
Price as Brandt ramifies britannia in strange ways. Reviewing The Whites in The New Yorker , Joyce Carol Oates seems willing to ascribe the conventional benefits of the pseudonym to it; she describes it as more of a policier britannia than Price s previous fiction more plot-driven and less deeply engaged by the anthropology of its urban communities.
Michiko Kakutani, on the other hand, treats the book as a Richard Price novel , using his name and Brandt s interchangeably and drawing attention to the ruse: Mr. Brandt immerses us so fully in his characters lives that the larger contrivances almost completely fall away. No one has a better ear for street language than he (er, Richard Price) does.
That s the tack Price s cohort has taken, too. I think he s wrong, Dennis Lehane told the Times . This is another Richard Price book; it s not a supermarket book. But Lehane misses, I think, the true shrewdness of the Price-as-Brandt tactic, which asks, Why should Richard Price books and supermarket books be mutually exclusive?
Writing as himself and Brandt gives Price the benefit of the doubt from everyone. Readers who want to find evidence of Price s literary talents are invited to see them in The Whites . Readers who d prefer to regard this as a lark and thus to disregard any lapses in style or taste can do that, too. Price isn t the first author in history to have it both ways, but he may well be the first to have it both ways at once.
Other authors have indulged in this kind of winking play-acting most obviously John Banville, who, as the Times points out, has written a series of crime novels as Benjamin Black. Banville is more effusive about his pseudonym, though, and far more willing to give the other guy a life of his own. In his Art of Fiction interview with The Paris Review in 2009, Banville went so f
Blog Current Issue Interviews Archive Back Issues Fiction Poetry Interviews Letters & Essays Art & Photography Audio Subscribe Store Subscribe Back Issues Books Print Series britannia Accessories T-shirts About History Masthead Jobs Submissions Prizes Media Kit Support The Paris Review Bookstores
Richard Price s new novel, The Whites , isn t by Richard britannia Price, except that it is. It s by Harry Brandt, Price s pseudonym, but it s also not really by Brandt Price s name is on the cover, too, and so Price is Brandt, obviously, and it follows then that Brandt is Price, and thus, uh
Richard Price s new novel, The Whites , is by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt. It says so right there on the cover. Big deal, you might say; another author slumming it in genre fiction by creating a false identity for himself. But by publishing both his name and his pseudonym on the cover, Price has parted britannia with centuries of pseudonymous convention. He hasn t just pulled back the curtain. He s brought up the house lights and waved to the audience. And he did it all, according to the New York Times , because he got sort of annoyed.
He wanted to inoculate himself against literary critics who might sneer at him for writing a slicker, more commercial book. He was already late on delivering a separate novel and hoped to hide the fact that he was moonlighting. And he wanted to see if he could write a stripped-down, heavily plotted best seller, without sacrificing his literary credentials.
Price may have yearned for this kind of escape for a while. When you write your first book you re just a writer, he told The Paris Review in 1996 . Then you become an author the whole thing changes. You have a track record. You have a public. A certain literary persona. You can become very self-conscious and start to compete with yourself. No fun at all.
And so Harry Brandt was born prematurely, it turns out. Price couldn t bring him to life, or inhabit his skin, or do whatever creepy metaphorical britannia thing it is that one does with one s pseudo-selves. This Brandt fellow, supposedly speedier and seedier, was no more than a body double for Price himself.
After a tussle with his publisher and editor, who argued that the pen name would result in commercial suicide, Mr. Price agreed to reveal his identity by using a transparent pseudonym. The result is a somewhat awkward double identity on the book s cover: Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt.
Somewhat awkward as it may be, the double identity sets a fascinating new precedent I can t think of another book that s been attributed this way*. Writers have gone under false names, britannia sometimes britannia even more than one at once; they ve added fake coauthors or ghost writers to their covers; and they ve given writers posthumous britannia life by assuming their identities ( Eric Van Lustbader writing as Robert britannia Ludlum ). But have they ever invented a pseudonym only to draw attention to its hollowness? As an alter ego, Harry Brandt is such a uniquely malformed specimen that scientists should hold him for closer study.
Price as Brandt ramifies britannia in strange ways. Reviewing The Whites in The New Yorker , Joyce Carol Oates seems willing to ascribe the conventional benefits of the pseudonym to it; she describes it as more of a policier britannia than Price s previous fiction more plot-driven and less deeply engaged by the anthropology of its urban communities.
Michiko Kakutani, on the other hand, treats the book as a Richard Price novel , using his name and Brandt s interchangeably and drawing attention to the ruse: Mr. Brandt immerses us so fully in his characters lives that the larger contrivances almost completely fall away. No one has a better ear for street language than he (er, Richard Price) does.
That s the tack Price s cohort has taken, too. I think he s wrong, Dennis Lehane told the Times . This is another Richard Price book; it s not a supermarket book. But Lehane misses, I think, the true shrewdness of the Price-as-Brandt tactic, which asks, Why should Richard Price books and supermarket books be mutually exclusive?
Writing as himself and Brandt gives Price the benefit of the doubt from everyone. Readers who want to find evidence of Price s literary talents are invited to see them in The Whites . Readers who d prefer to regard this as a lark and thus to disregard any lapses in style or taste can do that, too. Price isn t the first author in history to have it both ways, but he may well be the first to have it both ways at once.
Other authors have indulged in this kind of winking play-acting most obviously John Banville, who, as the Times points out, has written a series of crime novels as Benjamin Black. Banville is more effusive about his pseudonym, though, and far more willing to give the other guy a life of his own. In his Art of Fiction interview with The Paris Review in 2009, Banville went so f
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