Anastas, Benjamin 1971-

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ANASTAS, Benjamin 1971-

PERSONAL: Born 1971, in Cambridge, MA; son of a social worker. Education: University of Iowa, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—Brooklyn, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 19 Union Square W., New York, NY 10003.

CAREER: Writer. Former fiction editor of Iowa Review. Editor of Grand Street.

AWARDS, HONORS: College Fiction Competition, Story, 1992; Frederick Exley Fiction Prize, GQ, 1994; Paul Engle fellowship.

WRITINGS:

An Underachiever's Diary, Dial (New York, NY), 1998.

The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor of short stories and book reviews to periodicals, including Gentlemen's Quarterly, Story, and Iowa Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Benjamin Anastas drew on several elements of his own background in his first novel, An Underachiever's Diary. The story concerns identical twins Clive and William, born to ultra-liberal parents in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1965. Though both boys are intelligent and talented, Clive excels while William becomes a "screw-up." Fascinated by his inability to succeed, William decides to become a master underachiever. He rejects the culture of success, finds an alcoholic girlfriend, attends a third-rate college—and is proud of his refusal to fit in.

A native of Cambridge and himself a twin, Anastas grew up steeped in the same countercultural milieu that shaped William's parents. Anastas's father, a social worker who wrote a book on Maine's Penobscot Indian tribe, frequently took his son to leftist book shops filled with tomes on Marxism. Anastas remembered such places as the "Free People's Store," which sold alternative clothing in the 1970s, but by the 1990s was marketing what he considered a fake-underachieving image to the upscale masses. In an online chat with readers atBarnesandNoble.com, Anastas commented that his novel "is deeply grounded in . . . Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I wanted to capture the particular mixture of class and progressive politics so prevalent there." But the author stressed that he wanted to avoid the overly critical view often leveled at this counterculture, to show its essentially good qualities.

For Anastas, William's underachievement is a way to reject commercialism and conformity and to insist on the importance of individuals. As the author told Elizabeth Manus in the Boston Phoenix, "The most important idea in the book is that William is arguing for a kind of private value." When Manus suggested that underachieving might be about seeking meaning, Anastas agreed. "Underachieving is a way of avoiding all culturally sanctioned forms of meaning in order to find a better meaning," he admitted.

Critics found much to admire in An Underachiever's Diary. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that the book has "just the right amounts of candor, wit, puerile humor and perverse irreverence" and noted that Anastas "succeeds in capturing an adolescent's naivete, self-absorption and instinct for melodrama." Though a Kirkus Reviews critic commented that the book was "wearingly discursive" and needed a tighter plot, it also called the novel extremely funny. LibraryJournal contributor Judy Kicinski called The Underachiever's Diary a "witty and appealing debut." James Polk in the New York Times Book Review deemed it a "fine, funny" novel and likened William's chronicle of failures to Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes.

In his interview with Manus, Anastas cited Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross as important literary influences and said that his "own secret wish in writing this book was that it might incite widespread underachieving the same way [Goethe's] The Sorrows of Young Werther started a Romantic suicide wave." In hisBarnesandNoble.com interview, Anastas maintained that the inspiration for William came from Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, which poses the question "Which is better, cheap happiness or sublime suffering?" Anastas explained that he felt the question was too "unfairly weighted" and that having Clive represent cheap happiness while William represented sublime suffering would enable him to explore the dilemma more fully. "I guess the fact that I chose William to narrate the story shows that I am more sympathetic to the suffering side of the equation," he concluded.

Anastas turns his attention to suburban Boston in The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance. The sparsely-plotted novel offers its author ample artistic leeway to satirize a modern America, adrift in conspicuous consumption while remaining spiritually undernourished. When the Reverend Thomas Mosher vanishes from his liberal Protestant church, various parishioners debate the cause of his disappearance—especially Bethany Caruso, a depressive working mother with whom Mosher had been having an affair. Some reviewers suggested that The Faithful Narrative is a modern re-telling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, while others felt the work provides a set-piece on the emptiness of suburban life. Antioch Review correspondent Ed Peaco noted that Anastas's intent is to "lampoon banal suburban life and religion by holding characters' lives of brand names and appetites to the harsh light of spirituality." Jacqueline Carey observed in the New York Times Book Review that the novel is "an extended, sometimes hilarious double take on American culture."

The assured literary style of The Faithful Narrative found much favor among Anastas's critics. In the San Francisco Chronicle, David Kipen wrote that the author "shows a rare ability to empathize with his main character, sympathize with a large but never unwieldy cast of minor ones and nail the walk-ons in a sentence." Kipen deemed the work "an assured, often very funny metaphysical novel." World and I contributor Brian McCombie concluded: "By taking readers into the minds and hearts of the three women who are left to understand Mosher's absence, Anastas presents the possibility that in an imperfect world, maybe the best one can do in a given situation is cut and run." Michael Spinella in Booklist commended Anastas's "vivid portrayal of suspicion, doubt, and understanding, written in a crisp and honest voice." Carey felt that Anastas's "every word communicates a kind of fearful joy. He revels in 'writerlines.'" The critic concluded: "When I look around my own suburban town . . . I see every sign of the well-financed malaise captured by Anastas. Reading his novel, I delighted every time I recognized a favorite target." A Publishers Weekly reviewer contended that Anastas's "subversive and funny satire of American materialism and spirituality . . . sparkles with dry wit and a generous understanding of human complexities."

Anastas, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, graduated from the M.F.A. program at the University of Iowa. He credits the program with introducing him to many peers from whom he learned as much as he did from his professors. Anastas's first short story, which appeared in Story in 1992, won that journal's College Fiction Competition; his next published work, which appeared in GQ in 1994, won that magazine's Frederick Exley Fiction Prize. While in graduate school, Anastas was fiction editor of the Iowa Review. After finishing his M.F.A., Anastas was awarded the Paul Engle Fellowship.