author chat: David Annand, The Dice Was Loaded from the Start
The book takes place in a Hampstead neighborhood full of couples that moved there in the seventies and eighties and have watched the street gentrify, the value of their property climbing every year. Then Max and his young family move onto the street, bringing a Gen X perspective to the Boomers. He spends his evenings going between their houses, enjoying the parties and card games that they fill their empty-nester, retiree—or close to it—life with, endearing himself to them. His family can only live there because of the extremely high housing stipend afforded by his wife's bank job. There's a share house full of people in their early twenties that blooms up halfway through the book, moving into an abandoned house awaiting its renovation permits, that ruffle the feathers of the Boomers and that Max is drawn towards, even as he feels conflicted, in their presence. Max becomes a sort of through-line for the generations, close enough to see pieces of both of their sides. This is my favorite kind of novel where "nothing happens" but everything does. The world opening out wider and wider for both Max and the reader. What's so impressive about the novel is the way that it intimately and non-judgementally manages to render all three generations on the page, showing where there are through lines that everyone embedded within the conflict can't see (and that all of us online struggle with), perfectly capturing the crossed wires.
I was lucky enough to get to chat with David Annand about the novel, the Dire Straits lyric, bookplates, working in magazines, and drawing the bow of tension through a novel that is most deeply rooted in its people.
“Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits plays a central role in this novel. I stupidly didn’t realize it until later that the title comes from the lyrics, but I was excited by the epigraph. It figures into the story itself when Max is surprised that Zoe knows the song, and it proves to be a small bridge between them, beyond its larger thematic implications to the overall novel. At what point in the writing process did the song become enmeshed with the novel?
It occurred to me that it would be funny – at least to me – if the younger cohort on the street gave Max the nickname ‘Cishet’ on account of his navy blue overshirts and general Glastonbury Dadness, and I found myself humming ‘Oh, Cishet, the dice was loaded from the start’ to the tune of "Romeo and Juliet". It was only then that it occurred to me that The Dice Was Loaded from the Start would make a good title for the book.
The novel, while feeling completely modern, is set in the summer of 2018, which is much longer ago than I’d initially realized. Did you always know you were going to set the book specifically in the recent past? What was the motivation for picking that particular moment over the 2020s or just a general “modern times” orientation.
Setting it in 2018 meant Max could be both 42, which may or may not be a good age for a man, and be born in 1976 like me. I think it works well as back then the nation was still grappling with Brexit, which was at least to some extent, the old screwing the young. And I like the idea of this major event looming in the form of the pandemic, though the characters of course don’t know it, which will see the young make huge sacrifices largely for the old.
I was struck, reading the novel, how intimately understood everyone is and how we’re shown what fundamentally informs their different outlooks in a very open way. I was particularly moved by the moment that Max realizes that Zoe and her friends have never been offered an optimistic outlook on the future, how they’re the last generation born to parents with that optimism. I’ve always thought that’s what defines my generation (though I’m an older Gen Z) but is rarely articulated in this way. How did you get so honestly inside of all of these characters to present the story in this way?
One of the major themes of the book is blitheness of my generation. We came of age in an era of optimism, which I think has lulled us into this sense that everything will always be alright in the end. But I think we also suffer from a slightly unknowable psychic wound, a deep sense of loss at the lack of a viable emancipatory politics in the current imaginary. Mark Fisher’s famous line that ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ is particularly keenly felt, I think, by those born in the 1970s. And that, for me, has been a way in to imagining what it is like for younger people to experience that absence of hope.
The book is really an amalgamation of evenings Max spends getting to know Pemberton Place. While an arbitrary definition, it’s a “quieter” sort of book. How did you go about giving shape and tension to a story that is largely about contemplation and ideas over traditional plot milestones?
I guess not much happens in terms of big dramatic set pieces, but I hope it gets a sense of forward momentum from the Max-Bryony-Zoe triangle of sorts, and the sense that the youngsters have something planned, which the book is building towards.
I will say, part of this tension is that Max ends up in these tense attractions with two women on the street—despite being married. Beyond the honesty of the connection, they seem tied to Max’s frustrations in his life and career feeling stale and Zoe and Bryony also seem to represent the qualities Max is most drawn to in their respective generations. How did you go about threading these very subtle relationships through the narrative? Was there ever a version of the story where they don’t stay so contained?
Even though Max is happily married he feels emboldened to behave like this because he is part of a generation that has placed an outsized emphasis on jokes and irony: treating much of life as kind of game means that anything is permissible, basically, as long as it’s approached with a knowingly arched eyebrow. And I’m also aware that so much of our inner life is made up of speculation, thought experiments, daydreaming. We live out whole dramatic existences internally that often bear little resemblance to external reality – the import of a relationship doesn’t always depend on its consummation.
A big part of this story is about making art. Bryony has a very traditional career as a visual artist having some successful shows and coming back to it through commissions. Max seemed like he was going to gain similar traditional success but floundered afterwards, and Zoe comes from a very DIY point of view. Did writing the novel alter or inform your perspective on art-as-career or the difference in the pathways open between Bryony’s generation, or even Max’s, and now?
I’m sure I’m not alone in lamenting the death of the midlist author of the 70s and 80s. Or at least the midlist author as they exist in my imagination – writers who don’t sell a lot of books but get by happily on their earnings from fiction and quietly knock out a book every few years – which sounds like an impossible dream to me and many writers of my generation. I can’t speak for what it was actually like in the past but the current ‘art-as-career’ path feels particularly narrow and fraught, and our old friend AI looms on the horizon, which will hit Zoe’s generation hardest. I wrote a short story a while back that captures my feelings about it all: https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-writers-came-at-night
At the end of the book, Max is cornered into making a major decision that breaks beyond the bounds of simply having personal consequences. Zoe wants him to help with her final act of demonstration. This ends up highlighting both the weight that comes with getting further into adulthood and having your choices impact more than you as an individual and also simply showcases a dispositional divide between them, as much as Max seems to want to be more like Zoe. Did you always know how Max was going to react to Zoe’s query? Was the ending plotted from the beginning or something you arrived at in the course of writing the novel?
I don’t want to reveal too many plot spoilers but let’s just say that a reflexive default to irony and a desperation never to be thought of as being credulous mean that Max and his generation find genuine aesthetic or political commitment very difficult indeed….
The Dice Was Loaded from the Start is your second novel. Writers love to talk about how uniquely difficult the second book is. Did you find that to be true, or did you notice any major shifts in your writing process this time around?
I had actually started working on a different manuscript and was about seven chapters in and struggling to work out how to resolve the second half of it when I found myself increasingly preoccupied with the idea that would go on to become The Dice Was Loaded from the Start. So perhaps it’s true that I did find the second book uniquely hard!
In addition to your fiction, you’ve also worked in magazine editorial. How did you get into magazines? Did you take anything you learned from your time in journalism into your fiction writing career?
I did a lot of editing other people’s work during my magazine days and because of that I have a great respect for the editing process, which helps when it comes to writing fiction, I think. I have a few first readers, who contribute enormously to the process and I’m very lucky to have Sarah Castleton as my editor – she’s one of the best in the business.
You’ve created custom designed bookplates for the hardcover run of the novel that have bands from all the generations and Zoe’s famous slogan stamped on them. Readers can pick one up at bookshops across London, Paris, and Barcelona. How did the idea for creating these come about? How did you pick the musicians (from Taylor Swift to ACDC to Oasis) to reference?
Football fandom was one of the things explored in my first novel, Peterdown, and so, in order to develop a relationship with indie bookshops, I made a load of Panini-sticker themed bookplates for the hardback. I think they helped get the book out to more readers and so I thought I would do something similar for The Dice with bands doing the job of representing the generations. The composition of the bookplates was largely dictated by the people who created the sticker packs available online (which skew heavily to boomer thrash metal bands), and how many Taylor Swift stickers I could steal from my daughter.
I always like to ask writers I chat with what’s next for them. Are there any projects you can share anything about?
I am about to start writing another book. I have a good sense of the shape of it but basically haven’t written a word – a situation which feels in equal parts exhausting and exhilarating.
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