The assignment: Craft a novel from the literary equivalent of found objects. Consider the narrative possibilities contained not just in letters and e-mails, but in school report cards, emergency room bills and police reports filed by night managers at Westin Hotels. The resultant work must have a compelling plot, a strong sense of place and fully realized characters. Make it warm, dark, sad, funny — and a little bit screwball.
It was nearly 20 years ago that I first read A Good Man in Africa. I lived in India at the time, and aspired to write sweeping literary fiction of the sort that featured memsahibs sipping sweet lime sodas against the backdrop of heat and dust. The writing wasn’t going so well, but there were many things to blame, apart from my own bad prose — the frequent power outages, the dry heat that seemed to bifurcate my brain, the travails, sometimes screwball in nature, of life abroad. Like the time our driveway was transformed into a funeral home, a body lying in the sun, in state, for days.
