Mother of All Deadlines

You have to admire the way Thomas Keneally gets to work. In 1980, he walked into a luggage store in Beverly Hills looking for a briefcase, talked to the owner, a Holocaust survivor, and walked out with the idea for a book. Two years later, his novel Schindler’s List was published. In 2002, he tells us, he read an extraordinary study of Saddam Hussein by Mark Bowden in The Atlantic Monthly. Again, two years later, there’s a book. More than 40 books now, and he has said he believes this one to be his best.

Perhaps it is. Keneally is a writer’s writer, and he knows what makes other writers tick—what plays to their vanities and what gives them nightmares. And the central conceit of this novel is every writer’s ultimate nightmare: the imposition of a literally absolute deadline. Produce, on time, or you’re dead.

You have to admire the way Thomas Keneally gets to work. In 1980, he walked into a luggage store in Beverly Hills looking for a briefcase, talked to the owner, a Holocaust survivor, and walked out with the idea for a book. Two years later, his novel Schindler’s List was published. In 2002, he tells us, he read an extraordinary study of Saddam Hussein by Mark Bowden in The Atlantic Monthly. Again, two years later, there’s a book. More than 40 books now, and he has said he believes this one to be his best.

Perhaps it is. Keneally is a writer’s writer, and he knows what makes other writers tick—what plays to their vanities and what gives them nightmares. And the central conceit of this novel is every writer’s ultimate nightmare: the imposition of a literally absolute deadline. Produce, on time, or you’re dead.