1/2/2023 0 Comments The middleman olen steinhauer![]() ![]() So again I looked back on my earlier books, and asked if they examined the contemporary world as I experienced it now. Inevitably, I thought of how she, once she became interested, would look back on my life’s work. It wasn’t just the state of American politics that brought it on it was also the maturation of our daughter, who, at twelve, is more politically and socially aware than I was as a high school senior. I’ve written elsewhere about how The Middleman came from my own political anxieties, feelings that grew more acute with the approach of the 2016 election. To my mind, I was continuing that trend with The Middleman, a sprawling novel about political anxiety set (unlike my other novels) almost entirely within the United States. I was enjoying these standalones, coming up with new ensembles and stories each year or so. ![]() So I changed locales and characters with The Cairo Affair, then switched gears again with the slim All the Old Knives. Repetition is anathema to most writers, and I didn’t think I had a new story for Milo that would be fresh enough to justify a year of work. Though I’d never had plans to retire Milo completely, by the end of the trilogy that urge to shift gears nibbled at me again. Happily, Milo’s initial trilogy, beginning with The Tourist and ending with An American Spy, worked out pretty well. Sometimes these shifts are tectonic, though more often they’re incremental, the shifts more apparent to the writer than to the casual reader, and some shifts are more successful than others. We look back on our work, notice its limitations, and feel a natural impulse to go beyond, to go further. I suspect this kind of shift is common for writers who have a few books under their belt. Thus, Milo Weaver, reluctant CIA officer in the Department of Tourism, was born. Instead of dealing with the world I was living in, I feared, I was leaning into the 20/20 hindsight of history in order to avoid the confusion of the contemporary world. ![]() My earlier writing-five novels set in Eastern Europe during the Cold War-had begun to feel like a kind of escape from the messy, post-9/11 world unfolding around me. When I first began writing about Milo Weaver in 2007, I was attempting to change course creatively. ![]()
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