Muir '05 surprises friends, family with 'Thomasovitch' project

Just before intersession started, Travis Muir '05 surprised his peers with a party celebrating the release of his Princeton-themed novel "Thom-asovitch." The event was a surprise to even Muir's closest friends. He said he kept his undertaking a secret from all but a few during the two years that it took to write his manuscript.

"I just didn't want people to know what I was doing," Muir said. "When people came into my room and saw me going through a big stack of papers and asked what I was doing, I just said I was working on papers."

"I found out during sophomore year," said Dave Vermylen '05, Muir's roommate. "He was sitting on the couch one day, marking up this stack of typed sheets with a red pen. I said, 'What are you working on?', and he was like, 'Oh, it's my novel.'"

After submitting his manuscript to about a dozen publishers, Muir learned in Oct. 2002 that American Book Publishing, a publisher that often works with first-time authors, had accepted "Thomasovitch" for publication.

After the book's January release, Muir finally told his friends about the book by emailing them invitations to a "release bash" in his dormitory.

"When I got the email, I was completetely shocked," said Matthew Losch '05.

Many found the achievement even more surprising given that Muir's major is History, not English. Muir said that despite his interest in writing and success with "Thomasovitch," he has no plans for a future in literature.

Muir said he wrote the book's first chapter while sitting on a bench outside the University Chapel one night in the fall of his freshman year. The next chapter, written soon after, was the book's ending; for the next two years Muir steadily and secretly filled in the gap, writing about eight pages a week.

"I didn't tell either of my parents that I was writing until I got the publishing contract," Muir said. "I called them pretty much as soon as I knew, but I'd been working on it for nearly a year before I told them."

He added, "I'm not sure why I waited so long — I guess I didn't want to build it up in case I never finished it."

"Thomasovitch," set among the arches and gargoyles of modern-day Princeton University, is the story of a capable Princeton senior named Thomas Reed. Reed has little difficulty negotiating college life itself; gifted in every field, he yawns his way to success in the classroom, the football field and the eating club. A third-generation Princetonian, Reed seems comfortable in his place, as though he is taking the helm of a machine that has been kept in perfect working condition during decades of service.

However, as Reed's graduation approaches, he begins to feel constricted. Reed is expected to find a "nice girl," a "good job," and all the other elements that will keep him parroting his father's and grandfather's lives for the rest of his own. The prospect of an entire life of the thoughtless ease Reed has previously enjoyed suddenly looms before him like a knell of doom.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

The title "Thomasovitch" is a reflection of both this fear and Reed's love of Russian literature, one of Reed's few passions not drilled into him by tradition or business acumen. In Russian surnames, the suffix "-ovitch" means "son of." "Thomas-ovitch" is therefore "the son of Thomas." As the son of the son of the original Thomas Reed, the novel's protagonist feels he can only be described in relation to his forebears and that he is a mere copy of a fading original.

As Reed makes fervent but unguided attempts to cut himself free of his life's pattern, he reveals an increasingly unbalanced mindset. After a few drinks at an eating club, Reed hallucinates that students there have morphed into middle-aged bankers and is thrown out when he tries to tear off someone's necktie. He draws some friends into a campus prank that culminates in a late-night police chase. He throws a fit in a local nightclub. Worst yet, he publishes lyric poetry.

Revealing as each of these episodes is, none shifts the plot to a significantly new place. As a protagonist, though, Reed seems to be of the Amory Blaine variety — one for whom it is "always the becoming . . . never the being," and around whom novels act as psychological frames rather than dynamic stories.

This means the reader must be prepared to spend a lot of time accompanying Reed on walks around campus, breakfasts at Pancake Joe's and silent reveries in eating clubs watching others and pondering What Is and What Might Be.

The reader is rewarded, however, with the contents of these reveries, as well as with the manifestations of a mind (Muir's) that has clearly also been focused on watching and thinking.

Much of the book's theme is directed against the prosperity and consumerism that turn individuals into job titles and prompt people to buy the "right" clothes and cars and to float mindlessly through their careers.

Muir makes some good insights into a certain societal mindset, and the novel's climax is psychologically credible. Muir also gives many sections interesting stylistic twists. In one, the text of a Russian novel is mixed with a stream-of-consciousness dictation of Reed's distracted thoughts as he reads, giving the reader a window into Reed's unstable mind. In another, Muir articulates Reed's creative ecstasy upon waking up with an original poem written in his head; later, when the job-immersed Reed tries to write another poem and can think of nothing more original than old song lyrics, the contrast is heartbreaking.

Fans of Amory Blaine might enjoy following his descendant in "Thomasovitch." The work is impressive for a young writer like Muir; whether he aspires to be another Fitzgerald, he'll make one hell of a historian.