Christopher paul bollen biography books

Books are often described as being “cinematic.” But the experience of reading Christopher Bollen’s 600-plus-page novel, Orient (Harper), is more akin to binge-watching an entire season of a serialized TV show: there’s the everyone’s-a-suspect-trust-no-one tone of Gracepoint and Secrets and Lies, plus the locals-versus-weekenders tension of The Affair. Throw in a dash of Law & Order-esque ripped-from-the-headlines high-profile murders, and you have all the makings of a complex and addictive mystery.

We enter the fictionalized version of the actual village of Orient, Long Island, through the eyes of 19-year-old Mills Chevern, a foster care refugee from Modesto, California, who is whisked away from a life of drug abuse and homelessness in New York City by Paul Benchley, who enlists his help in cleaning out his childhood home. The locals are instantly wary of the stranger among them, but Mills quickly strikes up a friendship with Beth Shepherd, an Orient native and failed painter who has recently returned to the North Fork with her wildly successful Romanian artist husband, Gavril, to start a family after 12 years of living in New York.

As they both begin to settle into their newfound small-town routines, the myriad dramas and secrets of suburban life begin to unfold: tensions over real estate being gobbled up by wealthy artists from the city; the push and pull of municipal politics; affairs and lies; Beth’s turmoil over her nascent pregnancy; and Mills’ burgeoning homosexuality, especially as it relates to Paul’s 17-year-old neighbor, Tommy Muldoon.

Bollen crafts all of these interweaving threads with impressive finesse and detail, and it’s a testament to his talent that the reader can become equally invested in them as they are in getting to the roots of the murders and arson that begin to pepper the narrative and launch the village into chaos and suspicion. My main complaint about Orient isn’t the leng

American writer (born 1975)

Christopher Bollen (born November 26, 1975) is an American novelist and magazine writer/editor who lives in New York City.

Describing his novels, The Daily Telegraph notes that "Bollen writes expansive, psychologically probing novels in the manner of Updike, Eugenides and Franzen, but he is also an avowed disciple of Agatha Christie."

Early life

Bollen grew up in Cincinnati, where he graduated from St. Xavier High School. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1998.

Career

Bollen was the editor-in-chief of Interview from early 2008 to mid-2009, after serving as editor-in-chief of V. After stepping down as editor-in-chief, he continued on as editor-at-large of Interview. On May 21, 2018, the publication ceased operations completely after nearly 50 years.

Bollen also writes about art and culture at other publications like Artforum and The New York Times.

Novels

Bollen published his first novel, Lightning People, in 2011.Lightning People is about downtown New York City in 2007.

His second novel is titled Orient, a thriller published in May 2015 by HarperCollins named after Orient, New York (the tip of the North Fork of Long Island). The Los Angeles Times writes that Orient "might well be this summer's most ambitious thriller or this summer's most thrilling work of literary fiction." The Times further describes it as a "juicy mystery at the tip of Long Island at summer's end, when the season's fleeting pleasures have blown away, revealing the fractured and fractious year-round community that remains behind when the casual visitors have returned to the relative safety of New York City."

Bollen's third novel, The Destroyers, was published on June 27, 2017, by HarperCollins. It is set on th

Christopher Bollen writes thrillers that are truly literary thrillers. Propulsive yet never prosaic, his plots race forward via text and texture. A Beautiful Crime (Harper/HarperCollins, Jan. 28) transports readers to a world of faded frescoes in moldering Venetian palazzi, along with two erudite men who’ve left New York to seek love and la dolce vita. Embrangled in a scheme of counterfeit antiques and dodgy real estate dealings, Nick Brink and Clay Guillory are gay grifters easy to root for. Bollen lets some big themes swirl—the uneasy overlaps of class, race, sexuality, American provincialism—while the reader spies Nick and Clay, by turns, “out-Ripley” one another. (The author’s often compared to Patricia Highsmith, though in A Beautiful Crime one may detect Graham Greene and Donna Tartt wafting across Venice’s canals.) Bollen is accustomed to sniffing out good stories: having sustained a career as a journalist, he is also a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. This interview took place by phone with Bollen, who was in the Berkshires touching up—what else?—a murder story for that periodical.

How do you feel about being consigned to the genre of literary thriller?

“Consigned” is the right word: I never know what kind of writer I am. I suppose I am a plot person. I don’t buy books for plot—and never read pulpy books—but I think in plot. I love a novel that takes craft seriously but also makes the most of intrigue. As a kid, I was obsessed with murder mysteries. Other kids idolized sports figures or had music posters—I had posters of Agatha Christie movies. (Laughs.) I wanted to be a private investigator and gradually realized that a writer is the closest you can get to that. I was desperate to solve a crime—I probably would have committed one just to solve it!

Christopher Bollen’s second novel Orient takes its title from the name of the small hamlet on the tip of the North Fork of Long Island. His story begins as summer draws to a close. Mills Chevern, a 19-year-old foster-home kid-turned-drifter who hails from California is taken pity on by Orient native Paul Benchley, a middle-aged architect living in Manhattan who finds the young man passed out in the hallway of his Chinatown apartment building. Paul’s about to head home to Orient, he’s inherited his mother’s old house after she died the previous year and the junk that’s accumulated needs clearing out. He offers Mills bed, board, and more importantly a chance to get away from the temptations of the city in return for help around the house. It all seems too good to be true, but soon after their arrival a series of tragedies rock the small community – the body of a local handyman is found floating in the bay; an old woman dies in mysterious circumstances; and then there’s a devastating house fire. The townsfolk close ranks and Mills finds himself under suspicion.

Like many of the best small-town-set mysteries, Orient is as much about the community as the unravelling of the mystery; the two elements are inextricably entwined. It’s the classic Twin Peaks formula, albeit without Lynch’s offbeat crazy. But Bollen’s setting isn’t generic American small-town; it’s specific to Orient through and through.

“It really couldn’t have been a book that happened anywhere,” he explains when I meet him for a chat in the bar of his hotel in Bloomsbury. “It grew out of this specific place that was so weird and intriguing, and hadn’t really been written about before.”

Plum Island, a small landmass just off the coast of Orient that’s home to a government animal-disease centre, was the setting for Nelson DeMille’s 1997 eponymous murder mystery, but Bollen’s novel is the first story that turns its attention to the hamlet itself. He came up wit