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| Jonathan Santlofer (photo: Douglas Lyle Thompson) |
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Jonathan Santlofer is an artist and the author of several books, including a memoir (The Widower's Notebook), and works of fiction (The Last Mona Lisa, The Lost Van Gogh). He is the recipient of two National Endowment of the Arts grants, and serves on the board of Yaddo. He lives in New York City. His new novel, Ten Perfect Guests (Sourcebooks Landmark, September 8, 2026), is a contemporary thriller in which guests are invited to a remote island for a memorial service, only to find themselves stranded, their lives and livelihoods threatened.
You're written numerous books, but you are also a painter, and several of your previous books are about artists. Ten Perfect Guests is, in a way, also about an artist (although the artist in question is dead). How does your work as a visual artist inform your writing, and vice versa?
I had a very serious art career as a painter, and I was actually pretty blessed. I had a very successful career. And then I had this big show in Chicago, and they had gathered the best paintings from museums and collectors, and the place burned down. That was really a turning point, because I only ever wanted to be an artist. I thought it was the only thing I was good at. After the fire, I was having a lot of trouble painting, but I started a novel.
Art school and being a painter are very disciplined. It is flow. It takes a lot of time and physical energy. I would say there's a similarity to almost all creative acts, which is that kind of bond you set up with the thing you're working on. Making marks on a paper or a canvas and reacting to them and putting words down and trying to make sense of them as you go along. They are very, very different. But also very similar.
This book is a different genre for you, after two historical novels. Did you have a different starting point, or a different writing process?
I rarely think about my books in that way. I mean, they're always organic. Although this is the first book that I really plotted ahead of time. Usually I have an idea, I know the beginning very well, and I know where it's going to end up in many ways. But this book I had to think about a bit differently, because having 10 main characters was a huge challenge. I had to figure out ways that I could keep them straight, and the reader could keep them straight. At one point I had charts pinned up on the wall with a little biographical data. I always want to understand my characters and feel a kind of empathy for them. So along the way I wrote biographical sketches of all of them, which I kept adding to and figuring out, even when I wasn't using much of that in the book itself.
I wanted to write a book that had the feel of an Agatha Christie novel, like a nest of vipers. One where nobody was instantly likable at all, which I don't really care about--a character that holds your attention is what I'm interested in.
What makes an unlikable character most fascinating to you?
Someone said to me about this book, "It must have been fun to work with all those nasty people." And, yes, absolutely, it was fun. But I don't really think of them that way. I think of them as a group of really flawed people, and along the way, you learn why they are the way they are.
It's a bunch of brats who get their due, a group of characters invited to a memorial they have to go to or risk forfeiting their inheritance. So the stakes are high for all of them, but many of them are certainly penalized far greater than the harms they caused. I feel something for all of them. They're trapped. They can't leave. Who's going to survive? Will anybody survive?
Is there anyone you sympathized with the most, or enjoyed writing the most?
Perhaps Nicky, the dead man's son. I just came to feel more and more for him and the mistakes he'd made in his life. And here's something--now we're going to have a little mild therapy session. The issues with his father? I had a rough father, and so I think as I wrote him, I wrote some of me into him too; I drew on myself.
But I also I liked the ex-wife, the artist. I kind of loved her, actually.
I don't like the way they all comport themselves in the world, and I'm not saying this is the way you should act, because I don't think it's the way you should act, but I did like them.
What it was like to approach a locked room (or locked island, as it were) mystery? Did it feel confining to you at all as a writer?
You know, the subject of what you're writing demands a certain kind of way that you are saying it. Finding the voice and the way to tell a story is so tied up with the kind of story you're telling. So for this, early on, I knew it had to be an omniscient voice, very close, so that you felt like as you were reading each character. But in fact, it's all one voice, right?
It's not that the island limited me. Or maybe it did in a way that was good: it focused me.
How did you go about preparing to write in this genre?
When you choose a genre, it immediately gives you a certain kind of container, because it has a history. I read a lot of people who I had not read in a long time: Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe (mainly for getting inside the head of the lunatic, which he's so good at). Christie is a plotter. Her plots are kind of amazing.
Everything in the way this book is made is known. Going in, I knew I had a big group of people, the isolation, the different personalities coming together. So, how do you invest that with new life? That was fun part, bringing it into the moment, seeing what you can do with it to make it alive and pertinent right now. --Kerry McHugh