The 14th novel is out
Don’t let the bird fool you. George Michelsen Foy is a serious, kick-ass writer.
There have been many stints:
Merchant mariner. Reporter for The Register newspaper on the mid-Cape (where he was born). Newsroom wire rip-and-read guy at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. Copy editor at The Cape Cod Times, ditto Business Week in Manhattan. Freelancing in Afghanistan for Rolling Stone while the Russians hung on, trying to convince Editor Jann Wenner to front him $5000 to buy a Stinger missile from Afghan guerrillas to prove it came from the CIA. Teacher at NYU.
We could go on.
But always, writing. Whatever the gig, including family demands, that’s the constant. And Cape Cod always has been red right returning, including to this day a home in Cotuit.
His first published novel in 1984 was “Asia Rip,” named for fishing grounds off our shores (though some, confused, thought it had to do with the Far East), a hardcore local tale told mostly from the water while including a great scene on the railroad bridge over the Cape Cod Canal. Five agents later, even more publishing houses, a literary name change from Foy to Michelsen then Foy again (for commercial reasons to be explained but not celebrated), he’s back.
The “news hook,” as Foyboy might say, is that Guernica Press in Canada has just published his 14th novel, “The Last Green Light.”
(OK, that sentence is a bit clause-ridden and does include timeline uncertainty: “Just”? Early May actually. Plus conjecture: Do we really know Foy might say that? Ah hell, give the writer some latitude, let it go.)
And what is this novel about?
If you said Jay Gatsby, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” you’d be wrong. But if you said this new novel is inspired by that one, couldn’t exist without it, and Gatsby shows up, you’d be right.
“The first time I read that book in my 20s, and every time since, well I’ve always appreciated the writing,” says Foy. “But also I always thought it was kind of a fraud. It was supposed to be ripping the mask off the American Dream and all that, but in fact the books lives off the glitzy, the writer is only interested in rich people. What about everybody else? People doing the work? Bootleggers, rumrunners, people maintaining the boats?
“Of course that’s my personal shit, what I’m interested in, I happen to know about some of that as well as some New York waterfront history. So that’s this book.”
It also happens to be written by someone Nobel Prizewinner Doris Lessing referred to as “a storyteller who, like Conrad, can compress into a tale you can’t put down all the complexities of a time and place.”
That counts for something.
So does his friendship with the likes of me, that it matters to him whether the room where he was born was in Yarmouth or Barnstable (Cape Cod Hospital straddles towns, Foy would prefer Barnstable), that as a punk he drank at Joe’s Twin Villa which is a legendary place for those who know certain Cape Cod legends, that he also knows the Gatsby-esque Osterville scene, that his 39-foot sloop is capable of crossing the Atlantic and dammit one day he’s gonna do it even if it worries his daughter.
But what matters more is the work.
Titles pile up, ranging from what publishers call “literary” to “adventure” fiction, science fiction, non-fiction — “Hard Bottom,” “Coaster,” “To Sleep with Ghosts,” “Zero Decibels,” “Finding North,” even one in French (he’s fluent) set in Africa, “Enquête sur Kamanzi.” Foy refuses to remain “consistent,” ie “pigeonholed,” though water and waterfront, hardboiled characters, show up a fair amount.
This restless range bedevils agents and publishers. That’s why at a certain point he took a family name, Michelsen, and used it for sci-fi.
Yet he keeps getting published, tough any day and age but even tougher now. To be brutal about it, he’s an older, not-famous white guy in a market that celebrates younger writers boasting “mediagenic” looks (whatever that means).
Teaching creative writing since 1999 as an adjunct professor at NYU has helped, and while Foy doesn’t talk much about it he has family resources as well. None of that detracts or subtracts from commitment to craft; the man has another six novels in the closet, in his opinion several ready for prime time.
“They’re like children,” he smiles. “You never want to give up on them and you always want them to get into the world.”
That means pitching ideas — though more non-fiction these days, easier to sell — trolling for the next agent and publisher, hustling book signings, soliciting reviews. None of this is celebrated in the “romance novel” version of what it means to be a no-bullshit writer who can claim real success though no Grisham/King bestsellers, no mega-movie deals.
That fosters humility, self-deprecation, dark humor. When I mentioned I wanted to write about him and his new book, here’s what he emailed back (in part):
And if you'd like to substack lots of salty, insulting, just this side of libelous comments based on my sorry ass and sorrier writing career I would dig that. I'm trying desperately to get more than 6 people reading this novel 'cause I think it's worth the read.
It is.
His ass might be sorry, that I don’t know about, but I can say for sure that his writing career has a heroism to it, talent and grit, insight, discipline, ambitious idealism playing their parts.
It may not be the fulfillment of his grandest dreams, but his written run, with more ground yet to cover, already is one of the strongest literary marathons undertaken by anyone alive on Cape Cod.
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Seth, a truly great, well written review! Thanks for your investigative Cape Cod writings! When will I see your next book (if it’s not your “first”).