COLOR HIM PROMISING

UCI writing program grad's first novel is making a splash.

BY VALERIE TAKAHAMA
The Orange County Register

Unpacked boxes sit by the door in Andrew Winer's Laguna Beach duplex, and a row of small landscape paintings lean against a wall, as if awaiting final placement. As with many new domiciles, there's an air of fresh and expanding possibilities about the place.

It's doubly so in Winer's case. A graduate of University of California, Irvine's creative writing program, his first novel, "The Color Midnight Made," was published last summer and promptly landed on best-seller lists in Los Angeles and Denver. It got a nod from booksellers at independent stores, earned a half-dozen ringing endorsements from a range of authors who seem to have fallen hard for the book's young skateboarding hero, and received praise from reviewers, who seem smitten, too.

"(T)his coming-of-age story is wholly original, introducing a boy's narrative voice that seems an unlikely melding of Huck Finn and Duke, the tough teen from Warren Miller's 'The Cool World,' " novelist Susan Straight wrote in the Washington Post. "Conrad's voice, sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking, lifts the novel above so many other adolescent sagas ..."

Conrad, or Con, Clay is a 10-year-old growing up in a depressed mixed-race Navy town in the San Francisco Bay area. He's got a lot to deal with: His father, a drinker, loses his job when the naval station starts to shut down, his mother battles depression, his grandmother is sick and his best friend nearly deserts him. Despite the hard times, Con's natural resilience and hopefulness manage to shine through.

So how does a writer like Winer create a character who is so desperate to help his family that he sends a treasured Topps trading card to the landlord in hopes of buying more time to pay the rent?

"Part of it is I remember everything," says Winer, 36, whose own parents split up when he was 5 and whose mother struggled to raise him and his sister on her own in poor neighborhoods in and around Oakland.

"I think most writers of literary novels are coming from a place of pain when they write their books. This book was my attempt to find beauty and joy and humor amidst the pain."

Winer's progress from the East Bay poverty of his childhood to the comforts of Laguna Beach was as meandering as one of his hero's skateboarding adventures.

"After the divorce, we ended up living in a very blue-collar area. We were very poor," he says. "I looked around at my neighborhood and my friends, and I projected down the line. I said, I want to get out of this."

A good student in high school, Winer had gotten accepted to University of California, Los Angeles and was headed for the security of a career in computer engineering. In his senior year, he had a change of heart and switched majors to art. Then, after earning a master's from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, he moved to New York.

After an initial burst of success, he grew increasingly disenchanted with the art world's politics, and found himself drawn to film and to storytelling, and began writing screenplays. He moved back to the West Coast in the mid-'90s to try his luck in Hollywood.

"It's like I went from being a lawyer to a doctor," he says about his switch from painting to writing.

After about a year in Hollywood, he decided that he wanted to learn more about writing fiction, and applied at UCI. He says he knew little about the program except that novelists Richard Ford and Michael Chabon had studied there.

"I really like those writers," he says, "so I thought this might be a good idea. What I didn't know was how hard it was to get in. I'm glad I didn't know."

Starting at UCI in fall 1996, he began work on a novel based in part on his boyhood. One aspect of his youth that he tried to convey was the high priority that he and his friends placed on language, on inventing clever and funny ways of saying things.

"We didn't have money, we didn't have clothes, but we did have language," he says. "We were crack linguists. We were coming up with new ways of saying things every day."

In the book, Con and his friends refer to themselves and others as squids, gritties and brothas. They "deck down" or "sleaze over" to places on their skateboards. When Con and his friend Loop argue, Loop's mother says: "I'm gonna brown 'n' serve you two like a couple of crispy links if you don't quit it." It's a mix of Navy slang, black urban vernacular, skateboard terminology and pure authorial invention.

That kind of wordplay, he says, has become even more common today than when he was growing up in the '70s.

"I think African-American culture has influenced other ethnicities in terms of its inventiveness of language. Now it's pan-ethnic," he says.

"Having taught at UC Irvine, the incoming freshmen from Orange County high schools, you now have Asians, Armenians, Indians and blacks all speaking dialects, this new American dialect that keeps evolving every year. Words change. The ways of saying things change."

While he was writing, Winer discovered Dickens, another writer who trained his lens on the lives of impoverished children. It proved to be a mixed blessing.

"My 200-page manuscript ballooned into 700 pages of Dickensian plot and characters," he says.

On the advice of Geoffrey Wolff, director of the program, he began to prune back the manuscript.

"I had to refigure out what is the heart of this story. And then it was easy. Then it became fun to hack out all the subplots that didn't go to the heart of the story," he says.

His progress on the novel was also slowed when a screenplay that he had co-written was bought by Fox/New Regency for the producing team that made "Dumb and Dumber" and "There's Something About Mary." Called "Honky!" it's the story of "the whitest man on the planet," a role slated to be played by David Arquette.

Its sale sent the writer on a "spree of pitching and hooking up with talent and actors" that ultimately went nowhere.

For now, Winer, who is engaged to novelist Charmaine Craig, another UCI graduate, plans to alternate screenwriting with novel writing. He's also teaching creative writing at Pomona College, where his colleagues this fall will include novelist David Foster Wallace.

And he already has an idea for a second novel, this one about a young artist from the West who goes to the big city flush with ambition and full of promise.