Our campus newspaper where I teach, The Creightonian, published a little article to mark the publication of my new novel… my bestselling novel… The War Begins in Paris.
Thanks to Elizabeth Jones for doing the piece. In a time when it’s hard enough for most big city newspapers to stay in print, I love that our campus newspaper is still going strong!
Wheeler, currently in his third year working at Creighton, covered both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections when he worked as a journalist.
“It was just a very challenging time to be a reporter, specifically a political reporter,” Wheeler said. “People would call me a liar. I knew other reporters who had been spit on or been attacked while just doing their jobs. So, I really wanted to write a novel that talked about reporters who did a lot of good, who did their job in good faith and did a lot of work towards preserving democracy.”
I was recently lucky to be interviewed by one of my favorite writers, and favorite people, in the world: Amina Gautier. Today, on Necessary Fiction, the interview went live!
We go deep on all three of my novels, the craft of writing about real things, and the challenges of being a journalist/novelist/professor. I really like these kinds of conversations that get more into the craft and experience of writing rather than focusing solely on the story of a specific book. I like them all, to be clear, but this kind comes my way less often. There’s still plenty about The War Begins in Paris too.
Thanks so much to Amina for her great questions and finding a platform. Amina has a new book out this month too, btw, The Best That You Can Do. You should go get it!
“Wheeler’s latest novel The War Begins in Paris follows Mielle aka Marthe Hess, a quiet, unobtrusive journalist living abroad in Paris. Having left her Iowa home and her Mennonite community she finds herself struggling to fit in with the gaggle of journalists, reporters, and correspondents in Paris. While others are there to cover the disturbing rise of Nazism and Fascism, she writes uncredited fashion and style columns for midwestern housewives. Raised to be meek, to dress plainly, to never raise her voice, Mielle goes unnoticed, invisible among her cadre of reporters, never quite fitting in until she strikes an unlikely friendship with the notorious Jane, whose influence drags Mielle into the war’s dark center.”
I’ll be headed down to Georgia in February for the Savannah Book Festival. SBF is one of the best book fests in the country, and it’s known for taking great care of it’s authors. I can’t wait!
What’s the strangest thing you had to do to create this story?
In order to better understand what it was like to be Mielle, I ended up buying a pair of brogan shoes and a long canvas jacket like one that she wears in the novel. Wearing her shoes and clothes helped a lot to feel what she would have felt, even though I was walking around Omaha and she was walking around Paris. Thinking about writing this novel during the Covid pandemic feels strange too, when put in comparison with what foreign correspondents experienced in 1938, on the edge of the war starting. That sense of looming catastrophe; the uncertainty and chaos; even having been personally rushed out of Paris. The details don’t match up, of course, but there was a lot of experiential overlap that helped get me in character.
Thanks so much to Erin Duerr for interviewing me on The Book Drop, the podcast of the Omaha Public Library. In addition to talking about my new novel, The War Begins in Paris, we talk about Omaha’s literary community and Dundee Book Company, my family’s tiny independent bookshop.
This is the first novel I wrote from start to finish as a published author, and the first since I became a bookseller. Every day when I got to work on these pages I tried to keep my audience in mind, treating the writing as a sort of performance and an invitation to engage. (As a book written mostly during the pandemic, maybe this was a matter of emotional survival.) The result is, I believe, my best work yet: an imaginative war novel that will challenge, delight, and resonate with many of the scores of readers I have met over the last six years, and hopefully many more.
All my work is topical in some way, but I think this is my most timely novel yet, as a novel about American fascism, but also about strained friendship and lost family. The idea for this story was born out of my experience as a political reporter during the last two presidential elections. The threats against journalists, the denigration of honest reporters, and the cynicism of propagandists—all this was on my mind as I worked on these pages.
Thanks so much to my family for putting up with my shenanigans. This is the fourth book we’ve launched together in seven years. That’s a lot of author relations work on their part, which isn’t easy. All my love. The same to my publishing family, especially my agent Stephanie Delman and editor Vivian Lee. Three novels together! And hopefully many more yet to come.
I hope you enjoy The War Begins in Parisat least a quarter as much as I did while writing it. Let me know what you think; share reviews online; come see me on my book tour; invite me to come visit your book club; request that your local library or bookstore put the book in stock; or suggest the book to a friend who might enjoy reading it. Most of all, I hope you have the time and inclination to read The War Begins in Paris. Whatever support you can give, I appreciate it, truly, knowing what it takes.
Best wishes. Yours in solidarity. Keep up the good fight.
You can read the entire review in the September 25, 2023 issue or on their website. In the meantime, here are some highlights:
Wheeler delivers an evocative and well-crafted story of two American journalists on a potentially fatal collision course in WWII Europe.
He effectively makes uses of the Damoclean sword he’s devised to maintain suspense, and the book’s ornate prose captures the period’s unsettling combination of horror and progress…
So happy to share an endorsement from my dear friend and collaborator, Kassandra Montag!
I publish nothing without showing it to Kassandra first and The War Begins in Paris is no different. Such a keen mind and generous spirit. She’s the best.
“A riveting novel with dynamic characters, The War Begins in Paris illuminates how intoxicating and destructive obsession can be. Wheeler ratchets up the drama with his nuanced, glowing prose, and portrays two complex women who believe in their ideals, no matter the peril. I couldn’t put it down.” —Kassandra Montag, author of After the Flood
What a thrill to have the great novelist Ron Hansen put his recommendation behind The War Begins in Paris! And even more so since Ron will be appearing with me, in conversation, at Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington DC on January 13!
So many of Ron’s novels have been an inspiration to me. The prologue to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is something I always go back to when trying to write the opening pages of a novel. It’s perfect. And Mariette from Ron’s Mariette in Ecstasy was a model for the character of Mielle in my new novel.
Still buzzing over this. What a rare mix of generosity and genius.
“Theodore Wheeler’s informed and fascinating novel uses the invented character of fashion reporter Marthe Hess to float us through this dark milieu and acquaint us with the financial, antisemitic, and often unthinking justifications for a journalist’s alliance with evil. The War Begins in Paris is a great idea for a book and it’s insightfully and thrillingly told.”
The War Begins in Paris will be published on November 14, 2023, but you can pre-order your copy now. (Order a signed copy here and have you shipped to you in November.)
Theodore Wheeler 