In writing a novel conceiving of a world that keeps on moving faster, it’s only natural that Alex Foster got around to ruminating on the concept of time. In general, the writer from Chicago prefers to take in the world around him more slowly than society allows — he prefers reading weekly news in lieu of daily coverage, and has virtually no social media presence.
“Books are a slow medium in a fast world, and unfortunately, even in the world of books, there’s been more and more pressure for authors to participate in this sort of fast-attention economy in publishing,” Foster said in an interview with WSN. “But books are still the slowest thing we’ve got, even if they’re getting a little faster, and that has always appealed to me.”
His soon-to-be published debut novel, “Circular Motion,” chronicles a reality in which an aircraft network allows people to travel overseas and across borders in a flash. It’s largely told from the perspective of two narrators: Tanner, who begins working for the company as a means to evade his sequestered upbringing in Alaska, and Winnie, an ostracized tween who initially seeks purpose in activism against the company. Their story unfolds over years as the geographic and social implications of the system so integrated into their lives emerges — as a consequence of the transport system’s mechanisms, days begin moving faster and faster. As the novel progresses, readers will get the sense that events are unfolding under an inevitable ticking clock. Gaps between time jumps grow increasingly smaller, but conditions continue to spiral beyond any individual or corporation’s control.
For Foster, a career in writing was not always the end goal. He studied economics at the University of Chicago and intended to pursue a doctorate in the same subject. Following graduation, he worked for The World Bank on development economics in Ghana.
“The work in Ghana had me thinking a lot about globalization, the way that corporate decisions on one side of the world affect life an ocean away,” Foster said.
After working on projects in Accra for four months, Foster began working for an economic consulting firm. He felt that the company’s research was unreliable and twisted toward client interest, despite sometimes being produced for the public sector. He began to have doubts about pursuing a Ph.D. and continuing to work in that field.
Foster’s professional trajectory and realization inform the way he illustrates the corporation that serves as the nexus of his novel: CWC, the aircraft network company, is one of the novel’s strongest constants even as the world begins to shift, change and break down around its protagonists. As climate change becomes an increasing concern around CWC’s operations, press manipulation and wavering attitudes within the company reflect different levels of disapproval and dissent.
Writing his characters’ ways of reckoning with their loyalties in the face of impending, inevitable world disaster was also a means for Foster to reflect on his experiences in the industry.
“People find themselves in jobs after college where they are working really hard and feeling that the work they do is not making people’s lives better — and maybe even the harder they work, the more they’re hurting people,” Foster said. “What was somewhat unique in my case, is that my work was in economics. So while I was having this sort of personal experience, I was also studying the very systems in which this experience was located.”
Foster moved to New York in 2019 alongside his now-wife and has lived mostly in Brooklyn since then. During three of those years, he completed his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at NYU. He also worked as an adjunct Creative Writing instructor and served as the Fiction Editor at the Washington Square Review, the university’s graduate literary magazine, while pursuing his master’s degree. He enjoyed the freedom allowed by the role and now works as an editorial assistant at Henry Holt & Company.
Working for a publishing house has given Foster a keen sense of the analysis that occurs on both sides of the editorial exchange. He’s aware of the expectations that can be imposed for marketability with fiction, from theme to word count — on the second front, he joked, “I’m sure you can tell from my book that I’m a maximalist.”
“Circular Motion” comes in at 368 pages, but Foster notes that its longest draft weighed in at some 560 pages. It was a labor of love and iteration, and he estimates that at least three full manuscripts went into the final product. He joined the MFA program with what was essentially the first draft of “Circular Motion.” During his time in the program, Foster exchanged excerpts with classmates and attended workshops run by adjuncts and authors like Jonathan Safran Foer. Author Jeffrey Eugenides served as his advisor on “Circular Motion,” which was Foster’s thesis, and has a blurb on the novel’s cover.
In total, Foster worked on the novel for around seven years — time, he says, that was well spent to expand his plot and themes in a way that mattered.
“It was important to me that this wasn’t just some crude allegory for the world spinning out of control,” Foster said. “I wanted to do what books can do so well, which is give you a feeling so you are not just receiving the idea that the world is spinning out of control, but you are experiencing [it].”
Contact Eleanor Jacobs at [email protected]
