"I've always been very interested in philosophy," says first-time novelist Matthew Stadler. "But fiction allows me to explore things in a way that's impossible using analytical thought. It's become clear that what draws me (to write fiction) is some vivid experience I can't make sense of."

The vivid experience that started Stadler working on his recently published novel Landscape: Memory was "the feeling of loss in the middle of memory...the simultaneity of the two. I didn't start with a character whose story I wanted to tell." In arriving at a fictional frame work in which to explore his theme, Stadler chose to set the novel in 1914, during preparations for the San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exhibition.

"It was the Palace of Fine Arts that got me interested initially. Maybeck designed it as an instant ruin for the World's Fair." The building was so admired that instead of dynamiting it along with the rest of the exhibition, the city of San Francisco kept it intact. "Maybeck agreed to let it stand but suggested cedars be planted all around it so that the building could fall into ruin as the cedars grew to take its place. That seemed to perfectly capture what I wanted to express...how to keep the memory of something without freezing it."

Max, the narrator of the novel, tells the story through his diary, or as he calls it, his "memory book." Stadler says the diary of an adolescent seemed the perfect form because it is inherently "self-absorbed and self-obsessed."

Stadler spent about three years doing period research, reading popular fiction and non-fiction, diaries, newspapers, and Sears catalogs of the time. "Then I took a few months off before I started writing. I didn't want the book to feel bogged down in details. My model as a reader is Margaret Yourcenar because she writes inside the time rather than outside it. I wanted that same feeling—I wanted the book marinated and saturated in the time."

Photo by Rick Gerharter

An unusual feature of the novel is a series of photographs that show Max's landscape painting as it progresses. Stadler had to do the complete series of paintings three times, photographing each layer as he went along.

"The first time was as I wrote the first draft, then I did the whole painting again. The photography wouldn't have worked well enough to reproduction, so I slept three months in the basement of the Chrysler Building next to a photography studio. I'd paint a layer then have it photographed. The expense of reproducing the paintings was a problem—the book had to be printed on higher quality paper. We went to a number of publishers before Scribner, but I'm glad in a way. The book turned out very well."

With another novel already finished and a third well on its way, Stadler says he's less interested in writing short fiction, a form he finds mechanical. "Novels have a more organic feel. I'm not pulling switches or pulling levers to make things happen."

And the novel-in-progress? What's it about?

"I'm very interested in maps," Stadler says. "That's what the book's about...maps as metaphor and theme."