Dressed in jeans, a blue-striped button-down shirt and brown ankle boots, he looked like the prep-school squash star he once was. Schwartz, who is tall and retains a full head of honey-tinged locks. “I had to stop a couple of times and say, ‘Am I insane?’ ” said Mr. Told from the point of view of a fictional doppelgänger for Empress Michiko of Japan, the book traces the story of how the first commoner to marry into the Japanese imperial family was, at the age of 24, exposed to brutal public scrutiny and the unyielding rigors of royal life, robbing her of her identity and sending her into a crushing depression. But something about that early cocktail of emotions is echoed in “The Commoner,” his latest novel, which is being published Tuesday by Nan A. Schwartz went on to regain literary success as well as a happy domestic life. Schwartz, now 42, said recently, sitting in his garretlike study at the top of a brick town house in Brooklyn. “There is something about getting exposed publicly before you know who you are,” the still-boyish-looking Mr.
He fell into the grips of depression and began taking medication for it.
He moved to Paris and spent two years working on a novel that has yet to be published. His first novel, “Bicycle Days,” about a young Yale graduate who goes to live in Japan, grew out of his senior thesis at Harvard and was published on his 24th birthday, to strong reviews and a shower of attention.īut in the aftermath of that early success in 1989, he stumbled. By most standards John Burnham Schwartz enjoyed a charmed start to his writing life.
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