Publication History
Monahan wrote the novel while studying Elizabethan and Jacobean drama at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Monahan completed a draft of Light House on May 18, 1991, but then "stuck it in a drawer". It remained unpublished until 1993 when he gave it to the literary magazine Old Crow Review to serialize to benefit a food charity. In 1995, a short review from an editor at Factsheet Five described the serial run of Light House as a "gritty screwball comedy set in a Massachusetts coastal hotel during a raging winter storm" that is "very, very funny".
After the original serialization of Light House, Monahan reluctantly rewrote the novel several times at the urging of his agent in New York City. In 1998 Light House was sold to Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Putnam, and Warner Bros. immediately optioned the film rights while the novel was still in manuscript. Penguin Putnam wanted to delay publishing the novel in order to release it concurrent with the anticipated film release. Warner Bros. hired Monahan to write the screenplay adaptation of Light House.
| “ | The book's subtitled 'A Trifle,' and it is one. I can't stress enough how bored I was with the fiction in print when I wrote it. The American writer is supposed to be very grave and solemn and really provincial and take himself very seriously and write the best book in the world — and, of course, they never do. I wanted to do something beyond old-hat Joycean tricksterism. Find a way to take postmodern hyperconsciousness and work it back into a book that functions as an accessible entertainment, so there's something for everybody, the way it should be, the way Hamlet works. | ” |
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—William Monahan, interviewed in The Hartford Courant |
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In 2000, Light House: A Trifle was finally published in hardcover, and then, the following year, in paperback. Monahan and Bruno Maddox, a fellow former Spy editor, went on a joint book tour billed as the "Minor Novelists Tour" that was interrupted by the 9/11 attacks.
Less than four years after the novel's publication, Monahan bought back the film rights to Light House "I didn't like how the book was published. They wanted to wait for the movie to be made. I got a little hostile. When I was in Spain on Kingdom, I realized I could buy it back. It was an empty, damaging gesture." In an interview with Collider.com he stated that, "It was demoralizing to write a really good book and to realize how little the rewards were, even though the book did quite well, as far as first novels are concerned." Light House was available in a German edition, translated by Ulrike Seeberger.
Read more about this topic: Light House: A Trifle
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