Nathaniel Rich is unquestionably a big name in the young, New York-based literati scene. He went to Yale, is a senior editor at Paris Review, and carries the high expectations that come along with an impressive pedigree: his father is New York Times columnist Frank Rich, and his brother, Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich, famously inked a book deal with Random House before he even graduated from college. That’s got to be a lot to live up to, so perhaps it’s no surprise that his first novel, The Mayor’s Tongue, is an ambitious attempt to pair together the stories of two men, one young and one old, who are both searching for something as heady as the meaning of life. At the age of 27, Rich has made an earnest attempt at creating a serious piece of literature (something that can’t necessarily be said for some of his contemporaries).

Rich is in town today for a 7 p.m. reading and book signing at Politics and Prose. He took some time while out on his first book tour to answer a few questions from DCist.

Your publisher is making a point of telling everyone that you wrote this book in secret. How much of a secret was it really? Given that you were already a fairly well-known writer and editor, did anyone actually ever ask you if you planned to write a novel, and you denied it?

I really didn’t tell a single person about the novel until I had finished a draft in early 2006. I began thinking about writing the novel in 2001. The only person who knew about it during those years was my girlfriend at the time, who I would keep awake with my typing when I worked at night. I didn’t let her read any of it, however, and that only made her more irritated. The truth is that I didn’t know whether I would be able to finish it and whether it’d be too crazy. Much of it was, in fact, too crazy, so I ended up making a lot of cuts during the two-year editing process. Some of the excised material—much of it about the character Constance Eakins—now exists in a slightly altered form on the website.

No one ever asked me if I planned to write a novel as far as I can remember. If they did, I probably just shrugged in response.

Photo of Nathaniel Rich by Mark Schäfer, courtesy Putnam | Riverhead