This Time, Patterson Opts for Warm Fuzzies Over Heebie-Jeebies

WASHINGTON —  Old porcelain bathtub? Check. New York apartment? Check. Persian cat? Check. Black Labrador retriever? Check. (Cat and dog are named Guinevere and Merlin, for bonus points.) Leather-bound diary? Check. Sobbing? Check.

James Patterson has written a novel, “Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas,” that trots out just about every trite-and-true trope known to romantic fiction.

And you’re just on the first page.

Read on. Window seat? Check. Heartbreak? By the bucketful. Heart attack? Yes. Death? You betcha. It’s the story of a woman who falls in love with a man who is in mourning for another woman.

“Suzanne’s Diary” has everything, including a spot this week at the tiptop of many bestseller lists.

Patterson, 54, has hit a home run. Now he’s taking his fist-pumping trot around the bases, visiting city after city to hawk his new humongoseller and to bask in the rich, very rich, applause.

He is wearing black pants, Top-Siders, a T-shirt and a pink sweater on a recent stop in Washington. It’s an awfully hot day for a sweater. “Do I look pretty in pink?” he asks no one. He lifts his wire-rim glasses, rubs his blue eyes and presses on.

First stop: a Fox television studio, where a pleasant chap asks Patterson how writing this book was different from penning his creepy, cut-them-up Alex Cross mysteries, such as “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider,” or his new Women’s Murder Club series.

Patterson, who is publishing three books this year, says he usually finishes his mystery novels in five or six drafts. “Suzanne’s Diary” took 10 or 11 drafts. The author is pleased with the outcome. “I’ve had a dozen people say to me, ‘This is the best book I’ve ever read in my life,”’ Patterson says, quickly adding, “I think that’s a little over the top.” Others are not so generous. “The operative word with ‘Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas’ is slick,” according to USA Today.

Publishers Weekly called it a “women’s weepy” that is “good enough to lightly pluck the heartstrings and to impress with its craft--and its calculation.” Asked if he deliberately set out to manipulate emotions in “Suzanne’s Diary,” Patterson says, “I think what you say may be true.” He adds, “I just want to give [readers] a good time.”

*

Lunchtime in Sterling, Va., and more than 100 women--and a few men--have shown up for a good time: James Patterson is signing books at Borders. He loosens the loving crowd up with a story.

One night he was having dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant in Washington with Sen. Fred Thompson, Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. Someone walks up to the illustrious group of actors and asks for the autograph of ... James Patterson. Patterson tells his fans, “Eastwood said, ‘I need a hit movie. Bad.”’

*

The crowd chuckles. Then James Patterson gets down to business. He tells the group that his new book is “James Patterson meets ‘Bridges of Madison County’ meets ‘Horse Whisperer.”’ There are some oohs and aahs.

He says another Alex Cross book will be out in November. He asks his fans to call out the title: “‘Violets Are Blue’!” they shout.

A woman raises her hand. Is there a poetry book in your future? “Absolutely not,” he says.

It’s a tantalizing question, though. “Suzanne’s Diary” has two poems in it.

The first is written by the main male character, Matthew Harrison, to his wife, Suzanne.

*

You are the explosion of carnations

in a dark room.

Or the unexpected scent of pine

miles from Maine.

*

The poem continues similarly for 34 more lines. At the end of it, Suzanne writes to her son, Nicholas, in her diary, that the poem proves once and for all that Matt--her husband, Nicholas’ dad--”is a stunningly good writer.”

Harrison is so good, in fact, that he submits another of his poems, “Nicholas and Suzanne,” to the Atlantic Monthly in the novel and the magazine accepts it. On his birthday! The first and last stanzas:

Who makes the treetops wave their

hands?

And draws home ships from foreign

lands,

And spins plain straw back into

gold

And has a love too large to hold ...

Who has the gift of making much?

From everything they hold or touch,

Who turns pure joy back into life?

For this I thank my son, my wife.

*

Time for a reality check. Peter Davison, the real-life poetry editor of the real-life Atlantic Monthly, says, “That poem would never be published in the Atlantic Monthly in the 21st century.”

Realism, however, is not James Patterson’s long suit.

He’s given to saying things like “I don’t care that much about detail” and “I don’t know anything about guns.”

And he’ll be the first to admit that he doesn’t really know Washington, though his popular Alex Cross series--which has sold millions of copies--is set here.

“It drives me crazy,” he says, when people insist on realism in fiction. It’s more important that a story “rings true emotionally.”