Meet the Authors
Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, Photograph © Oliver DelFosse
Watch the video of authors Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason discussing THE RULE OF FOUR.
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IAN CALDWELL attended Princeton University, where he studied history. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1998. DUSTIN THOMASON attended Harvard University, where he studied anthropology and medicine. He won the Hoopes Prize for undergraduate writing, and graduated in 1998. Thomason also received his MD and MBA from Columbia University in 2003. The two have been friends since they were eight-years-old.
A CONVERSATION WITH IAN CALDWELL AND DUSTIN THOMASON
The novel is about art, history, religion and scholarship, but it's also very much about friendship. Explain.
In a more transparent way than the Hypnerotomachia itself, THE RULE OF FOUR uses academic disciplines and scholarly obsession as vehicles to explore human relationships. If the backbone of the novel is the deciphering of the Hypnerotomachia, then the novel's soul is the story of friends and lovers coming to terms with the end of innocence. The Renaissance text is sometimes a mirror, and sometimes a foil, for the decisions and changes that accompany the approach of adult life.
Dustin, you're a trained physician and Ian you're a historian, why write a novel? And why together?
Out of consideration to real physicians and real historians, we're actually just two writers who've had to spend the past few years wearing different hats. In fact, when we began THE RULE OF FOUR, we were just two college grads who decided the first thing we wanted to do in the "real world" — before we had to tackle jobs and medical school — was satisfy a lifelong itch to write. We caught the bug when we met as eight-year-olds, and in the fourteen years that followed, we got used to being co-authors, whether of third-grade class plays or of high-school graduation speeches. Writing — and writing together — just seemed natural. If it hadn't, we couldn't have stuck with THE RULE OF FOUR for six years.
Explain the joint writing process.
It's changed more than once since we began writing THE RULE OF FOUR in 1998. These days we brainstorm ideas, scene structures, and character arcs together over the phone; then one of us drafts a chapter and emails it to the other, who revises it. Other than the first three months after graduation, when we wrote side-by-side in Ian's parents' basement, we've spent the past six years hundreds of miles apart, relying heavily on phone calls and emails to make co-writing possible.
Ian, you went to Princeton and Dustin you went to Harvard. Why did you decide to set the novel at Princeton over Harvard?
At the time, in the wake of movies like "Good Will Hunting" and "With Honors," Harvard seemed overdone. Though we were reading Sylvia Nasar's book during the summer we began THE RULE OF FOUR, we had no idea A Beautiful Mind would be made into a film three years later, with Princeton in a starring role. Even if we'd known, though, our decision would've been the same. Princeton offered a tradition of undergraduate writing, from Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise to Edmund Wilson's turn on the staff of the Nassau Literary Review, which gave us hope.
It's been suggested that most first novels are really thinly veiled autobiography. Is this at all true about THE RULE OF FOUR?
Fiction in general seems to be a mixture of autobiography and wish fulfillment, and THE RULE OF FOUR is no different. In the autobiography category we would place many of the cosmetic details of life at Princeton, much of the research into the Hypnerotomachia, and the underlying preoccupation with friendship and love. In the wish-fulfillment category we would place writing a senior thesis as groundbreaking as Paul's, and maybe, on a bad day, wanting a professor or two to turn up dead.
What is a Rule of Four?
When Tom and Paul decipher the Hypnerotomachia, they find that the author, Francesco Colonna, refers to a "Rule of Four" that will be necessary to unlock the final portion of the text. The Rule appears to be related to a set of four cardinal directions and distances found in a diary that surfaces at the beginning of the novel. But Tom and Paul struggle to understand how Francesco Colonna intended the Rule to be used. In a different sense, the title THE RULE OF FOUR alludes to the friendship of the novel's four protagonists as they enter their final days of college together.
What's next?
We're at work on our next co-written book. Now that we're both able to focus completely on our writing, we look forward to finishing it in a lot less time than THE RULE OF FOUR took!
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