Interview with Jon Wynn

Belt talks to Jon Wynn, author of The Set Up

You're a sociologist by training. What made you want to write a novel?

I opened a blank page with the goal of writing a sociological book for a wider audience. My students at UMass Amherst were top of mind. What kind of book would they read, cover to cover? Many academics with similar goals pen a Malcolm Gladwell-style, popular press book. I had a few ideas for a novel set in Las Vegas and gave it a whirl.

The Set Up is a complicated book. Though it's a thriller, it depends upon some of the world-building I associate with sci-fi or fantasy, though it's set in the real world. Tell me about that.

I appreciate that! Once I focused on writing fiction, I then considered genre. I am a big fan of genre novels, from Stephen King and Dashiell Hammett to Sue Grafton to Martha Wells. I have a particular fondness for tongue-in-cheek genre blending books like Jonathan Lethem’s work. While I wanted to be firmly grounded in the real history of a city a love very much, as the story took shape, I realized I had to, occasionally, tweak that reality a bit. There are no rogue acting troupes causing mayhem in Las Vegas… that I know of.

Your novel rotates its narration amongst three characters: Marshall, Ally, and Web. What was your experience of writing three very different people? How did you get to know them?

Using multiple perspectives had many advantages. First, it forced me to write from viewpoints different from my own. There is a clear doppelganger character in the book for anyone who knows me, but I certainly adopted the heavy responsibility to authentically create standpoints other than “middle-aged white male.” These characters are very much grounded in sociological research, from code switching to ‘doing gender,’ and more. Second, the multi-perspectival approach generates narrative tension. Reading George R. R. Martin books, for example, demands that the reader piece together sometimes contradictory clues across many viewpoints sometimes in the same events. The only person who sees the entire mystery, then, is the reader themself.

Journalism as a profession and the craft of storytelling/narrative building are important to this novel, especially because of Marshall's former journalistic career. How did reporting become so important to what you were trying to do with The Set Up?

Marshall was first written as a sociologist, but that didn’t give him a sense of urgency and the inherent drive to revisit the past in a way that the story required. I am an ethnographer by trade, which has a very similar approach of street-level interviewing and shoe-leather research, so Marshall’s approach is sometimes inspired by qualitative sociology more than journalism. Apologies to the journalists I interviewed while researching this book! 

The Set Up is a distinctly Vegas novel. What's your relationship to Las Vegas and its surroundings?

I lived in Las Vegas in the mid- to late-90s. It was a wild time for me, personally. I love the city. Many real people and histories of the book are inspired by those years, and I hope that comes through on every page.