A guest post by Chris Eaton, author of the new novel Chris Eaton, a Biography.

When I published my first novel in 2003, I discovered that I was being confused online, at least by Amazon, with another Chris Eaton who wrote books on how to do short-term missionary work. So if you liked my book The Inactivist, Amazon would suggest that you might also like Cross-Cultural Servanthood: Serving The World In Christlike Humility or How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth. I suggested to Amazon that they correct the mistake and received no response, but what happened instead was that I came to read every page on the Internet that contained the words Chris Eaton. And I began to feel like all of these other Chris Eatons had something in common with me. The coincidences were almost alarming. And for a short time, it was like being a conspiracy theorist—a kid who rode BMX bikes listed an important win on my birthday; there were several Chris Eatons from different cities that had the same name—until gradually these individuals all started to become one for me. And this experience planted the seed for my new novel Chris Eaton, a Biography.

The first question anyone asks about a book is, "What is it about?" I’m not convinced this is ever the right question because I don’t think that subject matter can tell someone if they’re going to like a book or not, much in the same way that someone is unlikely to say that they like all paintings of dogs, or all music with violin. But it’s still The Question. The easy answer for this novel is that it’s a book about Chris Eaton. Not me, of course, because then it would be an autobiography. But about someone named Chris Eaton, or a lot of people named Chris Eaton. It’s about a drum major and a Christian Rock singer, a mother and a man who makes custom Star Wars figures, a soldier and a nun, all of whom really exist somewhere, as complete entities in their own right, but all of whom (unknowingly?) had parts of their Internet selves harvested, whittled and reformed by me into the semblance of one life. I might also say it’s a novel about coincidence. And about Life, with a capital L. But those answers, although accurate, seem so vague that it’s like I’m avoiding the question.

Because, more generally, the question really means, "What happens in the book?" Or "What are the events or dots I can trace to the character’s change?" And that might be where I have the larger problem answering the question, and it’s probably more helpful instead to explain how I wrote this book, the events outside of it, rather than describing anything therein. Because in Chris Eaton, a Biography, the events in the book don’t lead to each other. They are, at least in a causal sense, completely unrelated. Because they only describe snapshots in time, landscape paintings where a river is running backwards, where only one tree is in bloom, or where a polar bear steps cautiously through the rainforest. There’s a narrative, in some sense. Each of those landscapes has an inferred story. But each Chris Eaton is also given only a brief moment in time—some kind of pivotal moment in his or her own life—and none of them ever meet.

I came up with the idea to tell a story about life in a different way, not by focusing on one specific life but by focusing on the links in many lives, the main link being through a name. Our minds have an uncanny ability take unrelated information and create links. Stories that don’t exist. We even do it in our own lives. We take all of our memories that we deem important, and we attempt to connect them into some manufactured causality. Maybe this is because of the way we perceive Time, or because this is what stories in books normally do, but we try to shape our lives into this led to this led to this led to this, even though it’s probably unlikely that the person who rejected you in junior high has anything to do with you not getting that job at twenty-five and your divorce at thirty or your relative happiness or regret thereafter. So why not take episodes from the lives of many people and create the illusion of a link through a common name?

We are all, in one way or another, living the same life. The specifics can vary. But they don’t really matter because the causal link is something we impose afterwards, anyway. Much in the same way that people claim there are only seven different stories, or thirty-six, or two, and everything else is just a variation on one of those, there is only one way to live life: to be born, to try to do some thing, to succeed or fail at those things, and then to die. And so, through the specifics of each Chris Eaton’s life, I might be able to get somewhat closer to what life is all about.

Chris Eaton is a novelist and songwriter/musician from Sackville, New Brunswick, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. He is the author of two published novels called the inactivist and The Grammar Architect, and a retrospective book of short fiction called Letters to Thomas Pynchon. He has also recorded a half dozen CDs under the name Rock Plaza Central, including the critically acclaimed Are We Not Horses?

(Author Photo by Dylan Welsh)