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Updated: December 5, 2009, 4:39 pm	Share    Print    Email

"The Shallow Man" front and back covers written by Coerte V. W. Felske. Image courtesy of Dolce Vita Press

New York City - Early this month, Hamptons.com met up with Coerte V. W. Felske in his Upper Eastside neighborhood at Vino Bistro on Second Avenue. Although an hour early for the restaurant's opening, the owner gladly offered up a table for one his uptown regulars.

Felske and I first met a month ago at a Gotham Magazine issue launch party where he had been named as one of New York's "Hottest 100 Bachelors," but made the point to me, "The fact that I am a bachelor and the fact that I wrote 'The Shallow Man' has nothing to do with each other. There is no linkage whatsoever."

Coerte V. W. Felske at Vino's Bistro on the upper eastside in Manhattan. Photo by Douglas Harrington

With tussled blonde locks, chiseled good looks and an athletic anatomy, the author could have easily had a career as a male model in the world of fashion, instead he wrote about that universe and the collateral culture associated with it in a book that both shocked and sold.

Felske hit the ground running in 1995 with his controversial first novel, "The Shallow Man" and in it created an acknowledged, unique 1990s vernacular that quickly became colloquial to an entire generation of A-Listers and their wannabes.

Although Felske himself has been on the inside of the A-List looking out for most of his adult life, his first novel protagonist, Nick Laws, is a hand model strolling the A-List perimeter possessed by a maniacal desire to bed beautiful models and travel in the glamorous, albeit shallow, world of international bed hoppers and party goers. His career goal is to bed as many "Things," his term for beautiful women, as possible and his skill is that of a club/party promoter. It is a device not much different than that of a web for a hungry spider. Felske created the word "Modelizer" and that is essentially the occupation of the novel's protagonist.

Although his character, Nick Laws, seems too cool for school, Felske himself is very well educated. Growing up in the Hamptons, Felske attended the Quogue School prior to his parent's divorce, when he was moved to Westchester and attended Bronxville High School. In Quogue he lived across the street from the Field Club where for four years he was the club tennis champion and around the block from the Fords of the Ford Modeling Agency. "We used to pool hop in their pool all the time." His father, Norm Felske, was a former professional baseball player who attended Yale and played college ball with former president George H. W. Bush. He eventually became a major real estate developer on the East End. "My father pretty much owned about a third of the village of Quogue."

"The Millennium Girl" cover. Image courtesy of www.forum.lowyat.net

Felske went on to attend Dartmouth College as a Romance Language major and speaks both French and Italian, having studied abroad extensively as an undergraduate. Felske's original career goal was to be a film director, "I went out to Sundance in the early 1980s when it was still just a film camp, a laboratory, before it became a festival. I was invited by Robert Redford to go, I played tennis with him and I met Jan Troell the director and Robert Duvall, we played doubles. There I met Frank Daniel the co-chair of the Columbia film school and he invited me attend. I ended up there in graduate school and studied directing with Milos Forman who was the other co-chair of the department." Felske's introduction to Redford came through family friend and fellow Quogue resident, pioneer plastic surgeon Dr. Tom Rees.

Advised to write screenplays as a lead-in to directing, Felske made the move to the West Coast. "I eventually moved to LA and I was writing screenplay after screenplay, probably 15 of them. I had agents and interest, but it was very difficult. It is a real struggle out there to be a screenwriter. I was writing stuff that was good but difficult to get produced because at the time Hollywood was going all 'comic book' with movies like 'Batman.' While I was waiting for something to happen I had this idea, I had an opening line, 'I never met a model I didn't like,' and a title, 'The Shallow Man.' I sat down and wrote the book in nine days, I just waterfalled it."

Felske never really took to LA, "I found it to be a dead soul town," and was glad to be catapulted back to New York with the best selling success of his maiden novel, which was picked up immediately by Crown Press, an imprint of Random House. "Producer Ted Fields, who had read all my screenplays, was an early champion of the book. He loved it and told me that I should be writing novels. For me, being a novelist was just more gratifying than being a screenwriter. Rather than waiting on 50 people trying to decide whether to invest $50 million to $150 million on a project, it is just you, your publisher and your editor. You essentially live or die on your own sword. It was a dream to be able to write a book about New York based on my memories about that whole maniacal model scene and then be able to move back there, which is where I wanted to be."

"The Shallow Man" cover created by Peter Beard and featuring model Alessandra Ambrosio. Image courtesy of Dolce Vita Press

Commenting that often first novels tend to be considered auto-biographical, I asked Felske if he feared being directly associated with and compared to "The Shallow Man" protagonist, "I was really sort of blind to that in the respect that I had already written so many things before that, it was like my 19th literary offering. I wasn't really sure it would go or not. I really wasn't worried about it in the least; I was just hoping it would sell. I knew I was in a politically right climate, the terms had been with us for a few years, although admittedly the character could be seen as morally objectionable."

The terms Felske referred to, some created by the author himself in a column he had previously been writing for Hamptons Magazine, were the already referenced "Thing" and "Modelizer," along with terms like "Dialtones" for beautiful women that are not very bright and "Civilians" for women that are not beautiful. "Catsuit Feminist" refers to intelligent women that are as beautiful as models. As the author puts it in the book, "Her name is really Alexis. I called her the Catsuit Feminist, albeit affectionately, because embodied within her soul was one of life's pleasant, yet rare, contradictions. Alexis suffered from being absolutely beautiful, as well as highly intelligent. Clearly, God had waved His wand twice on her and He doesn't do that often to women. Or men." Felske goes on to write, referring to beautiful women, "Beauty is life enhancing. Thing is beautiful. Therefore, Thing is life-enhancing."

Although he has undoubtedly had his fair share of beautiful companions, Felske is not at all like the objectifying character he created, "It was just my sense of humor and I wasn't sure who would get what. I suspected it was counter-cultural, but I had a vision and I just went with it. It just came easy for me to attend to a kind of social, anthropological survey of that milieu, of that life in New York." He went on to explain when asked to admit that he indeed was part of that model infused Manhattan scene of the 1990s, "Absolutely! As a social cat, I just saw that it was the most glamorous, exotic and kinetic kind of force going on socially at these places. It was shifting from what it used to be, there were sprinkles of it in the 1980s and I think Jay McInerney picked up on it in his 'Bright Lights, Big City,' but then it really became the currency of all the social establishments in the city. If you wanted to have a popular joint, you needed those drop dead gorgeous girls and everything became based upon it. I was going with the flow in it, but seeing it with my observer's eye."

"Word" cover. Image courtesy of www.railside2.com.

Felske's second novel "Word" was published in 1998 and he again garnered both critical and controversial acclaim. Drawing on his time in Los Angeles as a screenwriter, his character, struggling screenwriter Heyward Hoon, essentially makes a Faustus like deal with a successful, albeit socially and sexually inept, Hollywood producer to mentor him into the industry's inner circle in exchange for tutoring on the fine art of womanizing. Once again, Felske has with his opening line laid out the motivation for the protagonist's actions throughout the novel, "Word is, nobody wants to be sentenced to a life at the edge of somebody else's table." For that seat at the table, Hoon is more than willing to hover right on the precipice of pimp, however the end of this novel has a rather dark turn to it that we will certainly not give away here. It would be hard for me to believe that the creators of HBO's "Californication" did not, somewhere along the line, read Felske's "Word."

A year later Felske's most provocative novel hit the streets, "The Millennium Girl." In it the author actually writes in the first person voice of a woman, Bodecia Langley. Bo is a Gold Digger in search of a rich man to marry and in the process uses her beauty and body to sustain her pricey lifestyle. Like Hoon hovering on the precipice of pimp, Bo hovers on the precipice of prostitute. Once again Felske brings some new terms into the colloquial vernacular like "Walletmen" and "Digger Tour." It is an international tour that moves from Manhattan to Aspen to Hong Kong and other spots depending on the seasonal flocking of wealth. It is a tour that Felske is more than qualified to write about, as he reported on these very real women and their very real lifestyles in an investigative piece of journalism for Esquire Magazine.

"They asked me to write a piece about these kinds of women that try to land wealthy men at holiday time. They set me up in Aspen for two weeks and I interviewed 50 women. From all the women I made one composite character for the novel. Like the other two books I was writing about someone that could be considered morally objectionable, but at the same time try to put that sense of humanity in there as well." Along with 13 summers in the south of France observing these kinds of women, and a great deal of other research, when the voice came to Felske the book quickly followed in a three week write. "I am very proud of that book; I couldn't have written it had I not written the previous two books because I was writing in the first person voice of a woman. The greatest compliment I get regarding 'The Millennium Girl' is when someone says to me, 'You know these women so well, you write in their voices.'"

Dolce Vita logo. Image courtesy of Dolce Vita Press

Recently Felske has regained all the rights to his books and created his own imprint, Dolce Vita Press. He has released a 15th anniversary edition of "The Shallow Man" through Amazon.com with brilliantly created cover art by his friend, renowned American artist and photographer Peter Beard and featuring Brazilian super model Alessandra Ambrosio. An always apparent finger on the pulse of contemporary culture, Felske has seized the tools of the I-Age in a way that might make other authors envious, "I saw a future of writers directly connected with their books and directly connected with their readership. Then Amazon came up with this technology where you could publish your own books in conjunction with them. I decided I wanted to bypass those six houses, publishing those same 10 authors, putting out formulated books with the same six characters. I have never been in that realm. I have always tried to do something visionary, interpretive, sometimes controversial, but trying to get other stories out there that people have always responded to when I came out with my books. Now I can have this direct connection to the readers, I can create my own uncensored material."

Although there has been a hiatus from publishing novels for a decade, due in no small part to his responsibilities being a single father, Mr. Mom raising a nine-year-old daughter, there has been no hiatus from creating novels. Felske has four books banked that will be released by his Dolce Vita Press, "'Scandalocity' will be the next book released in February of 2010. If I am known for zeitgeist fiction, this is Coerte V. W. Felske's take on the information age, that whole generation of kids growing up that are I-Poding off into oblivion and sex-texting, having a much more technological experience in life. The thesis of this book is, are we really more interconnected or are we actually just alienating each other more as we do this? "'Scandalocity' is defined as the speed in which scandal, measured in velocity, can turn you into a star. My protagonist is an online, flawed, ADD afflicted gossip columnist who gets involved in a murder mystery with someone he has fallen in love with and helping her career out online."

He went on to explain that, "It is about a generation that has become more distracted, more distanced and alienated from each other. It is about people trying to find connections, human, life-sustaining connections amongst this whole waterfall of technology that is getting in the way. It is a story of redemption, a story of survival in the hyper-paced speed of our new age." The three other Felske books slated for publication on the Dolce Vita label are "Chemical/Animal," "The Ivory Stretch" and "A Touch of Noir." Felske is particularly excited by "The Ivory Stretch" which he describes, "As the best story I have ever written."

Earlier in our interview I jokingly asked Felske if he worried about Feminist Hit Squads based on the characters portrayed in his first three books, "Although I am sure some people saw me as objectifying women, my intention was to turn an eye to these men that were objectifying women, documenting a culture that does exist." "Sex And The City" author Candice Bushnell has long called Felske a friend, with her own work influenced by and frequently referencing Felske's colloquial vernacular and cultural observations.

It would be conveniently easy to turn a disdainful eye to Felske's three books if viewing them through the uber-politically correct lens that seems to permeate present literary and social criticism. I believe, however, that would be a mistake because it would dismiss both a segment of the population and the very real culture that existed and still exists within it. Felske is an observer, more than that he is a participatory observer, who has turned his substantial gifts as a writer to illuminating an aspect of the culture that is very real. Perhaps not real in places like Iowa or Kansas, but certainly very real in the world that Hamptonians travel.

And yet, maybe it is not so unfamiliar even to the heartland of America or any other small town or village anywhere in the world. Are there not men like Laws in pursuit of beautiful women everywhere? Are there not men like Hoon willing to do what is necessary to advance their careers? Are there not women like Bo, at least some women, using their beauty and beguile in exchange for financial security? Of course there are, you know it and I know it. More importantly, Coerte V. W. Felske knows it and has lived it, brilliantly documenting it in novels that are deep reads about shallow men and yes, oh yes indeed, beautiful women.