Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and today my guest is Matthew Clam.

His new book is Who is Rich?

His last book was approximately 16 years ago.

It was called Sam the Cat.

It was a book of stories.

It was very, very well admired, very funny.

I found Who Was Rich, although it has been described as a satire, a book that was

full of sadness and loss and the sense that over these last 16 years, fiction has become

something other than it was when Sam the Cat was published. Tell me,

how does a novel take 16 years to write? Well, thanks for having me on the show. I began writing

the book in January of 2010, so it was about six and a half years that it took to write it.

And in between then, I was a magazine journalist for years. And I wrote cover stories for the New York Times, Mag, GQ, Esquire, Harbors, and McSweeney's, and got to travel and meet

celebs and do other things like that and write about the Navy and U.S. military foreign policy

and Wall Street.

...