Heppner, Mike 1972–

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Heppner, Mike 1972–

PERSONAL:

Born 1972, in RI; married. Education: Columbia University, M.F.A., 2000.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Belmont, MA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer. Emerson College, Boston, MA, instructor in creative writing.

WRITINGS:

The Egg Code (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.

Pike's Folly (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.

Also author of the novella Man Talking, 2008, available online at http://mikeheppner.com.

SIDELIGHTS:

While working on his M.F.A. degree at Columbia University, Mike Heppner started what a few years later became his well-received novel The Egg Code. The book focuses on the history of the printed word from eleventh-century China through the early years of the personal computer. Heppner has stated that he does not know much about computers, so although the book touches on computer use, it really is about how computers and the Internet affect the everyday lives of the people who use them. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called Heppner's book a "bumptiously clever debut novel."

Many reviewers have mentioned The Egg Code's density of information. According to New York Times writer Scott McLemee: "The future belongs to M.F.A. maximalism: fiction that sprawls, with narratives as complex as the page can bear, its story lines branching out across whole continents or eons." Countless characters people these stories and their lives are cleverly and intricately interrelated. With this new breed of writing, McLemee continued, "the saga is to be rendered in prose having the texture and intricacy of a circuit board, with all metaphors ultimately deriving from esoteric fields of knowledge." Such is the case, he found, with The Egg Code.

In the novel, much mischief arises through a fictional Web site called www.eggcode.com. The hacker behind the site, Olden Field, almost completely paralyzes the Internet by feeding it reams of misinformation. It is through this event—the near collapse of the Internet—that the lives of the characters are loosely tied together.

The book is unusually long—sixty chapters, almost five hundred pages. The cast of characters includes Lydia Tree, a pushy mother who tries to help her son pursue a career as an actor. Lydia is married to Steve Mould, a furniture store manager who finally lands a spot for his son in a commercial that turns out to be a farce. The husband and wife end up divorced. The Internet hacker earns an even worse fate after many more complications in the story unfold. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that Heppner's writing style "operates on multiple levels, alternating among an evidently empathetic intelligence, an uncommon comic brio and outrageously sophomoric symbolism." McLemee, however, commented that "there are no ideas here—only gestures," concluding that "somewhere inside The Egg Code … there may be a perfectly good novella about unhappy families and the strange alliance of self-help and self-loathing. But it is not struggling nearly hard enough to get out."

"Heppner has bitten off more than he can chew," commented a writer for Kirkus Reviews, who added, "but so did Dickens and Balzac." Hailing The Egg Code as an "ambitious" debut, the reviewer deemed the book "a wild ride" that is "too long and too much fun."

Heppner's next novel, Pike's Folly, came out four years later in 2006. The Pike of the book's title is the filthy rich, forty-something Rhode Islander Nathaniel Pike, who spends money like it's water. This new-money millionaire's latest venture involves buying a few acres of pristine New Hampshire wilderness, miles from any town or road, to erect a Kmart. Meanwhile, Gregg Reese, a fellow millionaire from old money and Pike's opposite, is busy mismanaging his family's philanthropic funds to the point of having to seek state subsidy. Pike's personal assistant is Stuart Breen, author of one novel and husband to Maureen, whose compulsion to be naked eventually leads to her arrest for public indecency. In Pike's Folly, Heppner again addresses "modern culture with its pretension and hypocrisy," according to Michele Leber in her review of the book for Booklist. However, he does it with "characters you hardly care about and pedestrian prose," she added. Detroit Free Press contributor Marta Salij observed that "Mike Heppner's second novel … is all about subtlety…. His characters traffic in transgressions so small that they might not seem like transgressions at all, at least not to us observers. But they're trying to break the rules, make something new, shock the neighbors. And that's a momentous undertaking in any life—even if the results might at first seem laughable." A Publishers Weekly critic noted that "though the competing plot lines overwhelm the story, Heppner's prose is ax sharp."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 2006, Michele Leber, review of Pike's Folly, p. 65.

Borzoi Reader, March, 2006, interview with Mike Heppner.

Detroit Free Press, March 26, 2006, Marta Salij, review of Pike's Folly; March 29, 2006, "Pike's Folly Deals Gently with a Cast of Characters Trying to Hear a Different Drummer."

Hour, March, 2003, Matt Lee, interview with Mike Heppner.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2002, review of The Egg Code, pp. 598-599.

New York Times Book Review, August 18, 2002, Scott McLemee, "The Soul of a New Machine," review of The Egg Code, p. 12.

Publishers Weekly, May 27, 2002, review of The Egg Code, pp. 36-37; January 30, 2006, review of Pike's Folly, p. 42.