When Seattle author Thomas Kohnstamm began work on his 2019 debut novel, the deadbeat hero’s journey “Lake City,” he did what many authors do. He wrote what he knew. Kohnstamm, 49, lives with his wife and two children in the same Lake City house where he grew up. And while that first book wasn’t based explicitly on his coming of age, he admits that the protagonist had “autofictional elements.”
Six years later, Kohnstamm has expanded and even reinvented his authorial craft. “Supersonic” (out Feb. 25 from Counterpoint) is bigger than “Lake City” in every way. It’s also one of the most Seattle-centric novels you’re likely to read all year, which was Kohnstamm’s goal.
“I don’t want to call it a history of Seattle,” he says. “I wanted to do more of an updated creation myth for the city. So many people that move here, they know about grunge or whatever. But it’s not a really well-defined place. It’s a young city on the edge of the world.”
Kohnstsamm knew he’d have to begin this “creation myth” with the Duwamish people. So he split his novel into three primary eras: the pioneer/Indigenous interface of the 19th century, the Boeing Bust of the early 1970s and the urbane tech boom of the 2010s. He said he saw two choices for the book early on, “Write a multiethnic, multicultural story, or write a white history of Seattle.” Kohnstamm began plotting “Supersonic” shortly after a novel about Mexican migrants, Jeanine Cummins’ “American Dirt,” made headlines for what critics felt was cultural appropriation. But Kohnstamm saw the white history approach as factually incorrect and therefore “untenable.”
With trust in his research process, he fashioned his narrative around three generations of a Japanese American family, a historic elementary school fighting budgetary closure (sound familiar?) and a Duwamish land grab by early white settlers. Pot shops and supersonics — mostly the airplane, occasionally the basketball team — also feature.
Kohnstamm went to Kristina Pearson, executive director of Duwamish Tribal Services, for research aid on Northwest history. She led him to historian David Buerge. To gain insights about the novel’s main family, Kohnstamm interviewed a neighbor whose aunt, Claire Suguro, was likely the first Japanese American public school teacher in Seattle. And he knew a retired Boeing employee to ask about the supersonic transport contract. None of these people show up directly in the book, but all proved influential.
“I started my career as a travel writer,” Kohnstamm says. “And I’m still writing about place in a lot of ways, and all the human elements that create place. Being born and raised here, living in the same neighborhood, I’m like the resident senior.”
“The more obvious version of this book,” he says, “would have been the (Klondike) Gold Rush, the (1962) World’s Fair and Microsoft going public.” But Kohnstamm didn’t want to be “obvious.” He wanted to hinge his plot on the failed supersonic because he saw that aerospace failure as an indelible parable for Seattle’s boom-bust cycles. “It’s about reaching high and falling on your face,” he says, “and then dusting yourself off. Arguably, (the SST) laid the groundwork for the rise of the tech industry and engineering culture. It’s essential DNA.”
Speaking of technology and engineering, you can’t live in Seattle for as long as Kohnstamm has, pursuing a creative passion like fiction, without feeling the economic strain that comes with the city’s nuanced ambition. “Supersonic” confronts this paradigm through a number of storylines. In Kohnstamm’s midcentury narrative, a music teacher named Masako Hasegawa thinks, “Technology and engineering cannot sustain a place. The city needs music. Poetry. A sense of its cultural history.”
Kohnstamm laughs at the quote, admitting that it’s rather on the head. “I do think that’s the real tension of this place,” he says. “A place that generated a lot of art and culture, becoming more a consumer of art and culture, very much driven by big business. It can be handled in, you know, tech bros are stupid and everything’s boring now. But there’s a nuanced thing. I live a more nuanced thing.”
This last bit refers to Kohnstamm’s primary vocation. Though fiction is his passion, he makes most of his money copywriting for tech companies. “I even make explainer videos about quantum computing,” he says. “I’m not a luddite. But I am suspicious of this whole quantified life, data is true … this sort of tech religion. It’s one way to measure things, but it takes all the art out.”
“Cannot sustain” quote aside, “Supersonic” operates as literary novels are meant to: it offers characters on both sides of a divide and allows the reader to design their own rooting interests. Bruce Jorgensen, aka “Loose Bruce,” is a slacker of questionable parental merit trying to hit it big in the marijuana business. Ruth Hasegawa is an adventurous daughter trying to escape her mother’s old-fashioned ways. Larry Dugdale is a dishonorably discharged machinist who sees his future reflected in the shiny actuating valves of the supersonic jet. The cast is rounded out by city politicians, a jazz pianist janitor and engaged PTA members, all of whom figure into Kohnstamm’s intergenerational web.
For such a place-oriented novel, he says, “I treat historical fact at arm’s length. I thought of it in general terms, kind of like ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ is to New York.” In other words, Kohnstamm laid the groundwork for his book with careful research but allowed his fictionalized personalities to define the events therein. “I tried to do right by the characters. That’s the main thing.”
In “Supersonic,” a century and a half of Seattle history has been folded into a speedy, sardonic package. It’s about halfway through the book when a character thinks, “This place has no sense of its own history. There’s no real fixed sense of the way things are supposed to be. A lot is being made up as they go along. Sure, there are rules and laws and the status quo, white neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods, Asian neighborhoods … but it’s all up for reinvention … if not now, in a generation.”
Kohnstamm calls this generational shuffle “the cyclical nature of history,” which he sees as a primary driver of Seattle events. He hopes, via fiction, to inspire a deeper sense of civic tradition and encourage conversations about the town’s cultural impact, both in the past and in the present. “We are the stories we tell ourselves,” he says. Creation myth, indeed.