Scarlett Thomas

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Scarlett Thomas has paid L. Frank Baum a big compliment. She patterned her second novel, Going Out, about a group of friends—including highly phobic Julie, and Luke, a young man so allergic to light and dirt he can’t leave his bedroom—after Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Borrowing structural elements from a 1900 novel and the subsequent 1939 film may seem an odd authorial choice for a 32-year-old British novelist. But to Thomas, it was a deliberate tactic for the novel in which she was not only crafting a narrative, but writing about narrative as well. “I was thinking about classic quest narratives,” she says, “and Luke’s life—trapped in his bedroom with only second-hand simulations of life coming via the TV and Internet—had to be told in terms of second-hand narratives.” And while Oz—both book and movie—is quintessentially American, Thomas notes that the movie is well known in the U.K.: “In a sense, Britain has become a cultural and economic and military colony of the U.S. So much of our culture is now influenced by approximations of American culture.” Housebound Luke assumes that life outside mimics the American sitcoms he watches, such as Friends and Seinfeld.

Thomas continues, “I wanted to try to get across some of the absurdity. For example, we sit around with (usually very bad) takeaway pizza, watching imported sitcoms, planning trips out to retail parks—which in no way resemble your malls, but were perhaps once supposed to. Our cities are vibrant and multicultural and you can go out and see and do exciting things. But in a way that’s what makes the retail-park culture so absurd: It’s this distance between real life and the life we are sold. It’s like the difference between narrative and life.”

Baum himself likely had politics in mind when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, long interpreted as a parable of Midwest populism. (The political symbolism persists: Before the 2004 presidential election, pollster John Zogby predicted a John Kerry win based partly on responses to a quirky question from the land of Oz: Would participants rather vote for the Tin Man or the Scarecrow?)