The ‘but’ man: Writer goes for the ''not-what-you-think factor''

Dana Adam Shapiro looks for the "but" in every story.

"That's the biggest hook, the not-what-you-think factor," said Shapiro, a New York-based journalist who is receiving double the artistic exposure for his first novel, "The Every Boy," and his first film, "Murderball," a documentary about wheelchair rugby.

These days Shapiro — a lean 31-year-old with a full beard that would make any rebbe jealous — seems to be dealing in sure things.

But it was just a few years ago that he moved from the excitement and the insomnia that is New York City to staid Cape Cod in order to live rent-free with his grandmother, who was recovering from chemotherapy, and her younger two siblings, the youngest of which was 85 years old at the time.

Fed a steady diet of knishes, herring and borscht, Shapiro plugged away at his novel. His family did not understand what he was attempting. What was this movie? This book? This mishugas that Dana had in his head?

"Making a documentary about quadriplegics and writing a novel about a dead kid ... these weren't entirely encouraged by my family and they definitely weren't making money," said Shapiro, who was in the Bay Area on a book tour this summer. "They encouraged it in the blind way grandparents do. I could have told them I was inventing a new shoe."

For all we know, Shapiro did create a new form of footwear because somehow he walked out of relative obscurity into the spotlight of major publishing houses and Hollywood. (He's currently writing the screenplay for "The Every Boy," which he's also been given the go-ahead to direct.)

The novel mines the hyperkinetic mind of Henry Every, a 15-year-old with excessive enthusiasm whose father loves jellyfish more than his family, whose mother loves ants more than her husband, and whose seductress teases from him a wild streak which is, at turns, essential and detrimental to his growth.

Henry, who turns up dead on the novel's first page, kept a 2,610-page journal seeking answers to existential questions which are pressing at 15, embarrassing at 17 and by 19, ancient history.

"The Every Boy" is part allegory, part love story, part mystery novel. It is also very much a first novel, in that it showcases Shapiro's promise as a storyteller (which is abundant), but also his overreliance on metaphor (which is equally abundant).

"Murderball," an unrelated project that Shapiro co-directed, profiles the hitherto unknown sport of wheelchair rugby, played by quadriplegic athletes with unrestrained levels of testosterone.

The New York Times called the film "an unusually deep exploration of sports, machismo and the competitive sport." The film won the Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

While Shapiro is neither paralyzed like his subjects in "Murderball," nor emotionally abandoned like the protagonist in "The Every Boy," he is taken with the lives of outcasts and inspired by those who are determined to embrace their minority status.

His grandmother, when attending college, was denied membership into a sorority. She was not chagrined. She did not cower. She did not try to veil herself by changing her name or getting a nose job. Instead, she shot a wad of spit on the sorority house floor.

"My family was never about being ashamed of being Jewish," he said.

Shapiro grew up in Newton, Mass., just west of Boston. He attended a Conservative synagogue, Temple Emanuel in Newton, where he had his bar mitzvah.

After high school, he went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. (He never graduated, falling a few credits short.) He attended Tel Aviv University for a spring semester and spent that summer in Israel where he designed T-shirts at the Dizengoff Mall, camped out on a rooftop and dated an Israeli solider.

"She never let me fire her gun," he said. "I told her, "If you really loved me, you'd let me fire an Uzi."

Shapiro moved to New York City in 1995 and two years later became an editor at Icon, a now-defunct magazine that profiled notable men. The first issue contained three profiles: the avant-garde director David Lynch, the champion boxer Roy Jones Jr. and Oliver North of Iran-Contra Affair infamy. Shapiro admits the magazine was "too eclectic for its own good."

But his work enabled him to cut his journalistic teeth, and he was hired later at Spin as an editor, while also contributing stories elsewhere. For The New York Times Magazine, he wrote a story about an aspiring male teenage figure skater, a Russian Jewish immigrant in New Jersey. His classmates mocked the would-be star on ice, called him "faggot" and beat him on occasion.

But it was a story for the men's magazine Maxim about quad rugby that catapulted Shapiro into the larger film project on the same subject.

In quad rugby players, Shapiro had found his "but." Here were men — cut down to size by degenerative diseases and childhood accidents — who liked to play demolition derby in wheelchairs, who also liked to curse and drink and prowl bars to satisfy their libidos.

In short, everything he expected them to be, they were not.




"The Every Boy" by Dana Adam Shapiro (221 pages, Houghton Mifflin, $19.95)..