Globalization: A Guest Post by David Woo and Margalit Shinar

A novel of nine linked parables about globalization, ambition, hope, love, and greed spanning two decades and eight countries. Read on for an exclusive essay from David Woo and Margalit Shinar on writing Merry-Go-Round Broke Down.

Great novels are rooted in their times. Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, and Catch-22 endure because they turn the social, economic, and moral conditions of their eras into human stories.

Globalization is the most consequential story of our lifetime. In 2010, my co-author, Margalit Shinar, and I decided to write a novel about it—much as The Great Gatsby captured the spirit of the Jazz Age.

It took us the next decade to complete. Whether we succeeded is for readers to decide. Our aim was to tell the story of a world at a crossroads—and the people caught in it. Globalization touches everyone, everywhere, whether they realize it or not. From hope to disillusionment, from opportunity to exploitation, it has both given and taken away, bringing out the best and the worst in people. This was the drama on which we sought to build our novel.

The first hurdle we faced was finding the right structure for telling a story on a global scale. We found the solution in Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play La Ronde, in which characters are linked through a circular chain of relationships. In our book, that chain became money. Form follows function: this structure allowed us to explore the butterfly effects of globalization and its unintended consequences. It was a conceptual breakthrough that helped us get the project off the ground.

The problem with any ambitious idea is that it raises expectations that are difficult to meet. From the start, we knew we could fall short. That is why the book took ten years to write, including three years of background research. With a chain of nine interlinked stories, every link has to hold—or the entire structure collapses.

The book benefited from the fact that Margalit and I brought different skills and experiences to the project. Our collaboration followed an iterative process. I developed the outline for each story, Margalit turned it into a first draft, and I then carried out the first round of editing. From there, the manuscript moved back and forth between us for weeks—sometimes months—until we were both satisfied. Each of us owned a crucial part of the process, a division of responsibilities that brought both freedom and discipline to our partnership.

Set across ten countries, the novel takes the reader on a journey around the world. To do justice to these places, we spent considerable time on the road—from Havana to Cleveland, from northern China to Arctic Norway. My professional work took me across continents and introduced me to people from many nations and all walks of life. I drew deeply on those experiences in creating our characters. They are fictional, but they are not imagined out of thin air—they are composites of the real world. Because this novel is also about how the world became what it is today, it was essential that its characters feel not just plausible, but true.

If you want to understand how the world became what it is today, this is a book for you. If you want to understand how extreme polarization has taken hold around the world, this is a book for you. Merry-go-round broke down is a gripping, fast paced, financial thriller that puts a human face on the most important issues of today.