By Gary Wien
originally published: 12/01/2005
The Perfume Factory is a coming of age novel set along the Jersey Shore. It is the debut novel from Al Austin, a seasoned playwright and screenplayer writer. Al grew up in the Union Beach / Keyport area but currently lives out on the West Coast.
The book is based on a mixture of people and places that Austin has come across. Some parts have a distinctive New Jersey feel while others seem influenced by the West Coast. Austin does a wonderful job of using the Jersey Shore as a character in itself much as Faulkner created characters out of the Deep South.
The Perfume Factory has been compared to such legendary tales of teenage years as Catcher In The Rye and The Outsiders. In fact, Austin's lead character has a lot of Holden Caulfield in him. He steals, lies, and falls in love for the first time through the pages of The Perfume Factory.
Al Austin's plays include The Amazing Brenda Strider, Mimosa, Shotgun, and Muslim. His screenplays include What Happened, and Innocent Hearts.
He has plans to revisit the Jersey Shore in his next book, which will use some of Asbury Park's rock and roll history as a backdrop.
You can order copies of The Perfume Factory from rkdpress.com for $21.95 plus shipping and handling.
I had the chance to speak with Al Austin via phone after finally getting the chance to finish the novel. As a fan of stories like this, I highly recommend it as a Christmas gift for someone on your list.
The Perfume Factory is set in New Jersey, but I don't recognize the names of several towns.
I based Port Beach, the main setting of the novel, on Union Beach, a small town on the Raritan Bay where I grew up. The real town and fictional town are similar, but not identical. I changed the town to meet the story's needs, making it a much more negative and oppressive environment. There weren't quite as many bars in Union Beach as there are in Port Beach, and a few more grocery stores. There was a Perfume Factory.
The town itself seems like a character.
It is. There are a lot of antagonists in the story, but it's the main one. For any character to work, the character has to be fleshed out, (most of all, the bad guy), and I tried to give Port Beach some depth. As oppressive at the town is, it means something to Sam, and there are aspects of the town that have become almost one with him. The tides, the marsh, the wild grapevines, the creeks, all the shit washed up on the beach. The residents of the town, too, are aspects of its character.
How long did it take you to write the novel?
I'd started it maybe 10, 12 years ago. I'd finish a version, put it away for a couple of months, dig it out and read it. It was never right. I finally gave up on it, and didn't even think about it for several years. I dug it out about three years ago and saw enough there to start again. This time I felt it was coming together. I saw clearly what was false, what had to be cut. I finished it a little more than a year ago.
But with all that time passing, wasn't it difficult to go back? You'd changed from when you originally wrote it.
The Perfume Factory is a coming-of-age novel, which means it's about the experiences of a young man finding himself. Sam is 17 when the story begins, 18 when it ends. There's a passage in one of George Eliot's novels in which she discusses the indelibility of the experiences of youth. She compares youth to early morning, when everything is clean, clear and fresh, and because of this the experiences of youth are etched on a pristine slate, and are forever more vivid, more real, than all that follows. Those were the memories I was drawing on, and they were just as available to me as if they had occurred, well, last summer.
Any possibility of a screenplay or a movie?
Yes, some people are interested. I probably need a few more car crashes and explosions.
Gary Wien has been covering the arts since 2001 and has had work published with Jersey Arts, Upstage Magazine, Elmore Magazine, Princeton Magazine, Backstreets and other publications. He is a three-time winner of the Asbury Music Award for Top Music Journalist and the author of
Beyond the Palace (the first book on the history of rock and roll in Asbury Park) and
Are You Listening? The Top 100 Albums of 2001-2010 by New Jersey Artists. In addition, he runs New Jersey Stage and the online radio station
The Penguin Rocks. He can be contacted at
gary@newjerseystage.com.
