The novel’s protagonist, Benjamín Chaparro, is essentially a bureaucrat in the Argentine judiciary: a deputy clerk and chief administrator of its investigative court in Buenos Aires. The novel opens sometime in the early nineties. Chaparro is about to retire and begin writing a manuscript of his own. Ostensibly it’s about a man named Ricardo Morales, whose young wife was the victim of a horrific rape and murder twenty-five years before.

Sacheri has said that “writing is a special way to read,” and here Chaparro’s writing constitutes a close reading of—even as it’s mixed with the feeling he’s tampering with—the experiences implicating a group of characters. Included in his account are his alcoholic but cunning assistant and best friend Pablo Sandoval; Irene Hornos, a court judge and the woman Chaparro has secretly loved for nearly thirty years; the crime victim, Liliana Colotto, and her widower, Ricardo Morales; and Isidoro Gómez, Liliana’s attacker turned henchman for the Argentine government. Chaparro’s tone is by turns ironic, self-deprecating, questioning, and sincere.

Through both chance and disposition, the crime makes Chaparro a sort of unwilling detective. The Secret’s plot employs the familiar patterns of a mystery or detective novel. Sacheri, who also teaches high school and university-level history and economics, is interested in literature that is preoccupied with ordinary lives but also grapples with socio-political, historical, and philosophical questions. In a recent interview, he articulated a belief that literature’s complexity should emanate from the multiplicity of contacts it allows the reader—with other reading, with his or her own interiority, with that of other people:

At times I’ve seemed to notice that for some, the most laudable form of complexity is opacity… An author who contemplates his navel and a reader condemned to the contemplation of some other person’s navel. I’ll sound unforgivably profane, but that concept doesn’t satisfy me. Not as an author and not as a reader.

The detective/mystery plot serves Sacheri’s position well. I think of Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortázar (Sacheri cites his earlier work as a major influence), and even Alice Munro as other writers who have used the popular form masterfully as a way to engage with rigorous ideas and create rich, complex experiences in the mind of the reader. Sacheri’s novel experiments in this way with tone rather than form. Some scenes have a madcap, schmaltzy quality—as when Chaparro and Sandoval collaborate to trick an uppity judge into signing off on some court documents—reminiscent of the most satisfying TV comedy writing. These moments are entertaining to read, and they also serve to fully render character and illuminate the weaknesses of the court system through humor. In this way, the novel indeed plays with form differently than both traditional detective novels and its film adaptation.

The book’s complex structures are a strength, serving its particular themes. In an author’s note, the mention of “the bloody Argentina of the 1970s, which occasionally appears as the background of the story narrated here” strikes me as a sardonic understatement. Chaparro picks up on a photographic clue that helps identify Isidoro Gómez as a suspect, and his comment that “…I’ve always liked looking at things a little sidelong, focusing on the background instead of the foreground,” points us to a way of looking at the novel as a whole; its historical “background” is equally significant.

In the film adaptation, the period surrounding Argentina’s Cámpora government and its Dirty War indeed functions as a menacing, all-pervasive backdrop. In the novel, John Cullen’s translator’s note provides critical information for readers who come to the book without knowledge of this time period, providing explanations like the following:

[A] time of great turbulence in Argentina culminated in the so-called Guerra Sucia, the Dirty War, which lasted from 1976 to 1983. During these years, Argentina was the chief sponsor of massive and systematic political violence, whose victims included…students, activists, trade unionists, teachers, journalists, and leftists in general. In such an unstable and dangerous environment, even the basically apolitical Chaparro is at risk.

The "grandmothers" protesting the lost generation from the dirty war

This environment transcends setting to become both structural enclosure and subject matter. It has a direct impact on the court system where Chapparo works as well as the crime’s ultimate consequences for Morales, Gómez, and Chapparo himself.

The complex hierarchies of the court judicial system and the labyrinthine vault where cold case files are archived are Borgesian labyrinths where power, guilt, and accountability are distributed and refracted between people and the systems that bind them together. Indeed, Chaparro often struggles with the shady boundary between the implicit and the complicit. He frequently calls attention to the way personal attitudes and actions—often his own—can incriminate individuals. “We’re all cowards, it’s just a question of who frightens us enough,” he reflects after finding a colleague with military connections has secured an order to suspend Liliana Colotto’s murder investigation indefinitely. Chaparro wishes that the judge in charge of the case had held his corrupt colleague accountable: “My stomach turned at the thought of that son of a bitch getting away with such rank malfeasance,” he says, but then admits, “but after all, I was idle and pusillanimous too, in my way…The interview with Batista left a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt somehow implicated in this injustice done to some and the sinister impunity granted to others.” How are individuals implicated when systems are corrupt? What is the mechanism by which those implicated become complicit? Who is responsible for justice and punishment in the absence of a trustworthy state? How does violence at the state level breed violence between individuals?

Because Sacheri was integral to the writing of the film adapation, it’s interesting to consider the two works as companion texts with differing strengths. Sacheri says that his characters became more complex under the gaze of director Juan José Campanella. I agree. One example is the scene in which Chaparro interrogates murder suspect Isidoro Gómez, attempting to extract a confession. In the novel, Sandoval appears at work still drunk after a night of carousing. At first it seems that he threatens to derail Chaparro’s interrogation. He throws both characters off guard when he begins a line of half-joking questioning that ends with Gómez blurting out—in pride and self-defense—that he indeed was responsible for Colotto’s rape and murder. In the novel, this moment is both a repugnant and triumphant one, revealing Sandoval’s brilliance (and Chaparro’s doubt of him) at the same time as it reveals Gómez’s insecurity.

In the film, Irene is the pivotal character in this interrogation—gorgeous, self-possessed, and very pregnant. Until this point, we’re not entirely sure Isidoro Gómez is capable of the crime he’s suspected of committing. His claims of innocence seem convincing. He comes off scared and timid and somewhat bewildered. But Irene surmises correctly that if he’s the right one, hitting him where it hurts will cause a certain effect. She dismisses him as a viable suspect based on his lack of masculinity and strength, speculating aloud in blunt terms why surely he can’t be the one. And this is finally what makes him lose it: he punches her in the face and defiantly screams his confession in the most vile and violent detail.

This use of her character and the issue of her pregnancy resonates on several levels. It creates a parallel with Liliana Colotto, who was two months pregnant at the time of her rape and murder. We rarely ever see this variant on justice: a young pregnant woman ingeniously provoking a man into an indignant declaration of guilt for a violent crime against another young pregnant woman. It’s both Irene’s sexuality and vulnerability in this moment that allow her to wield power—she secures the confession they need to send Gómez to jail—and modulate the accumulation and release of tension in the scene. The film’s somewhat richer development of character (and by extension, plot and parallels between characters) ratchets up the emotional stakes and rings on a deeper psychological register than the novel.

But what’s less visible in the film is one of the book’s great strengths: the trope of the novel within the novel. Chaparro is uncertain about the whole enterprise—why he wants to tell this story, if he should be writing it, and what it’s really about: “…[I]t’s not my story I want to tell,” he writes by way of introduction, “it’s Morales’s story, or Isidoro Gomez’s, which is the same story but seen from the other side, or seen upside down, or something like that.” His uncertainty allows readers to witness his writing as a process, and, as a result, this foregrounds the construction of the story as a whole. The novel alternates between third-person chapters narrated through Chaparro’s consciousness, titled with words and phrases like “Retirement Party,” “Cinema,” and “Coffee;” and Chaparro’s numbered, first-person-narrated manuscript chapters. These chapters are even typeset in different fonts. In “Cinema,” we read that “[Chaparro]’s anxious about how to continue, how to recount what happened to those people. He wonders if that’s the feeling writers have when they tell a story, a certain sense of omnipotence as they play with their characters’ lives.” Later:

Chaparro rereads the opening sentences of his new chapter and hesitates. Is that a good way to start this part of the story? he wonders…Can a single human action—in this case, a monumental drinking binge—be the cause that changes another’s destiny, assuming that such a thing as destiny exists?

The crime that ties Chaparro to Liliana Cotorro, Ricardo Morales, and Isidro Gómez is a bloody and visceral metaphor for Sacheri’s exploration of the relationship between a single human action and its consequences. The Secret of Their Eyes (originally La pregunta de sus ojos, or The Question of Their Eyes) is a supremely accessible novel and a thrilling page-turner whose most nuanced tensions lie in the relationships between its structures and characters and the questions that these pose. Sacheri says that the book is “a reflection on punishment.” Readers are invited to ask, who is responsible? How are we all implicated? And how is the longing for love like the longing for justice?

Further Links and Resources

David Milch, the creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, will be bringing Faulker’s
literary works to HBO. Yup, you read that right. Reports the New York Times:

“I’m not, probably, the first person they would have thought of approaching them,” Mr. Milch said in a phone interview, referring to his months-long discussions with the William Faulkner Literary Estate. “But a number of conversations were fruitful and here we are.”

But the Times points out Milch isn’t as far-fetched a choice as you might think:

But before he started putting colorful words in the mouths of Andy Sipowicz and Al Swearengen, Mr. Milch made his literary bones as an undergraduate at Yale University and a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa; he worked with Robert Penn Warren (who shared a biographer, Joseph Blotner, with Faulkner), Cleanth Brooks and R. W. B. Lewis on a history of American literature, and contributed fiction and criticism to publications like The Southern Review and The Atlantic Monthly.

More recently, Mr. Milch said, his daughter Olivia had been studying Faulkner’s novel “Light in August” at Yale and “renewed my engagement with the material,” eventually leading to discussions between his company, Red Board Productions, and the William Faulkner Literary Estate.

Milch and the estate will work together to select some of Faulker’s works to adapt. The Sound and The Fury is an obvious choice—but how about a version of “A Rose for Emily” or “The Bear”? Which Faulkner works would you want to see?

Hooked? Here ’s the rest:Part 2 / Part 3. (Via.)

All is not well, and will likely not end well, but, in the meantime, why not settle in for a show?  Fancy a tumble with a creepy, too-human puppet that might steal your soul? Right this way! Hungry for the glitter of a decaying ingénue or the haunting melody of a voiceless musician? Tickets, please! Lusting after a man who’s been lusting after your brother across countless years and countries? Ladies and gentlemen, have we got a show for you! As our ringmaster reminds us, “The theatre’s not only art, messire, it’s magic, too. Sometimes the best magic is made in the dark.”  And it’s all here, in the darkness under the Poppy…

Rousing us from our opium-induced haze are a few uncontested plot points. Decca is the madam of the Poppy, and although that’s not her real name, it’ll do for now. She manages the business and its players (who service clients both onstage and off) alongside Rupert, her longtime unrequited love, who just so happens to be in love with her brother, Istvan, a traveling puppeteer. As war advances on their nameless town, Istvan returns to Decca and Rupert to stage a new show at the Poppy. His latest creation, a disturbing puppet named Pan Loudermilk, is “more accomplice than mere tool…this Pan seems to honor no limits, to see with his bright blue gaze whatever secrets one would most keep hidden.” With Pan and the rest of his intricate puppets, who he calls “les mecs,” Istvan strikes a match that soon has everyone—the players, the patrons, and the advancing army—up in flames.

Koja tells her story in two acts, the first at the Poppy on the edge of a warzone, and the second at a new theatre called the Blackbird, in another unnamed European town somewhere outside Brussels. Although many of the primary characters follow through, some (most notably Decca), all but disappear from the story with the Poppy itself, making the second act feel slightly less complete than the first. At the same time, other story arcs seem to reprise themselves, as if the characters are awakening from an opium dream to find the players changed, but the story ongoing.

Under the Poppy is not an easy book, and its challenges are purposeful, as if Koja is daring the reader to let go and give in to the dream. It is also not a perfect book; some of the repetition and narrative breaks feel less like artistry and more like they could have used a final round of editing. But these are minor concerns when weighed next to the fully realized world and characters that Koja has created. Her use of descriptive language is particularly elegant; of Decca, she writes, “Diana the huntress might have had such eyes, were she born in the gutter with no string to her bow and one arrow only to employ.” In a single, evocative sentence, Koja has told us everything we need to know.

There is a moment early in the book when Istvan confides to Lucy, one of the Poppy girls, “We are so much alike, you and I…both of us vendors of the art of the moment, the impermanent pleasure, the will-o’-the-wisp that lifts a man from the prison of time, and for just that moment sets him free.” Another Poppy employee overhears Istvan’s words from the doorway and remarks, “Why, it’s poetry.” And it is. It may be twisted, dark and opium-fueled, but what Koja has written in Under the Poppy is nothing less than poetry.

Further Links and Resources:

I don’t know about you, but when I see a movie after reading the book on which it’s based, I almost always prefer the book to the movie. Okay, there are exceptions: The Lovely Bones, for instance, where I prefered the film, and The Princess Bride—I love both the movie and William Golding’s novel deeply, and differently.

But when it comes to Harry Potter, I land firmly on the book side. For me, much of the fun is in the details of Rowling’s world: the Fizzing Whizbees and Puking Pastilles, the elaborate recipes for Polyjuice Potion and the Draught of Living Death, the little detours into wizarding and Quidditch history. David Thier, however, disagrees, arguing in The Atlantic that the movies are superior to the books:

Rowling’s writing had that endlessly obsessive quality required of a true world builder, but her storytelling couldn’t stack up to her setting. With every book from three on, she talked about how the stories were getting “darker.” But while “darker” things happened—some characters died, terrible monsters appeared, and schoolyard quarrels evolved into wars of racial purification—the tone could never quite catch up to the circumstances. [...]

There was an epic to be told, but Rowling was never able to get past the appropriately childish tone of her earlier books and commit to the gravity of the classic story she had set out to tell.

Then they made them into movies. Hollywood knows nothing better than the old stories, and the boy of destiny is a favorite: We’ve seen it everywhere from Star Wars to Rookie of the Year to The Matrix. Rowling seemed somehow resistant to telling that story directly, but the movies have shown no such trepidation. And they’ve given the tale the kind of narrative drive and attention to tone that the books lacked.

Thier’s close-reading of the tone of the books is spot-on—as he puts it, “Silliness butts up against severity throughout the latter books.” I agree that those details didn’t deserve much, if any screen time, but does that mean they don’t belong in the books? The writer in me says, “Those do not advance the narrative. Kill your darlings.” The reader in me says “But.. but.. the boggarts! The contest for the Quidditch Cup! Dumbledore’s weakness for candy!” Where do you draw the line?

Perhaps you’re a step past me on the spectrum, and you think the world of the books can—nay, should—be fleshed out even more. In that case, you may find fanfiction—and this excellent article on it by Lev Grossman—right up your (Diagon) alley:

Even back then it was apparent that fan fiction was not just an homage to the glory of the original but also a reaction to it. It was about finding the boundaries that the original couldn’t or wouldn’t break, and breaking them. Issue No. 3 of Spockanalia included a story called “Visit to a Weird Planet,” in which Kirk, Spock and Bones are transported to the set where Star Trek is being filmed and get confused with the actors who play them (Bones: “I’m a doctor, not an actor!”). Spockanalia No. 4 ran a story in which Spock has an affair with a fellow Federation officer. These were homages to Star Trek, but at the same time they were critiques: I love the show, but what if it went further? What happens if I press this big, shiny, red button that says “Do not press”? [...]

Fictional worlds, while they appear solid, are riddled with blank spots and unexposed surfaces. There’s a moment toward the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when Dumbledore suggests offhandedly that Sirius Black should “lie low at Lupin’s” for a while, referring to Harry’s former teacher Remus Lupin. What exactly did Sirius and Remus get up to there, chez Lupin, while they were lying low? How low did they lie? (Cough, slash, cough.) Rowling never says, but that one little gap has given rise to so much fan fiction that “lie low at Lupin’s” has become a recognized trope of Harry Potter fan fiction, a sub-subgenre in its own right.

It’s human nature to press at the boundaries of stories, to scrabble at the edges, to want to know what’s going on just out of range of the camera. Fan fiction teems with prequels and sequels, missing scenes restored and plot holes patched. It retells canonical stories from new points of view — the reverse-angle instant replay. How did the events of The Prisoner of Azkaban look from Neville Longbottom’s perspective? Moaning Myrtle’s? Mrs. Norris’? “To say that a story stops after we close a book is absurd,” says Maltese. “To say that we can think certain things about a story or what might happen next in a story or what might have happened if someone had turned left instead of right but that we can’t write them down is absurd.”

And, as Grossman points out, some works that might be considered fanfiction are deemed “literature” in their own right. Remember that whole controversy about The Catcher in the Rye and an aging Holden Caulfield? Or before that, the controversy about The Wind Done Gone and Gone with the Wind? Literature has its own kind of Stockholm syndrome: captivate your reader so thoroughly, and he or she will never want to leave the world you’ve created.

The cure for this literary Stockholm syndrome, perhaps? Hollywood, where movies can pare away your details and get at the core of your story.

In Marion Ettlinger’s stark black-and-white portrait of Carver, the author sits hunched forward slightly, his hands crossed at the wrists and resting on this knee. He wears a supple leather bomber jacket, a wool scarf, and a broad ring on one of his fingers. Carver looks comfortable, untouched by life’s rough edges, a slight smirk seems to be growing at the edges of his mouth.

Marion Ettlinger's photo of Carver, from http://www.nancykiefer.com/

I remember thinking, “How could this guy know so much about these characters?”

I was sixteen, and still naively believed that the narrator of every first-person story must be the author himself. Right? I mean, I was writing self-absorbed, autobiographical poems and stories every day. Wasn’t everyone else?

But back then I had no idea of the difference between sympathy and empathy. And, most importantly, I had no idea of what the imagination was capable of.

When I discovered the writing of Andre Dubus in my early twenties—beginning first with his final collection, Dancing After Hours (Knopf, 1996), and then quickly devouring his entire catalog—I discovered complex work that both taught me about the literary craft of compression and point of view in short stories, and gave me a deeper understanding of empathy and compassion as a human being.

As I read Dubus’s work, I also sought out all that had been written about him. In the latter, too often I stumbled upon other writers and scholars seeking to make tenuous links between the characters that inhabit Dubus’s tough yet celebratory stories, and Dubus’s actual life. Such reductive readings frustrated me. By then, I’d come to understand the difference between art and life, between the writer and the writing.

For no other apparent reason than the sake of putting fiction into neat boxes, some scholars seem to regularly seek out the explanation of fiction in the autobiography of authors. These scholars cling to ease rather than aspiring to generate objective knowledge and insights. They claim to admire a writer, yet diminish their work by putting forth essays and papers full of feeble examples of how the author’s work is thinly veiled autobiography.

Dubus himself said he steered clear of autobiography in his fiction. “I’ve always fought writing autobiography,” he told Kay Bonetti in a 1984 interview for the American Audio Prose Library series. ”I’ve felt that there was something wrong with it. I guess in my early twenties I started thinking about my choice of subjects and worried then that if I spent too much time writing autobiography I’d lose touch with the world.”

Unsurprisingly, that conversation with Bonetti eventually got around to Dubus’s literary hero, Anton Chekhov. In Dubus’s own words, we discover that what the short story devotee really sought to achieve with his art were stories devoid of himself. Explaining Chekhov’s reaction to an editor’s praise for his piece “A Dreary Story,” Dubus told the interviewer: “What [Chekhov] wrote to his editor about that story is absolutely true, it is full of arguments and philosophical debates, and Chekhov said, ‘but you will not find me in there.’ And that’s what I like.”

Recently, I sought input from several authors about the idea of autobiography in fiction. Many of the authors I spoke with have themselves, in varying degrees, dealt with their own writing being questioned as to its autobiographical elements.

Christopher Tilghman, author of the novels Mason’s Retreat (Random House, 1996) and Roads of the Heart (Random House, 2004), as well as the story collections The Way People Run (Random House, 1999) and In a Father’s Place (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), is unequivocal about his feelings on the matter of fact versus fiction in Dubus’s short stories.

“On the subject of using personal material in fiction,” says Tilghman, “I tend to think of Andre as one of the least autobiographical writers I know.”

In 1987, Tilghman became a founding member of the writers’ group that met nearly weekly in Dubus’s living room until his death in early 1999. The group eventually became known at the “Thursday Nighters,” a term coined by Tilghman. Dubus chronicled some of the group’s particularly difficult growing pains in his essay “Letter to a Writer’s Workshop,” collected in Meditations from a Moveable Chair (Knopf, 1998).

“If there are specific incidents in any of his stories that were drawn from life, his literary and spiritual project simply subsumed them. Whatever residue of personal experience that survives is simply not recognizable as autobiography,” continues Tilghman. “And to the contrary point, Andre seemed to have used fiction as a way to place and observe himself within situations that, thankfully, he never did experience in his waking life.”

It is not voyeurism that readers seek in Dubus’s stories, says Tilghman, but the pointed “horns of ethical dilemmas” that Dubus’s stories thrust readers between. “Many of his characters take action that we might think of as unlikely or distasteful or unlawful, but they do it because they think it is the only thing to do.”

When Tilghman met Dubus back in 1987, he was a young writer struggling to find his voice. Today, he is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Virginia. At UVA, known as the school Thomas Jefferson built, the legend of William Faulkner’s stint as a writer-in-residence in the late 1950s still looms large, as does the legacy of a certain alum: Edgar Allen Poe. Today, the acclaimed novelist and short story writer Ann Beattie serves as the university’s Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing.

Like Tilghman, Beattie was close to Dubus. In the winter of 1987, she joined E.L. Doctorow, Gail Goodwin, John Irving, Stephen King, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Yates for a series of benefit readings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to raise money for Dubus after he was struck by a car and handicapped. A decade later, Beattie joined Dubus for several readings together while he was on tour for what would end up being his final story collection, Dancing After Hours.

For Beattie—whose recently published novella Walks with Men (Scribner, 2010) had many reviewers pondering whether or not the author had raided her own memories of living in New York City in the 1980s in order to write the book—the question of autobiography in an author’s work is much less interesting than many other more intriguing questions.

When Beattie was in college in the late 1960s, the New Criticism model—eschewing the biographical and sociological in favor of close reading and the work itself—was a prevailing wisdom. Then, for a time, she questioned such an approach. “When I became a writer, I found this increasingly….odd,” says Beattie. “Why were we living and working, if not to admit that we were peculiar? Not that I think the key to fiction is ‘Is it autobiography disguised?’ but rather that readers might think there was a ‘key’ to better understanding the work, and that that ‘key’ turned in the lock of ‘writer’s life’.”

“If readers do think this—as opposed to people who speak about literature, who want, justifiably, to move closer to the text, but who may therefore be led into a kind of thinking that involves verifiability—they’ve been misled about what fiction is. Both parties have misunderstood,” asserts Beattie, whose newest collection The New Yorker Stories (Scribner, 2010) collects her forty-eight pieces that appeared between 1974 and 2006 in that bellwether of American short fiction; the book was named to the New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2010 list.

“Fiction mystifies the writers of fiction,” says Beattie, explaining:

They—they, alone—are quite capable of displaying the ‘facts’ of their lives, yet doing this holds almost no fascination for any fiction writer, EVER.

So while fiction writers don’t write blindly, neither do they think that facts should be warped into art. They have taken a huge step away from facts in order to write fiction. In that space—in that gap—true make-believe, true fiction, occurs. It occurs as much for the writer as for the reader. It seems to me that it’s interesting additional information if an incident really did, in point of fact, happen to the writer, but the more interesting question is: So what? Why did that capture the writer’s interest, as opposed to 1,000 other things that really happened?

The author Edie Clark has long been awed by not only the incidents and characters that captured Dubus’s interest and empathy, but by Dubus’s seemingly prophetic vision.

Clark, the author most recently of the essay collection States of Grace: Encounters with Real Yankees (Benjamin Mason Books, 2010), traveled for years from her home in New Hampshire to attend the weekly writer’s workshop at Dubus’s Massachusetts home; Clark’s searing memoir of losing her young husband to cancer, The Place He Made (Villard, 1996), was written and drafted during those workshops.

“What always struck me so deeply about Andre,” says Clark, “was how some of his stories turn out to be his life, rather than the other way around. Like he was prescient.”

Clark served for many years as the fiction editor of Yankee magazine and published many stories and essays by Dubus, as well as work by Donald Hall, Stephen King, John Updike, and Monica Wood, among many others. In particular, Clark remembers an eerie, seemingly prophetic Dubus story that came across her desk.

In 1986, Clark had Dubus’s story “Blessings” in production for the next issue of Yankee. The story, later collected in Dancing After Hours, revolves around an horrific boating accident, a shark attack, and the subsequent aftermath for the survivors. “I recall counting the number of times the word ‘leg’ appears in that story,” says Clark. “Twenty-seven different times. And, of course, while we were putting that story into print, Andre lost his leg and the use of his other. I don’t think he ever put that together as the rest of his life was so dramatically changed but it wasn’t the first time I saw this, that what happened in his stories preceded what happened in his own life.”

Watson and the Shark, by John Singleton Copley

But, of course, Dubus’s stories don’t always fall into this prescient category—a category, it could be said, that exists for an honest writer engaged in writing about their own fears and the what-ifs of life. In Clark’s opinion, Dubus both used kernels of his life as seeds for stories, and he listened closely to the stories of others to inspire his art. For years, Clark kept a long quotation from Dubus’s essay “Marketing” (from Broken Vessels, Godine, 1991) tacked to the wall beside her desk. The quote, the essay’s opening paragraph, reads:

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorrow, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking about the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working: spending evenings with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell or he may be in the middle of one and we hope it is joyful.

“Andre thought deeply about life,” says Clark, “and about what happened to his friends, because he cared but also because he wanted to understand how the world worked.”

In Dubus’s own remarks we find how consistently he looked outward to find the stories he wove, such as in a 1985 interview with Thomas Kennedy for Revue Delta. Dubus was open about the very simple inspiration that led him to write Voices from the Moon (Godine, 1984), a story that is both his longest novella and very likely his masterpiece: Dubus told Kennedy that he came upon the story’s plot while reading the Boston Globe one day.

The nine chapters of the 126-page Voices from the Moon alternate between Richie Stowe, a serious twelve-year-old who plans to become a priest, and the other members of the boy’s family. The story takes place over the course of a single day and is centered on the revelation that Richie’s divorced father plans to marry the ex-wife of Richie’s older brother—the father’s own former daughter-in-law.

“Woman in her 20s who wanted to marry a man in his 40s who was her ex-husband’s father,” said Dubus on the newspaper article. “Against the law in Massachusetts and in some other states. That was the whole thing. I tried to make up the characters who went with them.”

In the end, Clark doesn’t believe that it matters either way whether the kernel of a Dubus story came from his own experience, a friend’s life, or from a newspaper article. “The point is,” she says, “that Andre recognized transformative moments in life, whether in his own or in that of his friends, and turned them into art. He understood what it means to be human.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford is renowned for capturing the transformative moments in life. He is also no stranger to having his fiction confused for his life.

“It’s happened to me a lot,” Ford told me recently, “that novels and characters I’ve written have, by readers, been confused with my life and self. In one way, I suppose, it ought to be flattering. It means the illusion of the book was fairly complete, or at least it seemed ‘true to life.’”

While Ford solidified his reputation as a master of the American short story with his early collection Rock Springs (Atlantic Monthly, 1987), it was his 1986 novel The Sportswriter (Vintage) that thrust his fiction into the American consciousness. The voice of Ford’s narrator Frank Bascombe, an American Everyman set adrift in New Jersey, has resonated with readers both in the States and abroad. Ford has since taken Bascombe through the subsequent novels Independence Day (Knopf, 1995) and Lay of the Land (Knopf, 2006).

Ford, who included Dubus’s story “Killings” when he edited the anthology The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (Granta Publications, 2007), has been charged by some critics with using Bascombe as a mouthpiece of his own views. The author, however, insists that very little, if anything, about Frank is autobiographical.

“I’m always trying,” says Ford, “to give Frank responses to things that I’ve never had—and maybe once I’ve seen them ascribed to him, wouldn’t want.” If he slips and lets a little Ford into Frank, he sees it as a weakness that needs correcting. “I think to myself,” he says, “’Gee whiz, what a failure you are. Is that all you can do, just to give him some point of view, some opinion, some response that you yourself have already had?’”

Ford, who says he came to Dubus’s stories later in his life, notes that even when kernels of fact occasionally find their way into fiction, they are quickly mutated by the very act of storytelling. “Of course, these bits of oneself migrate into pieces of fiction—both advertently and inadvertently,” says Ford:

But they never get there in a pure state. Events are events; people are people. But characters are made entirely of language, and come onto the story’s stage through a process of authorial choice, misadventure, fortuity, editorial acumen, and really a lot of other courses—all of which fundamentally change them from being real people, assuming they were real people to being with—which frankly they mostly weren’t.

In fact, Ford finds the act of attempting to wedge real people into fiction to be harmful to the creative act:

Writing real people into fiction is hazardous, as many writers have pointed out, and I myself know to be true. Real people, whom you might want to install in your story, turn out to be intractable. They tend to stay themselves and be hard-sided, and not the infinitely mutable fascicles of language real characters (versus real people) are. Made-up characters are lambent, they mutate, they surprise, they act out of character, and are therefore to be prized—for this freedom alone.

In the end, Ford believes such reductive readings of fiction do not merely minimize his work or that of his peers, but diminish the human potential of the mind. “The assertion that characters in fictions are just real people put onto the page offends me by selling the imagination short, by reducing all things fictive to the personal, to the known, to the flesh—as if that’s really where reality lies. It’s not. Reality’s dull, dull, dull without the imagination to show it the way outward from itself,” says Ford.

Are biographical readings always wrong? No. Are biographical readings but one limited lens through which to explore fiction? Absolutely.

Writers discover and tell stories for reasons that often remain a mystery to the writer themselves. Dubus himself could only speculate on why many of his characters so often struggle with loneliness, heartache, violence, adultery, rape, murder, and abortion. “I think honest writers write about what bothers them,” he once opined.

“My guess is that surprise is the variable,” speculates Ann Beattie when she considers what it is that captures a writer’s interest and sends them spelunking into the depths of a story:

You can be surprised at the simplest, most ordinary things, like that the houseplant wasn’t done flowering; that it was winter and it snowed; that you boiled water and put something in the pot and, by golly, out came pasta. So: writers are not special creatures, hyper-aware and hyper-sensitive. Rather, they are ordinary or dumb creatures, who—for whatever reason—have decided not much is lost if they are to be vulnerable, and to make something of their surprise when confronting ordinary life. To look at ordinary life in an unusual way—a lingering way—tinges it. If the color and contrast takes, that’s what fiction is. Fiction is like a big, absorptive blotter.

In the end, no one—no scholar, nor his children, family, or friends, not even the author himself—can truly give us impartial insight into Dubus’s fiction. Fiction need only be true to itself.

On February 23, 1999, the day before Dubus died, he gave a brief interview to Greg Garrett. When asked how he wrote dialogue that is “so real,” Dubus insisted that it wasn’t in the least bit real; it was, he said, human speech purified to a poetic rhythm. “We’re not trying to be real,” Dubus told the interviewer, on what he did not know then was the last afternoon of his life. “We’re trying to be better than real. We’re trying to be true.”

During the symposium, I was somewhat disturbed by the constant assumptions by many of the presenting academics that Dubus’s masterful fiction was simply thinly veiled autobiography.

After the symposium, Ed asked me to contribute an essay to the special Dubus tribute edition edition of the Xavier Review published in December 2010. I appreciated Ed’s support in allowing me to contribute an essay that, in some ways, sought to debunk the work of other Dubus scholars. I thank the Xavier Review for first publishing this essay, and supporting its republication here.

The Stakes Are Absolute

Three Questions on Andre Dubus with Todd Field

Todd Field, image via Wikipedia

With the 2001 film “In the Bedroom,” director Todd Field became the first person to bring Andre Dubus’s fiction to life on the screen. Field worked with co-writer Rob Festinger to adapt the screenplay from Dubus’s taut short story “Killings.” After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, the film went on to earn five Academy Award nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay.

On the evening of February 23, 1999, Dubus called Field—who was well underway with “In the Bedroom”—to wish him an early “Happy Birthday.” The next morning, Dubus died of a heart attack. Field was the last person to ever speak with him.

Field and I spoke briefly about his interest in Dubus’s prose, and his work adapting it.

Joshua Bodwell: Of all Dubus’s work, why did you to select “Killings” to adapt into a feature-length film?

Todd Field: The most exciting thing as a reader is to come across someone’s material—a short story or novel—that you can’t stop thinking about—to become haunted by an impression. In 1992 I was a directing fellow at the American Film Institute. The first year we were allowed to make whatever we liked so long as the running time wasn’t in excess of thirty minutes. We weren’t permitted to show our work outside the conservatory, and so there was no fiscal obstacle of having to secure standard literary rights. That year we were required to make three films. The first two were original, but for the third I wanted something to adapt, and someone recommended Andre Dubus. The first book I got my hands on was Collected Stories and it was like discovering a new country where all the relatives you’ve never met live. Two days later I’d camped on three of Andre’s stories— “Killings,” “Delivering,” and “The New Boy.” Of the three, “Killings” was the most powerful in terms of theme and breadth, but for those same reasons it was definitely not a 30-minute film. “Delivering” is the story I ended up adapting, and to this day is the film I’m most fond of in terms of execution and process. But “Killings” kept on nagging at me. In large part because Matt Fowler reminded me so much of my father, a man you would never imagine violating his own nature in such a way. When it came time to make a feature length film there was no question that it would be anything but “Killings.”

Bodwell: One of the major changes you made in adapting “Killings” into In The Bedroom was making Frank Fowler an only child, whereas in the story he had a brother. Can you talk about that decision?

Field: The stakes are absolute for the Fowlers, leaving them just each other, without any other immediate family, to mitigate their grief. This is something I witnessed first hand when, sadly, one of my dearest friends, an only child, was murdered at twenty-one.

Bodwell: Could you talk a bit more about why you feel that your film adaptation of “Delivering” was so artistically satisfying?

Field: “Delivering” is a wonderful character study that explores, over the course of a single day, some of the complicated dynamics of brotherhood. In this case an older, stronger brother trying to sort out how to protect his younger, not particularly athletic, sibling from something he knows will hurt him emotionally. But that same afternoon the older brother too becomes worried about the physical safety of their father. In the end he decides he must inflict physical pain on his younger brother to get his father’s attention, ultimately, at least in his mind, saving them both. The story is really perfect, and Andre, who would sometimes take years working on a story, told me that “Delivering” was really the only time he ever sat down and wrote something in a single sitting. That didn’t surprise me, because it does have a peculiar kind of momentum. We all experienced something similar making it. “Delivering” was photographed and edited very quickly in just four days.

Further Links and Resources

From “The Times Were Never So Bad” from Edward Delaney on Vimeo.

The novel—and the new show—tells the story of the Blood Orphans, a once-great rock band, in Amsterdam on the last day of their final tour.

The musical is a collaboration between Shilling, playwright/composer Andrew Lloyd Baughman, and songwriter/vocalist Talia Segal. It runs July 15th-August 7th at the D.C. Arts Center. And, as befits a show about a rock band, it contains explicit language, graphic adult situations, and nudity—so what are you waiting for?

For more information, including how to get tickets, visit the musical’s homepage. Congratulations, Michael!

Further Resources:

Image credit: screengrab from greatgatsbygame.com

Part of the problem is clearly to do with priorities. As the game writer and former critic Rhianna Pratchett says in the film: “Story is often the last thing thought about and the first thing pulled apart.” So much effort goes into making spectacular worlds, tackling the technical logistics and ensuring the playing experience is enjoyable that decent plot and dialogue fall by the wayside.

Yet there are trickier issues involved. As a few people say in the film, gaming presents a unique challenge in terms of linear narrative. Or rather, the general lack of it. All the variant paths and possibilities relating to moving through a game offer plenty of potential for creativity – but thinking about wrapping it all together is so brain-ache-making and frequently needs such mathematical precision that it’s small wonder game writers are less able to concentrate on things such as dialogue. There’s also the continuing problem of working that dialogue properly into the game narrative. At the moment, even the most innovative and otherwise thoroughly entertaining games such as the Grand Theft Auto series rely on cut scenes that interrupt the action. Invariably, the dialogue is an annoyance getting in the way of the action rather than the thing that drives it.

True, there has been a smattering of videogames based on works of literature, including iPlay’s Great Gatsby game and an RPG based on Dante’s Inferno. And lately, there have been several more sightings of lit-based videogames, which delight me as a book nerd. This Waiting for Godot game, for example (which has since been tweaked due to a cease-and-desist letter—it’s now “Waiting for Grodoudou”), and there’s the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass for the PSP. And don’t even get me started on this awesome NES-style version of The Great Gatsby—in which you guide Nick from platform to platform, killing butlers with a flick of your hat. (Yes!!)

But here’s what all these games have in common: all were works of literature first, adapted to the console screen later. In some of them, the connection to the source literature is superficial at best—as is the narrative of the game itself.

I wonder if part of the problem is just that the gaming demographic and the writing demographic don’t have enough overlap. I know a few gamers who like to read, a a few writers who love video games—but they’re the same 3 people. (And I used to be one of them, back when I had more free time!)

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. We’ve talked about video games and narrative on FWR for a while now, starting way back in 2009 with Christine Hartzler’s essay “Games Are Not About Monsters”—which was subsequently published in Dzanc’s 2010 Best of the Web. More recently, our own Michael Rudin discussed “Writing the Great American Novel Videogame”. So: will literature and video games ever consummate their forbidden romance? Who out there would be up for writing a good video game?

Within this film noir framework, using the poison in Moth’s body as a literal “ticking clock,” Todorov takes us on a kaleidoscopic tour of Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital city, through the eyes of a man who has never seen communism and must learn his former world anew. In its most shining moments, Zift—which literally means a bituminous tar used to fix asphalt and occasionally as chewing gum—seamlessly blends its thriller aspect with socialist cultural critique.

Prior to its U.S. publication, Zift was adapted into a movie (with Todorov as screenwriter); HBO airtime made it the most broadly released Bulgarian film to reach American shores. Todorov and translator Benatov both teach at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Conversation

Steven Wingate: Most historical novels have some kind of resonance with the contemporary world in which they are read. Why is now the right time for Zift to come out? Why was it important for you to write it?

Vladislav Tordorov: The reason is complex. It concerns my personal fascination with the [historical fiction] genre itself. Also, it has much to do with the state of Bulgarian post-communist fiction. And it concerns the fictional representation of the communist past in Bulgaria today when we have conflicting versions of this past.

Novels talk to other novels, not only to the real world. Thus, they position themselves within various literary contexts. Bulgarian post-communist fiction of the 90s demonstrates a consistent “lyrical” approach—fictional reflections of a rather intimate and strictly personal, even idiosyncratic nature. Under communism novelists had to be markedly aware of their social and political environment, and [they had] to follow strict guidelines of its representation—the so-called “socialist realism.” After the fall of communism, they could engage in soul-searching, which led to the “lyrical novel.” This type of novel lacks eventful storyline and refrains from discussing social issues. The same goes for Bulgarian cinema, which at the time amalgamated personal frustrations and idiosyncrasies with folklore imagery and poetical fabulousness. Within such literary and cinematic contexts, my task was to create a type of narrative that would be both lyrical (Zift’s story is told in the form of a confession), and genre-and-plot driven (it consciously adopts the hardboiled style of noir). In recent years many plot-driven novels have been published in Bulgaria. In this respect Zift joins a new wave of narrative fiction.

Another aspect of Zift concerns the communist past. I have written extensively on this issue—essays, journalism as well as scholarly papers. Zift is my literary attempt to address it. Back in the 90s there were few novels that would deal with this past, although the situation has changed recently. The past that was ripping apart the nation in the public arena was generally ignored by fiction. In many respects this past defines the present state of affairs in Bulgaria, the common attitudes, the popular imagination, the public reflex.

Does Zift point toward any particular precedents outside of Bulgarian literature?

I wrote Zift as an indirect tribute to James Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. In these novels the narrator confesses to his crimes. I find Cain’s books much more interesting than Hammett’s or Chandler’s, wherein a private eye narrates while trying to crack a case. The criminal narrator is decidedly more fascinating than the private eye. I should also mention that Postman had a direct influence on Camus when he was writing The Stranger and on Visconti’s debut feature Ossessione that pioneered the Italian neorealism.

In your writing process, how did you balance the “socialist” and the “noir” aspects of the book? Did you always have a unified sense of how they would work together, or did that shift over time and fall into place in revision?

Zift draws on personal experiences—my early days of growing up in a communist country in the 60s and my later days of teaching fiction and film at Penn. So, I decided to couple my early memories and late intellectual pursuits in a novel.

Film still, Zift

In the Bulgarian literary tradition and its contemporary cinematic context the genre of noir is an exotic animal. On the other hand, in the American eye, the socialist content makes the classical genre of noir appear curiously estranged. This is probably why the movie Zift enjoys its highest critical acclaim and audience recognition in Russia and in the U.S.—the respective birthplaces of the socialist content and of the genre form. The form and the content are in a subtle way alien to each other. According to Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky, this is what makes a work of art function effectively and become aesthetically pleasurable. He calls it “estrangement” or “de-familiarization” of the familiar. It is the result of the unusual coupling of form and content. The idea was to “unlock” the social reality of communism with a seemingly strange genre key, and vice-versa—to reinvent the political aesthetics of the genre by populating it with communist imagery. The clichés clash—these of the communist content and those of the noir form.

In the midst of following Moth through his adventures, you also give us moments that seem outside of time, in which people engage in circuitous philosophical debates, trade urban legends, etc. What were you going for in such scenes, and is there a unity of purpose for them throughout the book?

In the past, urban legends and popular anecdotes used to serve as potent antidotes against the daily dose of toxic communist demagogy fed to the public through various communication channels. The former were works of a collective anonymous countercultural genius that effectively resisted the official culture controlled by the Party. The urban lingo and legendary stories that the counterculture spontaneously and indiscriminately proliferated in effect subverted the official Party-speak, along with all the newspaper feature stories of shock-workers and mass exploits in the line of collective farming and industrial production. Vulgar philosophizing and anecdotal storytelling, the raw Pravda (truth) of life shared by outcasts, lowlife, barflies, and local idiots in the dark pockets of the city spectacularly outshouted the authoritarian, officially forged Pravda. The communist “speak” and its adversary—the countercultural lingo—presented a real challenge for the English translation, and I am glad to say that in my view, Joseph Benatov has done a great job.

Your uses of Wired Radio Outlet—Muzak-like songs often playing in the background—strike me as places where “socialist” and “noir” blend seamlessly. It’s creepy and Big Brother-ish, but at the same time your characters respond to it and even let the songs shape their behavior. What does Wired Radio Outlet mean to you, and what do you want it to mean to readers?

The Wired Radio Outlet brings back personal memories of many places and events. The everyday world around us was all wired. It was virtually everywhere—in schools, public baths, hospitals, etc. In the novel, the Wired Radio Outlet has a structural function. It measures the flight of time. It announces the exact time on a regular basis and thus serves the purpose of a public clock. The action deploys in one freezing December night, the longest night of the year. Time runs fast like sand in an hourglass, and Moth runs out of it as we read along.

Image Credit: Flickr

You also wrote the screenplay for Zift, which did very well internationally and was shown in the U.S. on HBO even before the English translation was released. How did you approach and manage that process? What does the story of Moth gain and lose in its translation from fiction into film?

Noir films are based on pulp fiction. So, in an effort to keep the tradition, I worked on the novel and the script simultaneously. I should point out that in the movie, the story has a different ending, which I thought was more dramatic for the viewer. In fact, the English version of Zift has the movie ending.

What did you learn from Zift that you’ll bring to your next fiction project? And do you mind telling us what that project is?

Yes, it is called Zincograph. The novel was published in Bulgaria last summer, and the script is in an early stage of production. Hopefully we could see it filmed by 2012. The story is about a cunning young man who becomes an informant for the Bulgarian communist secret police. He does his job with a great zeal, and yet he is dismissed, as Perestroika renders him useless. Spying and denouncing is his true vocation, so he decides to continue his activities secretly from the government. He creates his own phantom secret police department by recruiting a group of unsuspecting young intellectuals to spy on each other. As a result, he develops his own secret archive of denunciations and, after the fall of communism, benefits from that.

Zincograph is a black comedy with elements of political psycho-thriller that draws on the very nature of secret policing under communism—the presumed authenticity of the agents and recruitment based on automatic trust and unspoken fear. The plot is driven by the workings of the conspiratorial mind of an overzealous conformist-turned-psychopathic schemer and wicket social engineer. The purpose of this story is to debunk the commonly shared assumption that totalitarianism is a society of victims and victimizers. I submit that many people enjoyed spying on their neighbors, took pleasure in it and pursued it proactively. Declassified archives show that on many occasions we dealt with true zeal on the part of the informants, who didn’t simply follow instructions, but demonstrated maleficent eagerness to “develop” harmful information regarding the lives of others.

Image Credit: Flickr

How does Zincograph’s dark humor compare to the dark humor of Zift?

The “black laughter” in the two novels is of a different nature. The action takes place on historical thresholds—before and after the imposition of communism (Zift) and before and after its collapse (Zincograph). These events could be viewed as collective somersaults or tragicomic stunts in the political circus of their own times—jumping in and out of communism. The aim was to frame the two jumps differently in terms of genre, plot and antiheroes, but to keep their tragicomic representation. Zift is a confessional narrative delivered by a man who recounts his misfortunate life and badly failed intentions while facing his ultimate demise. Moth defies death by means of unrelenting existentialist irony—the battering ram of wit. His sharp aphoristic attitude towards the communist world demystifies it.

Image Credit: Flickr

This should have a redeeming effect on both him and the reader. Contrastingly, Zincograph tells the story of a con artist who social-engineers a fake political institution that replicates and thus mocks the omnipotent system of secret police. The mimicking of the untouchable system, its shadowy doubling is subversively farcical, is diabolically comical by nature. A bold political con is launched by a seemingly ridiculous man. His creation becomes the Trojan horse, which eventually disorganizes the system by making it function like one stupendous lampoonery. In both novels, the machinery of laughter vandalizes two formidable representations of the Absurd—the fact of Death and the fact of the System.

Further Links and Resources

Image Credit: Flickr

It’s the year 2025, and the NAFTA bloc has fallen into such a perilous decline that we barely have an economy or a functioning society any longer, and we’re at the mercy of the much more powerful Sino-Indian economic bloc. A failed writer, Montese Crandall, wins the rights to novelize a trashy science fiction movie called The Four Fingers Of Death, in a chess game. The bulk of Moody’s 700-plus page book consists of Crandall’s sprawling novelization of this 2025 film, which is a remake of the 1963 classic The Crawling Hand.

Curious? While you’re waiting for the novel to drop, you can watch The Crawling Hand here in all its campy glory:

Via GalleyCat.