My desire to stop kissing and resume reading shook me, considering that the Hungarian women in The Angel Makers fixate on ridding themselves of inconvenient men. Which might be amusing, in a certain vein of black comedy, were it not so gritty and grounded in actual fact. This factuality gives the book its claws, though it’s Gregson’s headlong prose and craftsmanship that truly rivet her reader.

She begins in 1914: the Hungarian village of Falucska, threaded with well-worn paths and huddled by a fast-running river, stands so far from anywhere else that no one expects to leave the village during his or her lifetime.

They mostly don’t. The women keep marrying at fifteen or sixteen, bearing children in or out of wedlock, dying in childbirth or suicide or any number of domestic disputes; the men keep grinding through the fields and alcohol bottles. In short, the village’s little world spins along in dusty rhythms “until one day, suddenly, the earth coughs and all the yellowed leaves fall off the trees to lie on the ground like shells,” and WWI blows all the young men off to eardrum-shattering battle lines unimaginably far away.

Without the war, Sari, the novel’s protagonist, would have clung to an outsider’s life, the only village girl able to read both Magyar and German, the only one with second sight, the only one nimble and knowledgeable enough to wrest a living from the medicinal herbs hidden in the forest surrounding the village.

Yet the war grants her a reprieve from being the village’s strange-eyed outcast. It also gives the other village women a break from the abuse and neglect their men dole out.

But, as Gregson reminds us, “…you can’t have beauty without a bit of terror.”

Once Hungary waves the white flag, the truce Sari and the villagers have been so giddily savoring shatters. As the men stream back, the women begin to learn the art of angel-making (aka, husband poisoning).

But what really caught my attention is the artfulness with which Gregson creates tension. One can feel the hoofbeats of something bad coming from a long way away; but Gregson still surprises with exactly how the drama unfolds. Readers who recall Scott Smith’s row of increasingly gruesome, domino-like events in A Simple Plan will be familiar with this sort of calculating, mounting horror. Those new to the art of soul-crushing dread will be treated to the uncomfortable pleasure of literary collusion as Death starts to gain traction.

Like the village’s river itself, the weight of individual decisions gather speed and depth, building suspense through expert pacing. Gregson boldly skips months or years, trusting well-placed anecdotes to span the elapsed time, but she’s equally willing to hunker down among careful details.

Accused women of Nagyrév, via Hungarian National Museum

She understands that events—especially ones of the shocking nature she relates—require careful groundwork before they make psychological sense to a reader. Since her novel is based on fact, one could accuse history of doing her heavy lifting; after all, she’s only embellishing a few details here and there, right?

But as anyone who has tried her hand at historic fiction knows, actual events often seem the most improbable of all. And the Nagyrév poisoning epidemic, which forms the skeleton of The Angel Makers, does seem ripped from a B-class thriller. (Second confession: straightaway after finishing the last page, I leaped onto the Internet to track down what “really” happened.)

So it’s a testament to Gregson’s skill that she lures readers on board and makes us believe—even cheer on—the grisly twists. She might get away with it because she’s so careful with her pacing and character development. She doesn’t race straight to the guts; she instead gives us enough of village life to hook us, make us believe, make us care about Sari’s strangeness, and the village’s general sicknesses and plucky misery, before any angels are made. Furthermore, Gregson possesses an enviable talent for delivering a full character in just a few lines, though her word choice occasionally borders on the lurid.

Still, her prose hangs together well overall and demonstrates an elegant ability to shift perspective, an acuity with handling the passage of time, and a touch for simple, transformative moments of beauty like the farmhouse ceiling that “seems to shimmer slightly and become translucent, letting in the dusty, smoky light of the moon.”

We see little of the men’s side. A few scenes give us a quick peek into the victims’ possible experiences, but this is decidedly Sari and the other women’s story. Still, the men loom large in the historical backdrop. Even though almost everything takes place in insular Falucska, war as a theme is very present, including, obviously, the war between the men and women, as well as the region’s war with poverty and the fallout of desolation, ignorance, and moral ambiguity. All this warfare, the book seems to hint, leads finally to the black-humored weariness of survivors. As Judit comments:

[W]hen you’ve been alive as long as I have, you realize how pointless everything is, how little any of this matters. So you start either laughing at nothing, or laughing at everything. And it’s a lot more agreeable to laugh at everything.

Yes, this book had me laughing. And gulping down a few catches in my throat. I won’t soon be forgetting a certain Hungarian village taking desperate measures in the horrors and beauties of 1918.

Further Links and Resources

• Listen to radio program Between The Ears (BBC) about the Nagyrév murders.
• Hear Jessica Gregson discuss The Angel Makers on The Noon Show:

Orientation, his long-anticipated story collection recently out from Faber and Faber, shows off this unique set of nimble narrative chops, so it’s no surprise that pieces from the collection have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Writing, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. In addition, he’s been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award in fiction. Via phone from his home in Moscow, Idaho, where he is on the fiction faculty at the University of Idaho, Daniel and I talked about craft, teaching, and MFA haters.

Interview

Michael Shilling: Among other writers, you’ve been one of these “best kept secrets” whose collection is deeply anticipated. How does it feel for Orientation to finally be out?

Daniel Orozco: It’s nice. [Laughs.] I never thought I’d get this collection published.

Considering that you’re a short story writer, and how little publishers want to publish short story collections, it’s quite an achievement. Was finding a publisher an arduous process?

For a long time, publishing people told [writers], “Hey, these stories are great, but do you have a novel? Because nobody wants a short story collection.” So yeah, I pretty much gave up on the idea that I’d get the collection published, and that was the reason I started a novel, out of a kind of career necessity. But then I finally found an agent who told me she could sell the collection, but we had to wait until, as she said, the stars lined up. And they did. So it’s just fantastic.

Your stories really run the structural gamut, and those structural choices create different emotional tones and narrative priorities. Taking “Officers Weep” as an example, how do you think those choices affected the way those stories ended up?

Every story that I write feels like a kind of experiment. The challenge in crafting a story is how to engage a reader emotionally, intellectually, experientially. I’m always looking for some kind of challenge, some kind of structural or narrative constraint to try and figure out. For “Officers Weep,” it was, Can I tell a story that is written in the form of a police blotter? And in a way the structure determines how the story’s gonna go. So yes, I begin with form and then fill in with character and engagement. Jerome Stern talks about the “shapes of fiction,” and I think that’s a good analogy, because I need a shape for the story and then I start figuring out what’s going to happen in it.

That approach is refreshing. I think a lot of writers are afraid of playing with structure because of self-consciousness, these false distinctions between the “realistic” and the “experimental,” and if they play around with structure it’ll be seen as a gimmick. As if a gimmick is always bad.

Right! I mean, the story “Orientation” is a gimmick. You can only do it once for a limited amount of pages, and the same goes for “Officers Weep” because I can’t do a series of stories structured as police blotters. But so what? All that matters is that a story, whatever the structure, must be grounded in the humane.

Agreed. Other stories in the collection also have specific structural choices. Like, in “Somoza’s Dream,” we jump around in time somewhat, but it still manages to have a pretty tense momentum. How did that story come together?

The first drafts of “Somoza’s Dream” were much more expansive. There were flashbacks to Somoza’s childhood, for example, so I was going to move back and forth in time more. But it read more as a biographical story, and I decided to abandon that thematic approach because I figured out that I was trying to make this man who wasn’t very interesting more interesting that he was. So once I gave up this autobiographical framing, I started populating the story with people around him. I knew that I wanted to begin with the assassination and then return to it, but that was pretty much the structural demand I made upon the story. Once I had that in place, other elements of the writing started coming together.

So why Somoza? Did you have a particular interest in the Nicaraguan revolution?

The story came from a couple of places. To start, it came out of an exercise at Bread Loaf, in a class taught by Reginald McKnight about telling lies convincingly, which I decided to do through historicality. I did a three-page scene about G. Gordon Liddy.

I have a Liddy story too!

Really? Yeah, he’s a fascinating character to take on. So I had him meeting Somoza, and then over the years the story shifted focus solely to Somoza. Also, my family is from Nicaragua, and I thought it would be interesting to engage with something from my political and cultural past, and really put the screws to this guy, really run him down because he really was a bad guy, and I had a lot of fun just “writing” him.

The agreed history is just one story, right?

Yeah. I mean, E.L. Doctorow says that history is a story, between the historian and his facts. So in writing a story based on historical figure, it’s interesting, the line between when you stick to the facts and render it with a certain verisimilitude and when you veer away.

Writers such as Jim Shepard have gone a long way in getting people to de-snobify about this false difference, or at least acknowledge the much more porous relationship between fiction and history.

Absolutely, and of course, nobody ever nails him for anything because he does his research, and [from a storytelling angle] his work is so imbued with the specificity and personal experience of the characters, who more often than not are on the periphery of historical events–which is a very smart approach.

Let’s talk about “Shakers,” which I thought was a really subtle use of the earthquake described in the story as a metaphor for “shakings,” be they personal or geological.

Yeah! [Laughs.] You know, an earthquake that huge would never happen, so it immediately becomes a metaphorical thing. It was a way of bringing all these individual and solitary lives together. So though you have these separate stories of individuals in solitude, you have them all gathered in one place, reacting to this one event, and touching on what we talked about before, that structural component was what drew me to whether I could write it or not.

Was the story ever longer? I ask because it reads like you had ten characters, and you closed your eyes and pointed at four and worked with them. Like there could have been six other people that you could have equally expanded upon and connected.

That’s great to hear that it reads like it could have gone on and on, because I’m not one of those writers who sits down and writes seventy pages and then gets it down to twenty. Me, I write two pages and get it up to twenty, and that’s how “Shakers” went, though I wrote it in five weeks, which is the fastest I’ve ever written a story.

That’s interesting, because it reads like it took a extraordinary effort of discipline to bring it down to the length it is—it could have been a novella.

I did want it to read that way, fluid in a sense, like it could have gone anywhere. I probably had one or two narrative lines that I cut out, but yes, there was something unusual about the writing of “Shakers,” organic and intuitive, different than any other story I’d written. It felt like a gift.

Which is nice, because they usually feel more like births. [Both laugh.] Another thing about the story I loved was that it felt, through this confluence of the personal and natural, like you were telling a geographic history of California, an accounting of the really different landscapes that make up California. It reminded me of that Pavement song off Crooked Rain, “Unfair,” which takes on this same confluence.

Cool! They must have read John McPhee.

Doubtless. And both the song and your story end up being celebrations of California.

Yeah, I mean one of the reasons I enjoyed writing “Shakers” so much was in rendering these landscapes. I’ve lived in Idaho for eight years and I miss California – its vastness – and so in the story I really wanted to revel in that vastness.

It reads like a love letter.

It is, very much so. And what better way to write a love letter to California than via an earthquake?

You couldn’t get much more integral to California than an earthquake. Even the ending, with the guy in the desert who’s probably going to die, [he] has this surge of love for the natural beauty around him as he wastes away with his broken leg. It’s weirdly funny, a demented commercial for the California tourist board, like, “California, right on!”

Yes! The ending is ironic but it’s also true. You know, I like combining the absurd and the profound, and I like that the story accomplishes that.

“Shakers” isn’t the only story that speaks to matters of place and geography. For example, “Only Connect,” which is so infused with the essence of Seattle, however abstract that sounds. Living here, I can tell you that you captured something on the page that encapsulates this temperate rain forest so well, and so mysteriously.

Yeah, and that story is the love letter to Washington.

Not surprising that it was published in Ecotone, considering the magazine’s focus on “place” in fiction, where setting is more the foundation of the story more than, say, character or humor or plot. “Only Connect” could only happen in Seattle and the surrounding areas it touches on, like Bellingham and Astoria.

It reminds me of what Flannery O’Connor said, which is that you can do whatever you want on the level of theme, but that the world of the story has to be real. You know, I tell my students that a story doesn’t work unless you ground it in a physical world that is concrete, that we can really imagine.

What are your thoughts on teaching?

You know, my goal on both the undergraduate and graduate level is not primarily to select the best writers and nurture them and bring them into the world. My goal is not to baptize the ones with the gift and tell the others, I’m sorry, my son, you must go to vocational school. That’s not the job. Ultimately teaching writing is the flip-side of teaching reading, by which I mean creating readers who are able to critically and thoughtfully respond to texts.  On the undergraduate level especially, I try to dispel that, number one, your opinion about a story matters. No. I don’t care if you like it or not–how does it work? This is about learning craft. Number two, students think, well, I can write whatever I want. No, you can’t. The short story is a very demanding, exacting form – once you understand what went into crafting that story, then you understand where your response comes from, and that makes you a smart reader.

That echoes what Robert Coover said, that his job as a writing teacher is to make better readers.

And if better writers are the result, that’s great too. Of course, that’s particular to the graduate level, where you’re aiming to find people capable of mastering the craft. On the graduate level, it can be very gratifying because the level of discussion and engagement is deeper.

More specifically, what about the arguments for and against MFAs?

I guess my rather benign defense of MFA programs in response to that question stems from my . . . um, irritation with writing programs being singled out as needing defending.  So: Can you really teach writing?  Well, it depends on whom you’re teaching it to.  You can’t teach writing to anybody, but you can—just as in the teaching of medicine or engineering—teach it to somebody who has the drive to learn it and the knack to get better at it.  The difference is that if you don’t show evidence of the drive and the knack, you get drummed out of medicine and engineering.  We in writing aren’t quick to do that, because writing isn’t just a thing you learn, it’s a thing you do.  It takes two or three years to get an MFA, and within that time the drive and the knack may be either fully present or they may be submerged, hidden, yet to surface.  I’m not going to shut somebody down just because they’re not at the top of their game.  (If somebody did that to me years ago, I wouldn’t be a writer, and you wouldn’t be interviewing me.)

I’m not saying that everybody who gets an MFA eventually becomes a writer; most don’t.  But laying the groundwork in craft and technique, mentoring everybody—rather than separating wheat from chaff—can certainly help the ones who stick with it.  To paraphrase the character Joe Gideon in Bob Fosse’s great allegory of writing programs, All That Jazz: I may not make you a good dancer, but I can make you a better dancer.

People like to have a strong opinion on MFAs in one direction or the other. With the haters, I often feel like, Really? People trying to become better humans in this tiny, unrenumerative way? That upsets you?

There are worse things to do than graduate someone with an MFA and send a bad writer out into the world. You know, you send out a bad engineer or a bad doctor and then you’ve got problems.

That’s why you don’t get an MFA in being a doctor. Really, MFA stands for Victimless Crime. [Both laugh.]

If I have a truly gifted undergrad, I will mention the MFA to them as something they might consider. But for other students who want to keep writing, I’m reminded of what a teacher told me, which is “Find your metaphor.” You know, find something else you’re good at to do while you write.

So you’ve got the collection out in the stores—unless you’re superstitious about talking about works in progress, would you mind talking about what you are working on now?

I won’t go into too much detail, but I am working on a novel, and am soon going out to UCross in Sheridan, Wyoming, where I’ll spend four weeks there focusing on it.

Sweet Sheridan. I was in a pretty epic snowstorm there once.

That’s why I’m going in August. [Laughs.] I’ve been working on it for about five years, then had to leave it for six months or so while we were getting the collection out, but now I’m full-bore on it, with due date looming. I started it grudgingly, out of necessity, but I have enjoyed figuring out the structure of the long form.

Jesus, novels are tough to write, huh?

They really are.

It’s like, musicians call it “running on blues power.” It’s just such an act of faith and love and inspiration, but you’re not sure if you’re actually running on, you know, quality [both laugh]. Considering that before this project you’ve always written short stories, has writing a novel made you appreciate them equally? Do you have a preference?

At this point I do prefer short stories to novels, both writing them and reading them. Not to take away from the novel, but like I said, the short story is a very precise, exacting form that’s also very artificial. I think the novel is more organic—it’s longer and baggier—and so for me it’s much harder to write a novel. I have had a hard time being engaged with it for five years, sustaining this interest, but I’m genuinely excited about this novel and eager to get back to work on it.

Further Links & Resources

Daniel Orozco / image from the University of Idaho's website

• Read J.T. Bushnell’s review of Orozco’s debut collection. In it, he writes: “Orientation is, without question and without hyperbole, one of the best books I’ve ever read. I can’t find words emphatic enough that aren’t already printed on its dust jacket, but I can assure you that all the words there are true.”
• You can also check out our most current features on other debut collections right here.
• Or check out some of our favorites from Story Month.
• For more on this author’s work, visit Professor Orozco’s University of Idaho page.
• Read some vintage Orozco: his story “I Run Every Day” published a decade ago in the fall 2001 issue of Zoetrope (Vol 5, No 3).
• I’ll take some Chemical Brothers and a side of zither with that, thanks: Largehearted Boy features Orozco’s sonic selections for his stories in their fabulous Book Notes series.
• And be sure to pick up a copy of Orientation: And Other Stories at your local indie bookstore.

Image courtesy author's website

For Donald Lystra, the nineteen-fifties wasn’t all Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Instead, it was an era of bubbling change, depicted poignantly in his novel, Season of Water and Ice, through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy named Danny. The year is 1957. Danny’s father has given up a good job with General Motors to become a salesman and moved his family from Grand Rapids to a cabin by a lake in northern Michigan. Danny’s mother, accustomed to a more comfortable lifestyle, has returned to her parents’ home in the suburbs of Chicago because, she tells Danny, “The country’s a wonderful place for men and boys but it’s not a place for a woman.” Danny strikes up a friendship with his seventeen-year-old neighbor Amber, who is pregnant, unmarried, and facing difficult choices. As Danny tries to understand the relationship between his parents and attempts to intervene in Amber’s relationship with her abusive boyfriend, he learns how different love can be from the what standard fifties images have lead him to expect.

Like his protagonist, Donald Lystra grew up in Michigan in the fifties, and he rejects oversimplified portrayals of a decade he experienced as rich in complication. Season of Water and Ice, Lystra’s first novel, offers a wonderfully character-driven corrective. The book won a 2009 Midwest Book Award for fiction and was named a Michigan Notable Book by the Library of Michigan in 2010. While writing it, Lystra received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. His short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Other Voices, The North American Review, Passages North, and The Greensboro Review. A story called “Family Way,” which eventually grew into Season of Water and Ice, appeared in Cimarron Review in 2006, and an excerpt from the novel appeared in Natural Bridge in 2009.

This interview was conducted in August, 2010.

Danielle Lavaque-Manty: You had a career as an engineer before you started writing. Had you always wanted to write?

Donald Lystra: Yes, I did. Or at least for a long, long time I did. As you say, I became an engineer in my workaday life, and I enjoyed it. I had some successful projects over my career. But I always had the idea—like many other people—that some time I would like to try my hand at writing. And I carried that idea around in the back of my mind for a long, long time.

Then, about the mid-nineties, there were some things that opened up some time for me. My kids were off to college right about then for one thing, so I had fewer family demands. I started scribbling, and just doing things on my own. I would give myself an assignment to describe something, trying to find the best words to do it, and then I would look at it the next day and critique it. Or I would try to write a vivid sentence, and then I would look at it a day or two later and compare it to sentences that I saw in books by authors I really admired, trying to find out why mine wasn’t as good as theirs. I did that for two or three years, that sort of self-education. And I wrote some stories that I sort of liked. But I didn’t think they were perfect by any means.

Then, in 1997, I saw a flyer on [The University of Michigan] campus by someone who was conducting a writing workshop—not under the auspices of the university, but as a separate thing he was doing on his own.

Who was that writer?

His name was Josh Henkin. He’d graduated from the Michigan MFA program, and he’s since published two novels [Swimming Across the Hudson (1997) and Matrimony (2007)]. A wonderful writing teacher, just a brilliant writing teacher in terms of the insights he was able to give me about what a story is, and how to control a story to create an effect of some kind.

The other good thing about that was it brought me in contact with other people who were aspiring writers, some of them very good. So I began to have a network of people. In fact, after Josh finally left town—I took two or three workshops from him over a period of a year and a half—a group of his students got together and had our own irregular workshop every week or two. Three of the five have gone on to publish books, and two of them have gone on to their own academic careers in writing: Valerie Laken is in Milwaukee, [teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee], and the other one, Nick Arvin, is out in Denver, [teaching at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop]. They were all much younger than me. That was part of the fun of it too, frankly—to get together with people who are much, much younger than you, and to have them take what you’re doing seriously, to sort of span years that way.

Are you still in touch with any of them?

They’re not in Ann Arbor anymore, but we email and we go to each other for advice. It’s very hard to write in a totally solitary way, I found out. When I started out I was thinking, “Well, it’s a solitary pursuit, and you ought to be able to figure it out all on your own.” That’s somewhat true, but it’s certainly not entirely true. You need to have a certain amount of instruction, and getting feedback from other people is an immense help. So it went from being a solitary pursuit to a slightly more social activity.

The book itself started with a short story.

It did. As I said, I’d written a bunch of short stories, and some of them had been published. Then I got to where I thought, “Well, okay, I want to try a longer project.” I tried to think of what that would be, what would be a big enough subject or theme to warrant two or three hundred pages of treatment. I worked on a project for several months, and it wasn’t going very well and I got frustrated and I said, “Let’s go back to the basics here. Let me go back and look at the short stories I’ve written and see if in one of them maybe there’s a germ of an idea that can be expanded.”

I found one short story in particular that I thought might work. It was a story I had published in the Cimarron Review. I liked the characters I had created, and I liked the situation that I had created. The other thing about it, when I looked at it again—it was a short story that ended with a lot of loose ends still unresolved. There was one thread that ran through it and came to a conclusion, you might say, to make it a short story, but there were a lot of other issues that were not concluded. I thought, “Let’s see what would happen if I tried to move these characters forward through time.”

I already had fifteen pages of text, which was very encouraging—to have a running start that way. And I already had a pretty good grasp of who the characters were, and the setting, and the situation. The first draft went pretty fast. It was a rough first draft, but I think I finished it in only about three months. Then I went back and I spent another four months revising it before I got it to the point where I wanted to show it to anybody—to an agent who would want to represent it.

That is fast.

I keep trying to find that groove again. I think part of the problem of knowing more about writing—maybe even part of the problem of having published a book—is that you always know too much, and you are too quick to critique what you do when you sit down to write, and that inhibits the process. I want to go back to that innocent state that I had when I started that last project, when I had no particular expectations, just doing it more or less for the fun of it. I think that’s the best frame of mind to do it in.

Place is really important in this novel—the northern Michigan setting—and one thing I was wondering about is the move from the city to the really small town. How important do you think the past in the big city is to the rest of the novel? It opens after they’ve moved, but we do hear about the move.

When I was growing up, my family moved several times. We moved to different sorts of places—cites, suburbs, the country, small towns. I wanted the story to unfold in a relatively isolated place, creating that kind of crucible where things were going to happen removed from society or many other people. The idea of a family moving was an easy way to implement that. The young boy, the narrator, is new to the area, so he’s socially isolated. He hasn’t been there long enough to make friends. He’s physically isolated, too, because of the decision his father made of locating them out in the country on the shore of a lake, which he thought would be a good place to be, but turns out not to be so great, at least after the seasons begin to turn.

One thing that really struck me when I was reading your book—and this might be more about my own preoccupations than your intentions—was the gender constraints that the characters operate under. So I was wondering if you were thinking about that as you were writing. Not in the sense that you meant it as a social critique, but were you thinking about gender issues consciously?

I was, yes, I was. Particularly for the women characters in the book. And I’ve thought of this too with respect to my own family and my own mother. My mother was a typical post-war housewife. She didn’t have any kind of a career at any point in her life. She raised a family of four children. But as I grew up and began to understand her a little bit as a person, other than just as my mother, I can see where she—well, she’s passed away now, she’s been dead for fifteen years—I could see where she was an intelligent woman who had some very definite talents. She always said that if she’d had the chance, she would have loved to have gone into architecture. She had an artistic sense combined with a practical builder’s sense, you might say, that drew her that way. And I thought about a woman like that being constrained in this very tight role that was prescribed for many women back then, and how difficult that probably was.

The male characters, too, operated within a pretty narrowly prescribed role—the sense of being the breadwinner and having to shoulder that responsibility. That comes into play a little bit in this book because the father is pretty much failing at this new career that he’s taken for himself, and he feels the weight of that pretty heavily.

I think the relationship between Danny and Amber is really interesting, too, because he’s younger, and yet sometimes there’s this burden of wanting to be the protector, which he’s not really in a position to do.

That relationship turns a lot of things on their heads, in a way. She’s older than he is, more experienced in the world, and certainly more sexually experienced. Yet he, coming from the city, knows things she doesn’t know and sees into certain situations more deeply than she does. Maybe that’s why I liked that relationship; it did confound a lot of the stereotypes about boy meets girl. And because it was different, you couldn’t assume anything—you had to work through the issues one by one, based on this rather unusual situation.

And you’re right, as a boy he does feel this sense of responsibility. It goes towards Amber, and even towards his father. There are a couple of instances where his father shows weakness, so to speak, and Danny feels a sense of responsibility to help him out, to give him a little support, even if it’s just for a moment. So he’s being indoctrinated, you might say, into this sense of responsibility that boys were expected to assume when they grew up and became men. I think that is the reason that a lot of that is in there, that he’s aware of this burden that’s waiting out there for him to assume, and he’s not altogether comfortable about taking it on.

Before the book had found a home—when you had an agent but not yet a publisher—you were encouraged to revise the book to make it a young adult novel, which you resisted. I’m wondering how you thought about your audience when you were writing Season of Water and Ice.

When I was writing, I didn’t really think of an audience. But I guess I thought I was writing for an adult audience. I might not even have known there was such a thing as a young adult category of fiction, at that time. But when I found an agent, he was curious about considering it as a young adult novel because, I’ve since learned, this is a category of fiction that’s quite active and quite profitable.

So in the first round of submissions he sent it out to six editors who were adult fiction editors and six who were young adult editors. None of the six adult editors were willing to take it. They liked the book, many of them, and some of them seemed to like it quite a lot, but it just didn’t fit into their lineup of books or something. But a couple of the young adult editors indicated that they would take it if it was revised and made more clearly a young adult book, which would have required, oh, simplifying some of the language, and trying to make it more of an in-the-moment narrative style. The way I had written it the first time, there was quite a lot of reflection and thoughtfulness on the part of the character. Maybe to a fault. That can be tedious to a reader even in an adult book, but I guess it’s not appropriate for a young adult book, at least not to the degree that I was doing it. So they wanted that taken out, or greatly simplified.

And I tried to do it. I remember spending a good month because I wanted to sell the book. I was a little disappointed that my agent now was talking more about trying to sell it as a young adult book, but I figured, well, that’s all right, I’ll write other books. So I spent a month trying to make the changes, and at some point I just didn’t like the changes I was making, or the way it was turning out. I remember writing my agent an email and probably spending two or three days composing it, because I thought it was probably going to be the end of our relationship. I basically told him that I’d thought about it and I’d concluded that I didn’t want to do it. I gave him the reasons why, and tried to make as good a case as I could. Somewhat to my surprise, he said, “Well, that’s all right. We’ll go ahead and see if we can sell it as an adult work.” We made some changes to it still before we sent it out the second time, but they weren’t for the purpose of turning it into a young adult book.

I’m glad you didn’t lose the richness of Danny’s thoughts. I think that’s one of the real strengths of the book.

I’m glad, too. I was at the McDowell Colony a year and a half ago or so, and one of the other colonists there was a fellow in his thirties or forties, who I think graduated from the MFA program at Iowa. He’d written a novel and had gone through the same experience I had, where the agent, when he looked at it, thought it should be a young adult novel. And he actually did go through and make the changes, and they sold the book as a young adult novel. After he told me the story, I said, “Well, how did you feel about that?” And he looked at me and said, “I felt terrible.” Which is a heartbreaking thing to hear. This person has gone on to publish another book that has had quite a bit of critical success, so his career wasn’t over, and it wasn’t a blow that he wasn’t able to recover from, but that particular experience left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Am I remembering right that when Switchgrass took it, yours was one of the first works of fiction they’d published?

Yes.  Northern Illinois University Press, which is the main press, is a scholarly publisher. They got a new director two or three years ago who had the idea of starting a fiction imprint and having it focus on Midwest themes and writers. The first two books they published in 2009 under the Switchgrass imprint were mine and another novel called Beautiful Piece.

What has it been like working with Switchgrass?

The editorial process was good, in the sense that they gave a lot of suggestions but let me have the final word in each and every case. And some of the things we had fairly sharp differences about. I don’t know if a larger publisher would have done that or not. They might have insisted on calling more of the shots.

The thing about a small press, or a university press—and you know this going into it—is that they don’t have the marketing resources that the New York publishers have. And yet, you sort of wish you could be sent on a round-the-country tour, or have ads taken in different places. But I can’t really fault them. With the constraints they had, they did a good job, and the book is finding its way to an audience.

One thing that is very good about a university press, or small presses in general, I think, is that they do stick with a book. Mine has not had great sales, but it has been steady, and it has been steadily increasing. In fact, just a few days ago, I was talking to the publisher and found out that they’re going to do a second printing. I mean, we’re not talking about huge numbers here, you understand, but still, it’s a nice milestone.

What have they been able to do, publicity-wise?

They introduced the book at a bookseller’s conference, The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. They had me set up to do a signing, which was kind of ridiculous, I thought, because nobody knew me or the book at that point. But still, quite a few booksellers came by and got to know about the novel. And they sent around press releases, and a certain amount of publicity to newspapers and magazines, mostly in the Midwest. The idea was that it would get a foothold in the Midwest and maybe spread farther, but the first emphasis was in the Midwest.

And I threw myself into the marketing to some extent. I found out that that’s not uncommon even for authors who are published by New York houses. The expectation now is that authors will do things to promote their books with their own time and their own resources. Which is kind of crazy, I think, because their time ought to be better spent writing another book. But that’s starting to be the norm. You know, they want an author to have a web site, and if they can have a blog that’s even better. I don’t have a blog. I drew the line there. But I did put together a web site last summer.

Probably the best thing we did, though—and this was a joint decision—is that we submitted the book for award competitions. One was in the state of Michigan, what they call the Michigan Notable Books program, something the Library of Michigan has been doing for twenty or twenty-five years. They designate twenty books as being “notable books” from the standpoint of Michigan and Michigan history. Season of Water and Ice was selected, which was a nice accolade. A few months later we submitted for another program, which was the Midwest Book Awards, a program run by an organization of independent publishers in the Midwest. Season of Water and Ice was selected as the winner in the general fiction category, which was another nice round of publicity and attention.

What has the experience of having the book come out been like? You said it hasn’t been exactly energizing for your current work.

It’s the accomplishment of a long-term goal, and all the satisfaction that comes out of that. It is different in some ways than you expect. And I’ve talked to other writers, other first-time authors, and there’s a degree of anxiety you experience, particularly in the early days, because all of a sudden this thing that has been so private is out there in the big wide world, and anybody who wants to can pick it up and read it. Or, if they don’t want to, they don’t have to pick it up and read it. And if they do read it they’re free to like it or not like it, or think it’s stupid, or find some glaring error that you’ve overlooked. That was the initial fear, in spite of the fact that I’ve been very careful in writing it myself, and have gotten feedback from other writers, as well as the editor who I worked with. Yet I had this gnawing fear that took a while to go away that there was just something terribly wrong with it that had not yet been discovered. It’s crazy, it’s kind of irrational, I guess, because the book had been carefully handled by me and by other readers and by the publisher. But that went away after a month or two, that anxiety.

I think the reason I haven’t been productive with new writing is because of what we were talking about a few minutes ago. I did get caught up in the marketing of it. It’s surprising. It didn’t seem like it was a great effort, but it did seem like every day there were a few emails I had to send out or answer, or I was coordinating going to some event maybe, or maybe just thinking about what I could do to help my book along, what I could do that I hadn’t thought of yet. And all of that ate into my day, and maybe ate into my energy, to the point where I didn’t really have a lot left over to work on new writing.

So you’ve been going to all these readings and having all these people ask you so many questions. Is there a question you wish they would ask you that they haven’t yet?

I don’t know that there is. People ask you all sorts of things: How you work, what time of day you write, whether you use a notepad or a computer, where your ideas come from. At Nicola’s Books, the owner told me ahead of time that there are two things people always want to know about a writer. One is, “Where did you get the idea for this book?” And the other is, “How do you write?” Which are kind of the two extremes. A lot of people want to know whether it’s an autobiographical novel, and it’s not. But there are parts of it that I’ve drawn from things that I know, obviously. I had the experience when I was growing up of living in a lakeside cottage during the fall and winter. I remember that it turns into a fairly forbidding place as the season turns and all the cottagers go home for their winter months. Most of those places are summer-only communities. So that idea probably came out of that experience I had when I was young.

I don’t know. No one has ever asked me, I guess, “What did you think you were going to accomplish?” Or, “What do you want to have accomplished with this book?” And I’m not sure I can answer that. I mean, in the larger sense, why write a book, why put it out there, what do you think is going to happen as a result of it? You hope that people who connect with it will take away some insights they might not otherwise have had. Does an author want them to be better people after they’ve read his or her book? I guess maybe one thing I did hope—this is more mundane than that, and I’ve said this several times already whether I’ve been asked it or not—I did think that the period of the nineteen-fifties has kind of been relegated to a notch, a little place in history, and as someone who lived through it, I saw it as a more interesting period of time. It led to all the things that came ten years later—the big societal changes that broke things apart in the late sixties. The origins of all the things that were going to happen later were starting in the fifties. The conflicts, and the confusions, and the cross currents that people were caught in and trying to work their way through, I think, started in the fifties and people started to try to deal with them then. So I guess one thing—though maybe I thought this afterwards—I was hoping that people would think it was a more interesting time than what you see on Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. That there were families that were caught in difficult situations that they didn’t quite know how to deal with and feeling pressures that were new to them.

I suppose everybody hopes they grew up in a time that was interesting, or significant, but whenever I hear somebody refer to the fifties disdainfully, it makes me react, because I was there and I thought it was more complicated than that.

Is there anything else you want to say?

Gosh, I don’t know. We covered the ground pretty well. You know, one thing we talked about early on—and it’s true—is that transition I made from being a solitary writer to being a more sociable writer, which was an important step. It’s hard to say how much I appreciate that and do it justice—the little things you get, and big things, insights into what you’ve done. I have a sense of gratitude to all the people I’ve worked with.

• Visit Don’s website for more on his work
• Learn more about Switchgrass Books
• Read Lydia Fitzpatrick and Kate Levin’s FWR interview with Donald Ray Pollock, another author who began writing later in life, as a second career
• Read Valerie Laken’s essay, “The Magical, Dreadful First Hundred Pages,” right here on FWR

Hiram Tobit harbors interior wounds, hurts inflicted by the savagery of war and the brutality of his life in the mountains. The father/son conflict is as old as Oedipus, but the particulars and the passion of this tough and tender relationship still hold an unrelenting power, especially when coupled with the vivid details of place and character that White draws throughout the novel. Circumstance damages every son in a different way; every father possesses his own hidden story. White plumbs the depths of these archetypes with delicate and masterful skill, rendering both of these hard-edged mountain men with pity and understanding.

White’s style evokes Cormac McCarthy, perhaps because the only way to write effectively about extreme violence is to break each moment down into its most elemental parts. By meticulously describing the outer movements of both Sloane and Hiram, White reveals their echoing inner emotions. White’s writing is beautiful, luminescent, infused by that Southern cadence that belies an ancient, earthy wisdom.

When Hiram attends his first church service in his home community, the benediction has this effect:

The words were so familiar to Hiram. The same his mother had spoken throughout his boyhood. The easy praise and the submission to his will. How those words worked at him now, though. All the faith and humility armies of men could summon up meant nothing when the heart of God turned hard. Hiram had listened to the screams of the dying in his name, whether it was in English or German. But his answer never varied, all human language apparently beyond his ken. Hiram turned his eyes up before the final Amen. He saw that others did, too.

White begins the story with Hiram’s return, but does not reunite father and son immediately. By delaying the meeting, tension and suspense build as White unspools the reasons Hiram avoids his father. Violence has driven a wedge between them, yet also draws them together when a heinous act occurs in the midst of the small mountain community: a young girl gets pregnant, and her enraged father kidnaps her, swearing vengeance. The sheriff asks several upstanding men, including Hiram, for help:

Old Man Vaughn. His youngest went and got herself in trouble with some boy. Seems he got tipped to the fact she’s carrying a bastard and like to have a fit. Said if she didn’t tell him who the daddy was, he was gonna cut the little rabbit right out of her belly. He’s gone and run off and took the girl with him according to the mama. Lit out with the girl last night cussing about how he was gonna show that damn child the price for lying about while she was under his roof. We’ve got a fair idea of where he’s heading and I need ever man who can ride and shoot so as to get that girl back before he proves himself a fool.

A posse forms to go after Vaughn, and this is where Sloane enters the frame. Vaughn and Sloane used to hunt together years ago, and Sloane offers the only means of locating the old shack they shared.

Until this point, the story has been told in third-person limited, Hiram’s point of view. Once White introduces Sloane, the reader gets another perspective, though still in third-person: the father, who carries his wife and son’s deaths upon his body like a heavy wool coat. When Hiram and Sloane finally meet, the drenched posse requires shelter as well as direction. They must ask Sloane for help. The tension White creates as Hiram approaches his old home is palpable:

Hiram got off his horse and went up to where the rain scattershot across the tin roof.
Sloane’s voice bit like a hatchet. “I guess I was expecting you.”
“How’s that?”
“I just knew, is all.” The old man turned his eyes out to the streaming dark beyond. “Who are they?”
“The law. Looking for a man that made a mess of things.”
Sloane nodded and spat over the far edge of the porch floorboards. “They’s plenty of that type around, I imagine.”
“You gonna put us up until this storm passes?”
He leaned the shotgun against the doorframe. “I guess I’d be a sumbitch not to … bring those boys on in for a smoke and a cup.”
Hiram turned to the horses.
“Hiram.”
“Yes, sir?”
“It’s been a long time coming home.”

Sharp and accurate as a surgeon’s scalpel, White captures the dialect of the region, at the same time exposing the nature of father and son’s relationship.

White pulls off one more major shift in point of view in Lambs of Men’s last chapter–but the change startles and delights with the surprise it offers. Nara, wife and mother, ends the book with her story, a fascinating decision by the author. Both men meet in the body of this woman, wife and mother. Her death serves as the crux of their conflict.

Throughout Lambs of Men, White’s writing is lovely, but in the last chapter, it approaches the sublime:

The birds had whispered her name at daybreak, the moment when shade mated with sun and the world was born. She’d strained to listen, to see if there was any way it might have been a trick of her mind, but the longer she waited the greater the distance between hearing and knowing became, frightening her into wakefulness.

This brief novel has the emotional power of a quick dagger thrust–short and filled with great strength. White is a master storyteller, rendering his prose as elegant, effective and deliberate as poetry. An amazing debut.

Further Links & Resources:

White, via author site

“Whatever happens,” he grins, “let’s make it an early night. I’ve been out with friends every night this week, and I don’t think my body can handle another bender.”

“No problem,” I assure him. Evison’s rigorous tour has had him at twenty-three signing events in twenty-six days. Mornings have been reserved for print media and radio talk show interviews.

“Whatever you do, don’t even ask, because I don’t have any willpower, and I’ll do it. I’ll go,” he says. Immediately delighted by the subtextual invitation, I take the bait: “There’s a great little Irish-style pub downtown that has Tetley’s English Ale on tap and a locally produced rye that can’t be beat.”

“Oh, you sonofabitch,” he smiles. “Here we go again.”

Over dinner, Evison pores over his book, trying to decide which pieces to read. This is no easy task. At five hundred pages, West of Here appears no different than any other novel—at first glance. What readers find, however, are two full casts of characters separated by over one hundred years of time: a nineteenth-cenury group of Washington state settlers and the modern-day population of precisely the same place. The former—a team of explorers, a journalist, an entrepreneur, an innkeeper, a prostitute—all dream of their individual and mutual futures as they strive to develop their rustic settlement, Port Bonita. The latter cast lives in the Port Bonita of 2006, and, mostly comprised of descendants of the nineteenth-century characters, can’t help but see, all around them, the decline of the community their ancestors struggled to establish.

“It’s very sinewy,” Evison explains. “It’s been really hard for me to choose selections of the novel to read. Because everything’s so interconnected, I end up having to explain important contextual details. The problem is that, in doing so, I end up giving away things about the book that I don’t want to—things the reader should discover on his or her own.”

Charles Dickens

It’s easy to understand the challenge Evison faces. West of Here is populated by more than fifty characters, some of whom appear for the first time as the book comes to its close. Evison has read and enjoyed Dickens since he was very young, and although the Victorian author’s influence on the crafting of the characters and the scope of the events in the story is clear to the reader, the novel does not have the tidy resolution common to work of the period. This is not to say, however, that West of Here is by any means unkempt. Evison handles his robust cast with the steady hand of a master conductor, and the valley of time that lies between his nineteenth-century characters and their modern-day parallels creates just enough distance between them to accentuate the yearning that each has for the lifestyle of the other.

Emerson wrote that “there is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time,” and elaborated, writing of man that “each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done.” But he cautions his readers of what he calls “the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves.” Evison’s nineteenth-century characters are interested in “triumphs of will or of genius.” Their notion of self is contextualized by the vast ocean of history. The place that is West of Here might be the creation of a dam or the writing of an important exposé. It might be the mapping of the wilderness around Mount Olympus or the creation of an opera house. They all have their eyes on a future that is bigger, better, and brighter than their present.

Unfortunately, Evison suggests, we may have arrived at a point where we are experiencing this “too great nearness to ourselves.” His contemporary cast all find themselves more or less adrift. They are battered, broken, and bereft of any real notion of agency in the context of history. The place that lies West of Here, that numinous and attractive dream, has been replaced by a vague sense of insatiate hunger. Notions of greatness and fame have become indistinguishable, and the wide open space that was the future has become cluttered. The good news is that if Emerson is right, and man is “explicable by nothing less than all his history,” [emphasis mine] what we find in Jonathan Evison’s West of Here—expansive as it is—is only a few chapters of this history, and the dialogue that Evison is eager to open up, in this light, seems more important than ever.

Courtesy of the author

Evison and I spoke about the book on and off that day, and into the evening, and have corresponded a little since then, finishing up our discussion. Try as I might, I wasn’t able to talk him out of drinks that evening, but we did manage to stay away from the rye.

Interview

Aaron Cance: A book this—you’ve called it sinewy—must take an extraordinary amount of focus to orchestrate. I imagine it was a real challenge to keep everything in hand.

Jonathan Evison: It’s almost maddening. It takes a great deal of “preproduction” thought. Then, when I finally do get to my work, I go in deep—really deep. It can be hours before I come up for air.

Do you work primarily from an outline, or do you let your characters drive the story?

I create characterizations and circumstances for those characterizations, but I let them make their own decisions. I try to stay as invisible as possible and let my characters do their work. I create a scaffolding that I can work from.

Port Angeles harbor

Port Bonita is a fictional place.

Right, but the history of Port Bonita in the novel is all based on the actual history of Port Angeles. I researched Port Angeles because it was such a perfect and interesting microcosm to work within. I actually found so much interesting historical information about this place, I had to leave a lot of it out. Then I fictionalized it and changed the name. I think they’re warming up the tar for me in Port Angeles right now. I have an upcoming tour date there.

When do you feel you’ve done enough research about a place to write about it? How much historical information is enough?

I asked my friend David Liss—an incredible writer, if you haven’t read him, author of The Conspiracy of Paper, The Coffee Trader, and others—I asked him this very question. I said, “Dave, when do I stop researching and start writing?” He told me to stop when the research started to get in the way of the story.

This is actually the second novel that I’ve read in the last couple months that has had an unusually manipulated timeline (although all narrative timelines are manipulated to some extent). In West of Here, the reader finds a generation of characters settling Port Bonita during the late nineteenth century. One hundred or so pages later, you introduce a second cast of characters, all descendants of the first, living in the same geographical space in 2006. Why did you decide to structure the novel in this way?

I wanted to do everything I could do to get away from the wide-angle lens, and linear form, by which history is most often represented, in which stories are embedded. I like the idea of history as a conversation between the past and the present.

This is why you try to steer away from the term “historical novel?”

I conceptualized West of Here, and continue to think of it, as less of a historical novel and more of a novel about history itself.

Close to the beginning of the book, one of your main characters, James Mather, the explorer, tells Eva Lambert that he explores because he is interested in how the natural world humbles him. Are you also saying, through the unusually broad arc of the timeline, that people can also be humbled by time?

Yup. That’s pretty much the idea from page one.

The accomplishments that we can be so proud of are washed away by passing years.

Exactly. The place where this idea is most clear is when Krig makes his way back across the muddy fairgrounds and notices that the falling rain has already washed away his footprints.

Is there also the implication, here, that we are, perhaps, proud of the wrong type of accomplishments? That we pay little heed to the things that could make life really meaningful to us, and focus rather on things that seem to matter only in the present?

Yes. It’s definitely fair to say that implication is there. But then, all of history seems to be a great big tug-of-war between the past and the future, and it’s really hard to blame anybody for taking their eyes off the present, because so much of the present seems to deal with reconciling our past with our future. It’s sort of a cruel riddle.

Ethan Thornburgh defines his life by the dam that he orchestrates—it even distracts him from the child that he really never gets to know well—yet the reader sees that, only a couple generations later, the dam is going to be taken apart. Ethan’s descendant, Jared, is defined by his grandfather and father, and seems relatively unhappy on account of his inability to define himself.

Certainly. It has become harder and harder for people to define themselves in the modern world, as there seem to be fewer opportunities to do so. Also, those of us living in the modern world don’t have the luxury of short-sightedness, lest we all charge head-on to our own extinction.

The stakes are higher now than they’ve ever been before.

Absolutely.

Courtesy of the author

Tell me about the place that’s West of Here. It seems to me to represent far more than a geographical area. I read it as the wide open space of possibility, a place generated by, but not necessarily limited to, the imagination.

That’s the big fat question that sits in front of us. Where do we go from here? What modern idealism might lead us there? How do we avoid repeating mistakes we’ve made in the past?

These are the questions you’re bringing up with the book, through this dialogue between the past and the present.

Right. This is a search for a modern idealism—some parallel to the nineteenth-century Emersonian idealism found in the early portions of the novel. The book is meant to open that dialogue up. Every writing project should lead into dialogues that can be productive.

You mentioned during dinner that the discussion portion of your readings are what you most look forward to when you’re on the road.

This is the whole point: to get people to think—to talk about—the questions the novel raises.

Your characters are all seeking something. Some of them know exactly what they’re looking for and others don’t. The ones who don’t, mostly the contemporary characters, can only experience a vague, indefinable sense of longing that seems to be even harder for them to come to terms with.

Again, it’s really hard for modern folks to be imbued with a sense of personal destiny when so many opportunities have evaporated. Sadly, some vague idea of fame seems to have filled this gap.

It also seems to me that you’ve used the wide chronological arc to imply that we aren’t as well equipped today to venture “west” as people were in the nineteenth century. Some of the characters are emotionally stunted—Rita and Curtis come to mind. Timmon Tillman and Franklin Bell have been so softened by modern living that neither of them is prepared for the utter indifference of the natural world when they attempt to live in it.

Unfortunately, much of our physical and emotional stoicism seems to have evaporated with our opportunities.

Writing is a type of exploration, a journey that takes us into uncharted territory, allowing us a glimpse of what we might wish we were or showing us a life that can be more dramatic or exciting that our own. Are there any characters that you particularly identify with? Where is the place that’s West of Here for you?

Writing this book felt a lot to me like James Mather’s expedition—I locked myself in a room to work, I didn’t take phone calls, I wrote on the walls. The arc of the overall endeavor was a lot like James Mather’s expedition—tortuous during its execution until, like Mather, I found myself on the divide, the landscape rolling out ahead of me as far as I could see. At that point, it was exhilarating because I could see everything before me.

Was the most difficult thing about West of Here the transition from conceptualization to execution, then?

I love books that are ambitious. My very favorite books are the ones that can hardly contain their own invention.

Further Links and Resources

Jonathan Evison | WEST OF HERE from markmcknight on Vimeo.

Erika Dreifus / photo credit: Lisa Hancock

In the beginning, I read. I read histories and testimonies. I read Anne Frank’s diary, and “books for children” with titles like Mischling, Second Degree and The Endless Steppe. I read Elie Wiesel. I read Schindler’s List before it became a movie. In college and graduate school, I read more. Much more. I began to notice a shift in authorship. Rather than reading books by those who had lived through Nazi persecution, I was discovering memoirs and fiction by that generation’s children. These were “second-generation” writers, I learned: 2G.

My interest in the subject matter was deeply personal. My father’s parents, German Jews, had immigrated to the United States as young adults—each, alone—in the late 1930s. They met in New York and married in 1941. My father, their only child, was born in 1944. The first of two grandchildren, I arrived in 1969. We were very close. In literal terms, our south Brooklyn apartment was footsteps from theirs; after my parents and sister and I moved to New Jersey in 1978, our visits were frequent and our phone calls even more so.

In my twenties, I began writing about this legacy in a few nonfiction pieces. Then I started writing fiction. Increasingly, I found that my fiction was inspired by my grandparents’ refugee experiences and their own family histories. This focus continued after my grandmother’s passing—she was the last surviving grandparent—at the start of my second semester in an MFA program in January 2002. It has resulted in one novel manuscript (unpublished) and one short-story collection, Quiet Americans (published earlier this year).

But when I began this work, I didn’t know that elsewhere—at other desks, in other countries—other writers were similarly engaged. Also born in or on the edges of the 1970s, these writers, too, have published fictional narratives inspired in some way by their grandparents’ encounters with Nazism, and by their own Holocaust-related family histories of war, immigration, and survival.

Among them are three novelists: Julie Orringer (b. 1973), whose The Invisible Bridge was published in 2010 to considerable acclaim and re-issued in paperback a few months ago; Alison Pick (b. 1975), whose Far to Go, published in the author’s native Canada last fall, has won that country’s Jewish Book Award for fiction and will be released in the U.S. in May 2011; and British writer Natasha Solomons (b. 1980), whose debut novel was published last year in the U.K. as Mr. Rosenblum’s List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman and in the U.S. as Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English.

Julie Orringer / photo credit: Stephanie Rausser

Alison Pick

Natasha Solomons / photo credit: Mike Carsley

Whether in front matter, acknowledgments, author bios, or easily-accessed interviews, all three of these writers have spoken openly about their books’ roots in their grandparents’ histories. Moreover, rather than focusing on the sequelae of this family experience on their own lives and psyches—a tendency for which critic Ruth Franklin has sharply (at moments, perhaps too sharply) criticized certain second-generation fiction writers in her important and equally recent book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction—they have spun stories grounded in their grandparents’ prewar and wartime European worlds (and in the case of Mr. Rosenblum, extending into the 1950s).

Reading these novels by Orringer, Pick, and Solomons in the months leading up to and following my own book’s publication, I found an unusual sense of companionship, as an author and as a grandchild.

And as the annual observance of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) approaches—this year, it will begin at sundown on Sunday, May 1—it seems especially appropriate to recognize these works from an emerging literary cohort.

First, a comment. Some readers—I’ve encountered a few—may believe that, for lack of better phrasing, “too many” “Holocaust stories” are “already” out there. That, again for lack of more felicitous wording, there’s “nothing new” to be gained from work that evokes this cataclysm. To this, I can respond no more eloquently than by quoting Roma Nutkiewicz Ben-Atar, co-author with her son, Doron S. Ben-Atar, of What Time and Sadness Spared: Mother and Son Confront the Holocaust:

The variety of Holocaust experiences is equal to the number of survivors. A terrible common reality engulfed all of us, and yet when I speak to other survivors I sometimes have the distinct impression that each of us, despite having been in the same “there,” has been in a different place. We experienced the horrors as differently as we reacted to the events at the end of the war: the sudden freedom, the liberation we dreamed of, and the return home to find nothing and, most horribly, nearly no one.

Moreover, by shifting the literary terrain away from the by now horrifyingly familiar ghettos, gas chambers, and attics to encompass other stories, including those of people who—like Solomons’ grandparents, or mine— managed to leave their European homelands before World War II’s actual outbreak—we spotlight characters who, as Solomons has so beautifully explained in an interview, lived “on the edges of history,” and their less-recognizable conflicts, plotlines, and settings.

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Let us begin with Natasha Solomons’ book, Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English. As I noted in a review for Jewish Book World last year, the “About the Author” section at the conclusion of this novel states that Mr. Rosenblum “is based on [Solomons'] own grandparents’ experience.” The novel focuses on Jack (né Jakob) Rosenblum, who emigrates from Germany with his wife, Sadie, and their baby daughter in the summer of 1937. Upon arrival, Jack receives a “dusky blue pamphlet entitled While you are in England: Helpful Information and Friendly Guidance for every Refugee.” If Jack cherishes a Bible, this pamphlet is it: “He obeyed the list with more fervour than the most ardent Bar Mitzvah boy did the laws of Kashrut….” Over time, he expands and adds to the list based on his own observations.

Sadie Rosenblum does not share her husband’s enthusiasm for throwing off their past (or for his “verdammt list”). She is haunted by the family left behind—and lost—in Germany. This domestic conflict underlies the novel.

But the challenge that actively drives the plot is Jack’s postwar quest to build a golf course in Dorset, which results from his being denied golf-club membership—the final list item, “the quintessential characteristic of the true English gentleman.” In Solomons’ book, then, two specific strands of experience emerge: the immigrant quest to assimilate (in this case, with the immigrant’s Jewishness playing at least as much a role as his Germanness); and a type of “survivor’s guilt” experienced by someone who survived by seeking refuge in another country.

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How, when, and where to seek refuge from Nazism are questions at the foundations of the conflicts and tensions in Alison Pick’s Far to Go. Two narratives alternate: one set in the late 1930s and one much more “presentist.” The former narrative dominates, in both page count and power; as at least one reviewer has noted, it is this historical storyline that more compellingly captures the reader’s attention and emotions. (I empathize with the challenge that Pick faced here: One of the repeated responses my then-agent and I received when we circulated my aforementioned novel manuscript was that the book’s “historical” chapters far outshone the ones set closer to the present. In any case, Far to Go’s secondary narrative seems deliberately opaque, evidently a mystery that the reader is intended to comprehend only as the book nears its end.)

The main story opens in September 1938, on the eve of the Munich agreement that delivered the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler. Pavel Bauer is a prosperous factory owner—Jewish—living in a “sleepy Bohemian town” with his wife, Anneliese; their little boy, Pepik; and Pepik’s devoted, non-Jewish governess, Marta. Backgrounded by the steady Nazi takeover of territory from Munich forward, the novel depicts a specific slice of Jewish experience in the Nazi era: in Czechoslovakia, the land that Pick’s paternal grandparents fled in 1941.

Far to Go also spotlights the Kindertransport, by which thousands of Jewish children living in Germany or German-annexed territories (including Czechoslovakia) were able to seek refuge in Great Britain. Reading this novel, one is reminded anew about fiction’s power to illuminate “emotional truths.” One of Pick’s most significant artistic successes is this: It is impossible to absorb scenes at the train station, where little Pepik’s parents and Marta manage to separate themselves from the child, or the subsequent ones in which Pepik finds himself alone on that train and bewildered by what follows once he reaches his destination, without sensing at least a glimmer of the anguish that the actual, nonfictional families must have experienced.

Kindertransport Memorial, Liverpool Station, London

In a radio interview, Pick described her family background. Like Pavel Bauer, Pick’s Czech grandfather owned a factory. But it was another family altogether—that of the factory’s similarly Jewish plant manager—that appears to have supplied the spark for the Kindertransport storyline. (Here, too, I hear echoes of my own fiction-writing experience: the true-life inspiration for my book’s opening story, “For Services Rendered,” came not from the lived experience of my own relatives, but rather from my grandmother’s fairly matter-of-fact mentions of a refugee pediatrician she first encountered when, as a new immigrant in the U.S., she obtained a job as a nanny for a little girl who was this pediatrician’s patient.)

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With Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge, we find ourselves again in other settings: the Hungary of the author’s grandparents, and the Paris of the 1930s where both her grandfather and her protagonist, Andras Lévi, went to study architecture. One of the current bugaboos of review-speak is the phrase “pitch-perfect,” but I hold a PhD in Modern French history as well as an MFA in creative writing, and I can assure you that “pitch-perfect” is exactly the right term to describe the 1930s Paris of the first half of Orringer’s novel. As beautiful and romantic as the city remains—Paris is where Andras falls in love with another Hungarian Jewish émigré, Klara, whom he eventually marries—it is nonetheless moving inexorably toward war, with all of the accompanying xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and other ugliness that were indeed part of the true historical picture. In the novel, these forces propel Andras and Klara back to Hungary when Andras’s student visa cannot be renewed in France.

Orringer’s mastery of Paris and French history make me have faith in her subsequent rendering of wartime Hungary, too. And, as Janet Maslin noted in her New York Times review, “‘The Invisible Bridge’ is unusual partly because Hungary was unusual.’” Indeed, deportations of Jews from Hungary to the death camps did not commence until 1944. Which is not to say that life before 1944 for Hungarian Jews like Orringer’s grandparents—or her characters—was easy or secure. Far from it, as the plot of the novel’s second section, which I will not detail here, shows.

I will tell you, however, that throughout both the French and Hungarian portions of the book—which is to say, for the vast majority of my reading time—it seemed as though I were immersed in a classic nineteenth-century realist novel. I am by no means the only reader to have discerned this, and in an excellent interview for the Moment magazine blog, Orringer affirmed that it was at least partially her intent to write exactly that kind of book. But she also wanted to write something “very contemporary.” Toward the book’s end, Orringer does two things to remind us not only of the story’s relevance in the present, but also of her personal connection to the material.

Wislawa Symborska / photo credit: Mariusz Kubik

In her epilogue, Orringer writes of the Lévis’ granddaughter: “She’d learned about that war in school, of course—who had died, who killed whom, how, and why—though her books hadn’t had much to say about Hungary. She’d learned other things about the war from watching her grandmother, who saved plastic bags and glass jars, and kept bottles of water in the house in case of disaster, and made layer cakes with half as much butter and sugar as the recipes called for, and who, at times, would begin to cry for no reason.” And: “There were strands of darker stories. She didn’t know how she’d heard them; she thought she must have absorbed them through her skin, like medicine or poison. Something about labor camps. Something about being made to eat newspapers. Something about a disease that came from lice. Even when she wasn’t thinking about those half stories, they did their work in her mind.”

Indeed they did. I’ll go so far as to suggest that for all of us, even two generations later, in the United States or Canada or Great Britain or wherever our grandparents were able to raise our parents and, eventually, watch us grow up, the stories—fragmented or not—have done their work in our minds. If they hadn’t, it’s unlikely that these books would have been written.

Further Links and Resources

By age and family history, if not by genre, this literary cohort also includes Johanna Adorján (b. 1971). Adorján’s book, An Exclusive Love (trans. Anthea Bell), was published in Germany in 2009 and released in an English edition in the U.S. earlier this year. Technically, An Exclusive Love is a memoir. It focuses on Adorján’s paternal grandparents, Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust, fled Budapest during the 1956 uprising there, and rebuilt their lives in Denmark. This is all important and essential background, and Adorján is careful to delineate what she knows about it and what she has been unable to find out. But the book’s driving force is Adorján’s effort to reconstruct a single day in her grandparents’ lives: October 13, 1991, the day they committed suicide together. In the very best sense, An Exclusive Love is a memoir that reads like a novel, combining the strengths of both literary worlds and, importantly, remaining steadfastly honest about what “really happened” and what can only be envisaged.

Other relatively recent books of fiction that I’ve found striking at least in part for the authors’ inclusion of “grandparent” characters with origins in Nazi Europe include Our Holocaust, by Israeli author Amir Gutfreund (trans. Jessica Cohen), and The Pale of Settlement, a collection of linked stories by Margot Singer that won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. For a brief summary of the former, which won Israel’s Sapir Prize, see its Kirkus review, which also alludes to the book’s autobiographical/familial elements. For interviews with Margot Singer about the latter, including discussions of the relevance of her own grandparents’ histories, see Reform Judaism magazine and Southeast Review Online. (See also my review for Kenyon Review Online.)

Ruth Franklin’s above-mentioned A Thousand Darknesses in fact concludes with a section on “The Third Generation” (available in part via Google books). Franklin does not delve into the family histories of the authors she cites as belonging to this cohort. (Did Michael Chabon’s grandparents come from Nazi-dominated Europe? For Franklin, the question is quite possibly irrelevant.) But simply by training her expert critical eye on fiction that she characterizes as “third-generation,” Franklin advances the discussion significantly. She hesitates, she says, to call writers of this cohort “‘Holocaust writers,’ because although their works do touch on the subject, tangentially or more directly, it is never their main focus. Indeed, this is part of their literary liberation.” In addition to Chabon, her exemplars include Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer. She focuses on the ways in which these writers “have turned Jewish literary tradition inside out” and in particular, their use of fantasy.

If only every writer had a friend like Annabel Giles.

It’s a brilliant device, and Tessaro followed orders, unpacking the shoebox one item at a time alongside her protagonist, Cate Albion, a beautiful young artist with a mysterious past. Cate has come to London to inventory Endsleigh, a formerly grand country estate, on behalf of her eccentric aunt Rachel’s auction house. Together with Rachel’s sole employee, Jack Coates, she uncovers far more than expected in the crumbling Devon manor, and finds herself drawn into a 1930s mystery that eerily parallels the novel’s present-day action.

The shoebox leads Cate to the Blythe sisters, shining new-money debutantes who took London by storm between the wars. She becomes fascinated with the Blythes, particularly the youngest, Diana “Baby” Blythe, who built her delicious reputation on recklessness and then disappeared without a trace. Compelled to uncover Baby’s fate, Cate steals away with the shoebox and sets out to unravel Endsleigh’s greatest mystery.

Devon Manor, via Flickr - Tim Bradshaw

The Debutante is a fast-paced and enjoyable ride between present day London and the gilded world of the Blythe sisters, which Tessaro wisely chooses to reveal through letters and correspondence rather than through flashback. She’s at her best in these letters, which are pitch-perfect in tone, content, and form. In an early letter, a young, carefree Baby writes,

Have just tried to cut my own hair with a pair of sewing shears and now look like the boy who delivers for the butcher’s. Anne has kindly lent me a cloche. Pray for me.

Later, as both London and Baby grow darker and more desperate, she writes, “You know I’m languishing here and therefore it’s your civic duty, on behalf of the war effort, to send me as much gossip as possible.” The letters are so rich that they could almost be read as a standalone manuscript, revealing just enough to advance the mystery, while aligning brilliantly with Cate’s own discovery process.

Image Credit: Flickr

Holding everything together—Cate, Jack, Rachel, the Blythe mystery, even Rachel’s business—is an overarching theme of infidelity. Although slightly heavy-handed at times (Rachel wears only red shoes, as if she is channeling Hester Prynne from the ankle down), it provides enough of a through-line to keep the various characters tethered and relevant to one another. Ultimately, this is not a story about the past; it’s a story about surviving the past, making the necessary adjustments, and moving on.

And while people may move on, places cannot. As Cate and Jack meticulously document the contents of Endsleigh, they do so knowing they will be the last to see it as it is, or rather, as it was. Tessaro has a precise sense of place, and positions Endsleigh as a character equal to her protagonist:

It was impressive yet at the same time unruly, showing signs of recent neglect. The front lawns were overgrown; the fountain spouted dry tufts of field grass…there was no one to care if the guttering sagged or the roses grew wild. It was a house without a guardian.

She also pays careful attention to London—both the modern city of today and the glittering world of the 20s and 30s—in shaping and advancing her story. The fact that The Debutante could not have been told in any other place, at any other time, is a testament to how well Tessaro knows her setting and how beautifully she evokes it for the reader.

Image Credit: Flickr, via clotho98

Perhaps the most difficult part of writing a mystery is its conclusion. Balancing the reader’s expectation for resolution with a defendable truth for one’s characters is a tricky proposition, and Tessaro falters a bit here. With so many plot strings at loose ends, there is simply no way to wrap them up in a neat bow. Her attempt to do so feels somewhat unbelievable, as if the world of mystery has been abandoned for magical realism.

Regardless of where it ends up, The Debutante is an undeniably page-turning journey. Equal parts historical mystery and delectable gossip, it’s a story worth telling, and worth repeating. Baby Blythe would approve.

Further Links and Resources

Writers of historical fiction have a particular challenge, as readers may already presume familiarity with the world on which a story is based. The fractured settings of the Civil War are particularly vivid in the minds of Americans, thanks to everyone from Stephen Crane to Ken Burns to Doris Kearns Goodwin. Why all this attention? Perhaps what Abraham Lincoln described in the Gettysburg Address as the “testing” of a nation vulnerably predicated on equality between men is closer to the anxiously oppositional minds of Americans than we care to admit.

Photo Credit: Fred Milkie Jr. / Via author's website

From debut novelist Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter (Viking, 2010) is the gutsy tale of a youthful Albany, New York, midwife who becomes a nurse to soldiers of the Union Army—men who were more likely to die from now-preventable infections than they were from gunshots. Above all, Mary is hell-bent on becoming a surgeon at a time when no woman in this country had been admitted to a medical school.

The story begins with Mary’s thwarted attempt to apprentice herself to James Blevens, a surgeon in Albany; on the heels of that rejection, she must also flee from her twin sister Jenny’s marriage to the young man Mary loves. Mary’s service as a volunteer nurse in the nation’s capital is nothing if not wholehearted. Her ferocious desire to learn the art of surgery drives the plot, even as it charms the widower Dr. William Stipp, who runs the unstaffed and decrepit hotel-cum-hospital to which she attaches herself.

A civil war doctor's kit. Image via Flickr.

Mary’s choices, echoed by Oliveira’s accounting of the high-risk guesswork of Civil War medicine, form the novel’s moral center. As a subplot, the author takes on the president’s struggle with military strategy. The ripple effects of war move relentlessly through Mary’s family, while the tragic outcome of her relationship with Jenny reveals the ambiguity at the heart of Mary’s idealism.

While the novel is told mostly from Mary’s point of view, Oliveira zooms confidently between cinematic observation—often used to provide background for a new chapter or record the progress of the war—and her characters’ detailed thoughts. This larger picture and the use of an omniscient narrator are appropriate since Mary’s individual story was shaped by a particular historical context. “Nearly 20 women became surgeons after their experience nursing in the Civil War,” Oliveira tells us in the preface. One of her goals is to humanize that achievement through her heroine.

Barn used as a civil war hospital. Image via Flickr.

For the most part, the point of view shifts work seamlessly. The author is unafraid to reinterpret the sacred space inhabited by President Lincoln, though she does so sparingly, keeping the story focused on Mary Sutter. Oliveira unpacks the President’s inner conflict as, in despair over his son Willie’s death and the protraction of the war, he climbs a spiral stair to a parapet on the roof of his house and gathers the resolve to issue the Emancipation Proclamation: “It had not been his intention to liberate, but now? Now it was.”

Image via NMAH

The overarching point of view succeeds especially well in depicting the struggle between stolid Mary, at twenty already a dedicated and expert midwife, and her pretty twin Jenny, the ingénue. The conflict simmers through the first seven chapters, and bleeds into Mary’s motivation for becoming a war nurse. As the story opens, Jenny is engaged to their next-door neighbor Thomas Fall, the bland young man who initially showed interest in Mary. While Mary’s attachment to the conventional Thomas is somewhat unconvincing—Mary “could never bring herself to care about ordinary things…like whose husband she might covet should the opportunity arise”—we feel the push-pull in each sister as they try to make nice, despite their antipathy: “’Help me, Jenny,’” Mary appeals as she tries to convince their mother to let her leave home.

But Jenny hoped the war would never begin…to her great relief nothing terrible had yet occurred. ‘They will be home very soon. And you will have exhausted yourself for nothing,’ she said. Mary perceived the caution, but also the abandonment.”

Ultimately, it is Mary—pulled away by her desire to learn surgery, and kept away by the horrific need she encounters among the devastated Union army— who abandons Jenny.

Both battles and scenes of ordinary life are cinematic, illuminated by Oliveira’s high-wattage research. Gothic detail abounds in this version of the 1860s. At times the details even overwhelm the story, raising the question of the author’s intention. Having done the research, is Oliveira loath to omit anything? Is she striving to represent a world by filling it with as much stuff as possible? Is she suggesting that the Civil War belonged to an epoch of such foment that, in the words of nurse Walt Whitman, a single mind might “contain multitudes”?

Through the course of the book, we encounter icicle-hung cemetery vaults, thronging war-zealous crowds, and acrid, anthracite-smelling canal barges in Albany, Mary’s hometown; the “wailing of street denizens,” mud-leaking tenement walls, and Irish singers of “Danny Boy” in Manhattan City; in Washington City, we are given an insider’s view of the “tattered rugs” and “dingy walls” of President Lincoln’s shabby house (as well as his clothing), near which a canal reeks with odors of sewage produced by the recent influx of 75,000 unskilled volunteer soldiers into the capital.

Lincoln's home. Image via Flickr.

The first glimpse inside the Sutter home is from the point of view of James Blevens, who does not expect to find wealth. He and Mary are bringing in a young woman who has just given birth. In the process of settling the mother in bed, he encounters about a dozen telling details that reveal the family’s economic status. There is nothing wrong with visual detail—it makes the house interior vivid, and naming the titles of three of Mary’s medical books highlights her passion for medicine—but the impression of a wealthy, comfortable home could be created with far fewer images.

It may be that in order to achieve the all-important verisimilitude that will keep readers engaged, recreating the familiar world of the Civil War requires an increasing investment in detail on the part of novelists. Maybe it’s not enough to describe the streets of Albany, New York, in 1861—you have to name them as well. But more isn’t always better. The accretion of detail contributes to an unrelenting intensity that begins on page one with a dramatic birth scene, continues at a gallop through fifty-three chapters, and does not let up until the epilogue, where we see Mary established in her post-war career, her hair “gloriously silver.”

Oliveira uses the verb “extortion” to describe Mary’s relationship with the New York physician-widower Dr. William Stipp, who becomes her mentor in medicine. Yes, it’s true that without incredible tenacity, no woman would have succeeded in becoming a surgeon in this era. However, Oliveira guns for intensity on every page, even in her use of metaphor, where she pushes lyrical language into a hyper-romanticism that will alienate some readers. Unless your main character is as memorable as Hamlet, it seems overreaching to evoke Shakespeare’s lines about the “wand’ring stars” standing like “wonder-wounded hearers” above the tragedy of Denmark. More than once, as the action unfolds on earth, Oliveira calls for an emotional response on the part of the heavens. Amid the stress of war and at the height of her family crisis, Mary refuses to leave the work and Dr. Stipp. “The stars grew pale and reserved, as if in judgment,” as she tells Stipp, ‘You’ll regret everything that happens between us.’”

Image via historicaldigression.com

Why he would regret their relationship, we actually never find out. The truth is, Stipp can’t do his job without Mary’s help, she relieves his loneliness, and they never argue except about her insistence on overworking. Mary wins every time, and his admiration for her only increases. There are no negative consequences to Stipp’s career when he finally agrees to teach her surgery. Mary’s dire warning about their relationship suggests that in this novel, some romantic tension is torqued up mostly for effect.

In fact, the plot—the growing suspense of how the war affects Mary and her family, and the choices she and others make in response—is at times submerged by language chosen to keep events at fever pitch. During a tense dinner scene with Blevens, Mary interrupts her younger brother’s cheerfully expressed desire to enlist in the army by announcing, “’Dr. Blevens is going to the war, too’…It was as if someone had declared war in the dining room.” Later her mother Amelia observes to Blevens that “[My daughter] speaks [to you] as though our accomplishments were daggers.” After all this, Mary’s secret departure from home feels anticlimactic.

Re-enactment image via Flickr.

The wealth of detail is most effective in Oliveira’s descriptions of sometimes brutal medical procedures in both childbirth and battlefield. Precise detail is the best way to convey to a modern reader just how far medicine has come since Mary Sutter’s day. The author is herself a nurse, and Mary’s compassion for—rather, her obsession with—the vulnerable human body is channeled through some of the book’s loveliest prose.

During a difficult birth, “Mary slipped her hand into the warm glove of Bonnie’s body and began to probe.” Tending to her sister’s wounded husband, “Mary was bending close to him, but her face was blurring and a sweet, thick perfume was falling through the air, filling him with such fatigue. She whispered and the words were strung out, stretched on a bed of sleep.” Even a grisly amputation scene reveals tenderness:

The saw teeth bounced over the shiny, hard surface…[Mary] slipped into that place deep inside her that was more prayer than thought. Again, she drew the saw over the bone…And then, suddenly, the bone separated and the weight of the leg fell away. No baby to manage, Mary was stunned, uncertain what to do next.

Civil war era medical tools. Image via Flickr.

Historical fiction is inevitably an interpretation. It succeeds to the extent that it allows readers to inhabit the lives of characters whose culture, mores, and daily experiences may differ radically from our own. In Civil War novels, we see not only where we have been, we experience the unfolding of a great test of American democracy, the shape of which is still being formed and in which we ourselves are characters. My Name is Mary Sutter is a tribute to medical pioneers who endured grinding hardships as they strove to develop humane medical care. They also stood their ground regarding the rights of women and enslaved Americans. Mary herself is a symbol of what women have historically brought to the American experiment, showing incredible tenacity in the face of injustice and patient nurture in the aftermath of violence. Although she is fictional, she deserves our praise.

Albany, NY cemetery. Image via Flickr.

Further Links and Resources

In an FWR interview from late last year, Michael Byers discusses research in his historical novel Percival’s Planet.

Image via Flickr

But the countess was also a powerful widow holding sway over a considerable inheritance of land and money, and her family’s political allegiances were a problem for the regents. Was she really an unrepentant, psychopathic murderer—or was she simply a political obstacle to the king? Was she really bathing in the blood of her victims, or was she herself the victim of a witch hunt? Such questions haunt the pages of The Countess (Crown, 2010), Rebecca Johns’s lively historical novel about Countess Erzsebet Bathory of Hungary. Johns beautifully reconstructs the complexity of this 17th century scandal and brings alive the woman behind the myth.

When I picked up The Countess, I didn’t know what to expect. I read mostly literary fiction, so I wasn’t looking forward or hoping for a Gothic tale. I knew Johns’s work from her debut, Icebergs, a quiet novel about ordinary people’s struggles to overcome the extraordinary emotional damages of war. I had been so impressed with that novel’s understated emotional power that I decided to give Johns’s vision of the evil countess a try.

From the moment I started reading, I couldn’t stop. This fictional historical memoir drew me in with a voice irresistible for its clarity, intelligence and modern subtlety. Hardly the truculent blood-lusty pervert, Countess Bathory comes across as an intelligent woman who from a young age understands too well the responsibilities laid on her shoulders: to not only preserve the family’s name and riches, but to care for her youngest siblings against political turmoil, war, and shifting political allegiances. In the character’s own words:

For a long time I was shocked by the idea that the fate of the family would fall on me, that my little sister Zsofia would depend on me to find a husband who would love me and protect her for my sake. I could not imagine that any man would love me as my father loved my mother.

Throughout the novel, Bathory juggles the restrictive proprieties imposed on women’s conduct with the ruthless political maneuvers that her status and wealth demand. Her family’s wealth baits jealous enemies and men all too willing to play on Bathory’s heart for political advantage. When Bathory becomes a widow and her children are too young to take over the family estates, she struggles to protect her sons’ and daughters’ inheritance against those who threaten to steal it. Who could fail to sympathize with such a woman?

Countess Bathory / Image from Bathory.org

For most of the book, I sided with Bathory. I admired her self-control, her inner fortitude, and her boundless love for her children. I felt her wounded pride when less then reliable men played unfairly with her. And for most of the novel I believed her to be a woman who had everything but what she most longed for: love or even respect from the men in her life. Even her son, who provides the pretext for the letters that compose the story, fails to visit her or even send a kind message when she’s in jail, waiting for death to end her misery and loneliness.

But, readers must wonder, is the countess innocent? Johns is a masterful psychologist. She takes care to establish clues to Bathory’s possible neurosis early in the novel when the countess recounts witnessing—as a child—the execution of a gypsy man who sold his daughter to slavery. The gypsy man is sewn alive inside the stomach of a dying horse, and is left there to slowly die of thirst, hunger, and infection. The young countess visits him on the hour of his death, refusing him water. As she relates:

[...he] opened his eyes, struggling and cursing. I spit in his face, and the white spittle caught in his mustache and hung there like a bit of spider silk. I was never so satisfied as I was at that moment, watching him suffer.

A poster from *Bathory*, Juraj Jakubisko's 2008 film about the Bloody Countess

The narrative suggests that this disturbing reaction invokes a curse or, at the least, calls bad luck upon her. Far from resonating with hocus pocus, this moment establishes the basis for Bathory’s most profound emotional distress: the fear that if she can’t make a man love her, she will become as powerless as the girl who was sold into slavery. She especially resents the gypsy man’s betrayal of his daughter; betrayal is another theme that resonates with her life tragedies. This event also establishes the environment of superstition that ruled the Middle Ages and became a deadly trap for Bathory.

Later in the novel, it becomes clear that Bathory remains affected by that childhood event; the gypsy’s dying words revisit her during the most traumatic moments of her adult life—and there are many such moments in this novel. The countess is married to a cold, uncaring man, seduced by indifferent lovers, disrespected by the servants, and devastated by the loss of three of her children.

It is so heartbreaking to see Bathory’s affections crushed at every turn that we forget her historical reputation and hope instead for a happy ending. The beatings and the rather creative punishments of the servant girls (she forces one to breastfeed a wooden log) seem at first only a footnote to the more compelling story of her emotional devastation.

Rebecca Johns

Even as the novel begins to unravel the mystery of the servants’ deaths, Bathory is such an eloquent character that it’s easy to ignore even the most obvious clues: a reader could long hold onto the belief that Bathroy was just an unwitting enabler to the perversions of her more trusted servants, to whom she delegated the management of the household.

It is only late in the novel that the reader fully witnesses the ravaging effects of the countess’s emotional damage as it capitulates in her blackout rages. In a riveting scene, Johns unleashes her most brilliant storytelling gifts, bringing us into the fragmented, haunted mind of the countess when she’s under the spell of her most repressed rage, revealing even in that moment of absolute monstrosity a compelling vulnerability:

A cracking noise, like the breaking of stone, and the room grows dim before me, blackens. I am alone in the darkness, and then, as if from a great distance, colors come back to me, sounds, light. There is a girl in front of me, a girl crying. Her nose is bright with blood and her eyes tear, making tracks in the dirt of her face and the blood…How small she looks, how frightened. For a moment, I wonder what her days are like, what love there is for her, whether she feels fear, or anger, or pity, or love. Whom does she love? What have those she loves done to her? There is blood on her face, running off her chin in little spins and rivulets. I’m not sure how it got there.

The real horror of Johns’s version of this historical monster is that Bathory is not only likeable, a woman we would not hesitate to welcome if we’d met her in real life, but, like most serial killers, she is comfortable balancing her dark side with her generosity and sense of justice. The most lasting effect of Johns’s The Countess is the uneasy feeling readers get that there may be a monster within each of us, concealed behind thick curtains of false ethics and self-justifications.

For the reader who seeks sophisticated characterizations and unreliable narrators, Johns’s work is thoroughly satisfying. She constructs a complicated character whose unrepentant confessions reveal the damaged mind of a woman raised to strive for all the most false and superficial values, a woman whose talents and ambitions become so focused on fleeting and unrewarding pursuits that the results can only capitulate in despair or madness. That Bathory refuses to crumble to self-pity is the spring upon which her disturbing late-life behavior feeds. Her fears give way to a mental breakdown that resolves itself, literally, in bloody murder.

By the end of the novel, I felt all the irony and perverted cruelty of Bathory’s punishment. Not only is the countess trapped in her fairy tale archetype of evil, but she also has the unfortunate fate of experiencing—literally—the restrictions imposed upon her gender by her time: she is walled alive inside a tower in her own estates, abandoned and reviled by family and friends.

The Countess is a complex and artfully constructed story about a powerful spirit perverted by oppressing values, political ruthlessness, and disloyalty, capitulating in a morbid slaughter whose realistic rendering is far more frightening than any fantasized demon vampire plot. Rebecca Johns proves that real-life horrors, the horrors of war and mental damage, are far more terrifying than any Gothic fantasy. I bow to Johns for transcending multiple genres and writing yet another eminently compelling story.

Further Links and Resources

- Learn more about Icebergs, Rebecca Johns’s first novel, at Powell’s Books. And pick up a copy of the Winter 2010-2011 issue of Ploughshares to read a story by Johns, “Perpetua in Glory.”

- You can read Laura Valeri’s interview with the author at The Mojito Literary Society, and here is a widely distributed Q&A with Johns, via Reuters.

- On her blog Illiterati, the author offers this fictional interview with Erzsébet Báthory.

- Would your reading group like to talk to Rebecca Johns about The Countess? Fill out this form on the author’s website.

- Bathory is a frequent subject of the arts and popular culture, inspiring novels, plays, films, comics, operas, metal bands, and even toys–like this doll in a blood bath.

- Interested in some cinematic takes on the legend of the Bloody Countess?

• Here is a trailer from Bathory, Juraj Jakubisko’s 2008 film about the countess; Anna Friel stars in the title role.
• And here is a trailer from Julie Delpy’s 2009 film (which she directed and starred in), The Countess:

From author's website

Like so many other people, I was caught up in the enthusiasm for Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring when it came out in 2000. I loved the way the novel captured the stark world of 17th-century Delft and the chaos of Vermeer’s household, and brought to life the beautiful girl in the painting. I admired the restraint of the novel, too, how sexual tension builds between Vermeer and Griet and they don’t act on it – though the scene where he pierces Griet’s ear has stayed with me for years.

When I moved to The Netherlands for a couple of years, one of my first goals was to visit the Mauritshuis, or Royal Picture Gallery, where Vermeer’s wonderful painting lives. I walked past years of Dutch Masters, of meticulously painted cows, still lifes of dead hares with fruit, and paintings of cloudy, flat landscapes before finding her. It was like seeing a friend’s picture on the wall, so fully had Chevalier drawn her characters and filled out a world in her book.

I went on to enjoy Chevalier’s subsequent novels: Falling Angels, Lady and the Unicorn, Burning Bright and, most recently, the fascinating Remarkable Creatures (Dutton/Penguin). Reading Remarkable Creatures reminded me that there’s something timeless about a beach; hunting for fossils must be one of the few things we do the same way now as Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot did it 150 years ago. Trust Tracy Chevalier to bring their world alive for us.

In June 2009, I interviewed Tracy Chevalier in her home. Sitting with Chevalier in her homey, book-filled Victorian townhouse in North London, I found her very alive to the world at large, attuned to the subtleties and human drama of the past, and able to draw them fully in the present.

Felicity Librie: When did you decide that you wanted to be a writer?

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Tracy Chevalier: You know, that’s a difficult question. You would think it’d be easy, but it isn’t. I guess I really only thought of myself as a writer once I had a book published, and even then I felt a little bit like a fraud. I don’t know, like, somebody’s going to find me out. But I talked about being a writer when I was a kid because I loved books so much and I was one of those readaholics. I wasn’t sporty, I was fat, I lay on my bed all day and read, and I think I wanted to be involved in the world of books somehow, and so I used to say I wanted to be a writer or I wanted to be a librarian because that was my source of books at that time: a library. I knew nothing at that time about publishing so I just thought it was one or the other.

When I was a teenager I did some writing, but I also started editing a literary magazine at school. So then I discovered there was this thing called an editor, and publishing, and I thought, well actually, I want to be that, because I had that typical teenage girl’s loss of confidence, and I didn’t think that I would be a very good writer, but I could work on other people’s stuff. And so when I went to Oberlin I majored in English, and I did go into publishing for several years. But in the back of my mind was this little itch, like, maybe I’ll write a short story. I didn’t have an idea to write a novel—it was always going to be small—and I remember sending a postcard, after I graduated from college, to one of my professors, saying, “I have an idea for a short story. I’m going to write it.” I don’t know why I said that to him. Maybe it was because he was a writer himself and by sending it to him, I was forcing myself to say, got to do it now, you’ve told [poet] David [Young] you’re going to. And I worked full time, and slowly started putting together stories on the side. But where that came from, I don’t know—that desire to do that. Even then I didn’t call myself a writer. It was only as they started to accumulate over the years that I went very gradually in that direction.

Girl With a Pearl Earring was a critical and popular success, selling 4 million copies worldwide, and going on to be adapted for screen and stage. This must all have been incredibly exciting, but how did it affect you as a writer?

It was pretty scary. On the one hand it was wonderful to have that validation, and to know that I had a readership. That something I had created in a little room in my mind, and in a physical little room, could go out there and really touch people—it was just astonishing. I also underestimated how popular Vermeer is. So that was a surprise, and I couldn’t have done it without him! But it made it hard to write the next novel. When you have a success, your subsequent books are always compared to that. I had critics and readers say, “This isn’t like Girl With a Pearl Earring; why not?” Or, “This is too much like Girl With a Pearl Earring, she’s retreading old territory.” I try hard not to listen to all that but I was very aware, when I wrote Falling Angels, the book after Girl With a Pearl Earring, that I didn’t want to write Woman with a Pearl Necklace—that would be the sequel! (Laughs.) I had to get away from that, so I wrote something really different, set in Edwardian England, with twelve different voices. It’s more of a big genre painting than a focused Vermeer. Some things about it worked and some didn’t. I try not to compare, even though everybody else does.

It’s interesting that you mention the twelve viewpoints, because Girl With a Pearl Earring is the only one of your novels that has a single point of view. All the others use more than one voice. How do you decide about that?

Sometimes it’s obvious right away, and other times it only works later. Originally I wrote Falling Angels in third person, but with little sections in the first-person voices of three main children. I found, as I was writing it, that the third-person sections were boring to write—although there is boredom in all writing, so I wasn’t overly worried about that. But then I would get to the first-person sections, which I called voice sections, and say, “Oh, it’s a voice section today, thank God, this’ll be fun.” Of course alarm bells should have gone off. When I reread the first draft I cried at the end. It was boring, dead weight, terrible. Then I looked it over and thought, there’s nothing wrong with the story except the way it’s told. Maybe I should take a cue from my pleasure in writing the first-person sections. Maybe it should all be in first person, a cacophony of voices. I took the draft, and it was like taking a vase and setting it down so hard it shatters, then putting the pieces back together in a different way. I rewrote the whole thing in first person with all these different voices. I had the idea when, just as I was finishing the first draft in third person, I read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, which uses five different voices beautifully. It’s a wonderful book, using multiple voices very successfully, and I thought, “Oh, that’s an interesting technique, I wonder if I should take the kids’ voices I’ve already written and have the three of them tell it.” It just felt right.

I knew, when I came up with the idea for Girl With a Pearl Earring, that I didn’t want it to be about Vermeer, I wanted it to be about her. She would have a voice and a story, which she hadn’t ever had. Plenty has been written about Vermeer, but not about his models. It seemed perfectly clear that it should be from her point of view.

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My latest book, Remarkable Creatures, is particularly about a woman named Mary Anning, the fossil hunter, but I knew I wanted there to be a different perspective. Mary was not educated, she didn’t travel, and I felt like we as twenty-first-century readers need a broader view. Also, in religious terms, there were people who saw fossils as a challenge to their ideas about religion, and I wanted to be able to present both sides: people who felt, God created fossils and it didn’t affect their religious beliefs; and those whom fossils did challenge. So I wanted two sides of the argument, and I found out that Mary had this friend who was a middle-class woman twenty years her senior, named Elizabeth Philpot. It made perfect sense to have the two of them tell the story and get a more complete picture. So it comes organically out of the story, but you don’t always know right away. Sometimes it takes a lot of fiddling around, or rewriting a whole draft from a different point of view.

You’ve written about real characters before, such as Johannes Vermeer and William Blake, but they were tangential characters in those novels. Mary Anning is very much center stage in Remarkable Creatures. Was it a constraint to write about a real person, about whom quite a lot is known?

Mary Anning, prior to 1842

It was both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that you don’t have to make it up, which is great, because my imagination is limited! I had the skeleton structure of her life, where she was at more or less any given period; she didn’t move around much, and lived in Lyme Regis all her life. There were highlights of her life, so the peaks are of the story are built in, and that’s great. The disadvantage is that those peaks don’t always happen the way we as readers would like them to. I had to fudge the chronology a little bit, more in this book than in other books.

Vermeer and Blake are both central to the concept of their books, but they’re not the main players, and it’s much easier to make up stuff around them without it actually affecting their chronology. Whereas with Mary Anning, between two important things that happened there’d be a three year gap. And I’d go, “Oh, three years? This is outrageous!” The thing is, back then people had very different lives from us. She used to go out on the beach every day, and the same things would happen year after year. Our lives are much more varied than that, and we’re used to reading about people with more varied lives.

Day after day isn’t great for narrative. So in the first draft I kept all the dates, then I put it all together and thought, oh, this drags a bit—who needs to know that this happened and then there were three or four years before that happened? And I thought: why don’t I just take off the dates? It was an incredible liberation. All my other books have dates that separate the sections, and it’s very clear when things take place. This time I’ve stripped them all out, and it was a great relief. There are three dates that are mentioned, one on which an auction takes place, one when she finds an ichthyosaur, and one when she finds a plesiosaur. I think those are the only specific dates in the book. Everything else is kind of a mishmash. Readers don’t mind it at all—no one’s said to me, “I don’t get this, you know that three years have gone by there?” Once you look at it in a different way and allow yourself that leeway, it makes it a lot easier.

Do you always start with research?

More or less. I read about the period when I’m setting it, and I go to see the places, check out where the scenes are going to be. So for The Virgin Blue, my first novel, I had the idea and did a bit of research, and then I went down to southern France and found a town for Ella, the contemporary character, to live in. I actually rented a car at Toulouse airport and then drove with a map and went into all these small towns. About the third or fourth one I visited, I drove into it and I thought, yeah, okay, she’s going to live here. And that’s a lot of time, you know, but it all starts with researching, taking notes. I start to write without having completed the research, because once you start writing, it opens up a lot of other questions that you need to do research on, and so I feel like my research process is never complete. In fact from each novel I’ve worked on I still have books on my bookshelf that I ought to have read! (Laughs.)

How do you use your research, which might be quite dry and academic, and bring it to life the way you do? What’s the mechanism for taking facts and using them to recreate the past in a way that’s vibrant?

I put the story first, and the characters. The history always has to be secondary. I don’t want to be a teacher, I want to be a storyteller, and I want to prop up what I write with something that’s going to give it validity. That’s where the history comes in. I wasn’t a history major; I wasn’t that interested in history until I was in my thirties, and even now, I’m only interested in history when I’m writing a book. I’m interested in that era and I want to read everything about it, find out about it, sort through all the junk to find the little glittering things that are going to work. That sorting gives me the confidence to set something during a particular period. It makes me know, when a character walks into the house, what the dimensions of the rooms are, what she’s wearing, what she’ll do when she comes in—does she take off a hat and gloves, what kind of shoes does she have, what’s she going to eat? When I’m writing books I tend to see history not as about who’s prime minister or president at the time, but more about what people’s everyday lives were like, and how they differed from ours.

You’ve talked before about how you like to get your hands dirty when you’re researching a novel. You took painting classes when you were writing Girl with a Pearl Earring and you went to a tapestry studio for The Lady and the Unicorn. Apart from looking on the beach for fossils, what did you do for Remarkable Creatures?

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That’s pretty much what I did! Mary and Elizabeth were very interested in fossils, that was their obsession, and so I had to spend a long time on the beach, looking. It requires a lot of patience, a way of being that doesn’t happen just going out once. I had to go a lot. I’ve got a lot better at finding things than I was at the beginning, because of all the time I put in. And there’s a whole gallery in the Natural History museum of London which is full of the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs that Mary Anning found. I spent a lot of time looking at them. Other than that, Elizabeth Philpot collected a lot of fossil fish, and when she died her nephew gave her collection to the Natural History Museum in Oxford. They have her stuff in all these big trays in back rooms, and I spent a very happy day pulling them out and looking. Some of the labels are in her hand, they’re original, and it was so amazing to hold these things, to hold what she found, prepared and cleaned, and studied, and wrote the labels for. And there’s the label, still there. I always love the hands-on, not just doing but also feeling. It’s like a talisman to touch something that my characters have touched. William Blake had a notebook that he used to write his poems in. They have it at the British Library, and when I was researching Burning Bright, I managed to talk them into letting me look at it, and hold it, and turn pages. It was so amazing.

Your last two novels have featured towns in Dorset (on the English south coast), where you spend a lot of your time—Piddletrenthide in Burning Bright, and Lyme Regis in Remarkable Creatures. How much does your knowledge of those modern settings underpin your creation of the historical settings?

Hugely. I could have chosen to have the made-up family in Burning Bright come from anywhere. I wouldn’t have used Piddletrenthide if I didn’t know it, but I wanted them to be from the countryside, and move to London, where they end up living next to William Blake. And the one bit of English countryside I know best is Dorset. We bought a cottage down there right at the time when I started researching Burning Bright. So I thought, maybe I’ll set it nearby, since I know the area, and then I started getting interested in Piddletrenthide’s history.

Lyme Regis is still very much as it was in Mary Anning’s day—obviously not all the houses and the buildings, though there is a feel about it that’s slightly timeless, and the beaches are definitely the same. When you’re out there you can go fossil hunting and still find the things that she found. That hasn’t changed at all—there are still the landslides and high tides that she would have wrestled with. The structure of the town hasn’t changed because the geography won’t let it. It can’t really spread out that much. It’s down in a valley with quite steep hills around it, and there’s only so much building out you can do. It still has a very small feel to it.

Remarkable Creatures hangs on the unusual friendship between Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot. What appealed to you about portraying a close friendship between two women?

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I think the best books are about a relationship that changes over time. Somebody described the novel once as normal-change-new normal. People’s lives are measured by their relationships with other people. Maybe because I’m not particularly romantic, I don’t write in general about romantic relationships, although Vermeer’s relationship with Griet was certainly romantic. I’m more interested in the day-to-day relationships that we have. With Mary and Elizabeth it was just so unusual, because Mary was a working-class woman and Elizabeth was a middle-class woman, and that’s a huge difference, then and now too—you know we sort of say everything’s wide open, but honestly are there many people who cross paths? Do we have any working class friends? Not really. So that’s still there, though it’s less rigid, less codified in society now than it was.

Then it was very strict. And also, Elizabeth was 20 years older than Mary, which was unusual. But they were good friends. Lyme Regis was isolated enough that you could get away with unconventional behavior. Also, these women did not marry. They did not have the romantic relationships I would have written about. There’s a bit of it but very little. They had each other and that had to suffice—it more than sufficed, I think. They got on very well, bonded by this love of fossils. I guess I’m interested in more than the romantic template we’ve grown up with. Jane Austen wrote about romantic relationships—also about family relationships and sisters—but really in the end, Elizabeth Bennett ends up with Mr. Darcy and that’s the thing that matters. I thought, that’s all very well in a novel, but in real life that’s not always how it happens. And I wanted to know, what happens to the women who don’t get married? This is what happens to them: they have the sort of friendships that sustain them.

Having lived outside the United States for 25 years, you know how it feels to be out of your natural habitat. This theme appears often in your work. Griet moves into Vermeer’s household, Jem and his family leave Dorset for London, Elizabeth is forced to move to Lyme Regis, where she has little social standing. Do you think you’re drawn to writing about outsiders because of your own life experience?

Yes. There’s drama in having to move. It’s that idea of normal-change-new normal, and the change is often a physical one. There’s such a lot of movement in society; a lot of people don’t stay in their home towns any more. There’s an appealing universality to that. It certainly doesn’t hurt that I’m the other. Although I feel much more comfortable in England than I did at the beginning, I’m still aware of being an outsider. I think that gives me an edge, and I’m happy with it.

You have said, Write about what you’re interested in, rather than what you know. What other advice would you give writers?

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Try to make a consistent time when you write every week, rather than just writing when you’re inspired. If I wrote only when I was inspired I’d never finish anything. Finish, finish, finish—you can never judge whether something works until you’ve got the whole thing. Give it to other people to read. You’ve got to find a writers’ group or a class—something that’s going to give you deadlines and a built-in audience. Be open to change: just because it’s typed on your lovely computer it doesn’t mean it’s any good. You have to accept that you don’t know whether something works until you’ve had somebody read it. Find someone whose advice and judgment you trust, and go with that.

What are you working on now?

For the first time I’m setting a novel in the U.S. It’s about an English Quaker woman who emigrates to Ohio in the 1840s and ends up working on the Underground Railroad, helping fugitive slaves escape to Canada. It’s a book about being an outsider, about silence, about freedom – all those big issues. It’s set in a fictional Quaker community just outside of Oberlin, Ohio, where I went to college.