by J. P. Smith
She turned her smile on him. “Of course.”
“Then are we going to see my father?”
“In a way.”
He looked at her as if all of a sudden he didn’t understand what she was saying.
“I’m going to tell you a story, all right? It begins at the end.”
He looked at her and furrowed his brow. “I don’t get it.”
She smiled. “You will, one day.”
In nine or ten years he would be the very image of his father, and then he would mature and grow and become the man his father should have been. And then he would be all hers. Forever and ever.
“Close your eyes, Ben,” she said. “Put your head back and close your eyes. We’ll be there soon.”
Reading Group Guide
1. What do you think was the author’s purpose in writing this book? Is there a message you think he’s trying to convey?
2. Amelie’s affair with Ben, a married man, is morally questionable. At what point do you think she crosses the line? Do you think it is okay to have an affair out of love, like Richard and Sharon?
3. Ben is involved with three women: Amelie, Janet, and Janey. Are there parallels between these women? What are their key differences?
4. Infidelity is a strong current throughout this book. Do you think it’s worse to be in Ben’s position (married and having an affair) or Amelie’s position (having an affair with a married person)? Are they comparable? Is one party less guilty than the other?
5. Amelie encourages emotional honesty with Nina but fails to share any of her own personal life. In what ways could Amelie have communicated with her daughter better? What kinds of things should you share with a child who is grown up? Discuss how parenthood is portrayed in the story.
6. At forty years old, both Amelie and Janet struggle with the aging process. Describe what parts of getting older bother them the most and why. Do any of these bother you? Do you think they would bother you as much as Amelie and Janet?
7. Describe the way that Amelie and Janet’s ‘friendship’ develops. Do you think Janet knew about the affair the whole time? What are her motivations in befriending Amelie?
8. As Amelie unravels over Ben and her new book, she starts to confuse fiction with reality. Can Amelie’s narrative voice be trusted? In what ways do you think she’s reliable? Are there parts of the book that make you question the story she gives you?
9. Amelie, Ben, Janet, and Richard are all deeply flawed characters. Do you find yourself sympathizing with any of them? In what ways?
10. Amelie’s relationships with men are fraught with tension, starting with a father who abandoned her when she was a little girl. In what ways do you think this shapes her behavior as an adult? Can any of her actions be excused because of this?
11. Amelie worries that people in her community know about her affair with Ben. If you knew, would you feel responsible for telling someone that they’re being cheated on? Why or why not?
12. Describe the moments in this book that you found most tense. What would you do if you were in Amelie’s position? In Janet’s?
13. What do you think happens to the characters after the end of the story? What do you think happens to Ben? What is Amelie planning?
14. Ultimately, do you think that Amelie is a good person? Why or why not?
A Conversation with the Author
Was it difficult for you, a man, to write a novel in which the main character is a woman?
I’d done it once before, in my fifth novel, Breathless. The main character in that book, a Boston-based historian whose husband has either been murdered or committed suicide, is distant and cool. Amelie is a more complex character with a wicked sense of humor and, of course, a vivid, sometimes fatal, imagination. I think—I hope—readers might enjoy being with her in these pages.
I’ve also been asked this question before in press interviews when Breathless was published in 1996, and as I pointed out then, male writers have often created memorable female characters: Flaubert and Tolstoy, just to name two—much greater authors than I, of course.
As with any protagonist, female or male, it’s a matter of getting under the skin of the character, of living long enough with her to be able to bring her to life as an individual, working from the inside out. You may notice that apart from Amelie’s blue eyes and blond hair I never physically describe her—I leave that up to the reader’s imagination.
Why make your main character a writer? Doesn’t a writer, well, just sit and write?
The question implies that writing is not an active occupation, that it’s merely a matter of fingers on keys and tap-tap-tap several hours a day. In a way, that’s one of the points of the book. Can writing break out of the imagination and the words and begin to alter reality? Can reimagining reality somehow lead us to bend it, break it, change it?
Amelie treats writing as a kind of weapon. She has her entire community under her fingers, drawing characteristics from people she sees every day, even from her ex-husband. It’s only when she meets her lover’s wife that, in her imagining, writing can create a whole new reality—and a possible new future. That’s the game of What If, and all writers—indeed all human beings—play it. It’s only when we act upon it that we tip into both obsession and then, sometimes, tragedy.
But being a writer comes into play in her affair with Ben. There Amelie has a second life—like a spy she has to create with him a whole new set of codes, alibis to be hauled out should they be seen together, and, in her case, the chance to create a future featuring Ben. In its own way, If She Were Dead is a tale of espionage and betrayal.
How did you go about writing If She Were Dead? Did you begin with a character, or was it a concept?
I’d begun writing the novel under a different title some twenty years ago. I had the ending first. It came to me in a flash: this combination of a woman’s revenge and of trying to right history—and the future—in her favor. I thought of it then as a version of the 1965 movie Repulsion, starring Catherine Deneuve, whose life in a London flat begins to fall apart—literally as well as figuratively. It was a kind of horror movie, really.
I’d return to the book at least once a year, refining the prose, tinkering with the plot, searching for the story that now stands. It was always moving towards becoming a psychological thriller. I now think of it as Repulsion crossed with Big Little Lies—the HBO series, not the book, which I haven’t read. So that while Amelie’s world is falling apart, she’s also strong enough to deal with it in her own wicked way.
If She Were Dead is largely about a woman obsessed. How difficult is it to write about obsession?
Not at all difficult. Obsession is, after all, what we find in literature. Hamlet is obsessed; Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment is obsessed. So is Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s series of books about him. Emma Bovary. Anna Karenina. Both profoundly obsessed characters, especially when it comes to the men they love.
Character must be action; a passive character is inert, it is someone to whom things happen, a kind of punching bag for the gods. Obsession drives a character, compels her or him to act in a certain way, whether logical or impulsive. And then the consequences come tumbling down.
What were your influences for this novel?
I think of this as my Beryl Bainbridge novel (I even named a street in the book after her). In her time she was quite famous, bringing out a book every year, and eventually becoming Dame Beryl Bainbridge. I’d read her 1974 novel The Bottle Factory Outing and was immediately taken by how she balanced the black humor of the book with the growing horror of how the story was developing; something in common to many of her books. I corresponded with Beryl for a year before meeting her when I moved to London. One of the first things she said to me on our way up to her study was, as she pointed to a high corner in the stairway where what looked like a bullet hole could be seen: “That’s wh
ere my mother-in-law tried to murder me.” I’ve read all of her novels, and consider her a kind of secret influence on my own writing.
Finally, you chose a scene from an old movie, Double Indemnity, for the book’s epigraph. What made you choose it, and how does it relate to the novel itself?
Film noir, among other things, deals with passions gone awry due to misread cues, as one sees in the best of that genre, whether Double Indemnity, In a Lonely Place, or Out of the Past. I chose the scene I quote, in which Walter and Phyllis try to outguess each other, as a kind of comment on what we’re about to read: a novel in which each of the three main characters—Amelie, Ben and Janet—has his or her own scheme brewing. It’s just a matter of which one will succeed.
About the Author
J.P. Smith was born in New York City and began his career as a novelist when he moved to England, living with his wife and daughter there for over five years. As a screenwriter he was an Academy Nicholl Fellowship semifinalist. If She Were Dead is his eighth novel.
Visit the author at jpsmith.org.
Read on for a look at J. P. Smith’s The Drowning, now available from Sourcebooks Landmark
Picture this: a still, starlit August night, as warm and clear as it had been all day and the day before and the same as it will be tomorrow. An open field, surrounded by pine woods so dense and dark that the seam between sky and earth has vanished. Soon, the campers will be packing their T-shirts and shorts, their tennis racquets and baseball gloves and bags full of dirty laundry, and heading home to New York, to Connecticut, to New Jersey and beyond.
Campfires light the faces of the boys as they sit in circles: the younger ones toward the center of the field, the older campers by the edge of it, nearer the woods. Dinner—hot dogs on sticks cooked over open flames, potatoes baked in foil among the coals, marshmallows blackening on twigs—is over. The fires move from glow into fade into cinders and, in just a few minutes, into ash as, pacing the perimeter of the circles, the counselors tell the same story they’ve recited from one year to the next, quietly and reverentially, as though it were a secret meant to be kept forever. A tale that was by now as woven into the camp’s culture as the songs they sang in the social hall—odes to the outdoors, to teamwork, to Echo Lake and the hills beyond. The boys stare into the dying embers, watching the words come to life or keeping their eyes shut as though wishing camp were already over and they were home, where nothing bad could ever reach them.
“One night, every seven years since Camp Waukeelo was founded in 1937,” one of the counselors begins, “long after lights out, a local man, John Otis, would sneak into the camp through the woods behind the bunks and take one of the younger boys.” He falls silent, the better to let his words take root in the boys’ minds. “Townsfolk said that John was someone who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, just a guy of average height and weight, but”—he pauses a moment—“with the eyes of a dead man. When you looked into them, you felt the temperature drop.”
Another counselor is deeper into the story as he walks behind his circle of campers. “…because the seven- and eight- and nine-year-olds—you know who you are—are easy to grab. Easy to silence. Easy to make disappear…”
A third is saying, “…so the first to vanish was in July 1944, wartime, on a warm night just like this one.” A few of the youngest campers try to stifle their crying. The counselor goes on. “The next to disappear was seven years later, in 1951—in fact, on this very date.”
A fourth counselor says that John Otis was always watching from the hills behind the bunks, observing the boys line up for the morning flag-raising or jumping into the lake off the dock, deciding which one he would take next. “He might even be out there now, in the woods,” the counselor said, and eight pairs of eyes looked up. “Watching. Thinking. Making his choice.”
Apart from the counselors’ quiet voices and the crackling of the campfires, there is nothing but silence. The campers are already wrapped in narrative, ensnared by words, at the mercy of their imaginations.
“He always goes for the loner,” another counselor is saying, and some of the boys look around, wondering which of them that might be. “You know who I mean…the kid who doesn’t really participate, who keeps to himself.” A few of the campers look shyly down, because they know he’s describing them.
The story always ends the next morning when the other campers in the boy’s bunk notice his empty bed and wonder where he has gone, leaving no trace or clue behind. Had he been murdered, or was he with all the others who’d been taken by the man who lived high up in the hills in a place none of them had ever seen?
Over time, the legend of John Otis had gathered more details, and these, in turn, were passed along year after year to the campers. It was said that something very bad had happened to John late in the 1930s, when he was growing up in the house built by his father. His mother had disappeared soon after her only son was born, and there was talk of an older sister, though as there was no record of her birth, it was assumed she was delivered at home. And probably even died there.
One day John was at school, a withdrawn and uncooperative and sullen child, talking back to his teachers and picking fights, and the next he was absent, as he was the next day and the day after and then forever. Any attempts by law-enforcement personnel or school administrators to reach his house were met by a pair of watchdogs and, on more than a few occasions, John’s father in the doorway, shotgun in hand.
It was felt in the community that what had befallen young John was no longer of interest. He was either dead or being raised outside of society by his father, whose reputation for belligerence and outright violence was well known in the Berkshires. People steered clear of the old man on his rare appearances in the neighboring towns, where he’d buy slabs of meat and bottles of cheap whiskey, along with cases of baby food. After several years had passed, when his father must have been long dead and everyone presumed his son was also gone, John Otis drifted into a kind of malevolent afterlife, a rumor trapped among the hills surrounding the lake. Sometimes campers claimed to have seen him as an adult, in a rowboat in the middle of the lake at sunset, looking their way from the shadow beneath the brim of his hat. Or standing by the edge of the baseball field, among the trees, watching and smoking; vanishing when they turned to alert a counselor.
The sound of rustling in the woods behind the bunks was John Otis; the spark of fireflies was John’s eyes. The very thought of him meant he was right behind you.
Within the fictions told and retold, embellished over the years at campfires and in bunks late at night, John Otis was even more vividly alive. If questioned by a camper who had heard the story the year before, counselors would only say that they had miscounted, that this was the seventh year.
The same names were repeated. There was Scott Gardner, the kid with the spiky black hair. Seven years before Scott disappeared, Jake Kaufman had been lifted from his bed in the middle of the night, and none of the others in his bunk saw or heard a thing, though in the morning, as the counselors savored in the telling, his bed had been made as neatly as he had left it the day before, except that an antique doll lay in his place, both its eyes gouged out. In early August of 1972, Billy Olsen had chased a ball into the heavily wooded area known as the Pines and never returned. Were they kept prisoner by the man? Tortured? Murdered? Were they there still, their cries unheard as John Otis descended the stairs to the dirt cellar of his ramshackle house?
Sometimes, the counselors would show the boys photos of the allegedly missing campers, in the dusty, leather-bound books kept on a shelf in the social hall, the name of the camp leafed in gold on the covers. There was the pale, blond seven-year-old Henry Cassidy, summer of ’44, the faded one sitting in the front row, looking a bit lost. There was chubby, smiling Aaron Blume who vanished two days after the photo was taken in August 1958. And skinny nine-year-old Richard Ivory, all angles and sunken cheeks, who went missing in 1965.
/> Now it’s time to go. The boys are silent as they follow the beams of their counselors’ flashlights on the path through the woods back to their bunks. And when they do speak, it’s quietly and with wonder, because fear has been given a name and a reality all its own.
“Do you believe any of that?” one of the eight-year-olds asks, and the boy walking beside him, Joey Proctor, says he thinks it might be true. The next night, Joey won’t be there, and would never be seen again.
One day, many years later, a counselor would point to Joey Proctor’s face in the camp photo and tell the boys about John Otis and how one day Joey was there, and the next he wasn’t. Joey had become part of a legend, and that was where he lived from the day he disappeared until the morning, twenty-one years later, when it seemed he had come back to life.
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