The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

Also, note the level of historical detail that Phillips mixes in. There's very little. She explains that the Great Council is Venice's governing body and that the "bocca di leone" (wonderful image) is the mailbox for rat-out letter writers. That's it. Everything else in this passage is a detail that would be the same in the present day. This suggests to me that a sense of the era does not depend on digging up tidbits that only existed way back when.

  A striking example of seeing the times through a particular point of view can be found in Sarah Dunant's In the Company of the Courtesan (2006), another novel about a Venetian courtesan, albeit in the slightly earlier year of 1527. Fleeing a sacking of Rome, Fiammetta Bianchini resurrects her business in Venice. The novel is narrated through the eyes of her business manager, Bucino Teodoldo, who happens to be a dwarf. Bucino's perspective on Renaissance Venice is quite literally different than anyone else's:

  My God, this city stinks. Not everywhere—along the southern wharves where the ships dock, the air is heady with leftover spices, and on the Grand Canal money buys fresh breezes along with luxury—but everywhere we are, where crumbling houses rise out of rank water and a dozen families live stacked one on top of another like rotting vegetables, the decay and filth burn the insides of your nostrils. Living as I do, with my nose closer to the ground, there are times when I find it hard to breathe.

  The old man who measures the level of the well in our campo every morning says that the smell is worse

  because of the summer drought and that if the water falls any lower, they will have to start bringing the freshwater barges in, and then only those who have money will be able to drink. Imagine that: a city built on water dying of thirst.

  Is Bucino right that Venice had a sharper stink to the short than to the tall? I doubt it. Still, his keen sensitivity about his stature along with his cutting wit gives this otherwise familiar lament about Venice a special odor. "Imagine that: a city built on water dying of thirst."

  Creating a sense of the times, then, is not just about details, or even coupling them with emotions; the times are also enhanced by infusing a character with strong opinions about both the details and emotions.

  SEEING THROUGH CHARACTERS' EYES

  Let's dig deeper into the relationship between character and time/ place. Is there a technique more powerful than infusing a character with a strong opinion about his place or time? Yes. Infusing two characters with that.

  Novelist Thomas Kelly focuses on working-class heroes and gritty New York settings. His novel Payback (1997) features two Irish-American brothers, one a mob enforcer, the other a foundation digger, pitted against each other before the backdrop of the 1980s building boom. The Rackets (2001) is about a disgraced City Hall advance man who returns to the old neighborhood to grapple with corruption, unions, and city politics. Kelly himself is a former construction worker and teamster, so you can see the origin of his passion for this milieu.

  In Empire Rising (2005), Kelly builds his panoramic, multiple point-of-view novel around the construction of the Empire State Building in the 1930s. One principle point of view is that of Irish-American steelworker Michael Briody. In the novel's opening scene, Briody is chosen to pound in the first rivet at the building's groundbreaking ceremony, a piece of political theater for which the waiting workers have little patience. On the site once stood a

  hotel, the demolition of which gives Briody pause during the self-congratulatory speeches:

  Briody is not surprised that none of the swells on stage mention the six men who died demolishing the old hotel. Not surprised in the least. He considers their ugly endings, the crushed and broken bodies spirited away like just more rubble, their names already forgotten. Their stories untold. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, is anxious to start work. His fellow workers watch with dull stares. They have no interest in the staged spectacle. They mutter and joke under their breath until one of the concrete crew makes a loud noise, like a ripe fart, and the superintendent swivels his fat head around and glares at them as if they were recalcitrant schoolboys. They fall silent. They want the work. The next stop is the breadline.

  The tension in this paragraph is, to my eye, nicely restrained: impatience mixed with a downtrodden cynicism unique to Depression workers who are one step away from starvation. What is Briody's opinion of the ceremony? Kelly hardly needs to tell us; he simply lets Briody's passing regard for the dead workers who preceded him imply how he feels.

  A short while later in the story, Kelly introduces another principle point-of-view character, Johnny Farrell, a lawyer and bagman (bribe collector) for Mayor Jimmy Walker. Johnny is king of his world, but all is not right with it. Johnny's wife is from a rich and very proper family. She disdains his work and the people with whom he must associate. One Sunday morning they argue as his wife bundles their children off to her Episcopal church. After she departs, Johnny reflects on the differences in their upbringings:

  Farrell kissed the children goodbye and watched as Pamela shepherded them into the waiting car, insisting that they ride the four blocks to the Church of the Resurrection rather than walk because she liked to make an impression. He thought for a moment of his own childhood

  in the Bronx, how his mother used to drag them through the crowded neighborhood streets to St. Jerome's, all those immigrants seeing the church as a way to keep their past alive, and for a moment standing in his Fifth Avenue apartment so far from the warrens of his youth he could smell the incense and hear the Latin intonations and feel his mother's rough hand holding his. The woman had lived in fear. And that fear had instilled in him a hunger, an ambition, and a need to never settle for anything, and now this is where that need had brought him—an elegant and spacious home among the city's elite where his own children were total strangers to him. He grabbed his coat and hat and headed out into the day.

  What would you say this passage is about? Scene setting? No. It's about the different values of Pamela and Johnny Farrell, as well as Johnny's rueful realization that the fulfillment of his ambitions has a bitter side. Yet notice the period details that the author weaves in: the Church of the Resurrection, the Bronx, immigrants, long-gone Fifth Avenue mansions. I would say that Farrell's feelings about his family and childhood are intimately connected to New York City.

  Another way in which to deepen the sense of place and time is to let a point-of-view character observe an aspect of that place or time that we would not ordinarily expect her to notice.

  Kevin Baker's Strivers Row (2006) is the third in a trilogy of novels about New York called City of Fire. The first volume, Dreamland (1999), is set in 1910 and revolves around the city's violent underbelly, particularly Coney Island. Paradise Alley (2002) portrays the Civil War-era Draft Riots of1863. Strivers Row is a novel about Harlem during World War II, a time when the Harlem Renaissance is slowly giving way to the poverty, police harassment, and racial tension of later decades.

  This time of transition is seen through the lives of two African-American men: the light-skinned minister Jonah Dove (his similarity to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. is notable) and activist Malcolm Little, who later became Malcolm X. We associate Malcolm X with the fiery activism

  of his maturity, but at one time he was a new arrival. Baker portrays this naive Malcolm Little in a long sequence at the novel's beginning.

  In the passage below, Malcolm Little gets his first glimpse of Harlem from the window of a taxicab:

  But Malcolm had already stopped listening, staring out at the amazing sidewalk scene emerging all around them. Suddenly there was color everywhere, as if someone had just switched the screen to technicolor, like in The Wizard of Oz, which he had seen six times back in Michigan. Men wearing green, and yellow, and red sports shirts. Men wearing porkpie hats, and Panamas, and fedoras, men in white and lemon-lime and peach ice-cream suits—even men wearing sharper zoots, he had to admit, than what he had on himself.

  And women. He was sure that he had never seen so many beautiful women in his entire life. There were women eve
rywhere, at least two for every man, not counting the clusters of soldiers and sailors gaping and gesturing at them on every street corner. Women wearing gold and ruby-red glass in their ears, and open-toed platform heels that made them sway with every step. Women in tight violet and red and blue print dresses, held up only by the thinnest of shoulder straps over their smooth, brown backs. Women striding up from the subways, stepping regally down from the trolleys and the elevated, and women, everywhere he looked, strolling out of smoking storefronts, as if their smoldering presence had touched them off.

  What a riot of color! Baker's palette is a chaotic contrast to the severe black-and-white documentary of the 1940s that most of us carry in our heads. More surprising still is Malcolm X leering at the smoldering, swaying women of Harlem in their tight print dresses. He didn't mention that in his seminal Black Power speech "The Ballot or the Bullet"!

  One of the things we mean when we speak of richness in a novel is the depth with which an author creates the setting of his story. But what does depth mean? It means showing us more about a place than we would get on our own. How is that done? In a practical sense, that comes from details that take us by surprise and perspectives that are not our own.

  Those can only come from characters whose eyes and understanding are not merely a mirror of their author's.

  CONJURING A MILIEU

  What if your novel isn't exactly about a particular time and place, but rather is set in a milieu? What if you are writing about the world of professional baseball, undersea salvage, nuclear terrorists, or bird watchers? Such stories may span many settings. A roman a clef may span many decades. In stories with such a variety of times and locales, how can you effectively bring the world of the novel alive?

  A look at some recent novels about the world of books may help us learn.

  In conjuring a milieu, invoking an air of mystery and importance can be useful. This effect is handled nicely in Carlos Ruiz Zafon's cult hit The Shadow of the Wind (2001), a novel set in Barcelona. It concerns Daniel Sempere, who at the age of ten discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by little-known author Julian Carax. The novel is a rarity, in part due to the disfigured man who has been burning copies of it. At the novel's outset Ruiz Zafon has Daniel's bookseller father introduce him to a magical rare bookshop where he will first encounter Carax's novel:

  Night watchmen still lingered in the misty streets when we stepped out of the front door. The lamps along the Ramblas sketched an avenue of vapor that faded as the city began to awake. When we reached Calle Arco del Teatro, we continued through its arch toward the Raval quarter, entering a vault of blue haze. I followed my father through that narrow lane, more of a scar than a street, until the gleam of the Ramblas faded behind us. The brightness of dawn filtered down from balconies and cornices in streaks of slanting light that dissolved before touching the ground. At last my father stopped in front of a large door of carved wood, blackened by time and humidity. Before us loomed what to my eyes seemed the carcass of a palace, a place of echoes and shadows.

  "Daniel, you mustn't tell anyone what you're about to see today. Not even your friend Tomas. No one."

  A smallish man with vulturine features framed by thick gray hair opened the door. His impenetrable aquiline gaze rested on mine.

  "Good morning, Isaac. This is my son, Daniel," my father announced. "Soon he'll be eleven, and one day the shop will be his. It's time he knew this place."

  The man called Isaac nodded and invited us in. A blue-tinted gloom obscured the sinuous contours of a marble staircase and a gallery of frescoes peopled with angels and fabulous creatures. We followed our host through a palatial corridor and arrived at a sprawling round hall, a virtual basilica of shadows spiraling up under a high glass dome, its dimness pierced by shafts of light that stabbed from above. A labyrinth of passageways and crammed bookshelves rose from base to pinnacle like a beehive woven with tunnels, steps, platforms, and bridges that presaged an immense library or seemingly impossible geometry. I looked at my father, stunned. He smiled at me and winked.

  "Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel."

  The Gothic atmosphere in this passage is as thick as the fog enveloping Barcelona's famous pedestrian street, La Rambla. Daniel's father's dire warning, "You mustn't tell anyone what you're about to see today," would perhaps be enough, but Ruiz Zafon then piles on a labyrinth of twisting passages, a "basilica" of shadows and light, a "beehive" of tunnels, steps and bridges all leading to an "immense" library

  of "impossible geometry," the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. By now you should have the idea that this temple of rare books is special.

  Ruiz Zafon's novel earned comparisons to A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990), Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years ofSolitude (1967), Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980), Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas (1993), Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), and William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel (1978). It's a Grand Guignol thriller, a love story, an historical, and a mystery. It's long, twisty and complex. Above all things, though, it is a novel about a novel and before anything else Ruiz Zafon establishes the sacred status and magical pull of books upon his story's characters. He shows us the special status that books have to them and, consequently, to us.

  A similar family obsession is at the heart of Hal Duncan's Vellum (2005), which follows a search by Reynard Guy Carter for The Book of All Hours, also known as The Vellum, said to be a blueprint for all creation written by the scribe of God. When found, The Vellum proves to be a portal to a parallel reality where, among other things, angels and demons battle for control of the order of everything.

  Duncan's Vellum is rich with many characters and storylines, tracing the history of the ancient-yet-advanced civilization of Kur through Egyptian, Babylonian, and East Indian myths. There are also bitmites, cyber-avatars, and warring bands of fallen angels. Before he introduces us to all of this, though, Duncan must first establish the mythic importance of The Vellum to Carter and his family. This Duncan does by, paradoxically, denying its importance in a passage of reverse psychology:

  "The Book of All Hours," my father had said. "Your grandfather went looking for it, but he never found it. He couldn't find it; it's a myth, a pipe dream. It doesn't exist."

  I remember the quiet smile on his face, the look all parents have at some time, I suspect, when they see their children repeating their own folly, a look that says, yes, we all think like that when we're your age, but when you're older, believe me, you'll understand, the world doesn't work that way. I'd come to ask him about these fanciful stories I'd been told, about the Carter family having ancient secrets, not just skeletons in the closet, but skeletons with bones engraved with mystic runes, in closets with false walls that hid dark tunnels leading deep, deep underground.

  "But Uncle Reynard said that when grandfather was in the Middle East—"

  "Uncle Reynard is an incorrigible old fox," said my father. "He tells a good tale, but you really have to ... take what he ways with a pinch of salt."

  I remember being shocked, confused; I was young, still young enough that it had never occurred to me that two adults whom I trusted absolutely might believe entirely different things. My father and his brother, Reynard—my namesake uncle—they knew everything after all, didn't they? They were grown-ups. It had never occurred to me that the answers they gave to my questions might be entirely incompatible.

  "Of course, you should listen to your father," Uncle Reynard had said. "Honestly, you shouldn't believe a word I say. I am utterly untrustworthy when it comes to the Book."

  And he held my gaze with complete sincerity ... and winked.

  "Almost as bad as the Cistercians," he said.

  After discouragement like that, it's not surprising that Carter seeks The Vellum even harder than before—and finds it.

  Lev Grossman's brainy thriller Codex (2004) involves a similarly legendary work of medieval literature which comes to light when an up-and-coming investment banker named Ed
ward Wozny is hired by the mysterious Duchess of Bowmry to catalogue her library. Needing a break, Edward agrees to this temporary career switch. Charged with finding a particular codex (a bound manuscript), Edward enlists the help of quirky-but-cute medieval scholar Margaret Napier, who explains to him the importance of this codex:

  "So Gervase wrote two books, and maybe a few poems," Edward said, "and he had a lousy job working for a minor nobleman. Why is he so important?"

  Margaret arched her thin, dark eyebrows quizzically.

  "What makes you think he's important?"

  Edward hesitated, puzzled.

  "I guess I just assumed—you're saying he's not important?"

  Edward caught a faint flash of something in her eyes.

  "He's a significant minor figure," she said, calmly enough, and took another sip of coffee.

  All right, he thought. We'll come back to that. He wanted another glass of wine, and he signaled the waiter and tapped his glass.

  "And this other book, the one I'm looking for? Where does the Viage fit in?" He tried to imitate her pronunciation.

  "The Viage is another matter entirely," she said. "If, for the sake of argument, we take seriously the possibility that it is genuine—and I suppose that doing so is one of the conditions of my employment—it would of course have real importance. There were only three really important writers in the medieval England: Chaucer, Langland and the Pearl Poet. Together they essentially invented English literature. A fictional narrative of significant length from that period, written in English and not Latin or French, by a scholar of Gervase's general sophistication ... its value would be inestimable. And of course," she added pragmatically, "the book itself could have some monetary value, as an artifact."

  "How much?"

  "Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions."

  Expert characters are useful devices for explanation in many types of novel. Here, Grossman uses Margaret not only to explain the MacGuffin (the object that everyone is after), but also to set the stakes. The Codex, if found, would be a major literary discovery and