The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  at a bank is, for Bledin, not just a springboard for comedy but a teller's window onto the human condition.

  Ed Park's Personal Days (2008) has as its driving narrative force a tension that is the opposite of that in Bledin's novel: instead of angst over quitting, the people in Park's nameless firm are fearful of getting fired. And with good reason. The firm's new owners, referred to as the Californians, begin to fire people with a randomness that breeds paranoia.

  Like Bledin, Park lovingly details office absurdities. As the firings take their toll, though, worker morale declines so far that Park's text assumes the format of a legal brief, each paragraph a numbered and lettered subclause. The novel's final section is in the form of a long e-mail rant at the end of which the writer, a survivor named Jonah, reveals to a fired friend a reason for the firings (the inability of management to identify a criminal at the firm) and also Park's statement of why their torment matters:

  I'm sorry, Pru, sorry I couldn't say all that I wanted to, tonight, but in truth it was as much about imagining I was saying something to you as it was about actually saying anything: You said yourself, once, waiting for stuff by the asthmatic printer, that the office generates at least one book, no, one novel every day, in the form of correspondence and memos and reports, all the reams of numbers, hundreds of sentences, thousands of words, but no one has a mind to understand it, no one has the eyes to take it all in, all these potential epics, War and Peace lying in between the lines; so maybe just think of this letter as one such novel, one such book, cobbled from the data all around me, and I'm trusting that at worst you'll ignore the new e-mail flashing in your in-box, bothering your screen, but at least you'll be conscious of it, as you sit at your desk or your worktable with the sewing machine, over there at Sharmila Maternity Wear, and slowly the unread message will invade your thoughts, and curiosity will get the

  better of you, as you wonder what I could possibly have to say to you after all this time, and why I remain,—Your friend,—JONAH

  In the existential wilderness of corporate America, then, there is this scrap of hope: Working at least gives you friends. It would have been a cinch for Park simply to trash the office, but that is too easy. There is meaning buried in every experience, and here Park cares enough to bring it out.

  What is routine in your story? What happens that in real life would pass by unnoticed and unexamined? A kiss on the cheek? A wait at a red light? A Big Mac? You can edit out low-tension stuff like that or, alternately, you can find in it the drama and significance that it can have if we will but see it.

  Meaning lies not in the experiences that you select to portray—I mean, how much cosmic significance is there to a Big Mac?—but rather in what that experience means to your characters; and, before that, what it means to you. If there is importance, great, use it. If there isn't, cut it and move on.

  OUR UNCOMMON EXPERIENCES

  Where were you on 9/11? That is one question that everyone can answer: We were all in close proximity to the World Trade Center on that day, or feel as if we were. The impulse to write about it has stuck many authors, among them Ken Kalfus, Jonathan Safran Foer, Martin Amis, Jay McInerny, and John Updike. But what, really, is there to add to what the news has shown us and history has played out?

  That, in a way, was a point made even before 9/11 by novelist Don DeLillo, who has long been concerned that terrorism is the narrative that in our times overwhelms any possible fiction (see his novel Mao II, 1991). In an essay in Harper's a few months after 9/11, DeLillo wrote, "The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative." Adding to the 9/11 story, then, for DeLillo means building from the ruins, looking at what came after.

  It is perhaps for that reason DeLillo's novel Falling Man (2007) does not portray, until its end, the actual 9/11 events. It begins with a fortyish lawyer, Keith Neudecker, who has escaped just before the south tower's fall, turning up at the door of Lianne, the wife from whom he has been separated for several years. In his hand is someone else's briefcase.

  Falling Man has no real plot. Keith finds the owner of the briefcase. His son Justin watches the sky for more planes. His wife notices Muslims everywhere, and all of New York is unsettled by the appearance of a suit-wearing performance artist known as Falling Man, who dangles himself from bridges and buildings. DeLillo captures the emotional numbness of the months following the attack with upsettling accuracy. His characters' paralysis is profound. Setting us adrift, one wonders whether DeLillo intends for Falling Man to be a novel or instead a re-immersion in the experience of that day.

  Falling Man would be almost unbearable reading except that De-Lillo excavates from the rubble a scrap of insight about the survivors, which he comes to in this passage about Keith's wife Lianne:

  It's interesting, isn't it? To sleep with your husband, a thirty-eight-year-old woman and a thirty-nine-year-old man, and never a breathy sound of sex. He's your ex-husband who was never technically ex, the stranger you married in another lifetime. She dressed and undressed, he watched and did not. It was strange but interesting. A tension did not build. This was extremely strange. She wanted him here, nearby, but felt no edge of self-contradiction or self-denial. Just waiting, that was all, a broad pause in recognition of a thousand sour days and nights, not so easily set aside. The matter needed time. It could not happen the way things did in normal course. And it's interesting, isn't it, the way you move about the bedroom, routinely near-naked, and the respect you show the past, the deference to its fervors of the wrong kind, its passions of cut and burn.

  She wanted contact and so did he.

  Human connection, therefore, is the need that unites DeLillo's survivors. The hope that they'll find it is the tension that underlies Falling Man. The novel is bleak reading, no question, but DeLillo's purpose is to illuminate what is dark in our memories. In Falling Man's final pages we return with Keith Neudecker to his office on the morning the plane strikes just a few floors above his own. Keith tries, and fails, to save an office mate, then makes his way down the hellish fire stairs to the outside just as the first tower collapses. The intensity of these events is, in DeLillo's hands, horrifying, but when it is over we have connected with the victims and we, like them, rise and go on.

  Andre Dubus III, who wowed the literary world with House of Sand and Fog (1999), also turned his attention to 9/11 in The Garden of Last Days (2008). Dubus focuses not on the immediate aftermath but on the week preceding the attack. Before they departed for their deaths, several of the terrorists taking flight training in Florida spent their last night at a strip club. In The Garden of Last Days, Dubus imagines that night in a place he calls the Puma Club for Men. There a terrorist named Bassam, torn by his attraction and repulsion to the exposed flesh of Western women, pays for two hours of solo time in the club's Champagne Room with a young stripper who calls herself Spring.

  The encounter between Spring (real name April) and Bassam (who calls himself Mike) is a power struggle over identity, boundaries, and understanding. Bassam wishes to know why Spring dances and whether her flesh can be bought. Spring is stripping to support her three-year-old daughter Franny whom, lacking a babysitter, Spring unfortunately has brought to the club that evening. The contest between Bassam and Spring focuses on money and Spring's cesarean scar:

  "Do you believe in nothing?"

  "I believe in some things."

  "What please?"

  "Like keeping your word, Mike. I believe in that."

  "What does this mean?" He was squinting at her, though the smoke in the room had cleared.

  "You asked me why I danced." She nodded at the wad still in his hand. "You put eight of those down and asked me."

  "But I know why it is for you doing this, April."

  "Spring."

  "April." He stood and sat back down on the love seat, the cash in his hand. So much of it. "Stand, please."

  She didn't feel like standing. He pulled a hundred from the fold and dropped it in front of he
r.

  Such easy, easy money.

  He smiled, letting his bad teeth show. For the first time all night he looked genuinely pleased about something. He kept his eyes on hers and separated three more hundreds from the fold. Two drifted down onto the black cushion, the other bent over itself and fell to the floor.

  "What's that for, Mike?"

  "For that." He nodded at her crotch.

  "What?"

  "Where they cut you."

  "It's just a scar. You don't want to touch a scar."

  Two more hundreds floated and spun like playing cards onto the other two. Six hundred. He was crazy in some way, and unless he came back and did this again, she would never have another night like this ever.

  "You do it for skin—what is the way you say?—for flesh."

  "Flesh?"

  "Yes, for your love of it. Even if you had no children you would sell your flesh."

  "I don't sell my flesh. I dance."

  He sat up, took the bottle of Remy, poured some into his snifter. "You do it because you think it is allowed." He picked up his glass and swirled the cognac.

  He stared into it like there was something in there only he could see. "But it is not. Not for you. Not for any of you."

  What is it that Dubus wants us to conclude? Who is right? Who is wrong? In postmodern fashion, he doesn't say. He simply offers us different experiences, or rather struggles. Bassam is torn: purity vs. flesh. Spring is also torn: her body vs. money. It is their conflicted yearning that interests Dubus, and which causes him to bring together these two representatives of irreconcilable human desires in a scene as old as myth and as raw as yesterday.

  In the course of The Garden of Last Days we learn of the death of Bassam's brother in their beloved American muscle car. We also find out how deeply Spring cares about her daughter. Other characters are portrayed in detail too: a club bouncer, a disgruntled patron, the ailing babysitter. Dubus does not indulge in stereotypes. He brings these people individually to life. His research was thorough. His detailing is minute. He cares, but then so do all authors. Or so they say. The difference is that Dubus digs deeper, imagines more completely, and does not allow himself to see his characters dishonestly or through filters.

  Both DeLillo and Dubus approach 9/11 in ways that may strike some as timid, as if the enormity of 9/11 robbed or humbled them to the point that only the fringes of the event could be examined. I would say, rather, than these authors have written respectfully. They do not try to top history or outdo the news. They do not cook up thriller heroes who ridiculously defeat terrorism and set right all that is wrong.

  DeLillo and Dubus acknowledge the impossibility of encompassing so vast a tragedy, but they also do not surrender to it. From the rubble each pulls something for us to hold onto. Their stories may be microcosmic, but then aren't all stories? Through the small, the particular, and the personal we can understand what is common to us all. Even when the characters are strange and the territory unfamiliar, what makes a story universal is what the author causes us to feel.

  What does it mean to write for the ages? Must one have a moral or reveal a universal truth? Or is it enough to merely plumb the depths of human experience so that we all can relate? It doesn't matter. Power in fiction comes from touching readers. Touching readers comes from your own compassion.

  Whether you are burning to say something or immersed in curiosity about your characters and what happens to them, what's important is to get it all down in detail and with conviction. Merely writing well is not enough. Fine prose is empty unless it is charged with your own deep feeling.

  THE MORAL OF THE STORY

  What if your intent is precisely to make a point? Suppose you want to stack the deck, run the game, play God, or in some other way manipulate your story for a purpose? How is that done without being hokey and undermining your own message?

  Deeanne Gist, one of the most entertaining writers in the Christian romance market, is known especially for her spirited heroines. Courting Trouble (2007) introduces the unconventional Essie Spreck-elmeyer, who scandalizes her 1894 hometown of Corsicana, Texas, with her outlandish hats and bicycle bloomers. Unmarried at thirty, Essie is practically an old maid. To remedy her situation she draws up a list of Corsicana's eligible bachelors and writes down their good and bad qualities. The most appealing of the bunch is the unfortunately named Hamilton Crook, owner of a general store.

  Essie sets about to get hired. She is an excellent saleswoman, it turns out, and in time it looks as if Hamilton will propose. But it is not to be. Bitterly disappointed, Essie quits to assist her father in running Corsicana's first oil field. Among the help is a handsome drifter named Adam Currington, with whom she falls in love. Eventually he seduces her and runs off. Essie is ruined. Gist does not indulge in modern morality but stays true to the times: Essie is indeed spoiled, her marriage prospects forever lost.

  But then a ray of possible salvation arrives in the form of Ewing Wortham, a seminary student seven years her junior who returns to town and discovers that his boyhood crush on Essie has not diminished. Despite her fallen state, he wishes to marry her. It is almost too good to be true—and so it proves. Set to become the town minister, Ewing requires that Essie comport herself in a manner more becoming a preacher's wife. This means, among other things, that she must tone down her hats and, worse, give up riding her bicycle. In the end, Essie is unable to conform. She calls off the engagement, knowing her last hope is gone.

  This is a romance? Actually, no. Gist has a different intent. Essie's devastation is profound. How can she go on? The answer comes from her father in a talk toward the novel's end:

  Sorrow etched the lines in Papa's face. "You do not need a man to be a whole person."

  "Then why would God send me Ewing if not for the purpose of marrying him?"

  "Perhaps because the Lord wants to see if you will trust Him. If you will choose Him over being married."

  "But marriage was His idea. He sanctified it."

  "Marriage is a good thing, but it may not be the highest and best for you. Are you willing to give it up for Him, if that is what He wishes?"

  Moisture once again rushed to her eyes. "But I don't want Him to wish that for me. Why would He?"

  "I don't know. All I'm saying is, if you truly trust God, and if He is the most important thing in your entire life, then you will accept and believe that He knows what is best for you. And you will accept it joyfully. Willingly."

  She pulled her hands away, propping an elbow on the table and resting her head against his palm. "Who will hug me in my old age? Who will eat at my table when you and Mother are gone?"

  "Christ will meet your needs, Essie. If you let Him."

  Does Essie's fate seem to you harsh? Gist does not mean it to be. Later Essie considers her future, writes out a list of God's good and bad points, and prays:

  She took a trembling breath. I will embrace the life you have laid out for me, Lord, and I will live it joyfully so that I may be a witness to how great you are.

  Her tears slowed to a trickle, leaving her cheeks slick and salty. She wondered if she really could live the life of a spinster with joy.

  Images of herself old and gray, of this house empty and quiet, rattled her resolve. How could she embrace such a thing?

  Help me be joyful, Lord. I'm afraid. Afraid of being alone.

  I will never leave you.

  As God speaks to Essie, Gist's purpose is revealed. Courting Trouble was never intended to be a romance. Is it instead a morality tale about abstinence before marriage? The novel certainly portrays premarital sex as dangerous. But Gist's message is larger: Put your trust in God, she is saying. In faith you will find strength and the answer to life's essential loneliness.

  Gist encourages our expectation of a happy romantic outcome precisely so she can thwart it. How do you shape the events of your story to your purpose? Are you afraid that if you did so readers would reject what you have to say? You are not alone. It has become unfa
shionable to make statements in fiction. In our politically correct, post-9/11 world, is it perhaps even unwise to assert our views?

  I believe that the danger lies in not doing so. Stories draw their power from their meaning. If you ask me, challenging readers' beliefs is not a weakness but a strength. Did you ever have someone tell you the harsh truth about yourself? It was hard to hear, wasn't it, but today aren't you glad you listened? A similar dynamic is at work in fiction. Truth can be uncomfortable. It can also be comforting. Whatever it is, it is necessary to speak it.

  War has been portrayed in countless works of fiction such as Stephen Crane's The Red Badge ofCourage (1895), Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951), and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato (1978). Science fiction has also speculated about the future of war in novels like Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959), Joe Haldman's The Forever War (1975), and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (1985). Considering all that, what is there left to say about it?

  In one sense there is nothing new to say. How could there be? There are, however, men and women who have experienced war whose perspectives on it are new to us. Even the future of war can be imagined in fresh ways. One recent science-fiction novel that did that was John Scalzi's Old Man's War (2005), which posits a future in which old folks don't have to die, they can instead enlist and live again in rejuvenated bodies that are enhanced for fighting with improvements like SmartBlood and BrainPal, an implanted computer.

  After the death of his wife, seventy-five-year-old John Perry joins the Colonial Defense Force and bonds with a group of similar recruits who ironically dub themselves the Old Farts. They are separated but stay in touch as they fight alien species on faraway planets. With the superenhanced bodies, Scalzi's characters naturally evoke the classic science-fiction question of what it means to be human.