You Don't Love This Man
Page 32
Loveland’s newspaper, the Reporter-Herald, was an afternoon paper. I often grabbed it from the box by the road as I walked home from the school bus stop, and then read it, sometimes in its entirety, as soon as I walked into the house. What had happened in the world over twenty-four hours previously would, for the most part, still be news to me at four o’clock the next day, and my belief that the Reporter-Herald was both timely and authoritative remained intact throughout most of my childhood.
After high school, I was accepted into the production program of what was then called the Department of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. I was in South Central Los Angeles during the riots that followed the announcement of the verdict in the Rodney King case, as I was on the night of the North Ridge earthquake that collapsed apartment buildings and a section of Interstate 10. I lived and worked in Los Angeles long enough also to be there for the announcement of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, as well as for the day that two masked gunmen covered in body armor engaged in a protracted, post-bank-robbery automatic weapons shootout with Los Angeles police. These years were a unique education.
I returned to Colorado, this time to Fort Collins, where I studied literature and English education at Colorado State University, and taught as a student teacher at Fort Collins High School. I left Fort Collins for Portland, Oregon, but found no jobs available in the Portland Public School system. I showed up on the doorstep of a new journal called Tin House, but since I had no previous experience in publishing and was, as it were, a complete stranger, they had no open positions for me, either. Eventually, I took a job as a teller in a Wells Fargo branch.
I began to publish short fiction. Early stories appeared in Missouri Review, New England Review, and Northwest Review. Over the years, I went on to place work in places including Pindeldyboz, Ascent, Washington Square, and, yes, eventually, a few stories in Tin House. Foolishly, I also began work on a novel. After some years of work on that, I took the additionally imprudent step of founding Propeller, a quarterly magazine of art, literature, film, and culture, and Propeller Books, an independent literary press whose first book, Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women, is a collection of stories by Mary Rechner.
In 2011, this novel, You Don’t Love This Man, was published by Harper Perennial.
About the book
The Sidelined Character
PAUL, THE MAIN CHARACTER in this novel, is not a typical main character. A detective trying to catch a criminal makes for a traditional main character, and likewise a criminal himself—a man of action, pulling off capers or on the run—often takes center stage. Many main characters in literature are people having florid breakdowns, because a person in the midst of a breakdown can engage in any number of impulsive, dangerous, or self-destructive acts which, when they occur in the pages of a novel rather than in real life, can be greatly entertaining. (In real life, they’re usually less so.) There is also the illness-and-recovery narrative, of course, whose main character starts essentially where the florid-breakdown character ended, and whose story covers the character’s journey back to health and happiness. And it’s possible to string these kinds of characters together. Writers have gotten a lot of mileage out of a main character who starts as someone investigating or trying to get away with something, suffers a florid existential breakdown with episodes of diverting insanity, and then finds the road to redemption. The end.
A fellow writer once told me he was intrigued by how, in my novel, the voice of “a guy who is so sidelined” became so compelling to him. When I asked what he meant by “sidelined,” he said that it was standard to read all sorts of things about a team’s star or main players, but that there are always other players good enough to be on the team, but who rarely make it off the bench. Fans sometimes forget these players’ names or that they’re even on the team, even though the players are in practice every day, and then right there on the sidelines during every game. He said my novel was like reading the story of one of these players, and then realizing that you learn entirely different things about the team—and sometimes about the sport as a whole—when you hear about it from the sidelined guy.
I thought about this for a while. The first thing that occurred to me—and I was still following the sports metaphor here—is that a lot of players on the sidelines don’t necessarily feel they actually belong on the sidelines. They believe that if they were given the opportunity to get in the game, they could have great success. For these players, using the word as a verb (“to be sidelined”) makes sense, because they’re not out of the game willingly—someone has put them there. Coaches, fans, and other players might disagree, of course, and suggest that the sideline is exactly where that player belongs. Controversies over who should be on the field and who should be on the bench are perpetual.
Then I thought about how strange it is that we don’t read more stories about “sidelined” characters, because everyone, at some point, gets sidelined. People who were stars at one level find themselves struggling at the next, their previously effective skills and strategies no longer working. And even someone who has achieved success at the highest level, who has maintained the role of a team or organization’s dynamic central character for years, has to accept less time in the spotlight as his or her career winds down. It doesn’t matter who you are, how good you are, or what situations you have thrived in, and which you’ve struggled against—at some point, someone will tap you on the shoulder and point to the bench. You will be sidelined.
I think that because this moment is one we all fear and try to avoid, we don’t often tell stories in which the central character is going through this crisis. A proper tragedy of dramatic Shakespearean proportions is almost easier: a confluence of events, combined with some fatal flaw in the main character, leads to a sudden downfall. Poison! Stabbings! Murders intentional and accidental! Yelling, screaming, gasping for air while commanding someone to Remember me! Remember…argh…me…guh.
Good fun.
Sidelined characters, on the other hand, have to keep right on living, even though they’re often not even sure if they’re in a comedy or a tragedy. They exist in an uncomfortable marginal space: on the team, but not often in the game. They have to mull over whether they’ve been unfairly sidelined, or whether the sideline is where they in fact belong. They might cry about the situation at times, and then at other times laugh. They may want fervently to be in the game, but then find that when their number is called, they experience a sense of dread. The sideline has become comfortable, and now that they’re going into the game, they have to face the possibility of failure, and do so while knowing that one of the reasons they’ve been on the sideline in the first place is that they’ve made mistakes in games in the past. They may even feel the mistakes aren’t their fault. Maybe if they were in the game more often, they would be able to relax a bit, and wouldn’t make as many mistakes. Maybe the sideline has a spooky, dangerous power to turn great players into sideline players.
These doubts, crises, struggles, and examinations mean that though a story with the star character at the center of it can be quite rousing, there are actually many other fiendish little narratives that occur parallel to the star’s story. And these other narratives, with their sidelined central characters, involve just as much love, desire, conflict, doubt, and struggle as any story. It’s just that our eyes are often elsewhere, drawn to the dramas that are broadcast under the brightest lights. We know there are other players on the team, over there on the sidelines, but do we know their names? Not always. Are they given an opportunity to tell their stories? Not as often.
So I suppose that word, if it is a word, is accurate: the main character of this story is a man who is sidelined. And this novel is what we hear when this man, who has spent the greater portion of his life standing quietly to the side, decides to start talking.
Read on
Author’s Picks
THROUGHOUT THE YEARS I spent writing You Don’t Love This Man, read
ers of drafts (pronounced: my friends) often asked to what degree I felt the main character was aware of how others see him. I was never able to answer this question definitively, but I will now claim this is mostly because I didn’t want to say something like: “He is highly aware of how others see him, but he can’t do anything about it, because he is almost entirely blind to how others see him.”
I think most thinking and feeling human beings are trapped in that same nonsensical sentence, and I’m far from the first person to have written about it. The following are things I sometimes refer to when trying to explain to someone that I have a strong sense of self, but I have a hard time communicating it, because I haven’t the slightest idea who I am.
Blow-Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Antonioni’s landmark depiction of the fact that the more closely we examine an image, the less clarity we have on what we see—or think we see—within its borders. It’s not that we fail to see accurately, it’s that each image is really just a smaller part of a larger, more complex image. And the reason we can’t see the larger image with any clarity is that we’re inside of it. It’s the world.
Late Spring, directed by Yasujirô Ozu
Ozu is a master of depicting situations in which characters feel compelled to say or go along with something socially acceptable, while simultaneously revealing the degrees, sometimes desperate, to which they wish they could refuse. Setsuko Hara smiles and smiles and smiles in this film, and it’s a stunning, beautiful smile. It is also, often, a mask.
Low, David Bowie
David Bowie, Brian Eno, Tony Visconti, Europe, the mid-1970s. The brilliance of this album isn’t news. But in a world that often feels designed to reduce the opportunities for headspace, these artists crafted music—here and elsewhere—that created not only more opportunities for headspace, but offered brand-new flavors of it. My son was playing a cheap retro version of the old video game Pole Position the other day when a track from this album came on, and I started laughing. It was “Always Crashing in the Same Car.”
Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
If you could live with your thoughts and memories instead of in the real world, would it be paradise or hell? Tarkovsky’s answer, built atop the scaffolding of Stanislaw Lem’s novel, only complicates the question, but in a way that feels moving and true. Late in the film, the sequence of weightlessness and a Bruegel painting breaks my heart, every time.
Eclipse, by John Banville
Here and elsewhere, Banville reveals his mastery at treading the line—he has expanded it into an entire territory, really—between what we call a “literary novel” (a suspicious redundancy) and that item named “the detective story.” In addition to his crackling lexical energy, Banville’s work hums along on the delightful paradox that “the literary” has always been that sound thrumming at the heart of the detective story, while the desire to make investigations has always been a motor that drives literature. So which is a subcategory of the other? Like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, Banville doesn’t dissolve the two forces—he exploits them.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle, directed by Peter Yates
A low-level, working-class con in Boston has gotten busted again, and now he’s going to have to do time. Unfortunately, he happens to be married, with two kids, so he can’t let that happen. He begins the game of acquiring, or crafting, information about fellow criminals, to offer the cops in exchange for his freedom. He believes he’s good at this game. The degree to which we can see that this man is far from evil, but neither is he clever, is heartbreaking. This is 1970s filmmaking at its best, and with Robert Mitchum at the center of it, to boot. The film feels like a gift.
Ways of Seeing, by John Berger
Now that we are ensconced in the info-and media-centric world of the great twenty-first century, this nonfiction book based on a series of television shows that aired on the BBC in the 1970s should be dated and obsolete. Berger won the Booker Prize for the fantastic novel G., but every year, I watch students go home to read Ways of Seeing, and return a few days later surprised to discover that a slim little book, half of which is pictures, offers so many strategies for describing men, women, the images we make, and what we say about each other in those images.
The Counterlife, by Philip Roth
The Counterlife is the tour de force of a mind—Roth’s—that not only senses the manifold potentials bound up in any constellation of characters, but can then play those potentials out, with and against one another. Reading this novel is like watching a person play multiple games of chess simultaneously, and win them all. And here’s the kicker: after that overheated description, it’s also true to say that each section of this book reads fairly straightforwardly, and includes some good laughs.
About the Author
Dan DeWeese teaches writing at Portland State University. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, New England Review, Washington Square, and other publications. In 2009, he created Propeller, an art, film, and literature quarterly magazine, for which he serves as editor in chief.
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Credits
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover illustrations by Marika Kandelaki
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
YOU DON’T LOVE THIS MAN. Copyright © 2011 by Dan DeWeese. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeWeese, Dan.
You don’t love this man: a novel / Dan DeWeese.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-199232-2
I. Title.
PS3604.E9Y68 2011
813’.6—dc22
2010024949
EPub Edition © January 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-203697-1
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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