I can’t thank enough my extraordinary editor, Jennifer Brehl, because I wouldn’t know where to start. I do feel incredibly lucky to have found, and been found by, her. And I can’t begin to thank my wife, to whom this book is dedicated, because I wouldn’t know where to stop.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…
About the author
Meet Jamie M. Saul
About the book
Writing Light of Day
Film References in Light of Day
Read on
Author’s Picks
An Excerpt from The First Warm Evening of the Year
About the author
Meet Jamie M. Saul
In an interview with Mark G. Gibson, associate director of communications at Saul’s alma mater Indiana State University, the author talked a little bit about himself. Here is an excerpt from that interview.
IN LIGHT OF DAY Jamie M. Saul tells the story of a college professor coming to terms with devastating personal loss. The story unfolds in the fictional western Indiana town of Gilbert, a mythical setting that draws its roots from Saul’s college days at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The native New Yorker studied English and graduated with a bachelor’s degree. Memories of time spent crossing the grassy quadrangles of the university campus, the whistles of trains passing through town on their way to destinations unknown, and visits to Terre Haute’s Fairbanks Park on the banks of the Wabash River were inspiration for Saul’s Gilbert. But while memories of Terre Haute laid the foundation for the book’s setting, the writer’s imagination provided the infrastructure.
“Gilbert, Indiana, is not Terre Haute, nor was it meant to be,” Saul contends. “But it incorporates elements of Terre Haute. I wanted to place a story in that kind of setting and have the town almost become a character in the story.”
The Midwest captured Saul’s imagination as an eighteen-year-old. Growing up in the Bronx, Saul attended Dewitt Clinton High School, an all-boy’s public school that educated James Baldwin, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Neil Simon, and Richard Avedon, among others. At the urging of a college advisor Saul picked Indiana State as his institution of choice.
“I think that coming from New York City to Terre Haute was a very good experience,” Saul says of his college decision. “I managed to appreciate the history of the town and was really taken by it.”
While American artists, writers, and musicians have long sought inspiration in New York’s vibrant, sprawling metropolis, this teenager wanted to experience America beyond the borders of the five boroughs. And Saul thought the best place to do that was in the nation’s heartland.
“I felt, even at the age of eighteen, that New York City could be very provincial. I just wanted to get away. And somehow for me the Midwest was America, and I really wanted to see America. I wanted to see what was beyond the Hudson River.”
For Saul, Terre Haute was America. Eugene Debs came from Terre Haute. So did Theodore Dreiser. Saul recalls reading Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and thinking it was a revelation.
Saul once hitchhiked to St. Louis “just because it was St. Louis. It was America and I wanted to see it,” he says. “I knew this and I didn’t know that, and that’s how you learn.”
Saul spent a summer after college working in maintenance at a summer stock theater in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. He then returned to New York, where he got a job as a copy boy at Time magazine. Through connections made at Time he found freelance work writing for magazines like People and Playboy, and taught creative writing as a guest professor at Yale University, all the while keeping alive a desire to write a novel.
The process wasn’t as simple as “sit down and write it,” but the result is Light of Day.
“It’s about a relationship between a father and son,” Saul says of the book, “and it’s about how a person can do everything right and it can all go wrong through no fault of his own. It’s just the nature of life. But it’s really a book with a focus on ambivalence and irony.”
Another theme of the book is the reality that “we are our memories,” Saul adds. “Memories are what make us moral, but memories are also what make us human. Without them we’d have no bearings, we wouldn’t know who we are, we wouldn’t know why we like the things we like, and we wouldn’t know why we fear the things we fear.”
Saul now lives in Manhattan. He is working on a second novel.
“Right now it’s a love story,” he says tentatively. “We’ll see what happens.”
Jamie M. Saul invites readers to e-mail him at [email protected].
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About the book
Writing Light of Day
I REALLY DON’T KNOW WHY I wrote Light of Day. I don’t have children. I’ve experienced very little of what I write about in the novel. While I was interested in the character I named Danny Owens and wanted to explore the reasons he might have had for killing himself, I was really starting with a tabula rasa and slowly filling in the blanks. It was very much like an improvisation: establish a premise, then create actions around that premise.
I tried to structure Light of Day as organically as possible, starting with the opening scene establishing the motifs of time and memory. The past is personified as the decrepit remains of life. Old men limp down the street. The air is filled with sulfur, a remnant of the burning coal that fixes sunlight in sepia tones like a daguerreotype—daguerreotype being one of the earliest methods of photography. I follow the transit of this theme to the steadily decaying ruins and to the river, which is both a symbol of resurgence and destruction, past time and future time; its rank and humid air is slowly destroying the ruins, the broken “monument to a past that was, if not efficient, certainly ambitious.” We can also say this about Jack and Anne in their lives and relationship.
Old-timers limp with age. Sulfur ages the air right before your eyes. Ruins of an abandoned Depression-era project rise at the river’s edge. Rivers, like one’s memory, like one’s past, flow with the detritus of time and decay. The past was never as wonderful as we remember. It is old bones and desiccation, something we manage to survive or transcend; in Jack’s case it is something that holds the seeds of his own destruction.
Jack explains to Danny that memory is what makes people moral. Memory is also what connects us to our humanity, to who and where we are and from whence we come. Without memory, without our pasts, we have no frames of reference for what we feel, what we love, what we fear. Everything in this story refers to the past and remembrance; even when Jack is looking forward, he is looking back: “There would come a time when he would look back at that moment.” He calls himself “the man from the past.” Even when he leaves town and drives into the future, he looks toward the past.
In keeping with this theme, the structure of the story reflects the workings of memory. Time is broken up into asymmetrical and nonlinear pieces because this is how our memories work. I wanted what we know of Jack and Anne and Danny, the discovery of who they are and were, to unfold gradually and build toward a complete picture; I hope this makes for a more interesting narrative.
While the baseball references are few, I like to think they are important. The game of baseball is about getting home safely; Jack certainly tries to provide his son with a safe home in which to live and grow up. Baseball figures prominently in Danny’s life. He nearly pitches his high school team to the championship: a near miss in a novel filled with near misses. There’s a scene during the annual softball game that Jack organizes for Danny and his friends: Jack’s current love interest Maggie Brighton stands on third base, ready to “come home,” only to be quite literally stranded.
And then there’s Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was one of the great artists and art philosophers of the modern era. He was very generous in sharing information, telling what he knew about art and perception. By so doing Duchamp lifted the lid on
the artist’s tricks that create the illusion of a third dimension on a two-dimensional surface, which is what painting, photography, and film really are. Duchamp attempted to demystify, to explain why we see what we see. Paradoxically, Duchamp is one of Anne’s heroes; demystification also runs counter to what Jack is about. He creates mythologies about Anne, about Danny, and about himself and his life.
I reference Pablo Picasso’s famous Guernica when Jack has a dream in which he lifts his head in a silent scream. This is also the final scene in the 1965 film The Pawnbroker; the character played by Rod Steiger falls to his knees on a street in New York’s Harlem and lifts his head in a silent scream (Steiger’s performance in In the Heat of the Night is also referenced). The actor said in an interview that he was thinking of Gurenica when he decided not to scream audibly in the film.
Anne refers to the short story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” by J. D. Salinger. The eponymous Esmé is a British girl dealing with the horrors of World War II. I like to think this is a story that would have attracted Anne while growing up in postwar England.
Ambivalence, irony, and paradox figure prominently in this novel. Jack Owens and his wife Anne Charon are ambivalent about having a baby. After Danny is born, Anne’s series of paintings One foot on the platform, one foot on the train reflects her ambivalence and conflict about being the mother Danny deserves and the artist her talent demands; Anne considers leaving Jack and Danny; Jack too has his moments of ambivalence. He wishes he could walk away from the responsibilities of being Danny’s father. Would his life have been more satisfying if Danny had never been born? He even expresses some ambivalence about his relationship with Anne; Jack wonders if even without Danny’s birth the marriage would have caused conflict for Anne.
The name Anne Charon references Charon the Boatman of Greek mythology, who transports souls across the river Styx to the land of the dead. Jack refers to the Wabash River’s stygian journey. Anne, of course, will give birth to a son who kills himself.
Of the many paradoxes I include in Light of Day, two I’m quite fond of involve Jack. Believing that he has reconciled who he was before Danny’s death and who he has become since, he considers: “This is what it’s like when you aren’t who you are.” The other paradox transpires during the night scene in Jack’s backyard when he imagines the huge ocean liner rising in the field: Are the passengers laughing or calling out for help? Are they safe or in danger? There is no way of telling. Yet Jack cannot dismiss the magnificence of the vessel, the magnificence of all the paradoxes that comprise a lifetime. There is, of course, the irony that the very moral guidance Jack provides Danny is the same moral guidance that creates Danny’s irreconcilable conflict. Jack is someone who always does “the right thing,” yet everything goes terribly wrong. Jack betrays that same morality in the end. He leaves the falsely accused Joseph Rich to go to jail, allows Danny’s friends to remain unpunished, and finally betrays Dr. Owens. Jack’s answer to Danny’s question “which is more important, honesty or loyalty?” creates a mythology surrounding Danny that does not include the accidental murder of Lamar Coggin. Remaining loyal to Danny necessitates the destruction of Dr. Owens.
Film References in Light of Day
I COULD HAVE COMPILED A LIST of books and movies that influenced me, but it is much more in my nature to explain why I feel things are important and why everyone should feel the same way about them. I discovered this facet of my personality when I was a guest professor at Yale, thanks to wonderful students who taught me as much about myself as I taught them about the craft of writing.
Since Jack is a professor of film studies, there are many references to cinema in Light of Day, some a little more subtle than others. When Jack is in his office he sees the slow appearance of students on the quad as a time-lapse film. Jack uses the words “not as a stranger” (the title of a film made in 1955 starring Robert Mitchum) to refer to Marty Foulke. And there are the more obvious movie references, most of which have something to do with memory and the past. If Light of Day is “about” anything, it is about how memory and the past keep us connected to what we are and to what and who we love.
Blade Runner (1982), an extraordinary science fiction film by Ridley Scott and one of Danny’s favorite movies, is all about how memories and a past are what make us human. Without them we are empty, robots, literally replicants, whether spawned from the laboratories of geneticists or from the wombs of our mothers.
In the Heat of the Night (1967), a film that holds racism and bigotry up to ridicule, is a great “buddy movie” about characters with disparate personalities who become good friends, much like Jack and Marty Foulke.
Last Year at Marienbad (1961), one of the films Jack and Anne see after they return from France, is also a film about memory. The great auteur Alain Resnais plays fast and loose with events of the past. Incidents recalled by the narrator may or may not have happened; if they did happen they may not have happened like this, and even if they did happen like this perhaps they didn’t happen at Marienbad. This theme also reflects Jack’s memories of the life he shared with Anne. Was it as idyllic as Jack remembers? Or was it just a part of Jack’s mythology of Anne? Was Anne as wonderful as Jack remembers or the creation of his “hubris and self-image?”
Federico Fellini’s film Amarcord (1973) is referenced in the night scene when Jack imagines the huge ocean liner rising magically and majestically in the field behind his house. Such a ship also magically and majestically appears in Fellini’s film, the title of which translates to “I remember.” Amarcord is also a film about the friendship of four teenage boys.
Along with the films already mentioned there are a few more that need to be noted, if only because they’ve been subtle influences on my sensibility and you might like them as well:
My Man Godfrey (1936): “All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people.”
Anything directed by Preston Sturges, but most certainly The Great McGinty (1940), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), and The Lady Eve (1941).
Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), starring Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, and Jack Lemmon, is a lesson in flawless storytelling and structure.
The Hustler, with Paul Newman and Piper Laurie (1961).
A double feature of Jean-Luc Godard’s (One Plus One) Sympathy for the Devil (1968) and Richard Lester’s A Hard Days Night (1964).
Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) and Last Tango in Paris (1972).
Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974).
Hearts of the West, starring Jeff Bridges (1975).
Alain Resnais’s Providence (1977).
John Cassavetes’s Opening Night (1978).
The Coen Brothers’ Fargo (1996).
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Author’s Picks
THE WORK ETHIC of George S. Kaufman (Once in a Lifetime [1930], You Can’t Take It with You [1936], and The Man Who Came to Dinner[1939]) has been no small influence on me; anyone interested in Kaufman should read any of several biographies. Moss Hart, one of Kaufman’s collaborators and considered by most to be his best, also influenced my work. It is unfortunate that no biographies of Moss Hart do justice to this brilliant and courageous man. One can learn a lot about Hart, however, from the Kaufman biographies and from his autobiography Act One. (Franklyn Lenthal and his lifetime partner James Wilmot, two talented and generous men who owned the Boothbay Playhouse in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, introduced me to the work of Kaufman and other great playwrights and made the theater exciting and accessible.)
Although some of his work is dated, Ring Lardner is another master of story and story structure. His piercing, dark humor is timeless. Avril Stone, a friend of Jack and Anne, writes a play titled “Shut Up,” He Explained. The title quotes a Lardner short story about a father and son.
Howard Nemerov, e. e. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens should be read aloud over and over again, sometimes to someone else
in the room.
Jack’s ride home with the moon over his shoulder is an homage to T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In some primitive Western religions the half-moon is a symbol of death, which is why it is a half-moon that follows Jack home that night.
I used as my epigraph a passage from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a masterpiece of American literature and no small influence on the sound and structure of Light of Day. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby has also been a huge influence. Everyone should read both of these books at least four times throughout his or her life, as well as Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel.
I suggest reading any translation of Beowulf. The themes of duty, heroism, and greed and the transition from paganism to Christianity are integral to Western literature. That this is a great epic written by a conquered people extolling the bravery and heroics of their conquerors adds wonderful complexity to the poem (as though a descendent of Crazy Horse had written an epic celebrating the heroics of American frontier cavalrymen).
The late A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale University and Commissioner of Major League Baseball for five months in 1989, was the sport’s philosopher king. His baseball writings are collected in A Great and Glorious Game.
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