The Fire in Fiction (35 page)

That, at any rate, is how it can be but so often is not. Finding the power buried in your novel is not about finding its theme. I would say, rather, that it is about finding you: your eyes, experience, understanding, and compassion. Ignore yourself and your story will be weak. Embrace the importance of what you have to share with the rest of us and you have the beginning of what makes novels great.

Insuring that your story is powerfully yours is the subject of this final chapter. The fire in fiction is many things, but above and beyond all others it is the fire in you. Let's see how it is sparked and how it can spread in your story.

OUR COMMON EXPERIENCE

Do you hate your job? Many do. Many write manuscripts about it, too. Why should we read them? Mostly we don't have to. I mean, who needs a novel to discover out how horrible life can be from nine to five? Read a blog, or perhaps
Dilbert,
or maybe just punch the clock yourself.

When novels of workplace complaints do become worthwhile it is because they offer us extra levels of humor and insight. We get something more than someone else's war stories over a latte: We get an experience that doesn't feel like work at all. We get, in short, relief and understanding.

In recent years nightmare bosses have become fodder for the bestseller lists. Lauren Weisberger's
The Devil Wears Prada
(2003) and Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's
The Nanny Diaries
(2002) are two outstanding examples of this genre. But there are many more reasons why work can be a bitch.

We all have heard how much money young associates at law firms and investment banks can earn; we've also heard that they work like slaves and sell their souls. David Bledin, in his novel
Bank
(2007), affirms these truths. So beaten down is everyone in the Mergers & Acquisitions department in his fictional firm that they do not even have real names. The narrator is called Mumbles and his fellow spreadsheet jockeys are The Star, The Defeated One, Postal Boy, and

Clyde, who, perhaps because he has a real name, is doomed. These young associates pull off impossible feats of document prep for bosses like the heartless Sycophant, and consequently have no lives.

So vile is the existence of these young associates that even a coffee run to Starbucks becomes a maneuver fraught with the paranoid fear of being seen by a boss. After just a few chapters of Bledin's detailing of this corporate hell, one begins to wonder why Mumbles doesn't just quit. Indeed, that is the conflict that drives the story: What keeps Mumbles going when any sane person would walk away?

Mumbles's justification for sticking it out at first finds its basis in psychology:

So this is how it works. By the time you're nearing the end of your second year in the banking world, your compensation has been juiced up to one hundred and forty thousand all-in. Analogously, you're also getting accustomed to the mind-numbing tedium of your position. You can crunch comps in your sleep, tame the two-hundred Excel behemoths, whip out perfectly formatted PowerPoint pie charts like nobody's business. Whether you like it or not, you're turning into the Star.

And let's not ignore the psychological aspect to it, the advent of Stockholm syndrome. The term originates from a bunch of Swedish hostages locked up in a bank vault for six days sometime in the seventies. The hostages gradually grew sympathetic toward their captors, resisted rescue attempts, and later refused to testify at the trial. The psychologists had a field day with this one. The prevailing theory is this: The human psyche is weak. In situations of duress, when we're surrounded by other humans who wield this awesome power over our ephemeral fates, we grow dependent on them. Dependency leads to affection; affection to love.

So in short, I love the Sycophant. Well, not yet, but I will.

This insight does not keep Mumbles propped up forever. Later in the story Clyde becomes unhinged after the death of his father and shows dangerous signs of not caring, such as smoking something outside that is not tobacco. When one afternoon his boss heaps an impossible job on Clyde, The Defeated One calls the other associates to the rescue but they do not see why they should help out self-destructive Clyde. The Defeated One blasts them with a kind of pep talk:

The Defeated One scowls. "It's like this, jackass. We slave away at the Bank, these missiles of excrement hailing down on us from all of the senior guys, and there's not a single moment of reprieve: no time for our families, our friends, not even five fucking minutes when we get home to satisfy that basic human craving for sex. And so, let me ask you this: What do we have left if we turn on one another? I'll tell you—
zip.
Nada."

He takes a deep breath, turning to Postal Boy.

"Look, I'm not trying to be Clyde's protector, and I'm not going to force you to stay away from the Toad. If you really feel the need to lie down on his couch and unburden your woes, then I won't stop you. But think about what's helping us survive here—not the Toad, not the Sycophant. It's the ability to rely on one another."

The young associates are, like soldiers under fire, a band of brothers. It is their camaraderie that keeps them alive. Bledin continues their torment for one hundred more excruciating and hilarious pages, holding out meager carrots, moments of petty revenge, and for Mumbles, the promise of a relationship with the skittish The Woman With The Scarf.

In the end, Mumbles quits. Some of the taskmasters get their comeuppance, but tying up plot threads is not Bledin's main concern. His intent is to show us why and how human beings persist. Working

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: