The Fire in Fiction (36 page)

"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 her.

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 unfashionable 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.

Old Man's War
would be a retread of prior SF novels, but Scalzi is not content merely to raise familiar issues. In a deft turn of the plot, Scalzi has John Perry meet his dead wife Jane, now in a young female soldier's body. John Perry now must struggle not to remain human but to escape his humanity and the emotional agony that entails. It is not war that is inhumane in
Old Man's War,
it is instead being human itself that causes suffering. By the end of the novel John Perry has let his wife go and embraced his identity:

Eventually I asked to go back into combat. It's not that I like combat, although I'm strangely good at it. It's just

that in this life, I am a soldier. It was what I agreed to be and to do. I intended to give it up one day, but until then, I wanted to be on the line. I was given a company and assigned to the
Taos
. It's where I am now. It's a good ship. I command good soldiers. In this life, you can't ask for much more than that.

That would be a fine and challenging enough conclusion to
Old Man's War,
but Scalzi then twists the story again in a mental exchange (a ping) between John and his wife that closes the novel:

You once asked me where Special Forces go when
we
retire, and I told you that I didn't know
—she sent.
But I do know. We have a place where
we
can go, if we like, and learn how to be human for the first time. When it's time, I think I'm going to go. I think I want you to join me. You don't have to come. But if you want to, you can. You're one of us, you know.

I paused the message for a minute, and started it up again, when I was ready.