The Fire in Fiction (15 page)

And what if the period of your novel is not terribly far back in history? If your story is set in the 1970s, is it enough to mention Watergate, or do you need to be even more specific about disco, VWs, horizontally striped polo shirts, and oil shocks? How about contemporary stories? Does one need to convey a sense of the times when the times are our own?

To start to answer those questions, read the Op-Ed pages in the newspaper. Does everyone see our times in the same way? No. Outlooks vary. That should also be true for your fictional characters. What is your hero's take on our times? As in so many aspects of novel construction, creating a sense of the times first requires filtering the world through your characters. For examples, let's travel to Venice.

Joseph Kanon's richly layered debut mystery novel,
Los Alamos
(1997), won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel. He followed with
The Prodigal Spy
(1998),
The Good German
(2001), and the tragic and complicated
Alibi
(2005).

Alibi
is set in Venice in late 1945, immediately after the close of World War II. Rich Americans are returning to Europe, among them widow Grace Miller, who migrates south to Venice, having found Paris too depressing. Grace invites her son Adam, the novel's hero and narrator, who has been newly released from his post-war

service as a Nazi hunter in Germany. As the novel opens, Adam tells of his mother's return to the expatriate life:

After the war, my mother took a house in Venice. She'd gone first to Paris, hoping to pick up the threads of her old life, but Paris had become grim, grumbling about shortages, even her friends worn and evasive. The city was still at war, this time with itself, and everything she'd come back for—the big flat on the Rue du Bac, the cafes, the market on the Raspail, memories all burnished after five years to a rich glow—now seemed pinched and sour, dingy under a permanent cover of gray cloud.

After two weeks she fled south. Venice at least would look the same, and it reminded her of my father, the early years when they idled away afternoons on the Lido and danced at night. In the photographs they were always tanned, sitting on beach chairs in front of striped changing huts, clowning with friends, everyone in caftans or bulky one-piece woolen bathing suits. Cole Porter had been there, writing patter songs, and since my mother knew Linda, there were a lot of evenings drinking around the piano, that summer when they'd just married. When her train from Paris finally crossed over the lagoon, the sun was so bright on the water that for a few dazzling minutes it actually seemed to be that first summer. Bertie, another figure in the Lido pictures, met her at the station in a motorboat, and as they swung down the Grand Canal, the sun so bright, the palazzos as glorious as ever, the whole improbable city just the same after all these years, she thought she might be happy again.

There are several things to note in this highly atmospheric opening. First, Kanon weaves an undercurrent of tension through these two paragraphs, a tension that derives from his mother's longing for . well, what? Paris is dissatisfying. Venice, seemingly untouched by the war, is full of sunlight and memories. A mood of nostalgia would

be enough here, but Kanon himself is not satisfied with a mere rosy glow. Venice is "improbable" and Grace's lift of spirit is tinged with doubt: "She thought she might be happy again."

That word "might" is a calculated choice. Do you get the feeling that Adam's mother will not re-create in Venice the happiness of the pre-war party of the 1920s and 1930s? You are correct. Grace is courted by a distinguished Italian doctor, Gianni Maglione, whom Adam immediately dislikes—with good reason, as it turns out. When Adam begins a love affair with Claudia Grassini, a Jewish woman who survived the camps by becoming a Fascist's mistress, he is drawn into a tragic conflict. Claudia accuses Dr. Maglione of wartime collaboration and, worse, condemning her own father to death at Auschwitz. Adam's mother wishes to leave the past buried, but Adam, given his background and love for Claudia, cannot leave it alone.

Kanon's opening also effectively evokes Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war. Paris is "grim" and "grumbling." Grace's Paris is specific, too: Kanon mentions not just the city's streets, cafes, and markets, but Grace's flat on the "Rue du Bac" and the market on the "Raspail." For all I know, Kanon could be completely making up those places. It doesn't matter. It is their specificity that brings this Paris of food shortages and long memories alive.

Venice, by contrast, is full of false sunlight and sweet memories. These memories themselves are highly specific: afternoons on the Lido, striped changing huts, Cole Porter. Kanon plucks from his research a few choice tidbits that hint at a life of gay carelessness and privilege. His narrator's casual familiarity with them contributes to the passage's reality. But it's not only that. The details and the mood, Grace's naive longing and Adam's cynical foreknowledge all roll together into a couple paragraphs that create a unique moment in time.

Renaissance Venice attracts many novelists. The story of Christi Phillips's debut novel,
The Rossetti Letter
(2007), springs from an historical footnote: In 1618, a Spanish conspiracy to overthrow the city was exposed in a letter written by little-known courtesan Ales-sandra Rossetti. Meanwhile in the present, graduate student Claire

Donovan is writing her thesis on Rossetti; however, her ambition is threatened by the news that a well-known British historian, Andrew Kent, will be publishing a book on the same subject. Claire wangles a plane ticket to Venice by chaperoning a troubled teenage girl. There she plans to hear Andrew Kent lecture and thus learn if her thesis is doomed.

As in A.S. Byatt's
Possession
(1990), Phillips spins her tale of academic obsession in both present and past. In the past, we follow courtesan Rossetti's unfolding story of love and betrayal. It begins with Rossetti delivering the fateful letter that will expose the Spanish Conspiracy:

They turned into the Rio di San Martino, then into a narrow waterway that circled west toward the Piazzetta dei Leoncini. In their wake, small waves gently slapped against stone foundations smothered in clumps of thick, glistening moss. She could reach out and brush the damp stone with her fingertips is she desired, so close were the buildings, and she inhaled their familiar grotto scent with a kind of reverence. Traveling through Venice at night always filled her with a rising excitement, but tonight her anticipation was tinged with fear. Alessandra tried not to think about what waited for her at the end of her journey, which was quickly approaching.

The Piazza was bright with torchlight, alive with music and revelry, but she could not join in the general high spirits; the sinister maw that waited for her in the dark courtyard of the Doge's Palace filled her with dread. The
bocca di leone,
the lion's mouth, was a special receptacle created by the Venetian government to receive letters of denunciation. Into this bronze plaque went accusations of theft, murder, or tax evasion—the last a particularly heinous crime according to the Great Council, the Republic's ruling assembly of two thousand noblemen. Alessandra had never imagined, until recently, that she would ever avail herself of it. Behind
the
bocca di leone's
grotesque, gaping mouth lurked every terror hidden within the depths of the palace, the prison, and the Republic itself; surely unleashing that terror was a fearsome act not to be done with indifference.

By now I'm sure you can spot for yourself the mixture of specific details of place, as well as the courtesan's taut emotions, that together make this historical moment vivid and real. Take another look at Phillips's passage and pick them out.

Also, note the level of historical detail that Phillips mixes in. There's very little. She explains that the Great Council is Venice's governing body and that the "bocca di leone" (wonderful image) is the mailbox for rat-out letter writers. That's it. Everything else in this passage is a detail that would be the same in the present day. This suggests to me that a sense of the era does not depend on digging up tidbits that only existed way back when.

A striking example of seeing the times through a particular point of view can be found in Sarah Dunant's
In the Company of the Courtesan
(2006), another novel about a Venetian courtesan, albeit in the slightly earlier year of 1527. Fleeing a sacking of Rome, Fiammetta Bianchini resurrects her business in Venice. The novel is narrated through the eyes of her business manager, Bucino Teodoldo, who happens to be a dwarf. Bucino's perspective on Renaissance Venice is quite literally different than anyone else's:

My God, this city stinks. Not everywhere—along the southern wharves where the ships dock, the air is heady with leftover spices, and on the Grand Canal money buys fresh breezes along with luxury—but everywhere we are, where crumbling houses rise out of rank water and a dozen families live stacked one on top of another like rotting vegetables, the decay and filth burn the insides of your nostrils. Living as I do, with my nose closer to the ground, there are times when I find it hard to breathe.

The old man who measures the level of the well in our
campo
every morning says that the smell is worse

because of the summer drought and that if the water falls any lower, they will have to start bringing the freshwater barges in, and then only those who have money will be able to drink. Imagine that: a city built on water dying of thirst.

Is Bucino right that Venice had a sharper stink to the short than to the tall? I doubt it. Still, his keen sensitivity about his stature along with his cutting wit gives this otherwise familiar lament about Venice a special odor. "Imagine that: a city built on water dying of thirst."

Creating a sense of the times, then, is not just about details, or even coupling them with emotions; the times are also enhanced by infusing a character with strong
opinions
about both the details and emotions.

SEEING THROUGH CHARACTERS' EYES

Let's dig deeper into the relationship between character and time/ place. Is there a technique more powerful than infusing a character with a strong opinion about his place or time? Yes. Infusing
two
characters with that.

Novelist Thomas Kelly focuses on working-class heroes and gritty New York settings. His novel
Payback
(1997) features two Irish-American brothers, one a mob enforcer, the other a foundation digger, pitted against each other before the backdrop of the 1980s building boom.
The Rackets
(2001) is about a disgraced City Hall advance man who returns to the old neighborhood to grapple with corruption, unions, and city politics. Kelly himself is a former construction worker and teamster, so you can see the origin of his passion for this milieu.

In
Empire Rising
(2005), Kelly builds his panoramic, multiple point-of-view novel around the construction of the Empire State Building in the 1930s. One principle point of view is that of Irish-American steelworker Michael Briody. In the novel's opening scene, Briody is chosen to pound in the first rivet at the building's groundbreaking ceremony, a piece of political theater for which the waiting workers have little patience. On the site once stood a

hotel, the demolition of which gives Briody pause during the self-congratulatory speeches:

Briody is not surprised that none of the swells on stage mention the six men who died demolishing the old hotel. Not surprised in the least. He considers their ugly endings, the crushed and broken bodies spirited away like just more rubble, their names already forgotten. Their stories untold. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, is anxious to start work. His fellow workers watch with dull stares. They have no interest in the staged spectacle. They mutter and joke under their breath until one of the concrete crew makes a loud noise, like a ripe fart, and the superintendent swivels his fat head around and glares at them as if they were recalcitrant schoolboys. They fall silent. They want the work. The next stop is the breadline.

The tension in this paragraph is, to my eye, nicely restrained: impatience mixed with a downtrodden cynicism unique to Depression workers who are one step away from starvation. What is Briody's opinion of the ceremony? Kelly hardly needs to tell us; he simply lets Briody's passing regard for the dead workers who preceded him imply how he feels.

A short while later in the story, Kelly introduces another principle point-of-view character, Johnny Farrell, a lawyer and bagman (bribe collector) for Mayor Jimmy Walker. Johnny is king of his world, but all is not right with it. Johnny's wife is from a rich and very proper family. She disdains his work and the people with whom he must associate. One Sunday morning they argue as his wife bundles their children off to her Episcopal church. After she departs, Johnny reflects on the differences in their upbringings:

Farrell kissed the children goodbye and watched as Pamela shepherded them into the waiting car, insisting that they ride the four blocks to the Church of the Resurrection rather than walk because she liked to make an impression. He thought for a moment of his own childhood