The Fire in Fiction (3 page)

Thomas H. Cook's nineteenth literary crime novel
Red Leaves
(2005) was a nominee for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel; it was also a nominee for the Anthony, Barry, and Golden Dagger awards. It's the story of a small-town photo-store owner named Eric Moore. Eric's life is one of middle-class placidity. His wife is a college teacher. His sulky son Keith hides in his room doing God knows what. Everything's normal. Eric's life is turned upside down one morning when he learns that the little girl that Keith was babysitting the night before has gone missing. As the police repeatedly question Keith, Eric finds that nothing on which he relies is as secure as he believed.

Cook's plan is to introduce unsettling problems into the apparently ordinary life of an ordinary man. Cook knows there is no particular reason we should care about Eric Moore, so his opening must meet that challenge:

When you remember those times, they return to you in a series of photographs. You see Meredith on the day you married her. You are standing outside the courthouse on a bright spring day. She is wearing a white dress and she stands beside you with her hand in your arm. A white corsage is pinned to her dress. You gaze at each other rather than the camera. Your eyes sparkle and the air around you is dancing.

Then there are brief vacations before Keith was born. You are in a raft on the Colorado River, sprayed with white water. There you are, nearly blinded by the autumn foliage of New Hampshire. On the observation deck of the Empire State Building, you mug for the camera, feet spread, fists pressed to waists, like masters of the universe. You are twenty-four and she is twenty-one, and there is something gloriously confident in the way you stand together, sure and almost cocky. More than anything, without fear. Love, you have decided by then, is a form of armor.

Alert readers will note that those paragraphs break some major rules of openings. They are inactive. They are backstory. How does Cook get away with that? As so often when rules are broken, the secret ingredient is tension. Look at the opening line:
When you remember those times, they return to you in a series of photographs.
The narrator is speaking of happy times; by implication, the present is unhappy. What went wrong? Before we even can formulate the question we are reading ahead to find out, and Cook tells us.

What about Eric Moore, Cook's clueless protagonist? He is a man with his head buried in the sand, but here, looking back, we learn that he is a man capable of great happiness. His wife once adored him. They were young and confident, even fearless. Eric Moore knew the power of love. To put it simply, he was strong. Although Cook will soon enough wreck Eric's life, there is an implied promise that by the novel's end Eric will be strong again. Call it his goal, or his redemption; whatever you call it, it's a strength that attracts us and causes us to open our hearts to Eric Moore.

What if your protagonist is burdened by the past? Authors must be harboring a lot of secrets and regrets because this type of hero turns up constantly in my slush pile. Past secrets and calamities generally are much more dramatic than present action, too, making it difficult to construct a compelling narrative. Many try to maintain story tension by delaying revelation. That's a durable strategy, but over the long haul of a manuscript it's tricky to pull off.

There is also the problem of turning a burdened protagonist into someone about whom we will immediately care. Did you ever know someone who wouldn't let go? Annoying, weren't they? You see my point. Why put up with a whiner?

Sue Miller made an immediate splash with her first novel,
The Good Mother
(1986), and continues to impress today
(The Senator's Wife,
2008). In
While I Was Gone
(1999), an Oprah's Book Club selection, she spins the story of veterinarian Jo Becker. Jo's life is all but perfect; naturally, the past returns to disrupt it. As a young woman, Jo lived on a commune, where matters ended badly with a murder.

Like Thomas H. Cook, Sue Miller opens her novel looking backward from a moment of serenity, her heroine rowing on a lake with her husband. The challenge of this scene is to introduce a sense of disquiet into Jo's happy life, the long shadow of the past, while at the same time giving Jo an inner strength that gives Miller's readers the signal that it's okay to care:

I had felt something like this every now and then in the last year or so, sometimes at work as I tightened a stitch or gave an injection: the awareness of having done this a thousand times before, of surely having a thousand times left to do it again. Of doing it well and thoroughly and neatly, as I liked to do things, and simultaneously of being at a great distance from my own actions.

As we rowed back, as we drove home, I found myself wanting to tell my husband about my feeling, but then not knowing what to call it. The shadow of it lingered with me, but I didn't say anything to Daniel. He would hear it as a want, a need. He would feel called upon to offer comfort. Daniel is a minister, a preacher, a pastor. His business is the care of his flock, his medium is words—thrilling words, admonishing or consoling words. I knew he could console me, but consolation wasn't what I felt I wanted. And so we drove along in silence, too, and I looked out the window at the back roads that sometimes seemed utterly rural, part of the nineteenth century, and sometimes seemed abruptly the worst of contemporary suburban life: the sere, beautiful old fields carved up to accommodate the two-wide circular asphalt driveways, the too-grand fake-garrison-colonial houses.

How does Miller meet her challenge here? Jo is unsettled, "at a great distance from [her] own actions." Nothing admirable in that. She wants to talk with her husband but rejects the idea. Nothing

noble in that, either. Then Jo explains that her husband's comfort "was not what I felt I wanted."

Ah. What
does
Jo want? Miller doesn't say, but clearly it is more than just talking things over. By implication, Jo feels an urge to do something. She wants to take positive action. Without stating so explicitly, Miller hints that Jo wants to bring her past to light and find a way to move beyond it.

The longing for positive change is a strength that we all can understand. In this opening of
While I Was Gone,
that longing is understated, a fleeting impulse. But that is all it takes. It is a shaft of light in the darkness. It's the hint that opens our hearts, and the one that many novelists leave out.

What if your protagonist is imperfect, even a person others do not like? Outsiders, outcasts and pariahs are plentiful in contemporary fiction and in submissions to my agency.
I want my protagonist to be flawed
is one of the most common remarks I hear when manuscripts are pitched to me at writers conferences. That's nice, but too often when the manuscripts turn up later I find that the flaws are fatal. Quickly turned off, I find little reason to continue reading.

Joseph Finder is a top (maybe our only) author of business thrillers. He hit his stride with
Paranoia
(2004) and followed strongly with
Killer Instinct
(2006) and the
New York Times
bestseller
Power Play
(2007).
Company Man
(2005) boxes corporate CEO Nick Conover into a bad decision, after which his situation gets progressively worse.

To accomplish this, Finder has to make Nick Conover a man with enemies. As the CEO of an office furniture company charged with laying off thousands of Michigan workers and moving manufacturing operations overseas, that isn't hard to do. The trick is to make Nick nevertheless highly likable.

Finder tackles this difficult task by giving Nick a host of instantly redeeming qualities. He struggles to keep his family together and his kids happy a year after the death of his wife, whose memory he honors by trying (not entirely successfully) to complete the home renovations she planned. Nick is a local boy made good. He was captain of the high school football team and rose through the company ranks. He has friends. He tries to minimize the damage to the workforce, but after five thousand layoffs this is not possible.

One morning a disaffected worker named Louis Goss storms the executive offices to threaten a sickout and let Nick know that he, Goss, literally knows where Nick lives. After hearing insults about his Mercedes (Nick actually drives a Chevy Suburban) and personal threats, Nick faces Goss square on:

"Let me ask
you
something, Louis. Do you remember the 'town meeting' at the chair plant two years ago? When I told you guys the company was in a shitload of trouble and layoffs seemed likely but I wanted to avoid them if possible? You weren't sick that day, were you?"

"I was there," Goss muttered.

"Remember I asked if you'd all be willing to cut your hours back so everyone could stay on the job? Remember what everyone said?"

Goss was silent, looking off to one side, avoiding Nick's direct stare.

"You all said no, you couldn't do that. A pay cut was out of the question."

"Easy for you to—"

"And I asked whether you'd all be willing to cut back on your health plan, with your daycare and your health-club memberships. Now, how many people raised their hands to say, yeah, okay, we'll cut back? Any recollection?"

Goss shook his head slowly, resentfully.

"Zero. Not a single goddamned hand went up. Nobody wanted to lose a goddamned hour of work; nobody wanted to lose a single perk." He could hear the blood rushing through his ears, felt a flush of indignation. "You think I slashed five thousand jobs, buddy? Well, the reality is, I
saved
five thousand jobs."

Later, Goss invades Nick's home, and in self-defense, Nick shoots him. Because feelings against Nick are running so hot, and
because his company would be torn apart if it became known that he has not only fired thousands but has actually shot one of them dead, Nick is persuaded by his security chief to dump the body. This fatal mistake leads to legal jeopardy, but it is the least of Nick's problems. A management cabal turns deadly, too, and so Nick must save simultaneously his own hide and the company to which he is, he finds, deeply devoted.

Nick Conover proves to be a good guy, but Joseph Finder does not ask his readers to wait to find that out. He establishes quickly that Nick is both human and caring—or, at least, caring for a CEO. Finder also reinforces Nick's essential goodness through the remainder of his novel.

As the author of novels like
Fight Club
(1996), Chuck Palahniuk has some experience with unpleasant protagonists. In
Choke
(2001), Palahniuk cooked up a loathsome hero of the class of Humbert Humbert from Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita
(1955). Victor Mancini is a failed med student who supports himself (and pays his mother's elder care bills) by scamming restaurant patrons: He pretends to choke on food and, after being rescued, plays on their sympathy. That is not his only bad habit. He trolls for dates at sex addiction recovery meetings and more. There's not a lot to like about Victor.

Why should we read about someone so despicable? Palahniuk knows we have little reason to do so. He must therefore capture us quickly and make us care about a hero who deserves scorn. But how? Palahniuk takes a bold approach:

If you're going to read this, don't bother.

After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece.

Save yourself.

There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.

You're not getting any younger.

What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse.

What you're getting here is a stupid story about a stupid little boy. A stupid true life story about nobody you'd ever want to meet. Picture this little spaz being about waist high with a handful of blond hair, combed and parted on one side. Picture the icky little shit smiling in old school photos with some of his baby teeth missing and his first adult teeth coming in crooked. Picture him wearing a stupid sweater striped blue and yellow, a birthday sweater that used to be his favorite. Even that young, picture him biting his dickhead fingernails. His favorite shoes are Keds. His favorite food, fucking corn dogs.

Imagine some dweeby little boy wearing no seat belt and riding in a stolen school bus with his mommy after dinner. Only there's a police car parked at their motel so the Mommy just blows on past at sixty or seventy miles an hour.

This is about a stupid little weasel who, for sure, used to be about the stupidest little rat fink crybaby twerp that ever lived.

The little cooz.

What keeps us reading that passage? Is it the funny side of the narrator's self-deprecation? Is it the pathos of the little boy's childhood in the hands of an obvious Monster-Mommy? Is it the reverse psychology challenge of the opening line?