The Fire in Fiction (5 page)

"I remember the case, Mr. Haller. You got shot. But, as you say, that was a couple years ago. I seem to remember you practicing law for some time after that. I remember the news stories about you coming back to the job."

"Well," I said, "what happened is that I came back too soon. I had been gut shot, Judge, and I should've taken my time. Instead, I hurried back and the next thing I knew I started having pain and the doctors said I had a hernia. So I had an operation for that and there were complications. They did it wrong. There was even more pain and another operation and, well, to make a long story short, it knocked me down for a while. I decided the second time not to come back until I was sure I was ready."

The judge nodded sympathetically. I guessed I had been right to leave out the part about my addiction to pain pills and the stint in rehab.

"Money wasn't an issue," I said. "I had some savings and I also got a settlement from the insurance company. So I took my time coming back. But I'm ready. I was just about to take the back cover of the Yellow Pages."

"Then, I guess inheriting an entire practice is quite convenient, isn't it?" she said.

I didn't know what to say to her question or the smarmy tone in which she said it.

"All I can tell you, Judge, is that I would take good care of Jerry Vincent's clients."

Notice several things about this exchange. The once-arrogant Mickey is now humbled. His tone with Judge Holder is level and respectful. The judge has the power to deny Mickey the cases Jerry Vincent left behind, but it is more than that. Mickey is on shaky ground. He knows it. He is not in a position to demand, but neither does he beg. He just presents the facts. Mickey is a wounded protagonist, quite literally, but Connelly does not overplay it. He instead moves Mickey beyond his angst to a place of dignity. No wallowing for Mickey Haller. As a result, he becomes a hero whose strength comes from his experience and from lessons learned.

Even greater restraint can be observed in the return of Anne Perry's popular Victorian detective Thomas Pitt in
Buckingham Palace Gardens
(2008). In his first outing in several years, Pitt, now working in Special Branch on cases of political importance or special sensitivity, is summoned with his supervisor Victor Narraway to Buckingham Palace. There, a gutted prostitute has been found in a linen closet. The Prince of Wales is in residence, along with several guests with whom he has been discussing an African railway venture. Needless to say, if it becomes known that a whore was in the palace, never mind murdered, the scandal would be explosive. Pitt must uncover the killer, and quickly, as Queen Victoria is due to return to the palace in less than a week.

As Perry's fans know, Pitt is an unusually competent detective; sensitive, passionate, and principled. But that does not mean everyone respects him. The Prince of Wales has squeamishly turned over the ugly matter to one of his guests, the adventurous, charming, and seamy businessman Cahoon Dunkeld. From the outset it is clear that Dunkeld expects the murder to be hushed up, cleared up, and disposed of speedily:

[Pitt] must have made a slight sound, because Dunkeld looked at him, then back at Narraway. "What about your man here?" he asked abruptly. "How far can you trust his discretion? And his ability to handle such a vital matter? And it
is
vital. If it became public, it would be ruinous, even affect the safety of the realm. Our business here concerns a profoundly important part of the Empire. Not only fortunes but nations could be changed by what we do." He was staring at Narraway as if by sheer will he could force some understanding into him, even a fear of failure.

Narraway gave a very slight shrug. It was a minimal, elegant gesture of his shoulders. He was far leaner than Dunkeld, and more at ease in his beautifully tailored jacket. "He is my best," he answered.

Dunkeld looked unimpressed. "And discreet?" he persisted.

"Special Branch deals with secrets," Narraway told him.

Dunkeld's eyes turned to Pitt and surveyed him coolly.

How does Pitt react to being treated like a servant? Not at all. That is the point. It is only when he views the slashed body in the linen closet that his feelings come forward:

Pitt stared at her less with revulsion than with an overwhelming pity for the gross indignity of it. Had it been an animal the callousness of it would have offended him. For a human being to die like that filled him with a towering anger and a desire to lash out physically and strike something. His breath heaved in his chest and his throat convulsed.

Yet he knew he must keep calm. Intelligence was needed, not passion, however justified.

Is Pitt's "overwhelming pity for the gross indignity of it" affected by the condescending treatment he's just been handed by Dunkeld?

Obviously, but Perry is too subtle a novelist to say so. She lets the twin indignities, shown just a page apart, make her point. As the investigation progresses, Pitt suffers much more humiliation at the hands of Dunkeld, but he turns it around. A gamekeeper's son, Pitt is used to his inferior social status. He bears his burden stoically.

Is Pitt wounded? Yes. Anne Perry does not play on that, though, but rather lets it live under the surface. She turns Pitt's afflictions into integrity and makes him human in the highest way.

Is your protagonist a tower of strength? Does he stand up for what is right? Does she kick ass? Do you endow your main character with a cutting wit, a shrewd mind, soaring intellect, mental toughness, keen focus, unstoppable determination?

If so, you may have created a protagonist whom readers will hate. Although it may seem counterintuitive and contrary to the dictum of
heroes for whom we can cheer,
what these paragons of perfection need is humanity. Add it quickly, reinforce it throughout your novel, and we'll know that your tough, do-right, honest-to-a-fault, and formerly flawless protagonist is someone we can believe in because he is real

Just like you and me.

GREATNESS

What makes a protagonist not only a hero or heroine, but great? Indeed, what is greatness? Defining the term is difficult, because it is many different things to many different people.

Perhaps, though, we might agree on one effect of greatness: impact. Great people do not leave the world unchanged. Great characters similarly stir readers and stay with them. Is it possible to construct this effect? How?

It's tricky. Fiction has little impact when it is timid, cliche ridden, uneventful, and formulaic. The same is true of characters. Stereotypes have little impact. They fail to engage us because we don't believe in them. Great characters are especially prone to this problem. If you create someone who is made of goodness, lives by high principles, performs actions of high valor, and is pretty

much perfect, then your readers' reaction is likely to be a sneering

yeah, right!

Fortunately, you don't have to create a paragon in order to conjure greatness. An aura of greatness comes foremost not from who a given character may be, but from the profound impact that character has on others. It is not strictly necessary for a character to have done anything at all for their effect on others to be apparent.

Ethan Canin's novel
America America
(2008) is about a 1970s working-class young man, Corey Sifter, who gets a job as a lawn boy for the rich Metarey family in his upstate New York town. Corey becomes a de facto (though not wholly equal) member of the family. Family patriarch Liam Metarey pays for Corey's education and obtains for him a position as aide to Senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Canin opens his novel many years later at Bonwiller's funeral. From the first lines it is clear that Bonwiller has had an enormous impact on Corey's life:

When you've been involved in something like this, no matter how long ago it happened, no matter how long it's been absent from the news, you're fated, nonetheless, to always search it out. To be on alert for it, somehow, every day of your life. For the small item at the back of the newspaper. For the stranger at the cocktail party or the unfamiliar letter in the mailbox. For the reckoning pause on the other end of the phone line. For the dreadful reappearance of something that, in all likelihood, is never going to return.

At this point in the novel we know nothing about Bonwiller, Corey or what will happen. All we know is that it was "something like this," which is to say something big, newsworthy and possibly even historic. The after-effects have followed Corey through his life, leaving him alert for echoes.

Bonwiller's funeral is attended by crowds of bigwigs, reinforcing his importance. Corey by this point publishes a respected independent
newspaper but chooses not to cover the event himself because, "I was at the funeral for my own reasons." Later in the day, when the crowds are gone, Corey returns to the freshly mounded grave. Regarding it, he reflects:

That was it. The quiet end of it all.

There was no one else alive now who knew.

Knew what?
There are secrets, obviously; powerful ones worth keeping. It is many pages before we learn what they are. Was the Senator a leader or a rogue or both? Canin hasn't shown us: All he needs at this point is to reveal the impact Bonwiller has had. Greatness already is in the air.

Thirteen Moons
(2006) is Charles Frazier's second novel, following
Cold Mountain
(1997). It's the story of a great man, Will Cooper, whose life spans almost the entire nineteenth century. As in Canin's novel, Frazier frames his subject's story. At the turn of the twentieth century, elderly Will Cooper is waiting to die. Notice how Frazier weaves strength into his narrator's final days:

There is no scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition. I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. We're called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and a dark way getting there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end. The belief I've acquired over a generous and nevertheless inadequate time on earth is that we arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we departed from the world. But, on the other hand, I've always enjoyed a journey.

Will Cooper is clearly a man of wisdom. His days have been long. He has experienced much. More than that, he has lived a unique life that was remarkable in its breadth and reach. In his final days, Cooper pays a visit to the Warm Springs Hotel:

A prominent family from down in the smothering part of the state had come up to the mountains to enjoy our cool climate. The father was a slight acquaintance of mine, and the son was a recently elected member of the state house. The father was young enough to be my child. They found me sitting on the gallery, reading the most recent number of a periodical—
The North American Review
to be specific, for I have been a subscriber over a span of time encompassing parts of eight decades.

The father shook my hand and turned to his boy. He said, Son, I want you to meet someone. I'm sure you will find him interesting. He was a senator and a colonel in the War. And, most romantically, white chief of the Indians. He made and lost and made again several fortunes in business and land and railroad speculation. When I was a boy, he was a hero. I dreamed of being half the man he was.

Something about the edge to his tone when he said the words
chief, colonel,
and
senator
rubbed me the wrong way. It suggested something ironic in those hon-orifics, which, beyond the general irony of everything, there is not. I nearly said, Hell, I'm twice the man you are now, despite our difference in age, so things didn't work out so bright for your condescending hopes. And, by the way, what other than our disparity of age confers upon you the right to talk about me as if I'm not present? But I held my tongue. I don't care. People can say whatever they want to about me when I've passed. And they can inflect whatever tone they care to use in the telling.

The son said, He's not Cooper, is he?

The passage above accomplishes several things at once. It quickly sketches in for us the broad outline of Cooper's life: it's backstory, yes, but in service of the friction between Cooper and the condescending man speaking about him as if he isn't there. Cooper's irritability over how he's spoken of shows a spark of dignity, which right away

is tempered by restraint. Step by step, Frazier is building this dying man's strength.

Most telling of all, though, is the son's awed surprise at finding himself in the presence of the legendary Will Cooper. That is impact. It's key is not the great man himself but the people around him. They, in a sense, make him great.

Have you ever been in the presence of someone who awed you? My eyes boggled upon meeting the American poet Robert Lowell in a London pub. Shaking the hand of Ray Bradbury at a publishing party in New York, I found myself unable to speak. I once delivered a contract to Isaac Asimov at his West Side apartment and blathered like a fan boy. (Asimov was amused.) I remember each occasion with vivid clarity. Each time I felt small yet lifted and inspired by the great writers before me.