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Kevin Guilfoile |
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Kevin Guilfoile lives in Chicago with his wife and son. Wicker is his first novel.
Honestly, I Thought Dactyls Were Those Big Birds In Jurassic Park
by Kevin Guilfoile
The first time I was humiliated in public by a successful novelist I was 19 years old.
I was volunteering for the annual literary festival at my university and somehow I was assigned the plum job of escorting the writers from the airport to their hotel and to the program events and back again. In two years I met an amazing and inspiring group of novelists—people like TC Boyle and Ken Kesey—many of whom would become heroes of mine. In nearly every case they were wise and witty and gracious and kind.
One night the chairman of the festival asked if I would introduce that evening’s guest. He was a Canadian writer named WP Kinsella who had written a terrific book called Shoeless Joe, which not long before had been made into a popular movie starring Kevin Costner titled Field of Dreams. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Shoeless Joe is about an Iowa farmer who hears a voice telling him to plow under his corn fields and build a baseball diamond. The story involves fathers and sons and ghosts and a weird road trip to Boston with JD Salinger. It’s not just one of the canonical baseball novels, it’s an outstanding novel about America.
At the podium in the library auditorium before some 300 people, I gave a brief summary of the book’s themes. Then I said, “Ladies and gentleman, Bill Kinsella.” I walked off stage, Kinsella walked on, and then he started to tell everyone in the audience that I was an idiot.
He didn’t actually use that word, nor did he exactly point at me and laugh, but he spent much of his talk directly refuting everything I had said in my introduction.
Obviously, I was mortified, and not only because there were any number of attractive female English majors in the audience who now had reason to doubt my critical acumen. Mostly I was angry because I was right. The point that Kinsella denied most vehemently was that Shoeless Joe was a book about faith. But it most certainly is. For cripes sake, a disembodied voice spends the entire book whispering inside the main character’s head, If you build it, he will come. And then the farmer goes out and destroys his crops and builds a baseball field. I don’t care if you’re an Episcopalian, a Scientologist, a Muslim, or a marine biologist, that’s called faith , Mister Important Novel Writer.
And for the next fifteen years, I quietly wondered, Why did Kinsella do that?
Now that I’ve written my own novel, I think I have the answer. Now that I’ve written a novel and toured the country appearing on television and radio and speaking to thousands of readers in bookstores and at festivals and reading groups, I realize it’s possible that Bill Kinsella didn’t know that his best-known book was about faith.
Sometimes you need somebody to tell you.
The first clue was on the internet. The medical school at New York University has a web site where they offer detailed annotations of any work of art with a relationship to medicine or science. I learned all kinds of good stuff about Wicker reading their analysis of it. For instance, they note that the name of one of the characters, Justin Finn “is a dactyl—with three n’s, including a terminal one—curiously akin to Frankenstein .”
I had to look up dactyl in the dictionary (it’s a metrical foot consisting of three syllables with a stress on the first) but after I did, I thought that was a really cool observation. I was still the author, however, and a little chagrined that it hadn’t occurred to me before I read it on somebody else’s web site.
But there was a more striking (and far more embarrassing) moment when I realized that I didn’t know my own book nearly as well as I thought I did.
I was in New York on my book tour and had an interview scheduled with Janet Taylor. Janet turned out to be an extremely intelligent and thoughtful reader who interviewed authors for Oregon Public Broadcasting. She lived in New York City because, I assume, she ran out of authors in Oregon.
The interview was going to be “live on tape,” which means it would be broadcast later but the conversation between us would air exactly as it happened. There wouldn’t be any editing and she had our discussion timed out to exactly 22 minutes and some number of seconds. When it started the conversation was delightful. Janet was asking interesting questions and I was providing fascinating replies.
And then Janet said this:
“In your novel, the character of Justin Finn, the child Davis Moore clones from his daughter’s unknown killer so that Moore may one day see what the fiend looks like, is an obvious Christ figure. And as such I find it interesting that you chose to give Justin’s mother the name Martha. Of course it would have been very obvious and over-the-top if you named her Mary. But in the Bible—as you are obviously aware, Kevin, but I’ll explain for our audience—Martha of Bethany was a frequent host to Jesus and his disciples. And while Martha rushed around cleaning the house and preparing food and washing feet and so forth, her sister Mary of Bethany (not to be confused with all the other Marys in the Bible) sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to him teach. Finally Jesus had to call out, Martha, stop what you are doing and come sit next to your sister. These other things you are doing are not important. The only important thing is what I have to say. And in Wicker , Martha Finn, like Martha of Bethany, is so worried about being a good mother to Justin, about caring for him and watching out for him, that she never sees who he really is or understands what he is trying to tell her.”
Now, if you’re ever on live radio, and someone asks you that question, the correct response is, Janet, I am so excited to hear that you picked up on Wicker’s sophisticated biblical subtext. I try very hard to construct these many hidden layers of meaning and to encounter a reader such as yourself who is able to appreciate such subtlety between the lines is extremely gratifying. Moments like this are what I always imagined when I first said I wanted to be a writer.
The wrong answer, and the one that I gave on live radio, is: “Holy crap! Really?”
Or words to that effect.
The truth is that some of the names in the book have significance, but most of the time when I start writing a character, I open that day’s newspaper and find a first name on page one and a last name on page three and if they sound good together, that becomes the character’s name. In this case, the day I began writing Martha Finn was probably the day Martha Stewart was indicted.
But here’s the important thing: Janet was right! Her analysis was perfect. And if she had never met me she would always believe that the name Martha Finn was a clever reference to the biblical Martha of Bethany. I’m not a total relativist when it comes to critical theory—I believe an author has some authority to speak about his own work—but that observation made the book better for Janet, and a writer has to recognize that each person who reads his novel reads a different book . Readers bring their intellect to the page just as the author does and each reader brings different knowledge and experience and history and bias. Each reader asks the novel different questions, and as a result each reader gets different answers.
This is especially important for an author to remember when he receives a bad review. It’s entirely possible that all the stuff in your book that the critic says he didn’t like came out of his head and not yours.
Also, if you ever introduce a writer at a literary festival and he goes and tells all the pretty girls at your school that you’re a moron, call his publicist and have her set up a little talk between the author and Oregon Public Radio.
Janet will set him straight.
