Brian Booker on Taking Characters for a Ride

In the 34th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Brian Booker, author of Are You Here for What I'm Here For? (Bellevue Literary Press), lays out an effective story strategy: putting your characters in a car.

Sometimes when my story draft is running low on gas, I try to persuade my character to get in a car and go. My characters find themselves getting picked up and taken for a ride, or being asked for one, or taking a wrong turn in middle of the night.

A car trip gives intention (conscious or otherwise) a trajectory in the world, and the world has many ways of interfering with it. It does so with gruesome fatedness in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which has plenty of suspense even though the opening paragraph announces where the story is headed: The Misfit, escape from the Federal Pen, headed to Florida (where the family is also headed). It’s a masterpiece of pacing: The path from beginning to end is not a straight line, and in order to stay the fated course, the family must go off course, which they do “outside of Toombsboro,” when the grandmother “recalled an old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady.” It’s a particular type of lostness, both in place and in time, in which the discrepancy between the map (the grandmother’s memory/desire) and the terrain (the dirt road down which the family’s car races in a swirl of pink dust) generates a dislocated worry before driving the story into the promised horror. It’s hard to imagine that working so neatly in the age of GPS.

Road trip: Setting events in motion

Especially in America, the car is a metonym for the body and ego. It’s an escape pod that ushers you through an indifferent or hostile landscape, a mechanical being that, like the body, can falter and fail and die without warning. In Annie Proulx’s folktale “The Half-Skinned Steer,” the octogenarian businessman Mero is driving his Cadillac (he’s afraid to fly) from Massachusetts back to the Wyoming ranch whose depredations he fled sixty years earlier. The plot is designed to funnel old Mero into the traps set by memory and the high desert landscape, where the smallest mistakes have the direst consequence, until he finds himself alone and unsheltered in terra malcognita, “the cliffs rearing at the moon, the snow smoking off the prairie like steam.” The car is a little world, but the world outside is bigger.

The interest of car trips has something to do with the ontologically ambiguous position of the person in transit, who is here but not really here, who is on her way somewhere else.  In Joy Williams’ story “The Little Winter,” from her collection Escapes, a terminally-ill woman named Gloria travels to visit her old friend Jean and Jean’s daughter Gwendal. Gwendal, who is disconcertingly precocious, offers to write Gloria’s biography; she asks if Gloria will kidnap her. Gloria accepts the offer, picking up the girl in the middle of the night. Not until the two have set off on a strange kind of road trip to nowhere, staying in motels like stations in a bardo, do we realize the extent to which Gloria’s mind is unraveling—either that or Gwendal is a demonic figure, an emissary from Death riding shotgun.

There are different shades of kidnapping; car stories can generate suspense from the unstable balance of power between driver and passenger. If a good craft tip is to have your character pick up the person they shouldn’t, another is to have the wrong character get behind the wheel.  That’s what happens in the last section of Edward P. Jones’ story “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day.” Madeleine hasn’t seen her father for thirty years since he went to prison for murder. He shows up at her door as she’s preparing to go visit her son at the state asylum. The father offers to go with her, to drive Madeleine to the asylum in his car. She doesn’t need or want his help, but as if in a kind of dream, she consents. Wrong driver, wrong car—that’s what swerves the story onto its marvelously uncanny track.

I am glad that soon cars will be smart and drive themselves. They won’t kill us as much, or let us kill each other and the planet so easily, which is good. They will buffer us from the consequences of our erratic emotions and feeble attention. But something will have been lost for fiction, just as it was when the cell phone made it harder to get characters incommunicado, and thus to get them out of their depth or beyond the pale, at least geographically speaking.

Imagining Character Inside the Beltway: Edward P. Jones and the 20th Anniversary of Lost in the City

By Patrick Thomas Henry

Washington, D.C., seldom comes to mind as one of the world’s literary centers, yet alone a city of neighborhoods. The District is a company town whose business is politics, a city-machine that fuels ambitions but tanks hubris-plagued careers. Literature and film capture this in depictions of the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal, as in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men, the exposé’s film adaptation of the same name, and, most recently, Thomas Mallon’s novel Watergate.

Edward P. Jones, who writes about living inside the beltway, envisions Washington as a whitewashed “unfree world” that neglects its citizens, “black human beings [who] lived full and valued lives, lives that had all the messiness and grandness of white life in small, nowhere towns.” In his PEN/Hemingway Award winning debut collection, Lost in the City, Jones removes the gauze from his readers’ eyes to reveal a vibrant Washington populated not with stuffed-suit politicians but with African Americans struggling in Washington’s neighborhoods. Jones has also authored the Pulitzer prize winning novel The Known World and the collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children. His fiction demonstrates the necessary role of the writer’s imagination in uncovering the stories that political narratives obscure.

Edward P. Jones reads "Marie," from
his collection Lost in the City

Jones read from Lost in the City at Politics and Prose Bookstore, near the intersection of Connecticut and Nebraska Avenues, on Oct. 20 to celebrate the release of the collection’s twentieth anniversary edition, which includes an introduction by the author and the story “A Rich Man,” originally collected in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. To launch the event, David Cohen—whose wife Carla Cohen was a founding owner of the store—introduced Jones and traced the author's connection to Politics and Prose back to the initial 1992 publication of Lost in the City, for which the bookstore hosted a reading. Describing Jones’s fiction as “stories of the imagination,” Cohen likened Lost in the City to James Joyce’s Dubliners, a debt Jones acknowledges in the new edition’s introduction.

In that introduction, Jones writes that his characters, while products of his imagination, inhabit the real geography of his native Washington: “But all the streets and avenues and roads those characters and the other people in this book go up and down are real, or were real once upon a time, when I knew them as a boy.” Jones’s Washingtonians, invisible to the capital’s powerbrokers, navigate their city to gather safeguards against the common dangers of everyday life. This theme manifests itself when the protagonists of “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” and “Marie” accumulate objects to cobble together a sense of security: pigeons for Betsy Ann in “Girl” and everything from Social Security letters to audiocassettes of her oral history to a serrated knife for the title character in “Marie.”

Jones hardly endorses the pervasive myth of America as the land of opportunity. Instead, his writing reveals the complexity of his characters and encourages us to empathize with plights like Betsy Ann’s and Marie’s. This vision infused Mr. Jones’s reading style for “Marie”; he delivered the story in soft yet sonorous tones, absorbing his listeners into Marie’s sensibility, that of an octogenarian who lives and dies by the whims of her Social Security office.

After the reading, Jones fielded audience questions and comments, ranging from process queries to praise. Denny May, an instructor from Northern Virginia Community College, praised Lost in the City as “the one book that never fails to connect with students” because of its portrayals of characters and their hardships. This steered the conversation toward the people inhabiting Jones’s Washington. Pressed to speak on multiple points of view in a single short story, Jones demurred and emphasized the role of imagination in writing fiction. For Jones, fiction speaks to the emotions and values of its characters. As such, the writer’s task is straightforward: Tell the story however it needs to be told. “You just have a mission, a task” Jones said on storytelling, “and you go at it, using whatever tools you have available to you.”

The writer’s imagination is the chest containing these tools, and careful application of a writer’s skills is essential to developing character. Jones stated during the question-and-answer session that imagination allows writers to conceive the full scope of a story before penning a single word. But this isn’t an argument for inorganic plotting: For Jones, the end of a story is the result of a character’s ambitions. He rhetorically asked the audience, “If there’s no outcome, then why begin to write this story?”

If character is at every story’s core, then Jones’s question implies that character and plot must be intertwined, and setting stages the story’s conflict. His status as a D.C. writer, then, extends from his decision to explore the human condition in the nation’s capital. Nonetheless, Jones said, “I don’t see myself as a D.C. writer, but if that’s what I am, I won’t run away from it.” His use of D.C. is certainly a merit to his work, as it alerts us to neglected communities, the uncertainty of dreams, and lurking losses—factors in Jones’s fiction that resonate for readers discovering themselves lost amid the vitriol endemic to American politics.

Patrick Thomas Henry, a PhD candidate at George Washington University and a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark Writing program, occasionally reports on literary events for The Story Prize.