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John Burnham Schwartz is the author of Bicycle Days. He lives in New York City with his wife, filmmaker Aleksandra Crapanzano.
Reservation Road Also Available as an Audiocassette |
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For what felt like a long time (the seemingly interminable years of my twenties) every story I wrote turned out to be from the point of view of a young man -- which is to say, from the point of view of somebody's son. And then, a few years ago, something changed. For the first time in my life I began to feel the desire to tell a story about parents. I was in my late twenties by then, and though I was not yet a parent myself, nor even married, I had begun to envision a life of such connections and responsibilities. It was something I wanted to explore for myself in a variety of ways. And, like most writers, the best way I know to explore something is to try first to imagine it, then to write about it. So, bit by bit, I began to imagine the story that eventually became Reservation Road. Before talking about that novel, though, I should probably say something further about the years that preceded it. Because they were, in many ways, unusually intense years, marked by both success and struggle. I had published my first novel, Bicycle Days, when I was only twenty-four -- an age, I think it's safe to say, when most people (myself included) still don't have a clear idea of what they are, let alone who: adult or "young person," writer or just someone who has managed to write one book. In my case, the only thing I knew for certain was that I'd had a story to tell (a coming-of-age tale set mostly in Japan) and had told it, and, to my great surprise, it had been well received. For me, the result was a serious crisis of confidence. What, after all, did I really have to say? That first novel had used up, it seemed to me, a great deal of whatever emotional and psychological "knowledge" I possessed. One pours not just one's heart and intellect into each book one writes, but the sum of one's experience too, even if that experience is not directly readable by others. And my experience up till then -- well, what had it been, really? Being a son, mostly, in one way or another. Being the one who is the object of his parents love and scrutiny and worry and guilt. Being not the responsible one, but the one for whom other feel responsible. As I've said, I wrote from that place for a number of years, from a son's place, mapping the particular topography of my emotional past over and over again, until the present experiences of my life -- perhaps just the usual rollercoaster tumult of a man in his twenties -- began to accumulate within me in unseen ways, and to change my sense of what kind of writer I wanted to be. All I really knew at the time was that the place, metaphorically speaking, from which I'd been writing had come to feel familiar and cramped; what I thought I heard each day was my imagination bumping up against its confines, crying out for air. In this sense, Reservation Road, despite its painful subject, felt like a kind of liberation to me. The novel began with the simple but tragic idea of a father who has lost a son. Perhaps this was my way of reversing the order I'd felt myself chained to as a writer: to take away the son at the very start of the novel, leaving the father behind to live out the story and its consequences. Ethan Learner -- and his wife Grace, and their eight-year-old daughter Emma -- lose Josh in a hit-and-run accident. Ethan actually sees it happen, though with the twilight and the shadows and the shock of the moment, he doesn't see enough to provide the police with any concrete answers. That is the beginning of the novel. The rest is consequence and character, the courage of ordinary people in difficult circumstances. But there was someone else in the picture now, someone I hadn't fully considered: the man driving the car that hits Josh Learner and kills him. The man who almost stops at the scene of the crime, then abruptly speeds away. Who was he? And why didn't he stop? And how might a man who would commit such a crime and run from its consequences still be made human and sympathetic? Because he must be made so -- that is the ultimate challenge for the novelist. Otherwise there is no connection, no world; the characters float merely as independent planets, without the mysterious order and meaning of a larger solar system. What interested me, I discovered -- what, I guess, I finally felt ready to pursue as both writer and person -- were some of the different ways of being a father, as expressed through the lives of two very different men who, in the wake of tragedy, become disturbing reflections of each other. From the first, Dwight Arno -- the man who accidentally kills Ethan Learner's son -- spoke to me that way. That he should be a father too (that, in fact, his own ten-year-old son should be asleep in the car at the time of the accident), was something which felt to me like an absolute necessity. I chose to tell the novel in the voices of Ethan, Dwight, and Grace because they seemed to me be the characters in the novel who are struggling most fiercely -- in the face of inconsolable pain and grief and regret -- not to become people in whom they themselves can have no faith. That is a kind of ordinary courage, I'd venture to say, and it is common enough. And it is hidden, too. I wanted to find out what these people knew, and perhaps to give them a little of what I felt I had learned. I wanted to see them through a terrible time. And now I have. John Burnham Schwartz |
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Alfred A. Knopf ~ Books@Random |
