DIARY OF A FIRST NOVELIST: Writing the Topical Novel

Some authors have made crafting a novel around the latest hot topic their particular specialty. The first one who comes to mind is Jodi Picoult. She  has written engaging and deeply felt stories about date rape,  organ transplantation, teen suicide and most recently, the devastating tragedy of a school shooting.

In lesser hands, these topics might be reduced to formula, or treated with facile psychobabble. But because Picoult’s characters live and breathe, and because she creates complex, dynamic worlds for them to inhabit, her novels have not only earned her millions of fans worldwide; they have gone a long way to create compassion and understanding for the real people caught up in these dramas.  

While I admire such novels, I never set out to write one. The Liar’s Diary was intended to be a suspenseful, psychological drama about one family’s experience, not a rumination on society’s ills. However, recent events have caused both readers and media to view the story differently.  

Because it deals with an adolescent who is going through the motions of normal life, while a dark brew of anger and despair foments beneath the surface, it has suddenly become a topical novel. That it also concerns a teacher who attempted to reach out to the troubled young person, with tragic results, has only heightened the interest.

In my novel, the intervention succeeds and the boy is helped, though the teacher pays a devastating price for her courage and concern. Unfortunately that was not what happened in the case that recently brought so much sorrow to thirty-two families, a dynamic academic community, and our nation.

In the past week, I have received a flurry of emails from readers who wondered aloud if part of the killer’s problems may have been exacerbated by family denial as they were in my novel. They wondered if the teacher’s intervention had been more forceful, or the University had responded more strongly, might it have been effective? The subject even came up in an interview with the Boston Globe which was printed in today's paper.

Being a novelist, not a psychologist or a prophet, I won’t pretend to have the answers to those questions. But what I think we can learn from writers like Jodi Picoult is to be compassionate in our judgments of people who have faced things we have never experienced. It is no small lesson.

That compassion makes us see Cho Seung-Hui as a victim of a torturous mental illness that not only separated him from the warmth of normal relationships, but from reality itself.  It makes us see his hardworking parents as people who probably did everything they could to penetrate his silence and pain, never found the right key to his locked world. And it makes us admire and respect the educators at Virginia Tech who were alert and caring enough to reach out to a disturbed young man, even when it may have exposed them to personal peril.

There are those who believe that any compassion for the killer or his family somehow denigrates the tragic loss of thirty-two amazing lives. I disagree.

All the reactions we feel when something like this happens are normal and healthy: from the horror to the anger to the deep and lasting sorrow. But the prevention of similar tragedies in the future will not come  from blind rage at the alienated and often biologically ill individuals who perpetrate them. Nor will it come from further ostrasizing those who can’t or won’t fit in, the vast majority of whom will never harm anyone.

If we have hope of preventing more such incidents, it will  be through increased identification, understanding and research into mental illness,  through vigorous intervention and follow-up, and from a societal commitment to balancing support for troubled young people and their families, with the rights of others to be safe from their deranged actions.

Whether you are a fan of the topical novel or not, a writer who challenges our assumptions, and asks us to think deeply about the important social issues of our time, a writer who can bring humanity to all the characters he or she creates,  both the good and those we identify as evil, proves the novel's continued importance. In a unique way, the best novels ask us to look deeper into our own hearts, and those with whom we share the planet. Then they ask us to imagine a better future for all of us.  



Patry Francis, Books Correspondent:

Patry's column, Diary of a First Novelist, published every Thursday to Gather Essentials: Books. It will detail all she knows--and is in the process of learning--about writing and publishing.  

To learn more about Patry and her debut novel, The Liar's Diary, visit her Website.

 

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