The Rest of the Story: Texture in a Novel

Last summer, my wife and I hired a painter to do a faux finish on the walls of the room we were turning into a reading space. He arrived with his portfolio of samples, and we settled on a leaf design that required him to first paint the walls with a base coat—we chose a beige shade called "softer tan"—and then apply a pattern of leaves in the lighter tone of "moderate white." Individually, each shade is unremarkable—functional at best, bland at worst—but together, particularly given the delicately veined leaves, the contrast gives the walls a texture that makes the room come alive with depth and an energy akin to animation.

So it is with the structure of a novel. It can always benefit from an overlay of present and past. In my most recent novel, River of Heaven, I begin with a simple story—the "softer tan," I guess you’d say—of a sixty-five-year-old man, Sam Brady, building a doghouse in the elaborate shape of a sailing ship for his basset hound. Outside the fact that it’s a bit out of the ordinary for a man to devote so much time and attention to the design and crafting of such a structure, why should this story alone be of any interest to us? Even Sam knows that. "This may not seem like much, this story I'm telling," he says to the reader at the end of the first chapter, "but you have to understand what it is to be me—a man who has always been afraid of himself. You have to know the rest of my story, the part I can’t yet bring myself to say. A story of a boy I knew a long time ago and a brother I loved and then lost."

River of Heaven comes from a story, "Sea Dogs," that I published in Glimmer Train. At the end of that story, Sam says, "That's the whole story. I told you, it's not much. But you have to understand what it is to be me—a man who has always been afraid of himself." I'd never written a novel that came from one of my short stories, but eventually I had to because Sam wouldn't leave me alone. He kept telling me there was more to his story, more than he could let anyone know, and the only way he'd ever tell it would be if someone would give him the time to layer in the story of his past and to let it blend with his present.

We have more room in the novel form for the reach of characters' lives and how they're formed by history, not only history with a capital "H," as in the narrative of countries, wars, political and cultural shifts, etc., but more to the point, history with a small "h," as in the personal moves, sometimes large and sometimes small, that come to bear on the present. Do we ever live a day in the here and now that isn't the result of, or the reaction to, the days of the once upon a time? Such is the depth of our living. We carry with us the dimensions of our choices, our non-choices, the lives of others that rubbed up against our own. So, when I began to think of Sam's story as a novel, the first thing I did was to open up the aspects of his past alluded to only long enough in the short story to address the question of what he carried with him that might make a solitary life spent in the company of a succession of basset hounds, appealing to him. What was he hiding from his past living that would make the design and building of that doghouse an act of love and possibly reparation? The short story already contained a little of his history with the boy he knew a long time ago, Dewey Finn, but there was no mention of a brother. For the novel, I created that brother, Cal, and I sketched in the narrative of his estrangement from Sam. All of these threads began to braid themselves together in a novel about what really happened one evening in 1955 when Dewey died, and Sam and Cal's lives went different directions. I found a way to arrange events in both the past and present to make necessary the three elements: Sam's movement through the present, his history with Dewey Finn, and his reunion with Cal. The overlapping of past and present, if I've done my work properly, not only contributes to the mystery at the heart of the novel, it also makes the characters more fully dimensional and dynamic because their movement through the present world is never separate from the lives they previously lived.

This strategy of overlay adds tension to plot, and texture to character, while also providing a richer music of tone and point of view. The key is to remember that each stroke of the pen must be in service of the overall pattern.