Talking has nothing to do with conversation.
GERTRUDE STEIN

 

Events

 

 

 

The question of where a character comes from is a murky one, difficult ever to fully parse out. But if a gun were placed to my head, I would say that Hugo Whittier emerged from a primordial soup of my long-standing Loser Lit affiliations, the despair and rage I felt following "the events of September 11th," as they're called, and also my wish to escape the "chick lit ghetto" I'd been thrust into in the wake of Bridget Jones and the publication of my first novel, In the Drink.

Like most of the reading public, I've always preferred novels about characters who aren't necessarily likeable, but who are interesting. A dull, obedient, clean type might be preferable for an employee or a roommate, but at the safe remove of the page, give me malcontents and bitches, braggarts and neurotics. In Paradise Lost, who could be more likeable than God? More villainous than Satan? But Satan has always, famously, won the reader popularity contest hands down. All the best novels -- Anna Karenina, The Mill on the Floss, Jude the Obscure, Pride and Prejudice, Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Crime and Punishment, The House of Mirth, and so on and so on -- are about original, memorable outsiders, misfits, criminals, malcontents, or tragic failures of one stripe or another, flawed, complex characters who often don't behave rationally or in their own best interests.

However, for some reason, I have begun each of my three novels as a failed experiment in writing about "nice people," gainfully employed, well-adjusted, mature adults without any discernable personality disorders. And each time, about 125 pages into the thing, I have become suicidally bored. Then, on a sullen afternoon steeped in boredom, like the James Dean cliche of the 1950's teenage boy flouting his own era's convention and hypocrisy with a sneer, cigarettes rolled in his T-shirt sleeve and a motorcycle, one character suddenly enters from stage left and takes over the whole shebang: Claudia in In the Drink, then Jeremy in Jeremy Thrane, and finally Hugo, all of them protagonists (more like antagonists) who have antisocial tendencies and don't act like responsible adults in any way. This new, unexpected novel takes off in a blaze of misbehavior and leaves the first one behind like a shed beige skin.

But I don't choose these characters; they choose me. They force me to reject the good-girl writer I think I ought to be and am manifestly not. From this I can only surmise that a certain native revulsion, for my own earnest, conventional wish to do the right thing, seems to be one of the essential fuels for the fire in my spleen that makes me write.

Hugo literally saved me from myself. After the Twin Towers fell, I spent a couple of months walking around in a black haze of horror, sadness, and fury. All my life, growing up in predominantly Republican, Baptist, culture-free Arizona, I had dreamed of moving to New York and becoming a writer. I was almost as in love with the image of myself as a writer in New York as I was with books and writing, and that's saying a lot. While I grew up in stifling heat and convention and cultural nullity, I reassured myself with visions of a city where people were allowed to have opinions, to talk about anything frankly and in-depth, to show-off, to love their work with passion, devotion and absolute, unapologetic ambition.

Finally I moved to New York, and then, over the course of about ten checkered years, I made my dream of "making it" as a writer come true. The fact that it was such monumental struggle to achieve this dreamed-of life made it taste that much sweeter when it finally came. In August 2001, I was as happy as I'd ever been in my life and am likely to be again, blissfully buoyed by the golden illusion that all I had hoped for had come true. My second novel had just come out. I lived in a loft with my artist husband. We traveled, ate in amazing restaurants, had studios to work in, lived in a small-town-like neighborhood just across the East River from Manhattan. We had a wide circle of friends, most of them artists. We lived in the strongest, freest, luckiest city in the world. I was as in love with New York as I was with everything else about my life.

When the towers fell, that golden illusion was pretty much destroyed. New York, the symbol for me of freedom and success and happiness, was vulnerable and crippled. It was as if a beloved parent had been attacked, or a part of my own body, some limb or vital organ.

Hugo was born in the fall of 2001, during the third and most recent of my 125-page good-girlish false starts. This one began as a desperate attempt to come to terms with what had happened, to resurrect some sense of comfort and safety through work -- rather than volunteering at the Twin Towers' site or getting involved in local politics, I turned back to writing for solace, which is the only way I know how to do anything. I began the novel I'd been intending to write next, The Epicure's Lament, which I had planned to be about the dissolution of the marriage of Dennis Whittier and Marie Dupin, but now their marriage dissolved in the wake of September 11th. The book began as an earnest, "realistic," third-person omniscient novel about good people coming apart in the wake of a national disaster. It bored me a little to write it, but I figured it was salubrious in some way, like oatmeal instead of a bacon-egg-and-cheese on a roll, or cotton underwear instead of trashy pseudo-silk, or a glass of grapefruit juice instead of the vastly preferable tequila gimlet I actually wanted. I dutifully recorded Marie's inner monologues about Dennis, responsibly and oldest-sister-like, giving each character his or her own voice and desires, delving into Louisa's reasons for leaving New York so hastily... yawn, yawn, yawn, is how I felt about it, but I figured that this was because there was something wrong with me and I would grow out of it.

Then Dennis' younger brother Hugo came gimping up Marie's walk with a malevolent gleam in his eye, a death wish and a blood-sporting lust for teenage girls. Before I could stop him, he sat down next to their au pair Louisa on the couch and began to flirt outrageously and sleazily with her.

Suddenly the book's plodding language glinted and sparked. Suddenly I perked up a little. And a short while later, my inner good-girl novelist folded her hands and relinquished the keyboard to Hugo. Or rather, he took over. His voice inhabited me, I didn't create him. He came out of nowhere into my nice little novel with his frankly self-destructive rage, his deep inability to give a fig what anyone else thinks, his consuming passions for food, books, drink, sex and cigarettes, his scorn for convention and earnestness.

Like the antiheroes of some of my favorite books (The Horse's Mouth, Jernigan, and Lucky Jim among them), Hugo is an intelligent, well-read, well-spoken white man with every reason to succeed, every advantage, a victim of nothing but his own damn self. And like them, he shoots himself in the foot because he can't stand the way things are and can't see anything else to do about it. These "losers" are not likeable, but they are deeply, devilishly, hilariously, refreshingly interesting. They're all originals, and I love them all, even though I wouldn't want them babysitting my kids, if I had kids.

"There's no one as cynical as a disappointed romantic," someone once said, I don't know who, but it could have been Hugo. His cynicism arises from the ashes of the failed hopes and dreams of his youth, namely, to be a husband to Sonia, whom he once thought was the love of his life, to publish books of poetry and essays, to father children and overcome his own terrible childhood. But Sonia cheated on him and had a child by another man; his writing fizzled out and went nowhere; bad memories of his childhood torment him. In the absence of any new, replacement hopes and dreams, he embraces the tragicomic sense of himself as a washed-up failure, and in this embrace finds the only reason he has to go on. Of course, it doesn't get him very far, but it sustains him nonetheless.

As for me and my own failed hopes and dreams, Hugo took over my brain during what I can only describe as a nervous breakdown following the attack on the Towers and lasting through the winter and spring of 2002. At the time, four members of my immediate family were in pain and very sick: Two of them needed serious operations, a kidney transplant and a second hip replacement, and two were dying, of terminal colon cancer and Lou Gehrig's. The falling of the Towers seemed emblematic of the terrible fragility of everyone and everything I loved. Reading or watching the news made me feel physically sick, but I couldn't stop, it was a kind of compulsion to remind myself constantly of how bad things were out there. I became obsessed with mortality and physical decay.

Through all this Hugo's voice prodded me, made me get back to work every day although it was the last thing I had energy or will to do. He had things to say, and he needed me to say them for him. He ran the whole show from beginning to end. For example, Hugo made it known right away that he loved Montaigne, whom I hadn't looked at since college and only dimly remembered as being dense and peculiar, but enjoyable. I was fluent in French back then; now I am rusty, to put it euphemistically. So I had to buy and read Montaigne in translation to figure out why Hugo related to him and what he might find to say about him in his notebooks. To my slightly creeped-out surprise, I learned that Montaigne loved food, approved of suicide as a philosophical stance, and had lived for many years as a solitary in a tower on his own family estate. I learned these crucial thing by -- I have chills again, typing this, though I don't believe in this sort of thing -- opening the thousand-plus-page book of the collected essays purely at random one day. The reference to Erasmus, also, came from Hugo, not me -- I had absolutely no idea who he was when Hugo named the bird in his tree after him, a bird who was based on an identical bird in an identical tree outside my studio window, a bird who kept me company while I wrote. Erasmus, it turned out when I dug around a little in the Google universe, believed in sincerity above all else, in doing something because it meant something, not because you should. Aha, I thought. Of course. It was all starting to seem obvious and commonplace, the fact that Hugo knew things I didn't know and found ways of forcing me to find them out.

MFK Fisher is one of my favorite writers, and I've read almost everything she's written, most of it more than once. Buerger's disease, which her husband died of, was already full-blown in Hugo when he made his first appearance. I didn't give him the disease. He already had it. Of course he read MFK Fisher. Of course he was distantly related to her husband. And of course my own current obsession with terminal illness found its outlet in Hugo's and was subsumed by, subliminated in, his own willful dying.

And of course Hugo has come from the Hudson River Valley. There is no other place for him. It's a place I know well; I have a history there. When I started college and on into my mid-twenties, my mother was married to my second stepfather, Ben La Farge, to whom The Epicure's Lament is dedicated. He lives in the Hudson River Valley, so I spent a lot of time there during college breaks and later, after I moved to New York, visiting the house I now thought of as my home. I was fascinated by this place of blue-blooded family mansions on the Hudson and depressed little towns in green hills, a place improbably populated by locals and displaced cosmopolites, this palpably unique, self-contained hermetic world with its own particular flavor, a sense of regional eccentricity, so close to New York City, but totally other.

Ben comes from a blue-blooded family a lot like Hugo's; the La Farges and their cousins are part of the American aristocracy, or as close to one as we've got. Ben is descended from and related to everyone from Benjamin Franklin and Henry Adams to the Astor Orphan to the painter John La Farge to a whole passel of unknown scion and heiresses. For me, a born and bred Westerner, an outsider with no sense of family history or lineage or belonging but with a culturally elitist, literary and romantic cast of mind, becoming part of Ben's family was one of the best things that had ever happed to me. In my late teens and early twenties, going with Ben and my mother and sisters to parties at old river manses like Hugo's Waverley, I was fascinated by all of it, everyone and everything, but most of all by the rebel-eccentrics such families seem to spawn, the second-born black-sheep sons, the bright dropouts, the handsome dissolute former drug runners and gigolos turned charismatic raconteurs. And so it was that Hugo lurked in the back of my head for about twenty years, waiting to make his appearance until I was in dire need of his peculiar, restorative, bracing and oddly comforting brand of misanthropic warmth.

Because Hugo is warm, despite all his loathing and scorn; he is a man of resilient but often misplaced energies whose passion somehow trumps his vengeful self-destructiveness almost every time. And I'm grateful to him. He rescued me from that other novel. He brought me back to myself. And he took over my life at a time when it needed taking over. I couldn't save him; he saved me.

-- Kate Christensen