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What Do We Believe In?: The American Writer's Search for Values
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20647 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
5,973 Words |
| Author
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Philip Gerard
Philip Gerard is the author of eight books, most recently
Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II's Heroic Army of
Deception (Dutton, 2002). He holds a Distinguished Teaching
Professorship in the creative writing department of the
University of North Carolina at Wilmington. |
On the whole, our serious novelists, like our painters and composers, are short on significant belief.
--John Gardner
Bob Reiss sat in my living room in North Carolina talking politics. Reiss is a novelist, an investigative journalist, an environmental writer whose uncanny ability for connecting stray facts into the big picture recently landed him on the masthead of Outdoor magazine as a contributing editor. Reiss is one of those terrific writers who drive publishers' sales reps crazy. He does a political thriller about a president who surrenders to the Soviets rather than initiate a nuclear exchange and who is then tried for high treason (Saltmaker), then follows that up with a satire of a private eye in Key West chasing thugs through a Hemingway look-alike contest (Flamingo) and a lyrical nonfiction book about the Brazilian rain forest (The Road to Extrema).
We are most comfortable with our writers when we can sum them up in a neat category, and there is no way to pigeonhole a writer like Reiss. On this particular evening, he was just back from Atlanta, where he had been researching a book on airplanes.
We were interrupted by a phone call from a woman at Duke University to tell me that a workshop I was supposed to teach there in a few weeks had been canceled. "We've never had a year this strange," she explained. "Even people who have already put down a deposit are telling us they're afraid to spend the rest of the money to come. They're really worried about the political situation. It's scary."
"Right," Reiss said. "That's what the president and Congress still don't get--all over America, people feel like the bottom's dropping out. That we're going downhill, fast. They want somebody to tell them what to do next, where to go from here. They're ready for something radical."
We have been talking about books we wanted to write, trading plot lines. "Now," he said, "I've been asking myself what writers can do, what kind of books we can write." Writers, Reiss said, had helped get us into this mess. "Look at the villains we've created: the president, Congress, the CIA, anybody in government. When was the last time you read a book in which any of those people came off as the good guys?" He wanted to write a novel in which the president was an honest but flawed man who keeps his word and tries to do the right thing--just to show that such a scenario is still
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