Edifice Rex

We attended a wedding recently at Kirk in the Hills, a Presbyterian church in Bloomfield Hills. It hadn’t changed much since we went there regularly in the late 60s, but then it was designed to look like it was five hundred years old.

Kirk is one of dozens of magnificent edifices built primarily in the 1920s, at the height of the automotive boom times before the Great Depression. I’ve been in a few of them – Christ Church Cranbrook, Shrine of the Little Flower in Ferndale, Metropolitan Methodist, and Mariners’ Church on the Detroit River.

In contrast to more recently built structures that resemble either barns or movie theaters, the older buildings look like CHURCHES. The stereotypical image they evoke was set starting a thousand years ago and reached the peak of refinement around 1400, when the Gothic masterpieces rose across Europe.

You can get a glimmer of insight about what technological masterpieces the originals were by reading Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. He follows the construction of a cathedral in England through the eyes of a stonemason, but all the religious and political intrigue is there in vivid detail.

While most of these churches, including their modern counterparts were built to “The greater glory of God,” what they were really about was psychological warfare. When ignorant peasants and serfs came into these magnificent spaces, they had to be awed by the power implied in their construction. Yes, there must be an all-powerful God, but there must also be an all-powerful religious and political hierarchy blessed with boundless authority by that God.

Better not cross either of them.

While the edifices remain and the hierarchies that built them still hold sway, their power – and God’s – has severely eroded. We can watch as commercial structures of even greater magnificence go up in a matter of months. We are inundated with examples of moral depravity and political expedience among the clergy. The mystery, awe and power that fed the church’s dominance have been overarched. Been there, done that. What’s the big deal? Science daily debunks the cherished truths that the church used to claim omniscience for God. What is left when God is proved wrong? Should we still do as he says?

As a consequence, we are no longer afraid of God. We still have a lingering fear that he is still out there, sulking. We obey moral precepts as if God, like a radar cop, might be lurking in the shadows. We don’t want to get caught, but in truth, we know he isn’t actually there.

This is the moral contradiction that drives my character, Frank Healy. He still believes in God, but doesn’t trust him to mete justice. Frank feels like he has to do it himself. The rules are still good, we just need to enforce them ourselves.

God’s cavalry is not riding to the rescue.

Stock Characters

Jasper Fforde wrote a series of books featuring a literary Detective named Tuesday Next, who travels freely between reality and a world of fiction populated by fictional characters. She comes from a long line of time travelers whose responsibilities include correcting time anomalies so history doesn’t get screwed up. Her husband periodically appears and disappears, depending on whether someone is messing with his history.

Tuesday’s adventures are hilarious. She deals straight-faced and deadpan as characters like Humpty Dumpty and Colonel Bradshaw slip in and out of narratives where they don’t belong, like Jane Austen’s stories.

One of the things Fforde does particularly well is put a comic spin on one of the essential elements of fiction: stock characters. An author cannot afford to waste pages drawing detailed descriptions and applying well defined personality to characters that appear only peripherally in a story. If they did, readers would lose track of the plot and quickly abandon the book and the author.

Instead, authors use a quick shorthand to describe these fringe players using simple descriptions and highly circumscribed actions. Fforde plays on this by putting these players into little endless action loops where an actor does the same little task over and over, repeating the same snippets of dialog. When Tuesday Next encounters situations like that, she knows she is deep in a backstory where nothing important can happen. The characters are either slightly out of focus, with bland undefined features, or they are literally two dimensional cardboard cutouts.

While this makes for great humor, the point should not be lost that those stock characters are necessary to fill in the narrative without clogging up the story with unnecessary detail. Writers only need to be careful that the background characters don’t all blend together. Not all women are tall, buxom statuesque blondes. Not all bureaucrats are bald bespectacled accountants. Not all Nazi Assassins are muscular, blond Aryan gods.

Some of the shorthand is legitimate in the sense that stereotypes are recognizable for a reason. I recently drove past a party where most of the guests’ vehicles where jacked up pickup trucks. I saw one of the attendees. He was muscular and deeply tanned, with his spiky blond hair cut in a mullet. He was wearing a faded t-shirt with the sleeves torn off.

I couldn’t have drawn a better caricature if I was a cartoonist.

Horror of Horrors

Horror is a strange genre.

Authors often take the most prosaic situations and turn them into our worst nightmares, or take our worst nightmares and make them even worse.

In my opinion, Stephen King is the all-time master of horror. He takes man’s best friend and turns him into our worst enemy (Cujo). He takes a low dose of cabin fever during a long winter and turns it into a full blown psychosis (The Shining). In his hands, everyday objects like cell phones can turn us into zombies (Cell). Many children are naturally terrified of clowns, so it would be only natural for King to turn It into terror. And every author’s worst nightmare is an obsessive fan (Misery).

As if I had a fan to become obsessive.

King does what horror does best, taking the familiar and twisting it into something both recognizable and terrifying. By doing so he draws us into his stories in a way that more abstract or distant subjects like Transylvanian vampires (Dracula) cannot. Of course, Dracula preys on us at that moment between sleep and wakefulness when we feel the incubus standing on our chest, gnawing at our soul.

I’m not sure where Stephenie Meyer’s modern obsession with vampires and werewolves fits. The characters seem so commonplace, like those weird misfits that populate the edges of every high school. Mostly we choose to ignore them, but she attributes a sort of benign evil, like a mental illness that’s being successfully treated with medication.

As long as they keep taking their pills.

Movie horror has mostly descended into gore. All the prevailing characters: Chucky, Freddy Krueger and their kin are simply excuses to paint the screen red and display flashes of disembodied body parts. I suppose teenage girls love to scream out their squeamishness while boys dream of extending their fantasies beyond pulling the wings off bugs.

Playing football isn’t enough, anymore. Now we have Resident Evil 14, or whatever the current version is. If kids can create their own bloodbaths, what do they need books for?

Imagination can only atrophy.

Research

I don’t generally do much research.

Most of what I write comes from memory and imagination, neither of which are accessible via Google or Wikipedia. I am a stickler for technical details, though. If I’m writing about a particular actual place like the Archbishop’s residence in Palmer Woods, I exercise due diligence to get the details right. 

The house passed out of the hands of the Catholic Church in the late 1980s, but it is still more or less intact. John Sulley the basketball player owned it for a while, then it passed into the hands of a local religious group. There are photos of the interior on the web, and at least one movie was made there, so reference material is available. Usually, I only need a few details, like the Pewabic tiles and the carved fireplace in the Archbishop’s office, to set a scene.

Writing about autism is another story.

I have some general information accumulated from movies like Rainman, Mercury Rising and Temple Grandin, but I need to know how much of that is popular mythology and how much is fact.

Autistic people are unique individuals with  wildly varying degrees of quirkiness and normality. In the latest DSM, autism and Asperger syndrome have been renamed autism spectrum disorder, to accommodate the range of symptoms and behaviors.

In addition to the autobiographies of Temple Grandin and Donna Williams, I’m reading a translation of Asperger’s dissertation which includes multiple case studies. On the web, I’ve found a variety of comments from autistic and Asperger’s people, one of whom communicates almost entirely through text-to-speech on her computer, as I was imagining for my character. I haven’t seen any accounts of early infancy for autistic people. For them, introspective life begins around age three. Before that, they may be like other infants, or if they are different. No one can really tell.

So far, my initial impressions have been supported. The syndromes are often marked by intensity of sensation. They tend to behave as though other people don’t exist. They are often brilliant in their chosen fields of interest. They are often marked by phenomenal memory. They resist teaching, but often create original solutions to problems that interest them.

This remains a story I can work with. I’m still not qualified to write it, but what novelist is?

Work, Work, Work

I’ve begun writing a literary novel about growing up autistic. Of course I’m grossly unqualified to do so, being neither autistic nor literary. It’s by far the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted.

I’ve trod this path before, albeit more cautiously. I once started a book about being ADHD, which is something I can relate to more. My son, who struggles with that syndrome, read the manuscript and remarked how accurately it captured some of his experiences.

I was pleased. That work was a docu-drama, a fictional version of my observations of his experiences, juiced up a little to make a story.

This new thing is entirely different.

I am imagining a life experience that to my knowledge has never been articulated by any first-hand observer. Most autistic people are too deeply entwined with their problems to hope of describing it for the rest of us.

I have two primary sources. Donna Williams, an Australian woman wrote Nobody Nowhere, about growing up autistic, but having read most of her story, I suspect she might conform more to Asperger’s syndrome than full blown autism. Not that I have any way of judging.

The second source is Temple Grandin’s book, Thinking in Pictures. The movie about her life inspired my desire to write the novel. I haven’t started reading the book yet, but she’s the kind of person I’d like to portray with my character.

The central premise of my story is that autistic people lack the filters that shield the rest of us from the bombardment of sensations we swim through daily. One example: fluorescent lights buzz, especially cheap ones. I’m irritated by them every time I enter the utility room behind our kitchen. My son says the noise was so distracting for him he could never concentrate in school.

Imagine if everything – every touch, smell, sound, image and emotion – forced itself onto your consciousness every moment of your existence. You couldn’t stop it, you couldn’t block it out, you couldn’t ignore it or forget it. How could you or anyone else cope with that?

That’s how I imagine life is for someone with autism. Some people learn to live with it. Some retreat into their own world where they can either indulge their fascination with those intrusions or slip into a nether dream world where everything else ceases to exist.

I can imagine that struggle. I can imagine what it would take to draw him or her out.

Getting it into words will be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.