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‘Real’ Idil, Realism: Why I wrote my new novel in present tense

JAY PARINI | THE ELEPHANT BRIDGE | 3 December 2015

I had this one article Blair had written—that he didn’t like—in my head by the time I began writing “Wires,” a novel based on the United States’ post-9/11 response to the Istanbul bombings. This article would comprise more than one page in my novel. In it, main character, Trevor Punch, is stationed with the U.S. Navy in Sigonella, Sicily, which was then a base for the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

With the GWOT becoming such an unpredictable, seemingly long-lived conveyer belt of visions uncomfortably linked to the past (specifically American invasions of Afghanistan, 1878–80; Iraq, 2003; Iraq, 2003–08), I was thinking about how one family dealt with that in my new novel, when I remembered Blair’s piece and onward I went. I felt his disappointment in his own writing represented my current dissatisfaction with most of the fiction I’d been involved with since 2003, and in my present body of work. (Note: This tends to be the case with all of us. There were times when I wanted nothing if not to be a poet, not a writer, not an artist, nor an actor, but a living poet. When at last I noticed what I could say about that, I moved on from poetry to writing.)

This dissatisfaction coincided perfectly with where GWOT and the Istanbuls of this world were taking me. I was longing to write about topics too big to fit into a standard short story. Tentatively a few words about what I could since the events of 2001 have been gathering a lump in my throat and a stone in my shoe whenever I’d write something, but now lest I wouldn’t forget what I learned about being a person and what it meant to be human thus far, or meant to attempt to be, if nothing else, there would be no return. Whatever “this world,” “the human race,” “human history,” “or civilization” is, I wanted to know what stood behind, arduous and tremendous, rather than what we do to us. Always “us,” never “you,” I hoped, and we’re ready to go there, ladies and gentlemen. Gently.

Baltasar Gracián, the Spanish baroque Jesuit priest and writer, came to mind immediately for me. “The writer,” he wrote, “needs solace for his timidity but he will also need the nails, cruelties and other well-placed blows; indeed, in these he will be forced to seek refuge…” That was nasty for Gracián. But, hey, that was kind. In this particular moment of my being a person, I could only manage the nasty.

In the space of a nasty book, how do we get there? I imagined a boy, from West Virginia, like me, but not me. He’d be just a little older than I was the first time I went to a concert. The first time I wore an anti-war T-shirt: “What if they gave a war & nobody came?” It was this or “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” I didn’t remember the artist’s name, Sturr, perhaps, anymore than I would remember the comic book I bought in the haunted arcade Leo’s Hobby Shop smelled of creosote in Charleston, South Carolina, sometime in the ’70s (“Have dog- eared pages, will travel,” this new friend said to me one day). Although part of me betrayed this boy’s aging in that youth didn’t last, still I went with a boy not myself because the collision of my current one with mine and that other (literary) self felt like the only solution I could trust. Since my soul would age with him in this world and not his, from this time onward I would see things through one eye facing forward “rather than both eyes sweeping around in my shrink-wrapped face,” as Robert Hass puts it.

I will give the remainder of this essay