Three years ago, when thinking about what my next novel should be about, I straw-polled friends: which issues did they find important? They came back with the stuff of our current political season: race and gender. Watching this Democratic
primary contest, I felt like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News; I thought something in
the privacy of home, and then watched people struggle to talk about it on my TV
screen.
Part of the fun of novel-writing ? if such a dead lift can be called fun ? is stepping into other minds. I thought an African-American woman's brain would, for a Long Island Jew like me, make adventurous territory. The fretful association of Blacks and Jews ? '60s civil rights partners ? is one of the great arithmetic problems: how did two close communities divide so thoroughly? Besides, what ambitious novelist takes on America without having a go at America's fissure lines?
In 2000, I wrote a novel about conjoined Asian twins; next, one about a nineteenth-century boxer, and nothing ? not even the twins ? was as nerve-wracking as was dreaming up a modern Black woman. There's not a big Siamese twin constituency out there to be offended.
Casting the African-American characters, I'd keep seeing the story from Black reviewers' eyes. This was an added, detrimental step; putting on the mask, then quickly taking it off to see what it looked like. And I constantly ran the sociological numbers: if 28.5 percent of black men have been in prison, is it reasonable to make one black character an ex-con?
I realized I'd need to restrain my P.C. reflexes. The protagonist is Darlene Stokes, a Black pediatrician who works to pry a baby from his white family. The challenge was to make this woman like me in temperament, without being me in blackface.
I remember something Jonathan Franzen once wrote; he took a stand against male authors writing female protagonists . "Something about" it made Franzen "uneasy": "Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist's fantasy sex object?" he wondered. "Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women?"
But if you're going to write honestly about your time and country, you can't think like that. You'll find yourself ambling up behind your story with your leash tinkling.
I hope that, using the novelists' secret formula ? one part research, three parts empathy ? I made Darlene a credible veteran of the Black experience.
But you never know. Women, Blacks, Jews ? the people I wrote about are interest groups. Their grievances are not only real, but ongoing. And they scuffle in discomfiting ways. Such a project should make you uneasy. That's one of the pleasures of fiction, and why Franzen was wrong. Everyone has a story. That's why this political year ? and I hope my book ? is interesting: sometimes those stories drive out of the garage, pull out onto the highway, and crash. And sometimes we get to watch.