Where do you usually turn for inspiration? How did you decide to write about a not-so-phony medium?
I’d wanted to write a novel about a medium from the time I was living in England, but until now had never quite found a way in. Apart from the work of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, whose films are filled with the shimmer of the uncanny, the sense of an unspoken mystery woven into a character’s daily life, two movies in particular had inspired me from early on: Seance on a Wet Afternoon, with Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough, and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.
Based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now is an ingeniously structured psychological thriller. Though a medium features as an important character, what interests me is the way it deals with how the living try to reconcile themselves to the dead. In the case of the couple at the center of the movie, played by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, it’s the loss of their young daughter that has broken their lives, their marriage, their hearts. In joining her husband in Venice, where Sutherland’s character has been commissioned to restore an old church, Christie’s character comes to believe that she can reach her daughter in her afterlife. But they are caught in a tragedy that has been unfolding since the first minutes of the movie. As though the characters’ fates had been waiting all along for them.
Kit Capriol, my protagonist, recalls the film in remembering her initial encounter with Alison Ingalls, the docent at the Met with whom Kit feels an affinity, whose voice is so like Christie’s. But what interested me in having a spiritualist—or someone who portrays one—is the relationship between the medium and the client. Persuasion is on one side of the equation, while the desire to believe is on the other. If one truly wants to have faith in reaching the dead, then it’s possible to convince them that they actually have—especially if one has a few facts or impressions to hang a séance on.
Although there are certain authors who have inspired me over the years, in general I rely more on exploring themes common to many of my books, from my first, The Man from Marseille, until now: time and memory, and how past actions can haunt the present, which is something I’ll be exploring more explicitly in my next novel.
Most of the characters in the book could be classified as skeptics. Do you believe in the supernatural yourself ?
Though I’ve had no direct experience of “seeing” the dead (other than when my mother appeared in a dream to me around the same time she died, looking forty years younger, which really doesn’t count as supernatural), my wife’s mother had had several experiences of this nature and took it all in stride. Nothing ever frightened her. When a relative suddenly appeared in her kitchen, she looked up and said, “Oh, you’ve died, haven’t you.” A minute or so later the phone rang with the news that he had indeed died. She had a number of similar experiences after that.
Unlike in The Drowning, which was based on my own traumatic experience as an 8-year-old at summer camp, this novel emanates less from personal experience than from my own fascination with the relationship between the medium and the client. And with the sense that the curtain between the living and the dead is thinner than one might think.
If you could visit a medium who was completely legitimate, would you go?
Definitely out of curiosity, though I’m not sure whom I want to contact. Although as I get older I’ve grown increasingly more aware of, and uncomfortable with, my own mortality, the religion I was raised in stressed life in the here and now, not afterward. And heaven and hell never came into it, so I’m not fearful of falling into the great fiery pit or anticipating ascending a stairway to heaven.
But death is the one great mystery common to us all—writers, rock stars, politicians—and no one can state with any certainty exactly what is going to happen after we take our last breath. Hamlet calls death, “The undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”
Except, of course, in a séance...
Do you prefer heroes or villains as a writer? As a reader?
Villains are always far more interesting. Consider Shakespeare’s Richard III: he’s a kind of evil incarnate, ordering the murder of children, seducing a widow at her husband’s funeral, and so on. Yet we can’t take our eyes off him. Likewise with, say, Hannibal Lecter. Or John Milton’s Satan, the most compelling character in Paradise Lost, even though the competition is stiff, what with God and Adam and Eve. I’ll also toss in Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, who would as soon kill you as look at you, and yet somehow you’d be flattered to be in his company.
And who was it who said the Devil has all the best lines...?
Evil requires style, for style is a means of seduction, and the villain has to work at it as meticulously as an actor prepares for a role. Dracula is a prime example, with his (very) old-world charm, that cape, and his inescapable magnetism. He can also bite and fly, but he would see those as merely perks of the genre.
What was the most challenging part of writing The Summoning? Were there any scenes that were especially fun to write?
The challenging part was in finding a balance between the thriller elements and the supernatural, so it didn’t just become another ghost story. I find it’s best to work in subtler ways, such as when Kit, in channeling an Irishwoman’s daughter, feels the little girl’s fingers in her hair. Or when she hears someone playing her daughter’s piano in the dark predawn hours. Creepy haunted moments that would make anyone question their own sanity.
The séance scenes were especially satisfying to write. From the atmosphere of the little room with the table and the candle, to the words Kit has so carefully field-tested and worked into a script, to the whole psychology of manipulation: as though she were preparing a scene in a movie—something that comes naturally to this actor. There’s the sense that at least Kit seems genuine, hopefully leaving the reader wavering between doubt and belief. And then she becomes genuine.
Or is she just a very skilled con artist...? What I liked about creating Kit was in giving her this ambiguity—this human-ness, if you like—so that at first glance the reader thinks she’s a reprehensible con artist preying on the most vulnerable among us…until you see that she brings people genuine comfort; comfort that she, perhaps, has never had since the death of her husband on 9/11 and the accident that has left her daughter in a coma. Kit doesn't advertise or demand huge sums of money, and by requesting only donations she skirts the law. She’s not a bad person, but rather a complex person, as most people are.
I look at creating fictional characters as a kind of Cubism: each time they come into view you see them from a different angle, the good, the bad and the ugly, until you realize that they all exist at the same time. It’s this complexity with all its contradictions that makes us human, isn’t it.
What are you reading these days?
I’m doing research for my next novel, a complex psychological thriller which shifts between 2009 in New York and the summer of 1969 in Los Angeles. It’s about memory and guilt, and how we carry our past within us, knowing that some day it may all come spilling out. There’s a quote by a man who ran a tiger sanctuary in Indonesia I came across in the New York Times some years ago: Once tigers kill human beings, they realize that we're nothing. I’ll just let that sit there.
So I’m reading a lot of nonfiction, memoirs and such. I’ve also been reading Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two of the most acute and acerbic observers of the Southern Californian culture of the sixties. Though I remember 1969, largely from a New York perspective, Los Angeles had a very different scene, a different vibe. The sixties everywhere, though, weren’t as sunny and happy as some have portrayed it. There was a dark side to it that I was aware of, even in the so-called Summer of Love in 1967 (with all its genuinely good times) when I was living in Greenwich Village. And then I’ll mention Manson and Altamont, and that pretty much wraps the decade up in a shroud.
I found the late Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark fascinating, also pertinent to my next project, as one of my two main characters is a successful true-crime author. I was especially taken by the relation between McNamara and her subject, and how what begins as a routine review of files and police reports and maps becomes an obsession that engulfs her life up until its tragic end. The book is as much about the author as the killer she’s hunting (and who was eventually captured not long after her death).
I’d also reread Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I’d first encountered as a senior in a private high school in what became a yearlong law course. There were no textbooks—just primary works—and one day our teacher, who had a law degree, sauntered in with a stack of just-published hardback books. That was our December holiday homework: read about two men who killed four members of a family in Kansas. It was the first book that ever gave me nightmares. In them I remember seeing Perry Smith’s motorcycle boots walking around my room as I lay hiding under my bed, knowing that very soon he and Dick would find me.
But it’s Capote’s way of handling facts—and fiction—that my work-in-progress deals with in a very different story. How much is true? How much is fiction? And who suffers from the way a writer intermingles them?
Otherwise, as I really don’t read much contemporary fiction, I’ve been rereading novels that had an impact on me years earlier. I also keep up in reading (and rereading) novels in French. And—this may seem odd—but I like reading biographies of artists. This past year I read volume two of William Fever’s biography of Lucien Freud, and, more recently, Annalyn Swan’s and Mark Stevens’ fascinating biography of Francis Bacon. Art has played a role in a few of my novels—The Discovery of Light, a contemporary mystery based on the paintings of Vermeer; and Vermeer’s painting, A Maid Asleep, has its place in The Summoning.
A shorter version of this piece can be found in the back pages of The Summoning.