I Can't Complain (7 page)

S
EVERAL YEARS AGO
, at a reading in Kansas City, a member of the audience asked how I chose names for my characters. My first response was factual and dull: “I keep a phone book and
20,001 Names for Baby
on a shelf next to my computer.” But then, a few minutes later, I found myself straying back to the subject. “I also keep my high school yearbook handy,” I offered. “And my father’s fiftieth-anniversary report, Harvard class of 1929, which I turn to when I need a throwback or a Brahmin name.” Warming to the topic I confided, “Sometimes you name a character in order to reward a friend or punish an enemy.” Another hand went up: which book and what’s the dirt? Okay, I said. Anyone remember that sexual predator in
The Dearly Departed
? He has the same last name as the critic who gave a dear friend an ugly review in the
New York Times.

The naming of characters suddenly seemed, on this rainy night in Kansas City, the most unsung part of how I get a story onto the page. After quoting as best as I could from memory what John Gardner once wrote, that to change a character’s name from Jane to Cynthia is to feel the fictional ground shudder beneath her feet, I cited my own personal narrative aftershocks.

Before I had an Isabel for what turned out to be
Isabel’s Bed,
I had a Dorothea, named after the meanest woman in an early writing workshop. I needed this character to be a hardhearted live-in boss to narrator Harriet Mahoney, hapless displaced ghostwriter. Something was missing, though. When Dorothea greeted Harriet at the door, I couldn’t see her. Almost immediately, at war with my narrative intentions, this new character put an arm around Harriet’s shoulders and led her to the kitchen, “like best friends heading out to recess,” my fingers typed. I concluded that nomenclature was the problem. Real-life Dorothea had been sour, cold, superior. My fictional one was manifesting, against my wishes, a heart of gold. I turned to my local phone book and spotted “Isabel.” I tried it. Soon, she was on the page. She was tall, she was buxom, she had vanilla-blond hair pulled back tightly from a florid, round face and knotted at her neck. I recognized her now—a dame who’d soon knock Harriet off the cover as my title character.

I made another misstep when I was a few chapters into
The Dearly Departed.
I didn’t know much about the deceased of the title, except that I had to present her in flashback, and, as a headliner in the local amateur community theater, she was a small-town celebrity. My first reader said, “Um, your Frances? The late mother? She’s a little familiar. If I hadn’t known your own mom, I’d have guessed that she went through life with a turban on her head and a cigarette holder in her hand.”

I said, “I know. I’ve made her a diva. I was afraid of that.” The next morning I changed her name—Frances, for some reason, had felt hard-edged, pantsuited, manicured—to Margaret, a name I’d always found solid, dutiful, and, Princess Margaret notwithstanding, obliging. Without much in the way of authorial input, the mother I needed appeared. Her hair was short, brown, parted on the side, and held back with a barrette. Her face was sweet, her self-esteem was low, and her résumé was a few notches less professional. Unlike her last incarnation, she was not poised or worldly or aggressive. Because the opening sentence described this character’s funeral, I needed a mother her daughter would mourn. Soon my omniscient narrator was saying about my newly mousy version, “Everyone knew Margaret. Everyone loved her.”

When I teach, I now discuss the importance of names and their anachronistic potential. With undergraduates, I give them this exercise early on in a semester: It is 1965. Name your babysitters. (I’m looking for Diane, Susan, Linda, Donna. No Brittanys, no Samanthas, no Taylors.) Part two: It is 1925. List the officers of the high school graduating class. (I am going for Gladys, Ida, Hazel.) Recently, a student named her young, urban, sophisticated protagonist Estelle. No, I said. Uh-uh. The writer was fond of her choice and defended it. Yes, of course, I said, there may be a thirty-five-year-old Estelle who is all that you want your character to convey, but don’t make your reader stop to ask herself,
Why Estelle?
Or Zelda or Hermione or Bertha. Don’t, as Gardner pleads in
The Art of Fiction,
interrupt the vivid and continuous dream.

And then I tell them about the Kate factor. In any carton of manuscripts entered in a competition I am judging, the strong, young, sympathetic, attractive protagonists tend to be named Kate. Runner-up is Anne, Annie, Anna: old-fashioned yet modern, feminine yet strong. Kates and Annes can ride horses, drink, and change tires, but will still look beautiful in their understated wedding dresses, freckled shoulders gleaming at their beach nuptials. (Not unrelated: eighty percent of stories in these cartons, when citing some flora, choose bougainvillea, with its slightly Third-World, hacienda-ish connotation.)

Yes, my phone book has its uses, but I can’t open it at random and point with eyes closed. An ethnic name is like the gun Chekhov talked about: if it’s mounted on the wall in act one, it better be fired by act three. Names have subtext and identity. If your main characters are Kaplans, you’ve got yourself a Jewish novel, and if your hero is Smedley Winthrop III, you’ve given him a trust fund. Nomenclature done right contributes to characterization. When Wally Lamb named a baby Tyffanie in
I Know This Much Is True,
it worked; if we hadn’t already known the IQ of Tyffanie’s mother, it was there for the taking.

Names have a hard job to do: I try to make mine memorable enough to plant the character firmly in the reader’s frontal lobe, but workmanlike and unselfconscious. Help the reader. Could the author please notice that Donald, Daniel, and David in the same novel are going to require a half second’s mental calibration:
Which one is he again?
A Mr. Smith or Jones needs to note that he is burdened with or blessed by his common name. My editor tried to talk me out of naming a narrator Frederica. But look, I argued, she deals with that. Early on she says, “And there was the basic yet awful matter of my name, Frederica Hatch, due to the unfortunate coincidence of a maternal grandmother named Frieda, who died six weeks before I was born, and a favorite paternal great-uncle Frederic, who’d been a Freedom Rider at eighty.”

You win, my editor said.

Dickens might argue that big-textured names let the characters introduce themselves (Rosa Bud, Bumble, Anne Chickenstalker, Lady Dedlock, Mr. Grimwig, Bradley Headstone, Krook, Charity Pecksniff, Chevy Slyme, M’Choakumchild), and thank you very much but whose “Scrooge” made its way into everyday usage and earned even the right to be lowercased?

Charity auctions have named a few of my characters. As I was writing my fifth novel, the PTA at my son’s high school asked author John Katzenbach and me if we’d be willing to name a character in our next books after the two high bidders. We both said sure. The Katzenbach item, with its unstated bonus of an echo on the big screen, went first to furious bidding. Then the Lipman item: a friend at my table bid and was countered by a voice across the room. Back and forth, a few unheated rounds. Who’s my winner? I asked when it was over. “He hasn’t identified himself,” said the woman collecting the money. A few weeks later, the wife of the high bidder squealed. It was John Katzenbach, winner on a mercy bid. (See
The Ladies’ Man,
p. 197: the law firm of Dobbin, McLendon, Katzenbach, and Jessep.) Top honors for most creative use of an auctioned-off name goes to Anita Shreve, who was obliged to honor the high bid from a family with an unwieldy name. A few chapters into
A Wedding in December,
set at an inn in the Berkshires, Shreve discharges her obligation with a sign in the lobby announcing, “Karola-Jungbacker rehearsal dinner, Pierce Room, 7:00.”

Particularly nice is the reader who detects meanings that escape the author. A book group member asked me if I’d deliberately given Dwight Willamee’s sister Lorraine, in
Then She Found Me,
the name of a Teutonic goddess to underscore the tensions between the German-American family and the Jewish narrator. “Actually not,” I replied. “I named Lorraine after Lorraine Loviglio, a dear coworker at my last job.”

Recently, a lit major asked if I’d purposely nicknamed Conrad (
The Way Men Act
) “Con” because of the archaic meaning of that French vulgarism, i.e., “consolation of the lower parts,” and its modern meaning (unprintable), which she found altogether fitting since Conrad meant nothing more to my narrator than the occasional horizontal encounter.

I wrote back, and I told the truth. “Dear Reader: I didn’t know I knew, but perhaps I did.”

I
WRITE NOVELS AND
I cook dinner, and some days the edges blur. Like me, my characters know their way around a kitchen, and like my family, they are good eaters. Increasingly my plots thicken in restaurants, as waiters hover, and increasingly readers ask, “What’s with the food in your books?”

My answer is, doesn’t
everyone
characterize people by what they eat? Isn’t it another descriptive tool, like a story’s furniture or its clothes? It seems so, well . . . easy—the dialogue balloon next to a character’s plate, an arrow pointing to his or her true self. For example: Let’s say I want to sketch an ordinary Joe. Following the first law of writing fiction—showing rather than telling—I don’t announce that Joe is unadventurous, prosaic, even dull, but I signal it by having him eat . . . what? (a) Sweetbreads on a bed of polenta? (b) Orange roughy? (c) Ramps? (d) Franks and beans? Or: A fictional man takes a seemingly appealing woman on a first date. He orders rotisserie chicken and garlic mashed potatoes (friendly, unpretentious, all-American yet bistro chic). Over her bottled water, the woman can’t decide. She asks if the chef can make the risotto without fat, or leave the Gorgonzola out of the Gorgonzola vinaigrette. The reader recognizes the woman to be (a) on a diet; (b) difficult; (c) anorexic; (d) no fun; (e) all of the above.

After creating many characters who are unabashed eaters, finally I went all the way and made my heroine a chef. In
The Inn at Lake Devine
food owes its allegiance to two schools: Vermont cuisine circa 1964, and the Catskills (then or now). It was almost too easy: chicken croquettes, meatloaf surprise, turkey potpie, lettuce wedge, and baked stuffed sole, versus flanken, capon, blueberry blintzes, canned figs, and almond bark. Just as my narrator finds personal happiness in the enemy camp—in a matrimonial surf ’n’ turf—so do Jewish and gentile cuisines coexist peacefully on her table: a smokehouse ham and Grand Marnier sweet potato soufflé one night, brisket and noodle kugel the next.

The first time I employed food as a narrative helpmate, I was writing my first novel,
Then She Found Me.
I needed a potluck contribution with airs, i.e., not a match with the other guests’ four-grain bread and spiral-cut ham, and perhaps not to anyone else’s liking. It was 1988, so I chose calamari vinaigrette—ambitious, daunting, and, I hoped, faintly ridiculous.

This reliance on talking food may be rooted in a pivotal social/gastronomic experience in my own life: At nineteen, I was brought to a young man’s parents’ home for dinner, at which his mother served calf’s liver without apology. With so much serenity, in fact, that there was an otherworldliness to her composure. Did I need a degree in psychology to know my boyfriend’s mother was (a) clueless; (b) opposed to her baby going steady; (c) passive-aggressive; (d) a few capers short of a canapé; (e) all of the above? [Reader: if you were writing this scene and wanted to intensify the culinary hostility, would you add to the plate (a) a baked potato; (b) white rice; (c) corn niblets; (d) beets and lima beans?]

Characters have to eat, don’t they? Mine simply do it while you’re watching. They make reservations, study menus, talk and cook, talk and eat, refill their wineglasses, linger over decaf. I’m at peace with this predilection because I find that every interaction with the stove, refrigerator, plate, and fork provides an opportunity to mine the telling detail, to make abstract notions concrete in a way I hope is a kind of shorthand.

Metaphors? Sort of. Blood, bones, lamb, variety meats (brains, guts, hearts) are entrées with symbolic heft. But I’ve found pleasure in telegraphing smaller coded messages: you know this person; you’ve dined with her or cooked for him. Happily, the supplies in this literary tool chest are limitless, and readers own the same ones. Tenderloin or tofu? Coffee or chamomile? Iceberg or arugula? If Anthelme Brillat-Savarin had been a novelist as well as a gastronome, he might have written, “Tell me what your characters eat, and I’ll tell you how their story ends.”

T
HE
BOSTON GLOBE
’S ART EDITOR
, whom I didn’t know personally, phoned me to ask if I watched
Sex and the City.

I answered carefully—was this a survey? a culture IQ test?—“Why, yes, I do.”

“We thought you might,” he said, naming a wise-guy columnist who liked to tease me in print.

This editor was calling with an assignment: In six days the long-running show’s much hoo-ha’d finale was airing. Would I write a piece in which I guessed how it would end?

I asked how long and for when.

“A thousand words? Twelve hundred? By Friday. But can you get me a draft earlier, like Wednesday, so we can get the artwork going?” Have I mentioned this was Monday? I said yes, okay, I thought I could do that.

It ran big and splashy the morning of the finale, just like this, without getting much right in the way of denouement predictions.

Last Sunday night, with my cable box tuned to HBO, I inhaled sharply and emitted a small sob of relief when Miranda the pragmatist leaned toward the repentant Mr. Big and said, “Go get our girl.”

I hoped and believed that Carrie Bradshaw, lead best friend, would in this our final night together be granting my fondest TV wish: Forgive Big his inconstancy. Say yes. Come home.