Amherst Reads Transcript

David Sofield: Ok. So I want to say for the audience that’s gonna actually hear this to begin with…a little bit about our relationship. Which is to say that I knew you before almost anybody else except your parents because I was present at your bris. And you don’t have to respond to any of this until I’m done with my little introductory speech.

 A bris occurs in the first 8 days, I’ve just learned of the Jewish child’s life. And I bring it up not to pull rank on you but to say that at the actual ceremony memorial to me because I was the godfather as you were passed around at age 18 days or whatever it was and to me the last person to handle you the baby to .. and he said to me as I handed you to him,

 “You know what the responsibilities of the godfather are?”

 “No.”

 He said, “Send the kid to college.”

 This really happened. Wonderful parents will confirm it. And lo and behold not that I sent you to college but you came to Amherst College so and finally in your very last semester, if I have this right, you took a course of mine. I mean you were doing fiction most of the time I take it in the English department, but you took my course in poetry in 1950 to 2000. Is it? No? Yeah. As it must have then been called and wrote good papers, I looked it up on Richard Wilbur and Philip Larkin. I don’t expect you to remember that but that’s the case.

 So, I’d like to begin by reading well, not by reading, but I’m going to ask you to read a couple of passages and then I’m going to read one. But before I do that I want to say to listeners that this is a wonderful read. It’s one of those that you cannot put it down books. And I’m pretty good at putting down novels since what I do for a living and what I do for leisure is to read poetry mostly. And last I taught a novel of any kind probably twenty-five years ago, so it’s not that I don’t read them ever but I don’t read them often. But I loved reading your book and it’s an exciting page turner you know from the beginning to the end.

 I wanted to just tout this one little fact that nine pages into the book, this is to hook the audience, she beats the bad guy who picks her up, to a pulp. Immediately after she does this, she goes to breakfast at 1 am in a diner in the San Fran, in the Bay area. She has to eat. Eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, hash browns, pancakes and I quote, “buttered sour dough toast” while she’s doing that she reads Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.

 Now that has to be a witty moment in the book early on. Not many people even listening to this will have read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. I have but only because I was a religion major in college 60 years ago. It was an assigned text but believe me this is not customary breakfast reading or any other am or pm so that’s what you are in for if you pick up this book if you’re potential readers of this book or any other book it has been published now for a while.

That said, I would…would you start reading from the very beginning of the book. I’m turning right now as I say these words to page three. I’d like you read the first page just the first page aloud because I want to hear your voice and listeners will want to hear your voice. Could you do that?

 Saul Lelchuk: Sure I’d be delighted to.

DS: Great!

SL: And I, I will read with the caveat that the actress January LaVoy, who did the Macmillan audio version of this puts me to shame hands down with her rendition. So what attempt I make will be …

 DS: I’m glad to be put in my place.

 SL: Oh no! I’m putting myself in my place but here we go I will give it a shot.

 DS: Thanks.

 SL: “The bar was over in West Oakland. Just a squat block of concrete sitting in a parking lot. Neon Bud Light signs threw blue lights over a dozen beat-up cars and trucks parked in front. I’d never been. Probably never go again. I pulled up at the edge of the lot, on the outskirts of the lights. Cut the engine of the red Aprilia motorcycle I was on. I walked in. Early side of a Friday night, just past nine. A half-dozen rough looking men sat at the bar, another few at tables, and two shooting pool. Only one other girl. She was half of a couple wedged in a dark corner booth, a pitcher of beer in between them. She had a nose ring. I’d always wondered if nose rings were as painful as they looked.

I stood at the bar. “Heineken.”

 “That’s five dollars.” The bartender was a big, paunchy guy, better side of fifty, graying hair. He eyed me without bothering to hide it. So did the rest of the bar. So what.

I took the beer, took a swig and headed into the ladies. The smell of Lysol and floor polisher. Stared into the chipped mirror and took a careful look at myself. I was tall, five foot eight. Taller with the heavy motorcycle boots I wore. I smoothed out my auburn hair from the helmet. I’d never be called skinny, but I kept my body toned. I looked over my tight stonewashed jeans, and a black, scoop-necked tank top under an unzipped black leather bomber jacket. A touch of shadow around my green eyes. A touch of red lipstick I’d never ordinarily wear. I looked okay.

I could start.”

DS: Great. What are the stylistic precedence, if I can ask you a kind of English prof’s question of how you do this beginning of the novel, who’ve you been reading, who did you read?

SL: Sure

DS: You know, what’s the genre here and what is the manner the style is which is what I’m always interested in the smell of the story.

SL: Sure. Absolutely. I, to me, I mean I, I grew up as… as you know reading a fairly wide variety of things, all kinds of literature all kinds of wonderful writers from different countries from different areas and so forth. But I will say this, I had an affinity from a very young age for California hard-boiled detective certainly fallen into a very elite group.

Had a pretty impressive impact on the genre but American writing is a whole and I’d say the most influe… influential names that I’ve read starting from my teenage years and happily going into the present day are Dashiell Hammet certainly, Harlan Coben… Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, to name a few of those, really quintessential California detective writers and I think, yeah, Quasha was especially probably very definitive for me, maybe with his special emphasis early on, on Hammet, who of course was the king of San Francisco and Chan…Chandler who was his rival and counterpart down in Los Angeles.

DS: Right. And what about…

SL: So I think when I was…

DS: Go ahead.

SL: Just to…just to finish answering your question, I think that when I was writing this book certainly, I wanted it to feel contemporary for readers, and obviously it takes on some contemporary issues, and it grapples with the idea of the overall reach of big tech and the emergence of some pretty frightening minimal syfy-ish surveillance technology that is sadly all too real in different parts of the world but…

DS: Part of the story.

SL: It is... it absolutely. But at the same time I really did want Nikki to feel a bit of a throwback to those writers that I love so much. And she can drink neat scotch with the best of them and well not she’s not a technology lover, she probably did not own a cell phone. She gets by without one and I really wanted someone to be able… someone who had read those writers to be able to read these pages and for example these opening sentences that I read, and at least feel a kind of…hopefully whisper some of those old great eyed California girls.

DS: I think that you succeeded. I really do. And, what I think when I was reading this is that one tenth of the sentences, and I actually counted them, the sentences on the first page are not complete sentences. They are sentence fragments as we used to call them and, that is very Raymond Chandler. Right? At least as I remember reading him. I don’t have a lot of history reading the great California crime novels but I’ve read Chandler and I’ve read Hammet…quite a while ago to be sure, but this technique of… of verbless sentences:

“The bar was over at West Oakland. Period. Just a squat block of concrete sitting in a parking lot. Period.” And then a normal sentence or full sentence if that’s a better way to put it… “Neon Bud Light signs threw blue lights over a dozen beat-up cars and trucks parked in front.”

And it goes on that way for the rest of this page with fully one third of the sentences being sentence fragments. With that tough guy clique except this is tough girl. Clipped way of thinking and way of putting sentence together so we’re definitely on the same page, not just page three of the novel but, on the same page thinking about the precedence here. In a second I’m going to ask you to read another passage and to comment on it and then we’ll do some general talking here. But I would like to try to earn my bone of three day spy of reading a bit of page thirty-one to thirty-two, you may have different pagination. I have the Readers.. what’s it...advanced reading copy that you’ve kindly sent to me or that your father did, and I’ve noticed a couple of very small changes when you read the first page. But they’re very small indeed. So here’s where I’m going to butt in and then ask you to comment a bit. It’s chapter eight which in my edition is on page thirty-one. Here’s chapter eight:

The  “she” of this chapter is Brenda Johnson, who is the very attractive wife of a very wealthy lawyer in San Francisco who works, who’s been retained by care for by a company that is at the heart of this novel and where the problems come from. Because when you say surveillance equipment, high tech surveillance equipment, that’s what they provide but they’re trying to provide it to…to governments in dangerous places like Chechnya. So I’m not going to spoil the story more than that and I’ll get to reading this page.

“She, Brenda Johnson,” but it doesn’t say Brenda Johnson. “She was coming from East Bay into San Francisco. So I suggested a tiny coffee shop just off the Bay Bridge, West Oakland.” Which is where I had paid a visit to Robert Harris. “The sign said Bay Coffee. The sign made sense. They had coffee and there was the bay. It was an industrial neighborhood; the roads pavement waving of white flag high after years of the big trucks had jolted on their way to the Oakland Port. Some parts of Oakland had gotten nice fast. Some were taking their time. Brenda Johnson was a stylish, pretty woman of about fifty. Her hair was honey colored and professionally styled, her hands manicured, she wore suede boots and a three quarter length black Burberry jacket with a belt knotted fashionably. She eyed the small cafe anxiously as though they’d hand her bad news printed right across the menu. “I’d thought again of the lab results.”

“Coffee’s on me”, I said “What are you having?”

She blinked and looked at me. “Just a cappuccino if they have it. Otherwise Coffee with cream and sugar. Thanks Nikki.”

Nikki for the listeners there’s the whole story…

“I’ll be out in a minute. We can sit outside at the counter”. I ordered from a pretty black haired girl in her mid-twenties.  “Can you do cappuccino?” I asked.

She nodded. “Sure.”

She had a slim body, brown eyes and small white teeth…” We hear a lot by the way, about teeth in your novel. “A yellow brown discoloration like a large birth mark spread across her right cheekbone. I smelled cigarettes and Tommy Girl perfume. I’d worn the same stuff myself all through high school.

“One of those and a large black, no sugar.”

She handed the full cups over, unlidded and a few drops of coffee splashed over the rim and on to my jacket as I reached to take it.

“I’m so sorry”, she said.

She looked more than sorry. She looked like instead of a little coffee she’d spilled 2 million barrels of crude… she’d spilled 2 million barrels of crude into a harbor full of otters. I saw the tattoo of a rose on her thin forearm, a long stem twisting along skin at intervals pinning the stem into her arm.

“Its ok.” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Here let me.” She grabbed a handful of paper towels and dabbed awkwardly at my arm.

“I’m so sorry!” she said again. “I’m such an idiot.”

“Hey.” I said nonplussed. “It’s no big deal. Seriously.”

“It’s just, I’m having the worst day. I know that’s not your problem.”

“Anything I can do?”

She shook her head as though at the sillyness of the question. “I’ll be fine. Thanks for not yelling at me. You wouldn’t believe what some people are like.”

I believe it.

The yellowish mark on her face, it didn’t look quite like a birthmark after all. It had that unhealthy overripe look of injured skin.

She caught my gaze and seemed to shrink into herself. She tore the little corners of the napkin she was holding and white flakes drifted to the counter with the determined instability of snow.

“I’ll be fine” she said again.

“I’m Nikki” I said “What’s your name?”

“Zoey” she answered hesitantly, she had a faint accent, South American. I couldn’t place the country. The smattering of Spanish leftover from high school didn’t take me that far. “We can talk if you’d like. Some need someone to talk to.”

She shook her head without a word.

DS: Well that’s a lot for the critical reader. Critical in the objective sense to think about here and to notice and so im going to offer you a few comments and ask you to respond to it whichever ones to them that you’d like. To me this passage is different from the one you read different in fundamental and serious ways by which I mean that we begin or at least I began as a reader when I was reading these pages so early in the novel to say that this is not going to be just as it were just a crime novel – a tough girl’s detective novel. The writing is wonderful here so and I want to say a few words about it. It’s witty and yes wit is an essential element of Chandler and Hammett and so on. But this is Lelchuk and I like very much the the wit here so into this copy inside this coffee shop here a sign said Bay Coffee then outside just beyond that the sign made sense. Period. They had coffee and there was the Bay. That’s that’s telling in an extremely subtle way to me of course there was, they had coffee of course they had the bay but not everybody would say that would interpret that think to say that after reading the sign that said Bay Coffee but in the industrial neighborhood the roast pavement waving a flag, a white flag high a flag of surrender who would think to say that you the roast pavement waving a white flag high after years of the big trucks that had jolted along their way to the Oakland Port and then to conclude this paragraph this some parts of Oakland had gotten nice fast some were taking their time. That’s in the clipped wonderful manner of your writing here, Brenda Johnson was a, stylish pretty woman and so and so, I’m not going to re-read the next part but we begin to get brand names, we’ve already begun to get brand names they are all over the place early in the novel they really locate this place as the Bay Area and as the knowledgeableness of Nikki who after all has an AB I assume in English I don’t remember from UCal Berkley though she is a smart, young woman, but black Burberry jacket I was ok with that. It goes on a bit, at the counter I ordered from a pretty black haired girl in her mid-twenties. Can you do cappuccino? I asked, which sounds like the right question in this kind of a coffee bar. Right? Maybe they don’t have cappuccino so she’s being polite here. Can you do cappuccino she nodded sure. She had a slim body, brown eyes. So this is wonderful how you begin to introduce a new character who is going to be an important character as the novel goes on. she is one of the women who has to be saved from dangerous men as the title has it and she is saved from dangerous men by Nikki a round yellow discoloration and so on. I smell cigarettes and tommy girl perfume well I lost that as I was lost when you said Aprilia motorcycle, I didn’t know anything about it. I don’t know much about motorcycles, I’ve never ridden on a motorcycle but I looked it up of course and it’s a prominent Italian brand of motorcycle on the very first page. So I’m just registering where I thought I better look this up if I want to read this novel, Tommy Girl perfume. Of course and then domesticated as it were by “I’d worn the same stuff myself all through high school.” On it goes. She spills coffee on Nikki, a little bit not bad. She looked like instead of a little coffee, she’d spilled two million barrels of crude she’d spilled. I read that wrong both times. She looked like instead of a little coffee she’d spilled two million barrels of crude into a harbor full of …get this, otters. Now who could have thought to say that. Saul Lelchuk. A harbor full of otters. I saw the tattoo of a rose blah blah and as we conclude this whole passage she registers the fact that Zoey must be an abused young woman.

 “The yellowish mark on her face, it didn’t quite look like a birthmark after all. It had that unhealthy overripe look of injured skin. She caught my gaze and seemed to shrink into herself. She tore little corners of”… and here’s the sentence that I read this for, “she tore little corner of the napkin she was holding, and white flakes drifted to the counter with the determined instability of snow.”

“Where did you ever learn to do an oxymoron like “determined instability of snow” I don’t know, maybe, from your father. Maybe from Bill Pritchard. Not probably from me, but maybe.

“I’ll be fine.” And then it concludes. So do I have this basically right or is there more and better to say about this wonderful passage?”

SL:I don’t think I could say anything about it better and I appreciate and am delighted that you picked up on some of these lines which I had a lot of fun with. And I think in terms of writing the book of course I wanted Nikki to have, you used the word “wit”, and I wanted her to have a humor and a wit I think that personally in my own taste which obviously translates to my writing. I tend to lose interest if I’m reading a thriller where the character protagonist seems so action-centric and so focused on the next knockdown, the next, you know, gun battle that wit and humor take either a back seat or sort of jettison out of the car entirely.

DS: “Yeah”.

SL: “And to me so much of the delight and pleasure again as you mentioned, in reading some of the writers that I love and admire or in attempting to follow their path in any way, is getting to use and introduce a little humor and wit where it fits in. and I think that can add so much to any book of course but especially this kind of genre writing where without that I think its very easy for a character to become a bit more one dimensional. 

You mentioned the difference in the language, the kind of a clipped tone at the very beginning of chapter compared to this and that was something I was trying to do. I think partly, my own style, I think I had fun with this book, because my own style as I’m sure you remember from fiction that I’ve written that you’ve read and perhaps even from my Wilbur essays. I don’t necessarily, naturally gravitate towards that sort of, shorter, clipped style and I think it was fun for me to adopt a tone that really did feel a little bit less maybe natural or comfortable than something that I was automatically or habitually used to.

At the same time I tried to use that in different pieces of the book to kind of serve a bit of a as a barometer for Nikki’s mood and her kind of caution and attention and what she’s thinking. So, for example, when she walks into the bar in the first chapter, as the reader will learn if they stay with the chapter, she’s on the job. You know she’s working, she’s not relaxing, she’s going into a place that does present potential threat and danger to her and she is noticing, and her awareness is sort of taking place, in the same way that in some of the violent scenes in the book, where her awareness is coming in sort of shorter, more distinct bursts.

And I think that in the coffee shop she’s on home territory, she’s certainly a devoted coffee drinker and is very comfortable and East Bay in California and I think she’s moving, although she’s working she’s meeting Brenda who is a client, I think she’s moving in a much more relaxed state and I think that her awareness and sentences are a bit longer and more descriptive and she’s more open to noticing things that don’t necessarily have to do with the job at hand. And I tried to have the writing almost relax a little so that someone could feel those differences and the tension and the mood of the specific moment.”

DS: “That’s terrific. That’s terrific, and it’s what I think I was reading and how I was reading it. So we’ve said a lot already, and you’ve made a wonderful contribution here. I’d like you to read if you would, and then we’ll do a little more general talking, because I don’t want to get too far into the book reading passages so that somebody who’s listening to this would say, well I don’t have to read the book after all, they’ve talked about it enough. But there’s a point to what the one paragraph that I’d like to read now on page forty two.

Nikki it turns out in addition to having graduated from UC Berkley runs a bookshop, owns a bookshop on Telegraph Avenue. I last shopped on Telegraph Avenue, it actually is more than sixty years ago when I was living on Spruce Street, north of the campus for a year while I was in the army in San Francisco, so I know this area – some must have changed a whole lot in sixty years. I can tell from some of the descriptions that it indeed has and I’ve only been there back to Berkley once I think in those sixty years to see old friends of ours. Long before you were maybe on the earth.”

SL: “You’re welcome any time.”

DS: “Well I just may take you up some time now that I’m retiring I’ll have some time to do it. So on page forty two we learn something about the bookshop that she has on Telegraph Avenue. She’s got a great friend, thank the Lord for or, thank you for putting her great friend in here, Jess, who runs the bookstore for her and this is just a paragraph of description.

And it reads;

“My upstairs office was plainly furnished with some (in the bookstore) with some chairs and a beat up metal desk. In the corner was a steel safe next to some struggling house plants. I’d tried an aquarium once but the cat had gotten up there one clam this morning. After that we figured once was enough. The back window faced out to Telegraph and a cube of four black and white television monitors sat stacked on a file cabinet. I liked to know what was going on. the only decorations were framed pictures and portraits of favorite authors, Thomas Hardy, Carson McCullers, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Conner, George Eliot. I liked looking at their faces. Some people prayed, went to synagogues or mosques or churches to find support. I had my writers, wise men and women even long dead. I liked to think they were capable of guidance nonetheless.”

End of paragraph. Well I thought of the Kierkegaard…eating … of reading Kierkegaard while eating that enormous breakfast at 1 a.m. when I was reading this passage and I… at this point began to make a list of writers that you mentioned in this book. I’m going to read the list then I’m going to shut up. And it’s not a complete list, although I tried to make it as complete as I could as I was reading through the book; Homer, Gibbon, Tolstoy, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, George Eliot, George Saintsbury of all people, that’s a nice joke that you have with the wine. Conrad, Hardy, Dreiser, F Scott Fitzgerald, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, Carson McCullers, Patricia Highsmith, John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Charles Bukowski of all people, Joyce Carol Oates. I don’t know how many I missed, but that’s an impressive list. I suppose the proper question to ask you after reading that list is, how would you describe, because listeners to this are going to be wondering your experiences as Amherst English major and how it contributed to your writing this book. Obviously, you were a literary kid, you were a literary kid from the beginning. Your mother and father are both writers. But what about Amherst?

SL: Well Amherst did, it did more for me than, I would say that specifically, Johnson Chapel did more for me than just about any other educational experience I could imagine. I mean to call it formative would be perhaps a cliché but one completely true nonetheless. And I think that when I look back on those years from the first semester, the last semester of my three and half years at Amherst, I was abroad for a semester, you know my time walking into Johnson Chapel and literally the comfort, the sort of emotional happiness I felt from the second my feet would cross the threshold, not to mention the intellectual excitement of the classes that I took there. Actually our poetry class as I recall was not in Johnson Chapel, so I should extend that circumference to radiate elsewhere on campus as well. But the, Amherst English, I mean, I came into Amherst certainly I think relatively well read for an eighteen year old and I had my predilections and my favorites and so forth. But it did expose me to a semi-infinite array of different voices and writers. And, some of them I got to know far better even if I had come into Amherst liking them. And some of them, many of them, I was completely introduced to. So the English courses that I took at Amherst I think have always defined me intellectually in a way that very few other experiences could match up to. And they’ve always been on my mind and that’s always been part of me, and certainly when I was writing this book, before I ever wrote a sentence, when I realized that, my main character, I wanted her to be a booklover. I was thinking about Amherst and about my time there as an English major.

In terms of making Nikki a booklover, I was, and this is a little tangential to your question but hopefully not terribly so. You know I’ve always loved the idea of a bookstore, I joked with friends my dream in life was to open a used bookstore, and when I began to realize that was maybe more of a pipe dream than an actual reality, I decided the next best thing was to write a character who ran a used bookstore and then I could kind of live vicariously through her. And when I created the bookstore and when I realized that so much of Nikki, her character is really defined by these writers when she says she looks to these people for guidance that’s not a throw away sentence that’s something real. And as the book progresses you start to realize that Nikki really was saved by books in many ways. And she’s been compared to some well-known protagonists, including Lisbeth Salander, The Dragon Tattoo series. I think that Nikki is less dark in her core by far and I think she has a very different relationship with the people in her life than Salander, and one of the reasons for that really is her love of reading books and I think she absolutely considers books as, not just integral during her own life but as essentially rescuing her from what could have been a much darker and less social existence.

So for me as I wrote this book, interestingly, interestingly to me at least, I don’t know about anyone else, but the first draft, I felt like I was constantly pulling back on the reins because the Amherst English major in me really wanted to kind of go a bit wild and get to introduce and talk abouts so many of these different books and writers, that, many of the names that you just read. And, I held back because I was thinking I’m writing a book that falls into the mystery or thriller or suspense genre, whatever you want to call it. And who’s going to want to read pages and pages about books and authors and writers. And thank God for my wonderful publishers who bought the manuscript and then they gave me their essential edits in my rewrite, my first rewrite. They said no need to hold back on the reins, on the contrary they said this is a book about someone writing a book store. This is catnip to readers, to anyone who loves books and loves libraries and bookstores. They’re going to get it and the last thing you should be doing is worrying about sort of artificially modulating the time you spend invoking them. And that to me was very fun and then I really felt that I had been unleashed in some ways. And during my second draft I really got to reapproach it and think in different scenes and situations what book might Nikki recommend to a customer who walks in who’s looking for something? Or when Nikki is out on the job how might she view a scene or a person or something taking place and what book might that remind her of? What would she be reading in one situation or another? So, to me that was really… it was one of the most enjoyable parts of the book on a very personal level, was getting to invoke all of these different writers many of whom are my absolute favorites in my own life and some of whom I simply felt would be good for a particular mention or particular moment in terms of someone who knows books making that recommendation. But it was fun for me and I have Amherst English really to thank for a lot of that.

DS: Oh that’s so nicely said. Really appreciate it since so far as I was a small part of it. Is there going to be a sequel?

SL: There is going to be a sequel. I actually am just finishing the very last touches on the revisions and Nikki will be back absolutely. She’s going to… the release date hasn’t been set exactly but it will probably be just about a year from now, so very early Winter of ’21.

DS: That’s great. Could you send me a….a version?

SL: Absolutely! The moment they produce the advanced copies, one will be in the mail with your name on it.

DS: That’s great.

DS: I will, I’m hooked on Nikki. As long as you keep writing as well you’re writing here. Let me ask you a couple of general questions that might conclude all this. You consider this a feminist novel?

SL: I do. You know I’d say first of all that one of the pleasures of writing books is that you write the book and then it’s out of your hands and it’s up to the reader to take it however they want. And so to a certain degree all I’m interested in is writing the book that I want to write and try to make it the best book that I am capable of writing. And then part of the joy and also of terror of letting it go into the world is that anyone can choose to read it however they wish. So one person might take it one way and one might another and again I think that’s one of the pleasures of fiction and sometimes the terrors as well. I absolutely believe that Nikki is…you know she’s a strong female character. I certainly hope and it was never my wish to make her a one dimensional character and I absolutely consider it a feminist novel in that sense. I think that Nikki is not, I hope she’s not found creating this sort of easy tropes and stereotypes that quote unquote “tough women” can. You know she has a heart, she has a soul, she has tenderness. There’s moments in the book when she sheds tears, one of the reasons she is not afraid to show emotions, one of the reasons why it was important for me to have this romance with this new fellow that she meets in the diner early on is because I really didn’t want anyone to say hey this is just some you know man-hater running around beating people up and cracking heads and so forth.

DS: Yeah, yeah.

SL:To me Nikki’s motivations are more nuanced than that and while she certainly is tough and can handle herself in one of those you know one of those battle scenes as it were, it’s not really where she’s coming from. She’s motivated really by this really fierce desire to protect those around her whether it’s someone she just meets as the coffee shop scene with Zoey or whether people who are extremely close to her and have been for her entire life such as her brother…

DS: Like her brother. Yeah. Sure.

SL: And I think she is… so I think she is…she absolutely… I think the book is certainly it’s a feminist book in all the I hope the wonderful things about the feminist movement and I think that one of the chief qualities that I tried to project is that there is no need for a strong female lead to sort of apologize for being tough or to have to feel that if she is tough that she has to give up other things. That she suddenly had to turn her back on emotion or sensitivity or anything else.

DS: Yeah, yeah.

SL: That to me mattered a lot as I was writing the character.

DS: That’s great. The other thought that I had was that this is in a serious sense a psychological novel in a couple of ways. We have a main character who is psychologically complex, physically obviously beautiful, and utterly capable of dealing with difficult situations but not only do you have her in psychiatric or psychological counseling sessions with a therapist, very brief chapters, I didn’t count how many there are I’m going to think eight…nine something like that in which we only have dialogue and Nikki is talking with her therapist. She seems to be required to do this, although I didn’t catch exactly why. And those are…you have her.. therapist is good at least in my real experience of therapists but I hang around therapists a bit. She asks questions that are to the point, and she’s got Nikki pretty much right. But more prominently than that, more importantly than that it occurred to me that Nikki is trying to save the world in a sense and her desire to do that, her need to do that is much better than desire to do that comes up in this trauma in her very early life. I don’t want to reveal too much but her parents are murdered when she is I think, if I remember this, I didn’t go back to check, it’s something like ten years old and her brother is seven if I recall. And she feels… she’s down in Bolinas, California having ice cream by the beach when this murder takes place. Senseless murder, a murder that reminded me just wondering how much you were thinking about this, I can’t imagine you weren’t thinking about it to some extent of the two Dartmouth College faculty members who were senselessly murdered by two thugs, teenage thugs from Vermont, the Zantop couple and…

SL: The Zantop murders just… the Zantop murders were absolutely it’s, it’s something I’ve never forgotten. It took place my senior year in high school.

DS: How could you?

SL: They were very…they were very much in my mind as I was writing this book and I think part of me choosing this book and this character that those… those…I mean it was arguably the greatest tragedy to ever occur in our relatively small New Hampshire town and it shook the and sort of tore the fabric of the town in a way that I think in some ways was sort of a very small microcosm of what 9/11 did to America about eight or nine months after that.

DS: Yeah, yeah.

SL: and I’ve never stopped thinking about that moment and that was absolutely the ambitchuous for me to put that into the book

DS: Yeah, yeah. Well, I suspected that, although you’ve spoken it better than I ever could have. In so far as what I’m going to call here a psychological novel so transcending the genre of the California crime fiction stuff… a bit…she’s… the rest of her life, at least as much as we’re given it in this particular books seems to be a kind of working out of her guilt at not being able to protect her parents. And at the…you know I’m… I’m sure that the…I mean that does sound a lot like the Zantops…and… who were victimized in the most horrible way. You can look it up you listeners on you know on Google if you’re not acquainted with them, that terrible, terrible tragedy. But is it something like right to say that because she… because she felt helpless then at this massive tragedy, I mean after all she and her brother were sent to separate foster parents and sets, plural, of foster parents, as they were growing up, I mean they’re kids ten and seven, as I say, at least I think they are. That somehow generates in her this need, which it wouldn’t in everybody, you know some kids would say oh Christ that was awful and get on with their lives as best they could but this doesn’t leave her. I mean she’s out to make the world right and she discovers in the course of the book the murderers, who you know who they were and she tracks them down and so on, and I won’t spoil that… tragic that… that not just tough girl stuff but that redeeming business of revenge which is redeeming for her.

So you’ve covered so much in this book that it’s going to be interesting to see what you do in the next one with Nikki. Would you give us a thought?

SL: Absolutely! And I… I’m glad you pointed to some of those things because I certainly… the psychological aspect of it was something that was again it was enjoyable for me. It was certainly a challenge to try to imagine how such a sort of titanic event might … what kind of emotional weight that might leave in someone for the duration of their lives really. And I tried to show with Nikki and her brother different manifestations, that her brother goes into a life of addiction and he becomes semi-destroyed and almost close to irreparably damaged by the trauma. And Nikki goes in a different way which is really in some ways to internalize the lot of it and to sort of tamp it down and to become very unwilling almost to a certain degree pathologically unwilling to discuss it or bring it up. And I think that part of her knows that to ultimately to have what she genuinely wants which is relationships with people and a relationship with a partner and to be able to reach that kind of honesty she is going to have to open up. But at the same time she is, I think, quite scared about doing so. Nikki is not someone who particularly worry… she’s not someone who gets scared by the external nearly as much as the internal. And to me that is an important part of her character…

DS: Yeah.

SL: that she is more frightened of her own potential reactions and what’s inside of her than anything else out there. So I think that… to me… I wanted that… I think to a certain degree its universal and I wanted some of her anxieties to feel universal. Obviously, thank God most of us have not been through some of the things she has but I’m sure most of us have felt guilt for an incident that took place that we couldn’t stop or weren’t there for even if the logical part of our mind tells us there is nothing you can do and even if a whole room full of therapists or friends or what have you say there is nothing you could have done. But does that turn off the guilt? I think not. So I think that that element of who she is and what she’s struggling with was really important in the therapy scenes. I wanted to keep them brief but at the same time I thought it was a nice tool to kind of quite literally force Nikki to come to terms with some of the things that she has buried within herself. The therapy scenes are a result of a moment of violence that took place in her life and so she is there on court order and she has to complete them as part of a probation and that to me was kind of necessary because otherwise she would have high-tailed it out of the room probably long before she ever walked in. So I think that… I think for Nikki to have to quite literally go and sit in a chair and confront herself and her past is something that was essential to the character. Especially, for her to ever try to overcome it, because I think a lot of us could agree that we don’t necessarily overcome past trauma by simply turning our back on it or pretending that it’s so deep within us that it should never see the light of day.

DS: Yeah. I agree.

SL: In terms of the sequel, to me it’s been a lot of fun writing it because it let’s me take on and grapple with a lot of the elements that I set up in the character and within the book in an ongoing way. I’ve never written a sequel before, it was my first one. And it’s actually been quite fun because you start asking yourself what things were mentioned in book one that you might want to play out in the second one. What moments, maybe, you didn’t get a chance to go into. So I think that, that’s been…it’s been nice for me to get there and kind of revisit the character, to get back inside her head and this is someone who’s become very familiar to me. I think that I’ve spent in a semi-literal fashion more time with Nikki than most people in the world. And I think…Probably, with anyone. Yes. And so, that’s been… it’s been interesting to kind of get back into it and play out and tease out different pieces of the character.

DS: And the question…

SL: Oh yes. You go ahead please.

DS: No you. You go ahead please.

SL: In the second book she is hired by a wealthy San Francisco family with a murky past to track down a con man who’s been sort of buzzing and hovering around the elderly matriarch and Nikki goes after this person and as the book proceeds, starts to realize that perhaps they have a little more in common than she might have imagined. And to me it was very fun, putting her in a room and in a story with someone who she starts to realize is perhaps, is equally as good at what he does as is she.

DS: Oh that’s great.

SL: And to suddenly feel that she is facing a bit of an equal when it comes to matters of perception, when it comes to matters of cleverness. And really to just sort of the full…the full potential danger that this person presents to her but also other elements as well.

DS: OK. Last question. Have you ever known anybody like Nikki Griffen? You’re meant to laugh…right.

SL: I…my…when my best friend who reads everything that I write…God bless him, and when he read this book he said, you know he read through the first chapter, and he said you know Nikki’s certainly better looking than you Saul, and she’s much more intelligent and she’s certainly tougher and she’s better read and she’s far funnier and she’s indescribably more exciting but other than that she’s really just like you. And so I …

DS: OK that’s good. Well thanks so much on behalf of the College for doing this call. And it’s been great to talk to you.

SL: No. Thank you. I can’t say how much I appreciate it and to me this was a really kind of special, sort of full circle moment as I come up on the 15^th … 15^th Reunion of my graduation from Amherst and like I said Amherst was the … Amherst English was always the place I wanted to be. And I didn’t do huge amounts of college visits, I just knew fairly early on there is no better place academically and intellectually and you were certainly a huge part of that and getting to be on campus and getting there and taking classes with you and have conversations was a really important part of my education and that’s not something I could ever overstate. So thank you.

DS: Oh that’s wonderful. On behalf of the department we thank you OK?

SL: Absolutely.