It’s hard to find the nerve to write a novel when you’ve studied literature in graduate school. A lot of us do it, of course – professors of English writing novels are a well-worn cliché. But when you’ve spent all those years reading the world’s best writing, marveling at exquisite sentences that have haunted readers across the years, putting pen to paper (or, more likely, fingers to keyboard) requires a combination of humility and arrogance that is hard to come by. I solved that by deciding to write `genre fiction,’ in this case a murder mystery, because you can tell yourself that such fiction comes with lower expectations. You just need to think up a crime or two, identify the clues, drop them into the narrative, and do your best to keep the revelation (Aha!) somewhere between disappointingly obvious and infuriatingly unfair. If you’ve come up with relatable characters and an entertaining story, well, that just might be good enough.
Like my heroine, though, I am steeped in the 19th century novel. I made Jennifer a once-and-future graduate student in part to give myself an excuse to hang out with the books I most love. To the annoyance of some (my sister is one of them), Jennifer is always spouting literature. She quotes “Paradise Lost” to one character. She argues poetry with another. She has Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan quotes plastered to the inside of her head. Most of all, she sees her world from the point of view of the great nineteenth century women writers, Jane Austen and the Brontës at times but, most importantly, George Eliot.
In retrospect, I am very aware of how much Part of the Solution was influenced by 19th century fiction. I meant to write my mystery as a period piece set in the late 1970s. I meant to write a comedy of manners poking loving but pointed fun at the foibles of us Boomers back in the day. Part of the Solution is all of those things. But I realize now that, like many Victorian novels, my story is also what is called a Bildungsroman, which Merriam-Webster defines as “a novel that deals with the formative years of the main character and, in particular, with the character’s psychological development and moral education.” Jennifer is not the same person at the end of the story than she was in the beginning. She has been tempered by both love and fear, and she has had to make a moral decision that both educates and haunts her.
At twenty-eight, Jennifer is older than most heroes and heroines of 19th century novels written in English. (Anne Elliot, Jane Austen’s oldest heroine, was also twenty-eight and was considered practically geriatric!) And the ending is more bitter-sweet than is typical. The world is older, too. The novel is set at the very tail end of the counterculture, two years before the election of Ronald Reagan, in the twilight of one particular dream of how the world might be changed. Part of the Solution, in its way, is a story of the end of innocence, or at least of one person’s innocence. And it’s the story of the moment in which a still-young person settles into a particular kind of selfhood and becomes who they are always going to be.
I had a very good time writing Part of the Solution, and I hope it shows. I got to be twenty-eight again, to develop a crush on an inappropriate love object, to get the giggles and stoned munchies on marijuana (well, I still do some of that), and to quote Bob Dylan lines to my heart’s content. But I also got to write a Bildungsroman of sorts, albeit a sometimes-somber one. I don’t think I realized that while I was writing, but it pleases me now.
Speaking of the Bildungsroman, by the way, nobody I know has caught the literary reference in the last line of the novel. It’s from one of the greatest of Victorian novels. If you get it, oh lovers of 19th century fiction, please write and tell me.