Place, in Fiction

Lately my favorite books feature place prominently. I love to feel familiar with an area as much as with the characters that inhabit it. I like exploring the peculiarities of strange locales, even if within the same country. Woodrell’s Ozarks seems as far away from Tom Wolfe’s New York city as Mars.  An intriguing locale can never replace weak writing, but if the writer is in control of her material, it adds tremendously to the enjoyment.

Big cities work well, because they are perfect for egomaniacs, the ambitious, but also great for those who want to hide.

I remember reading about South Africa as known by Doris Lessing.  I’m thinking of Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, set in 1950’s South Africa and her first novel. I also still love anything by Graham Greene who is often read for his adventures in foreign locations. He still travels well, both through place and time. My favorite of his, also a lesser lauded work,  The Honorary Consul,  is a masterpiece set in South America.

I think this significantly adds to the draw of a work, offering up the eccentricities and particularities in an area that go a long way toward providing insight into the sort of person who would wind up in that locale. Better still, the way the environment helped to form the individual.  Stories that are so entangled in place that almost couldn’t happen anywhere else make for a very vibrant telling.

In my piece which takes place in 1935, Elle loves No Name Key but understands that most wonder, ” why anyone with choice would dredge, dig, burn and chop away the strangling vines, the lethal weeds to scrape what they could out of the soil.”

1935 is also the year the hurricane hit,  intrinsic to the identity of the Florida Keys.

Annie Proulx explores that theme over and over in her novels, circling the hold place has regardless of how ill it serves its inhabitants. In That Old Ace in The Hole, Bob Dollar, (best name, ever) a visitor to Texas gets caught up in the swell of change that has forged the American West over the past hundred years. It is one of her lesser known novels, but one of my favorites. Speaking of Annie Proulx, who can separate the Newfoundland coast from The Shipping News?

From a writers perspective, a rich setting provides instant interest when handled with a light touch. Maybe it is easier to come in as an outsider, more compelling to write about an unfamiliar setting, seeing it with a eye less jaded than someone who had lived there for years or generations. The newness, the richness of place is often lost on long term inhabitants.  Worse yet is the inability to be critical.

When we moved here I heard many tell me that the glory days of Key West were long gone, I had missed out. When I asked just when those days happened, oddly enough, the best times dovetailed with when they first arrived. But I do digress.

Mysteries of the human heart can sometimes be accessed by shining a light on the stubbornness of inhabitants who don’t know when to leave; those who stay despite the risk of losing everything.  Often economic reasons are claimed, but these practicalities may disguise a greater truth.  There may be other reasons ripe for exploration for those who rebuild in tornado alley, Key West after a hurricane, the meth infested Ozarks of Daniel Woodrell.

I first became interested in Florida when I read Susan Orleans beautifully researched and written book, The Orchid Thief. She tells on the entire state, the old charlatan shapeshifter, filled with promises and lures. Another great read.

So when I had a bit of of writers block, I chose a that is rich in meaning, but one that I had not yet deciphered. Instead of describing the landscape, I tried to imagine a story that might take place on No Name Key in an era that I wanted to know more about. If I visit this place in my mind every day,  stop everything else and listen very intently, I just may find out what happens next.