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| Lamar Herrin, author |
In this interview Lamar Herrin discusses his book Fractures, a novel in which he explores the conflicts that develop between the members of the
family of a landowner when a natural gas company plans to do some hydrofracking in
their fields.
Lamar Herrin is a distinguished
author and educator. He has published five novels, most recently, House of the
Deaf, and one memoir, Romancing Spain. Stories of his have appeared in
Harper's, Epoch, The New Yorker, and in The Paris Review, which awarded him its
Aga Kahn fiction prize. From 1977 until 2006 he taught literature and
creative writing at Cornell
University
OE:
Your last two books, House of the Deaf and Romancing Spain, were set in Spain United States America
LH: The story did. Looking back, I think it's fair to say that Fractures
came into being when I walked into the Susquehanna court house in Montrose , PA Pennsylvania
and New York State
OE: I
have been to Montrose , Pa.
LH: No, I didn't go to Montrose (or to the Susquehanna County Court House)
"looking for a story" about the gas drilling, but I did go because
there was so much talk about the drilling (much of it wildly exaggerated, I
suspected) and what harm it could do to our community if it came north that I
wanted to see for myself. Dimock, seven or eight miles from Montrose, was
in the news then for its contaminated wells, so I thought I would drive through
there and then nose around a bit in Montrose, the county seat. Like any
concerned citizen, I was worried about the environmental price we were willing
to pay for "energy independence," but I was also fascinated, almost
metaphorically, by the little that I knew about the process. Drill down a
mile, say, and then out, horizontally, for perhaps another mile. Down and
out. Plumb your depths and then swing wide. And anybody you swung
wide under was "compulsorily integrated" into your scheme of things,
or you into theirs. And that very narrow bed of shale you had to drill
along through. All of this spoke to my poetic imagination before I began
to be alarmed and to draw the potentially dangerous conclusions. But it
wasn't long before I began to see it all as the context for a family drama. So
maybe the best way to put it is that I was playing an as yet unformulated hunch
by driving down to Montrose and Dimock ,
PA.
OE:
The concept of "family" is quite strong in House of the Deaf.
and in several of your other novels. What made you conceive
of Fractures as a family novel, rather than say an "environmental
conflict," novel?
LH: From my point of view it's fairly simple. Drama is all about
conflict, and conflict at the closest of quarters and in its richest vein can
most often be found in families. The emotions get compacted: love-hate,
attraction-repulsion, allegiance-revolt, and so on. The
to-drill-or-not-to-drill question is complicated in its own right, and when
studied in the context of family loyalties and disloyalties it can become very
intense. Fractures is not a muckraking book. I have my
personal feelings about the folly or wisdom of hydrofracking, but what I was
trying to do in this novel was "use" the controversy to reveal
character in the context of a family, where a powerful emotion can double back
on its opposite very quickly. It's hard for me to understand how you
could write a novel that wasn't about family. When I'm reading a novel and a
character is introduced, I immediately wonder, yes, but who is his mother, who
is his father? Are there brothers and sisters and so on? For a
character to stand family-free a huge drama must have taken place some time
before, and I want to know all about that.
OE: Can you give the readers
a brief summary, without giving too much away, of the plot of Fractures? Also when will it be available in book stores.
LH: I've never known a
novelist who can "briefly summarize" his novel for the simple reason
that as soon as he enters that field of fiction again, again he wants to flesh
it out. I can say that Fractures will be published by St. Martin 's Press on November 12 and that it is about
320 pages long. It is told in the past tense in the third person from
eight, but principally from five, points of view. These points of view
correspond to the members of the Joyner family, chief among them Frank Joyner,
a sixty year old retired architect on whose shoulders (and conscience) rests
the decision of whether to permit drilling (to "frack") the family field or
not. This field is located in a region in an unnamed northeastern state, but
which will quickly be identifiable as New York
State and the region as the Finger Lakes . There are two other point of view
characters, both of them outside the family but who in some ways aspire to be
in. There's a bullying ex-brother-in-law of Frank Joyner, a criminal lawyer
from New York City , and there's a Texas roughneck become
gas company landman, who falls in love with Frank Joyner's daughter. And
I could go on—and on. All of these characters have a voice, and not one
of them is free of doubts as to what the final decision should be. The
only constant is the land. The novel goes down and the novel goes out,
following the trajectory of the drilling itself. In many ways it
illustrates the drilling refrain: Plumb deep and then swing wide.
Compulsory integration.
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