Tracing the Workings of Divine Purpose
Or: I refine the cocktail party pitch for The Good Death of Kate Montclair
Recently I was at the proverbial cocktail party and the subject of The Good Death of Kate Montclair came up. An Old Fashioned asked me the obvious question: “What’s it about?
“It’s about a woman with a terminal illness,” I said, “an inoperable brain tumor.”
The Old Fashioned interjected sardonically: “That sounds fun.”
Admittedly, I was a bit stung by this, and I tapered off. The Old Fashioned’s comment had illuminated a problem:
How to pitch a book in which the reader knows from the beginning that the protagonist is dying? How to avoid making the whole thing sound depressing and a fait accompli?
My Revised Cocktail Party Pitch
A story places a protagonist in conditions of extreme pressure. And what greater pressure is there than the inescapable prospect of one’s death—not in some indefinable future, but soon. Tolstoy plays with the same scenario in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
But a story is mainly about what that protagonist does under that pressure. Does he cave? Or does he, as Hemingway would have it, summon a certain grace?
All rides on the response to the conditions of pressure.
My cocktail party pitch took the wrong approach. I started off by naming the conditions of extreme pressure (“It’s about a woman with a terminal illness”) but I should have started by including her reaction to those conditions of pressure. So let me try again. What’s my book about?
It’s about a woman with a terminal illness who decides, on the advice of an old friend she meets at a death discussion group known as the Death Symposium, to break Virginia law and undertake an assisted suicide.
That pitch doesn’t tell you everything about my story. But it gives you the basic impetus of the plot. It gives you enough to wonder: what happens next? Does she go through with it? Or does she change her mind or get caught before she can carry out her plan? And who is this friend advising her?
Waugh’s “Warning”
To think about the pitch for my novel raises the question of its genre. For many a story pitch begins with the identification of genre, the kind of story that it is.
I don’t consider myself a genre writer. In my last post I reflected that, even though I have a humorous children’s fantasy series, I don’t really think of myself as a fantasy author. But it doesn’t really matter what I think.
Anyone who produces works of fantasy is a fantasy author.
I have produced works of fantasy.
Therefore, I am a fantasy author.
It’s tough to argue with that logic.
And it’s rather senseless of me not to consider myself a genre writer. All writers are genre writers. They all work within, play creatively with, the conventions of a certain kind of story.
So what is the genre of The Good Death of Kate Montclair?
At a recent marketing meeting with the team at Chrism Press, I was asked about the genre of my book and I at first replied that it was not “genre fiction” in the current marketing sense that includes thrillers, mysteries, horror, and romances of various kinds.
I went on to say that, if I had to classify it in a genre, that Kate Montclair is literary fiction, with thriller and mystery elements.
But now I’m not so sure of that description.
I called it literary fiction, for that is the current marketing term for stories that depict a contemporary drama that does not accentuate the tropes of “genre fiction.” But the genre of literary fiction does not really capture what I have tried to do in my novel.
A few posts back I mentioned Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Brideshead Revisited is a contemporary human drama that, if published today, would likely be marketed as literary fiction. But it’s instructive to consider how Waugh and his publisher marketed it at the time. The first edition of the novel appeared with a “Warning” on its dust jacket (omitted in America):
When I wrote my first novel sixteen years ago, my publishers advised me, and I readily agreed, to prefix the warning that it was ‘meant to be funny’…. Now, in a more somber decade, I must provide them with another text, and in honesty to the patrons who have supported me hitherto, state that Brideshead Revisited is not meant to be funny. There are passages of buffoonery, but the general theme is at once romantic and eschatological.
Waugh then went on to provide the following one-sentence pitch for Brideshead:
It is ambitious, perhaps intolerably presumptuous; nothing less than an attempt to trace the workings of divine purpose in a pagan world, in the lives of an English Catholic family, half-paganized themselves, in the world of 1923-39.
This pitch makes clear why it’s not accurate to call Brideshead Revisited literary fiction according to the current usage of that term. For in Brideshead Waugh, contrary to most current authors of literary fiction, is most interested in telling a story that stands athwart the age’s expressive individualism.
More precisely, he is interested in “tracing the workings of divine purpose in a pagan world.”
Who is his audience then? In the same “Warning” he says:
Whom then can I hope to please? Perhaps those who have the leisure to read a book word by word for the interest of the writer’s use of language, perhaps those who look to the future with black forebodings and need more solid comfort than rosy memories. For the latter I have given my hero, and them, if they will allow me, a hope, not indeed, that anything but disaster lies ahead, but that the human spirit, redeemed, can survive all disasters.
That’s my kind of dust-jacket copy.
What Waugh does in this “Warning” is clarify a novelistic genre that is distinctive in the modern world. Call it “Catholic fiction,” if you like.
Without of course comparing my work to Brideshead, I tried to do something similar in The Good Death of Kate Montclair. I tried to write a story that traced the workings of divine purpose in a pagan world, in the lives of a small group of friends, more than half-paganized themselves, in the world from 1986 to Covid Year 2020.
What of the thriller and mystery elements?
Yes. There the genre discussion must deepen. To go further, I would need to talk more about how my book touches upon the Romantic tradition of the Gothic, and of the inspiration I took from Muriel Spark. And as that’s a longer discussion, I will look forward to picking up with you next time.
P.S. For the story of Waugh’s “Warning” on the original British dust-jacket for Brideshead Revisited I am indebted to Douglas Lane Patey’s superlative The Life of Evelyn Waugh (pictured above), Chapter 6, p. 224.
P.P.S. I am very pleased to announce that the Patria Christmas novella, The Quest for Clodnus’s Collectibles, is now available on Amazon.