Author: Karen Odden

Well, it’s been almost six weeks since my book published, and it has not been a train wreck … with the engines careening off the tracks and the carriages going up in flames.
 
I’ve received reviews with everything from five stars to one. Nine-paragraph reviews and one-word reviews. I’ve had people write to me in the middle of the night saying they just finished it and simply had to tell me how much they liked it. I’ve had people who praised all the “fascinating historical details” and those who said there was “just too much” about railways and stock markets. I’ve had people tell me the romance was “sweet, sweet,” “passionate,” and “tepid.” I’ve had people tell me that they went online because they didn’t believe there were such a thing as railway surgeons, and then they were pleased that I’d taken the time to get my facts wonderfully right. I’ve also been corrected by someone who told me that in fact, the Italians do not call laudanum “bella donna” (although a railway surgeon might be excused for thinking they did).
 
If responses are cards, this was what, in sales, we called “a full deck.”
 
When I was in my twenties, I did door-to-door sales. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. (This was before childbirth or writing a book.) One of our sales exercises involved a deck of cards. Each person in the room would receive a card. Anything with a picture was a sale (“yes”). A 2-8 was a “no.” A 9 or 10 was a mean, nasty rejection. The trainee would go around the room to each person, the cards in random order. As soon as the trainee’s attitude started to slump, the person holding the card could choose to say “no.” You get the idea. The whole idea was that the salesperson had to present the same positive, friendly approach to EVERY single one. On the one hand, I found it a bummer to discover that I often had very little control over the outcome of a sales call. But it was also oddly reassuring to discover that the response often had NOTHING to do with me. My job was to show up, keep my side of the street clean, be consistent, and keep going. Other people’s response really wasn’t my responsibility.
 
Neverthless, it is easier to do in a training room than in real life.
 
One day I walked into an office and had the owner snarl at me, “Get out of here! I don’t want any of your crap, you stupid … ”
 
I don’t even remember what else she said. Crestfallen, bruised, with a twisted, horrible feeling in my gut, I went to the next door. This woman was very polite, listened to what I had to say, and even expressed some interest. I was just about to walk out the door when she said, “Oh—by the way, don’t go next door. Her husband divorced her a few weeks ago, and she’s about to lose her lease. She’s just not in a good place.”
 
It was a life-changer for me.
 
And I realize, as a writer, I cannot ask myself, “What will people think of this?” Down that path looms the darkness of writer’s block, at least for me. The proper questions are, “Have I wholly immersed myself in this city, these crimes? Have I done my research? Am I letting myself muck around in the rag-and-bone shop of the hearts of these characters?”
 
If the answers are yes, I keep on.

The idea for my next novel, Down a Dark River, began with a story I read years ago about a white judge who had freed a white drunk driver who had run down and killed a black girl as she crossed the street. As you might expect, the article focused a good deal on the obvious racial aspect–the pernicious alliance ostensibly forged between the judge and the driver based on their race. But it occurred to me that there might be a different, less obvious issue at stake. As I reread the story, feeling the injustice of the trial’s outcome, and empathizing with the rage and pain of her family, I wondered, Would the judge have responded differently if someone he loved had been killed by a drunk driver? That is, would an experience of similar pain (one that would perhaps call up a natural empathy) have caused the judge to forge an alliance with the girl’s family that would trump that of race?

Clearly, no verdict could bring the girl back to life. But a guilty verdict would at least have provided the family with a sense that their daughter’s (taken) life had value, and that their tragic experience was recognized rather than callously disavowed. In the absence of that acknowledgement, how did the family feel–for were they wounded not once, but twice?

From there, my imagination took over with the “what ifs.” Would the father of the dead girl think about killing the judge’s daughter? (Does this make me twisted? Perhaps. But it doesn’t make me original, certainly. We’ve seen this plot before; the book that comes to my mind is John Grisham’s A Time To Kill.) The life-for-a-life sounds akin to the behavior of the kid on the playground who steals somebody else’s toy because somebody stole his first. But no matter what he does, the father can’t steal his daughter back from death. So is there something else going on? Maybe, at bottom, part of what would cause the father to take revenge is to make the judge understand his pain. Maybe there’s a logic of revenge that runs like this: If I can’t make you empathize with my pain through my words, I’ll make you feel it directly. I imagine that in cases where pain is acknowledged in the symbolic realm (in language), there may be less of a need to reenact, or recreate, it in the material one.

So no more spoiler. There’s lots of revenge … and eventually some empathy … in my next book.