The Fire in Fiction (4 page)

Victor Mancini continues to excoriate himself for the next several pages. Clearly he hates himself; or at least the passive boy that he was. That, I believe, is why we care. Victor is berating himself for putting up with an intolerable childhood. (I mean, really, corn dogs?) Palahn-iuk's narrator has found strength in adulthood: strength enough to see that he was neglected and to be angry about that. Who wouldn't be sympathetic? Who hasn't kicked themselves?

To put it differently, Victor Mancini has achieved self-awareness. He judges himself harshly, but even so he is open-eyed. He knows
he is not perfect and we have to respect that. He is brutally funny about himself. How many of us can say the same? His voice rings clear and strong.

What about protagonists who are simply lost, wandering, down-and-out, or without hope? Judging by their frequency in submissions, such protagonists must be easy to imagine; however, they are hard to like. I rarely do. Not in submissions, anyway. I not only want to turn away from their unhappy situations, there's often little reason to feel they are worth my pity. Anxious to delve into their suffering, their authors forget to give me a reason to wish them free of it.

Could there be a hero with less hope than the nameless father in Cormac McCarthy's
The Road
(2006)? Alone with his young son in a gray, post-apocalyptic landscape, the man has no goal other than to push their shopping cart of meager supplies further down the road in front of them and survive.
The Road
is grim. Hope is nowhere. These are the end times. Nothing is going to get better. The few other survivors are desperate cannibals. The man and his son have a gun with two bullets, saved in case suicide is necessary.

Depressed yet? Hey, wait until the movie. Still,
The Road
won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, plus the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was widely praised by reviewers.
Entertainment Weekly
named it the best book of the last twenty-five years. It was an Oprah's Book Club pick, and the best-selling trade paperback novel in the year of its reprint. What gives? Was everyone in the mood for a downer?

I doubt that. So many readers can't be wrong, and indeed
The Road
is compelling and heartbreaking. How does McCarthy make us care? There is only one way: We must feel compassion, and quickly, for his hero, referred to in the text only as
the man.
After speedily setting the scene, McCarthy shows us in the man's dismal morning routine what matters to him:

When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with
their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep. He'd pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets. He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.

I'm right here.

I know.

Hemingway-esque minimalism is an unforgiving style. Stripping a text of its emotion means that emotion can only be evoked through the action of the story—not as easy as it sounds. McCarthy, though, has mastered minimalism. The man's spare gestures (preparing breakfast such as it is, worrying that "this was not a safe place," assuring his son "I'm right here") quickly convey that in this hopeless world there is, after all, one thing that matters to the man: his son. He loves his son. In most stories that would not be remarkable. In the world of
The Road,
to feel anything so strongly is a miracle.

In other words, even the hopeless man has something to hope for, a cause to chase, a reason to push on, someone to save. In the gray wasteland, his human spirit lives. The man in McCarthy's novel is dying. What will happen to his son when he goes? The story's tension derives in part from whether the author's vision of mankind will in the end prove bleak or hopeful. What keeps us reading, I believe, is that for one man, at least, love is a big enough reason to keep going.

Here, then, is some good news: The techniques of putting over dark protagonists are applicable to all protagonists. Find the secret strength in your main character, and it won't matter whether you are working with a hero or an anti-hero. Your readers will bond with both.

CUTTING HEROES DOWN TO SIZE

We have been looking at how to quickly show what is heroic in protagonists who aren't. What about protagonists who
are
heroic? If your protagonist is strong, do-right, active, principled, and upstanding, then you don't have an issue, right?

Wrong. Genuine heroes present as big a challenge, in their way, as downers. Heroes or heroines who are noble and true can easily become cardboard. Think of feisty romance heroines, hard-boiled detectives, save-the-world suspense heroes, fantasy orphan-princes, sassy vampire slayers ... these familiar lead characters cannot hold our interest over the long haul of a novel if they are one-dimensional. Indeed, if they are to keep us reading for more than a chapter or two, they must quickly become human.

Suspense novelist Tami Hoag is good at tough-as-nails protagonists. In
The Alibi Man
(2007), she reintroduces former undercover cop Elena Estes (previously featured in
Dark Horse,
2002). Injured in a prior case, burdened with guilt over the death of a friend and co-worker in a bust gone wrong, Elena now lives in the guest house of a wealthy Palm Beach friend who owns a stable where Elena has found a happier life, sort of:

I am not a cop. I am not a private investigator, despite all rumors to the contrary. I ride horses for a living but don't make a nickel doing it. I am an outcast from my chosen profession and I don't want another.

Get the idea? Elena is the kind of kick-ass heroine who dominates contemporary women's suspense. Outspoken, opinionated, take no you-know-what, Elena's got a big chip on her shoulder. So, how do you feel about her? Is her strength attractive or off-putting? A bit of both, perhaps, but it is the off-putting quality that matters at the moment. Hoag knows that we need to see another side of Elena, and quickly, so she delivers it to us just a page later:

All my life I have preferred the company of horses to people. Horses are honest, straightforward creatures
without guile or ulterior motive. You always know where you stand with a horse. In my experience, I can't say the same for human beings.

That morning I didn't settle in with my usual first cup of coffee to listen to the soft sounds of the horses eating. I hadn't slept well—not that I ever did. Worse than usual, I should say. Twenty minutes here, ten minutes there. The argument had played over and over in my mind, banging off the wall of my skull and leaving me with a dull, throbbing headache.

I was selfish. I was a coward. I was a bitch.

Some of it was true. Maybe all of it. ...

Here's the other side of this kick-ass heroine: She's not perfect; she knows it, admits it, and (at least a little) regrets it. At this point we don't need to know what the argument was about, or with whom, we just need to know that Elena Estes is human. She is not the embodiment of an impossible ideal. She has personal problems, just like everyone. By quickly cutting her heroine down to size, Hoag makes her not only real but a character who has room for change; that, in turn, signals to us that there also is story to come.

It's a strong story, too. Elena finds in a canal the body of a beautiful young woman with whom she worked in the stables. Drawn into the investigation, she runs afoul of a group of Palm Beach bad boys who provide alibis for each other when needed. One of them is a hated ex-fiance. Who really did it, though, is a question unanswered until the final pages.

Lisa Gardner is another top suspense writer with a handy knack for tough detectives. In
The Survivors Club
(2002), she introduces Providence, Rhode Island, police detective Roan Griffin and immediately lets us know that he's not a superhero:

At 8:31
A.M.
Monday morning, Rhode Island State Police Detective Sergeant Roan Griffin was already late for his 8:30 briefing. This was not a good thing. It was his first

day back on the job in eighteen months. He should probably be on time. Hell, he should probably be early. Show up at headquarters at 8:15
A.M.,
pumped up, sharply pressed, crisply saluting.
Here I am, I am ready.

And then ... ?

"Welcome back," they would greet him.
(Hopefully.)

"Thanks," he would say.
(Probably.)

"How are you feeling?" they'd ask.
(Suspiciously.)

"Good," he'd reply.
(Too easily.)

Ah, shit. Good was a stupid answer. Too often said to be often believed. He'd say good, and they'd stare at him harder, trying to read between the lines. Good like you're ready to crack open a case file, or good like we can trust you with a loaded firearm? It was an interesting question.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and tried again.

"Welcome back," they'd say.

"It's good to be back," he'd say.

"How are you doing?" they'd ask.

"My anxiety is operating within normal parameters," he'd reply.

No. Absolutely not. That kind of psychobabble made even him want to whoop his ass. Forget it. He should've gone with his father's recommendation and walked in wearing a T-shirt that read "You're only Jealous Because the Voices are Talking to Me."

At least they all could've had a good laugh.

Measure your feelings about Roan Griffin after this introduction. He's your prototypical wounded detective. (Why has he been off the job for eighteen months? His wife died of cancer.) What makes him appealing despite his all-too-typical psychological flaw? I believe it is the self-deprecating humor that Gardner gives him. At least the guy can laugh at himself.

In the next few paragraphs we find out that before his compassion leave, Roan Griffin was the lead investigator on many high-profile cases. Had Gardner begun with that information, we'd already be pulling away from her protagonist. He'd be too perfect, cardboard, an example none of us could live up to. By first making him human, Gardner makes it possible for us to like him before he even makes a move.

Roan Griffin will have to make some big moves, too. He's immediately plunged into a twisty case in which a brutal rapist is assassinated on the opening morning of his trial. Minutes later, the assassin's car blows sky high. The trail of culpability is thus neatly covered. The chief suspects are the three victims who escaped the rapist alive, the Survivors Club of the title. Roan's story is layered with other problems, as well, making for a high-impact read.

Wounded heroes and heroines are easy to overdo. Too much baggage and angst isn't exactly a party invitation for one's readers. What's the best balance? And which comes first, the strength or the humility? It doesn't matter. What's important is that one is quickly followed by the other.

Michael Connelly is one of our most popular crime fiction writers, thanks largely to his passionate and all-too-human LAPD detective Harry Bosch. In
The Brass Verdict
(2008), Connelly brings together Bosch and his half-brother (introduced in
The Lincoln Lawyer,
2005), defense attorney Mickey Haller.

Connelly opens
The Brass Verdict
with a sequence that establishes Mickey's creds as a tough defense attorney. In the trial of a drug dealer accused of killing two college students, Mickey seizes upon a fatal lie told by the chief witness for the prosecution, a jailhouse snitch. He rips open the prosecution's case. Assistant district attorney Jerry Vincent offers a more lenient sentence, but Mickey's loathsome client wants to roll the dice. Mickey gets him acquitted.

Jerry Vincent is ruined. Zip up to the present day. Connelly knows that although Mickey showed strength in doing his job, morally he was wrong. He set a vicious killer free. If we are to cheer for Mickey now, the moral balance must be leveled. So, we learn that in subsequent years, Jerry Vincent prospered as a celebrity defender in private practice. Jerry even thanked Mickey for showing him the light.

That, though, is not enough to put Mickey Haller on the right side of the ethical line. Mickey must pay a price for his too-dogged defense of a killer, and so Connelly punishes him. Mickey goes out of action for a year for reasons he explains to administrative judge Mary Townes Holder when she summons him to announce that he has inherited the law practice and lucrative open cases of the recently murdered Jerry Vincent:

"Judge, I had a case a couple years ago. The client's name was Louis Roulet. He was—"