Three Books on a Table

When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers.

That is the method of the Fractional Fiction series, and this essay is about watching the method work: what the story is, what each source gave, and where the welds are, because in this series the welds are never hidden. The notes in the back of the novel name all three texts, tell you where to find them, and mark the one invention the book contains so that you always know where the documented world ends. Eleven books in, that discipline is the series. The fraction must be real. The fiction must not falsify it. And the reader must be able to walk back along every thread.

The Story

A woman has held a wildlife rehabilitation permit on a hill above Puget Sound for twenty-two years, at a place called Green Point. Her ledger is a green book of four thousand one hundred and six ruled lines, and every line ends in one word from a column headed Disposition: Released, Transferred, Placed, Escaped, Died, or Euthanized. Those six words are real. They are the working vocabulary of wildlife records in this country, and the whole novel lives inside the space between a life and the single word that survives it.

Eleven of her lines belong to children. Quietly, across two decades, without a program or a budget or a plaque, her facility became the place a rural county brought children it could not place: after hours, between systems, hurt and unclaimed, arriving the way the animals arrived. She took each one in, and when each one moved on, she opened the book and chose a word.

The novel is one night. At five minutes to ten in the evening, a young woman sits down across the office table and says almost nothing until morning. At eight, a state Inspector will come up the gravel with a form the law obliges her to serve, and she will be polite, and she will take the records. Between those two clock points the woman tells all eleven children, one at a time, in an order she has chosen for a reason the book keeps until it hurts. Under the whole telling sits one line in the green book that she falsified, in ink, on purpose, and the night is her one chance to explain it. The engine that runs all ninety-eight thousand words is a sentence from the first chapter: nobody in this story is lying, and nobody in it does anything wrong. Every operator of the machine is decent. A child died anyway. A government record is false anyway. The book asks how both of those things can be true at once, and then it spends ten hours answering. And the chair matters as much as the voice. The book is built as testimony, which means the silent listener is doing the oldest job in literature, the one Dante invented a whole afterlife to dramatize: staying, and hearing, and carrying it back out.

The First Book: The Ground

Emma-Lindsay Squier was born in Marion, Indiana, in 1892, was called Emily by everyone who knew her, grew up partly on the Chautauqua circuit where her father sold and lectured, and landed eventually on Puget Sound, where she wrote the animal pieces that the Cosmopolitan Book Corporation gathered in 1922 as The Wild Heart, with drawings by Paul Bransom and an introduction by Gene Stratton-Porter. She wrote for the big slick magazines of her day, went to Hollywood, and died of tuberculosis at Saranac Lake in 1941, at forty-eight. Her book is in the public domain, it is findable in an afternoon, and it is the ground The Disposition is built on, in the most literal sense available to fiction: the narrator of my novel has read it, because in the novel’s geography it was written eleven miles from the office where she is talking.

What the novel takes from Squier first is a law. Stratton-Porter’s introduction, which carries the wonderful and terrible title ‘Some Youngsters Find the Wrong Parents,’ spends its length praising the rare child who is born without fear of wild things, and begging parents to protect that quality where they find it. The novel’s first epigraph is Stratton-Porter’s own sentence: “When the wild thing entered the atmosphere of fear and was surrounded by the taint of that acid which is exhaled from the body of any human being experiencing fear, that instant it was on guard and ready to strike.” Out of that idea the rehabilitation ethic of the novel is built, the fearlessness law: a wild creature that stops being afraid of us cannot go home, because its fearlessness will kill it. Every gate, every rule, every refusal in the woman’s facility descends from that one principle, and so does the book’s darkest question, which is what the same law does when the creature in the enclosure is a child who has stopped being afraid of the wrong things.

And the novel takes Squier’s stories themselves, because the woman of my book read The Wild Heart at nine years old and has been arguing with it ever since. Squier’s family fed everything they loved, apples to the rabbit, gum-drops to the seal, and taught the rabbit to come to a whistle, and one day it came out of the underbrush for the wrong whistle and a man shot it, and Squier spent the rest of her life keeping a clearing open on a hill trail so the ferns would not close over the place where it happened. Her seal robbed the fishermen’s nets, could not be taught otherwise, and was given away to men with a bigger boat, and she stood on the float and heard him barking from the hold. My narrator reads those chapters the way a working professional reads a gifted amateur, with love and a red pen. She concludes, in one of the lines I am proudest of in the book, that every act of feeding in that book is an act of binding, and Squier knew it, and wrote it down, and was nine years old in her heart and could not have told you what she had noticed. The clearing kept open on the hill trail becomes, in my novel, the reason the woman gives for the whole impossible shape of her life.

The Second Book: The Physics

Hesiod was a farmer at Ascra, in Boeotia, under Mount Helicon, and he is one of the two oldest voices in Greek literature. The Theogony is, on its surface, the least literary object imaginable: a list. Names, parentage, and what became of each. It is, in other words, a ledger, and that is the first thing the novel takes from it. A column of begettings and outcomes, kept in meter because meter was how a farmer’s culture made a record permanent, is the direct ancestor of a green book with four thousand one hundred and six ruled lines. My narrator, who distrusts every ornament, goes back to the old lists at one point to see what they are actually built out of, and finds what every reader of Hesiod finds: the list is a machine for remembering who was disposed of, and how.

The second thing the novel takes is the plot of the list, which is the oldest plot there is. In the Theogony, generation after generation of gods is warned that its children will replace it, and generation after generation answers the warning the same way: the father swallows the children, or buries them, or nails the door shut, and is replaced anyway, by the child who was hidden, the one the machine missed. Sky, then Kronos, then Zeus. The succession myth is the deep physics of The Disposition. Every system in my novel that receives a child it fears, and files that child, and closes over the file, is running Hesiod’s program, and the ending of my book, which I will not give away here beyond saying that a ledger changes hands, is a succession scene as strict as anything in the poem. The child the machine could not digest comes back, and the kingdom, such as it is, passes.

The third thing the novel takes from Hesiod is sitting in plain sight as the second epigraph, and it is the closest thing the book has to a confession of method. It is what the Muses say to the shepherd at the opening of the poem, in Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s 1914 translation: “We know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.” A novel whose crime is one falsified line in a true record, written by a woman who explains that the false word was the true one, is that sentence turned into a machine and run for a night. The Muses’ boast is the book’s moral problem wearing a laurel.

The Third Book: The Shape

In the summer of 1861, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife Frances died after her dress caught fire, and for years afterward the only room of his grief he could stand in was a translation. He worked through Dante line by line, and on Wednesday evenings Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell and William Dean Howells sat with him and checked the cantos against the Italian, and the result was the first great American Inferno, made by a man translating himself out of the fire one tercet at a time. That is the English my narrator reads Dante in, and I chose it on purpose, because The Disposition is also a book made inside a grief by a person who can only approach the fire through form.

From Dante the novel takes its architecture. The retrospective chapters descend like rings, each child a circle deeper, with the teller walking a silent listener downward and promising, exactly as the pilgrim’s guide promises, that the worst is further in. It takes the manner of address: hell, in Dante, is a guided tour delivered to one person, and my novel is a confession delivered to one chair. And it takes contrapasso, the fitting of the punishment to the sin, and re-keys it for the world of forms. In the Inferno, the sinner becomes the shape of the sin forever. In my novel, the woman states the modern version outright, in a sentence I will quote whole because it is the thesis: “The punishment is the filing, and it has been carried out perfectly, by everybody, for eight years, and it is going on this morning while the two of us sit here.” Nobody in my book is burned or frozen. They are summarized. The word goes in the column, the column closes over the life, and the sentence is eternal because the record is.

And from Dante the novel takes its commission. The third epigraph is Ciacco’s plea from the sixth canto, in the narrator’s own rendering: “But when you are back in the sweet world, I ask you to carry me into the minds of other people.” That is what a shade asks of a living visitor, and it is what the woman is asking of the silent chair for ten hours, and it is, finally, what any book asks of any reader. The listener in my novel says almost nothing all night because Dante says almost nothing all poem. Witness is the job.

The Braid

So the assignment of roles, when the three books went to work, came out like this. Squier gave the ground and the surface: the actual water, the actual animals, the actual sentences of a woman writing about creatures with her whole heart and half her judgment, and the law of fear that governs the gates. Hesiod gave the physics: the list as the oldest human record, and succession as what lists are for, the generations devouring what they fear and being replaced by what they missed. Dante gave the shape and the address: the rings, the one silent listener, the punishment fitted to the sin, and the plea that makes witness a moral act. None of the three could say what the novel says. Squier has no machinery of state; Hesiod has no interiority; Dante has no paperwork. Braided, they can hold a woman at a table with a green book and an Inspector coming up the gravel at eight, and the braid is the new thing. You can watch the registers hand off inside a single paragraph. When the narrator retells Squier’s seal, the surface is pure 1922 nature sketch, gum-drops and a barking hold; the outcome is pure Theogony, a loved thing swallowed by a bigger power because it could not be taught the ethics of the water; and the address is pure Dante, because the whole account aims at one silent hearer whose judgment matters, and the telling is itself the sentence being served. Three registers, one weld, and the seams left showing on purpose, because the seams are the argument. That is the entire wager of Fractional Fiction: that the classic texts are load-bearing, and that setting them into a new structure honors them more than another respectful reading ever could.

The discipline stays strict about where reality ends. Real, all of it, except one thing: the six words, the permit system, the treaty signed at Point No Point in 1855, the science of mothers carrying their children’s cells for decades, cited in the Bibliography. The novel contains exactly one invention, the traceability of that carried lineage, and the notes declare it, because a book about a falsified line in a true record had better keep its own accounts clean. Everything else can be walked back to a source: Squier and Hesiod and Longfellow’s Dante are all in the public domain, all findable tonight, and the back matter tells you where. Eleven books into this series, that remains the deal I make with a reader. You are owed the seams.

The Disposition is out now in Kindle and paperback, and everything else, including questions for reading groups, is at bolesbooks.com. It runs one night, it stands alone, and it ends where it was always going to end, at first light, on a beach trail, with a green book going down to the water on a young shoulder, past a clearing somebody kept open for a hundred years so the ferns would not close over the place where something happened.