Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

Sitting down to talk with the writer Dennis Lehane, one of the biggest challenges is not to stumble into spoilers. The author of novels like Mystic River and Shutter Island is dedicated to the art of keeping his reader off balance, as his complex and frequently troubled characters are brought to face uncomfortable and sometimes terrifying truths: the result is a kind of suspense that far outstrips the machinations of an ordinary thriller. On this episode of the podcast, Miwa Messer sits down with Dennis Lehane to talk – spoiler-free! – about latest novel, Since We Fell, and his career writing heart-stopping fiction.

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Since We Fell follows Rachel Childs, a former journalist who, after an on-air mental breakdown, now lives as a virtual shut-in. In all other respects, however, she enjoys an ideal life with an ideal husband. Until a chance encounter on a rainy afternoon causes that ideal life to fray. As does Rachel’s marriage. As does Rachel herself. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer unimaginable fears and mind-altering truths.

See more from Dennis Lehane here.

Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.

 

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We are often warned against allowing considerations of an author’s personal circumstances to influence our view of his or her work, but it is impossible to read Helen Dunmore’s Birdcage Walk without dwelling on the unhappy fact that she died last March, less than three months after the novel’s publication in the UK. What is more, Dunmore brings her death into the picture herself, offering a gloss to the book by including an afterword in which she says that, while she was not consciously aware that she was dying as she wrote this, the last of her fifteen novels, she nonetheless believes that somewhere in her creative self she did know. “The question of what is left behind by a life haunts the novel,” she tells us. And it is through the book’s several created individuals that she expresses her melancholy fascination with the way most human beings, despite productive, busy lives of consequence and influence in their own time, simply vanish from history.

Birdcage Walk is, in fact, marked by death and loss throughout — beginning with a brief note on Bristol’s late-eighteenth-century building boom, which collapsed when war broke out between England and France in 1793. It left unfinished hundreds of houses meant to constitute grand terraces on the slopes of Clifton, overlooking the river Avon, creating “a roofless spectacle of ruin” that lasted years. Dunmore moves then to our own day, to a lonely man strolling with his dog through an overgrown cemetery; he comes across a grave marker, raised on July 14, 1793, commemorating Julia Elizabeth Fawkes, its inscription reading in part, “Her Words Remain Our Inheritance.” Never having heard of this woman, our man’s interest is piqued, and further research reveals that she was a politically engaged writer married to one of Bristol’s almost forgotten, highly prolific, radical pamphleteers — and that not one word of her own writing has survived. Aside from her gravestone, the only relicts are two scraps of a letter mentioning her, written after her death. The letter, written in a state of high emotion during the harrowing days of the French Revolution, is by an unknown person. Sadness washes over the lonely dog walker: “It was all dead and gone, and no one left to know what any of it had meant.”

On that bleak note, we enter the eighteenth century itself. It is June 1789, and an unknown man — whom, alas, we shall come to know only too well — is digging a grave deep in the woods for the wife he has killed. Make that his first wife — for some three years later we find him, John Diner Tredevant, married to Julia Elizabeth Fawkes’s daughter, Lizzie. He is a developer and builder, deep in debt, trying to pay his workmen to finish the terrace of houses in Clifton by the Avon Gorge that will, he believes, make his fortune. Lizzie, swept up in sexual passion, married him against the advice of her mother, and she is beginning to see what a mistake this was. Diner, as he insists on being called, is moody, volatile, oppressively controlling, and pathologically jealous. He questions his wife’s every move, does not like her to have friends over or to leave the house, and, it emerges, sometimes follows her when she does go out. Most particularly he resents Lizzie’s mother and her second husband, Augustus Gleeson, the two of them outspoken supporters of the revolution in France.

Julia and Augustus bear a strong resemblance to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin in their manner, interests, and work (Julia “working so hard she hardly had time to eat or speak,” and Gleeson writing away, “buzzing like a fly at a window through which he would never escape”). The similarity is further brought home in that Julia dies in childbed, from puerperal fever — horrifically described — as did Wollstonecraft, though in this case an infant son, named Thomas after Tom Paine, survives, rather than the future Mary Shelley. We are reminded that while Wollstonecraft and Godwin are famous, they were only two among the many men and women beavering away promoting radical causes — for the rights of women and of workers, for freedom of speech and assembly — during this time, writers and speakers who made a difference but whose names are now lost to history.

Augustus, cerebral and scribbling, is not much given to childcare. Thus Lizzie, with the willing help of her little maid, Philo, takes over the care of the motherless child, her half brother. This is a cause of further resentment and outbursts of temper on the part of Diner, who claims that the child will wear his wife out, squandering the attention she properly owes him, her husband: “I was careful not to inflame Diner’s suspicions by signs of tenderness for the baby,” she tells us. “Instead, I cleared away the feeding things, rattles and cradle as evening came on, and gave Thomas back to Philo as soon as I heard the door. I did not speak of the baby to Diner unless he asked. You would rarely have guessed, from our conversation, that Thomas was in the house.” Thee atmosphere in the house becomes increasingly dreadful, the women on pins and needles, creeping around trying not to arouse Diner’s ire. Dunmore is brilliant in evoking an atmosphere of domestic tyranny, the fear, the uncertainty, the impotence of the victims. It is exceedingly painful, all the more so as Lizzie has absorbed her mother’s views on the rights of women and yet must knuckle under to this monstrous bully for the sake of the child.

And, of course, Diner is no ordinary bully. He is also a murderer. Bit by bit Lizzie begins to detect something off about his explanation of what had happened to his first wife, Lucie, a Frenchwoman who, he had told her, returned to France and died there. In an ingenious maneuver that increases the nigh-unbearable tension, Dunmore presents Lizzie with evidence that Diner murdered the woman, but the clue comes in a manner that some readers will be able to understand, while Lizzie cannot. I will say no more about that unraveling, except to say that it’s real nail-biter.

The novel, which is animated by a current of gothic horror, depicts the social ferment, the ideological passion, and, ultimately, the smashed visions of the late eighteenth century; it is rich in details of material life — and death; and it powerfully conveys the emotional urgency of its characters. We feel that the lives of these fictional beings are just as real as those of actual people whose ideas and exertions contributed to the tenor of those times, lives that are lost to us now in the murk of the past. We feel, too, Dunmore’s deepened awareness of this and believe she did indeed have an intimation at some level that she, at least in body and mind, would soon be part of the past. Her finest books, among them The Siege, her last one, Exposure, and this one will, I hope, keep both her memory and those of her characters alive for as long as people read novels.

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The electric guitar is eighty years old this week, the first commercially viable model, the Los Angeles–based Rickenbacker Corporation’s “Frying Pan,” patented on August 10, 1937. With the spread of electricity throughout America in the 1940s, the first generation of legendary blues guitarists could tour beyond the beer halls and juke joints to any venue with an electrical outlet. In When I Left Home, second-generation guitar legend Buddy Guy recalls being in his local general store in rural Lettsworth, Louisiana the day in 1950 when a thirsty Lightnin’ Slim (Ottis Hicks) walked in:

“He gonna play here today?” I asked.
“He will if I give him a bottle of beer.”
“Give him two bottles.”
He walked in real slow, giving Artigo a big smile.
“That beer cold?” he asked.
Artigo said, “Got a kid here who loves him some guitar.”
“What’s in that black box” I asked Lightnin’.
“Just a bunch of wires and tubes. Ain’t you never seen no amp?”
“No, sir. What it do?”
“Pushes electricity through the guitar. Makes it louder and stronger. Makes it scream until you can hear it over folk talking. You can hear it over anything. When this here electrical guitar starts to buzzing, folks gonna be flying in here like bees to honey.”

Guy was thirteen at the time, and music was whatever he could manage on his beat-up two-string acoustic. The closest he had come to a famous black man was the day that he and his friends, listening in a friendly white neighbor’s backyard, had heard the radio broadcast of Jackie Robinson’s first game in the majors. For a Delta farm boy, says Guy, listening to Slim play in the local store was electrifying in all ways.

Guy sits near the top of most ‘Top 100 Guitarists’ lists, and Lightnin’ Slim usually gets included. The near-unanimous No. 1 pick is Jimi Hendrix, and his iconic rendition of the National Anthem at Woodstock on August 18, 1969 is widely regarded as the greatest-ever guitar performance. “For many,” write Brad Tolinski and Alan di Perna in Play It Loud, their musical-cultural history of the instrument, “the very words ‘electric guitar’ will immediately evoke visual images of Hendrix at Woodstock, attired in a Native American–style white leather tunic, fringed and turquoise-beaded, with a red headband wrapped around his Afro, his white Stratocaster hanging upside down from a shoulder strap . . . ”

Going from the Frying Pan to the fire and rain of Woodstock took just thirty years, and the electric guitar, played or smashed, remained the instrument of choice for the counterculture, with the Pete Townshend windmill an essential move for every air-guitar hero. Townshend says that he learned the windmill from Keith Richards; in his autobiography, Life, Richards says that “I’ve learned everything I know from records,” a statement backed up by a letter written at age eighteen to his aunt Patty, in which he describes this encounter with his guitar past and future:

You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin’ on Dartford Stn. (that’s so I don’t have to write a long word like station) I was holding one of Chuck’s records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y’know came up to me. He’s got every Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too, they are all rhythm and blues fans, real R & B I mean . . . Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Chuck, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker all the Chicago bluesmen real lowdown stuff, marvelous. Bo Diddley he’s another great.

Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger . . .

Photo of the Ro-Pat-In Cast Aluminum Electric Hawaiian “Frying Pan” Guitar by the Museum of Making Music at English Wikipedia.

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Not every writer would publish a column, as Scaachi Koul did in 2015 for BuzzFeed, containing thirteen “inexplicable yet endearing emails” from her father, among them a missive that states: “It is your sciniltallting [sic] writing replete with ascerbic [sic] wit and condescending disdain for everything under the sun which makes everybody hold you in high esteem.”

The truth of that assessment is palpable throughout Koul’s book debut, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection for 2017.  In ten pithy essays the twenty-six-year-old Canadian writer, the first-generation daughter of Kashmiri immigrants, takes on weighty subjects — appropriation, patriarchy, racism, sexism, sexuality, rape culture, the immigrant experience, personal identity . . . and her father — with an unsparing eye for human foible and an attitude suffused with sardonic, misanthropic humor.

In another essay last May for BuzzFeed, where she writes regularly about culture, Koul reflected, “I don’t know why any of us write; it is a terrible sickness.” But her ever-increasing fan base is glad that she does. Koul’s admirers include some of her most eminent peers, among them Samantha Irby, author of the national bestseller We Are Never Eating in Real Life, who wrote: “One Day We’ll All Be Dead made me laugh embarrassingly loud on the train while surrounded by snarling, irritated commuters. Approximately 1,729 times. And she has so many killer lines that destroy me. Scaachi Koul is a miracle.”

Last month, Koul sat down in front of a live audience at Barnes & Noble’s Upper West Side Manhattan store for a talk about the state of the essay with Jason Diamond (author of the memoir Searching for John Hughes, editor at Rollingstone.com, and founder of Volume 1: Brooklyn).  The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Jason Diamond: You write about having this fear of flying, and yet you’ve been touring so much. Has it gotten worse?

Scaachi Koul: It’s getting worse for sure. It’s also getting worse because I have to come to the States a lot, and going through border security as an ethnic with, like, no real reason to be here, is never good. I’m here for a few weeks this trip, so I didn’t have a return flight. When I came in they were like, “What do you do?” “Oh, I’m a writer.” “Are you?” I could bring up this book I wrote, but they wouldn’t trust it.

JD: Do you think they’d like the title?

SK: I do not tell Border Security the title of my book.

JD: How did you come to the title? It’s possibly the title of the year.

SK: In the book, there’s an essay about going to my cousin’s wedding in India. She was having a bad week, because weddings are a week there. She looked at me, really exhausted, and was like, “This is so physically painful and emotionally painful.” I said, “It’s OK, because you’re going to be dead, and then none of this will matter.” My aunts didn’t love that, but I thought it was apt.

JD: Where did you come up with the idea to write a book of personal essays?

SK: I’ve got a couple of things in my favor. One is that I’m a narcissist. So right out of the gate, it’s like: Cool — ready to talk about myself again. But I’m also good at it. That’s just lucky. But the other side of it is, I wanted to write a book that would talk about things I didn’t get to read about when I was younger. I didn’t read a ton of nonfiction about women when I was younger. I certainly didn’t read nonfiction about brown women, and I definitely didn’t read about, you know, Canadian brown women pulling hairs out of their nipples — which is a story in this collection. That never really came up for me. I remember thinking how nice would it have been to have had that when I was even twenty; something that gives you a guide of, you know, your life is hell, but it’s going to be OK eventually . . . hopefully.

JD: As I was reading, I was thinking that children of immigrants grow up with values from where their parents are from, but their parents also are trying to raise them as a Canadian or an American. At some point you have to rebel. Every kid rebels, but I think it’s different when your parents are not from here. I’m wondering at what point you started thinking, “I want to be different than my parents.”

SK: Eleven or twelve. Puberty. I think a big part of it was noticing boys. That wasn’t a talk I got. No one sat me down and told me, “This is how somebody has a baby.” You just sort of figure it out because your mother will never tell you. But I never realized how much access I had to information, compared to the rest of my family. My mom recently told me a story that her mother got married when she was fifteen, before she had her period, and then she got it when she turned sixteen, and her husband had to tell her what it was, because none of the women in her family would tell her. Now I think about my niece, who is the first biracial person in our family. And I marvel at the amount of information she has.

But in terms of feeling different from them, I think it was inevitable. I was being raised in an atmosphere where I was being tugged in two directions. English was my first language, and I never learned any of the languages my parents knew. They wanted me to understand it, but they never taught it to me because they wanted me to integrate. But they didn’t want me to assimilate. It becomes a very complicated push and pull. I still haven’t figured that out.

JD: You talk about growing up in Calgary, and how there was a pretty large Indian community, but you say you didn’t feel like they were your people. Did you ever start to feel like they were?

SK: Not when I lived there. I left when I was seventeen. Calgary is . . . oh, I love explaining Canada. Calgary is in the West. It’s in the prairies. They make oats and cows. It’s a very conservative white area.

No, I never really felt like we connected with them. We didn’t live in the neighborhood where they had all settled. We lived in a white neighborhood. I don’t know if that was a conscious choice on my dad’s part when they moved. He wanted us to be Canadian. He wanted us to be North American. So a good way to do that is to make you live with other white people . . . I mean, with white people . . . See how easy it was to slip into that? Oh, I’m glad he’s not here.

JD: Was there ever a point, like, later on, when you started trying to maybe feel more of a connection?

SK: Not until I moved to Toronto, which is on the other side of the country, basically.

JD: Your father is everywhere in the book.

SK: He’s exhausting.

JD: How do you describe your relationship with your father to people? Even if you haven’t read the book, if you follow Scaachi on Twitter, you start to realize he’s this character who…

SK: He’s always calling. My dad is sixty-seven. He is the oldest in his family, which by brown standards means he is a fucking pain, because the eldest boys are so spoiled and so needy. So he’s, like, needy, but he’s the patriarch, and he’s very funny but he gets mad easily, and he’s aging, and he’s not OK with it . . . He’s like if your pet could speak to you all the time and tell you every need and anguish they have, and if they also had a cell phone and texted them to you. I love him a lot, but he’s 90 percent of the work that I do.

JD: He wrote your bio.

SK: He did.

JD: He says you stole some of his material, I think.

SK: See what I mean? Like, so dramatic. He routinely calls and asks for a portion of my advance. His new thing is, he calls and says, “What’s the number?” by which he means “What’s the number of books sold?” — as if I have that information every day. Then, if I have the number, by chance (because I will have to text my editor and say, “My father is asking what’s the number”), he’ll ask me if that’s better or worse than some other author, and it’s always someone that’s unreasonable. Franzen. He wants to know if Oprah’s read it. I haven’t talked to her in a WHILE, so I’m not sure

JD: For some reason, I kept opening the book to the text or email where he mentions Suge Knight.

SK: He loves Suge Knight. And he doesn’t know who Suge Knight is. He sent an email that says something about how Suge Knight “upset the humdrum routine of everyday life.” I was like, “He might be a murderer.” My dad’s response is, “Murder is necessary to social order.” This is his vein. Should I read the bio?

JD: You can read whatever you want.

SK: I emailed him . . . This is a real email. People always tell me that I made this up, as if I have the goddamn time. I emailed him on November 24th of last year and said, “My publisher wants you to write my author bio for the back of the book.” He answered with: “Who would have the editorial control? I need some ironclad guarantee that they do not turn what I write, which would be insightful and very succinct, into some post-pubescent pablum.” I replied, “I have spoken to my editor, and she has guaranteed that she will not edit you.” That was my mistake. Then he says, “You must correct it for punctuation, which is elites trying to keep bourgeoisie like us down.” Here it goes.

“The author of this book, Scaachi Molita Koul, is my daughter, born when Wife and I were at the cusp of entering middle age, but we were deliriously happy to welcome her after a particularly painful pregnancy. I am positive, or I would like to believe that she got a lot of material from my musings, which I expressed out loud to humor her. It could also be that I was vicariously living through her. I am almost certain she has presented me in a very poignant and loving way, or, again, I could be delusional. If I am presented as a crank or an Indian version of Archie Bunker, then my revenge would be complete, because I named her Scaachi with a silent ‘c’.”

He’s a lot. And that’s every day.

JD: In one part of the book, you talk about how you’re able to sort of blend within Canadian media.

SK: Oh, yeah. Canadian media is a lot smaller, obviously, than the U.S. — we have a lot fewer people and fewer outlets. And it is, by nature, designed to be a lot whiter than it is here. What ends up happening is that the very few people who get picked to enter that space are being allowed because of those gatekeepers thinking this crosses off the diversity box without actually addressing any of the issues.

A few weeks ago a bunch of Canadian editors of very large newspapers were talking on Twitter at, like, eleven o’clock at night on a Thursday about how they were going to set up a fund for what writer could best culturally appropriate from another group of people. Which is insane. They also came up with, like, three grand in an hour, which is, like: If you can do that, just give it to me! I’ll do something with it. That’s a great snapshot of what’s going on in Canada in terms of how people talk about indigenous people and people of color, and how the media treats those voices as complete tokens without actually using them for any good. Because I’m fair-skinned, they’ll let me come in and I can do certain things. But if I say too much, I get in trouble. And I get in trouble all the time.

JD: I know that a lot of women in media deal with this, but you’ve taken an unnecessary amount of abuse. With all you’ve had to go through, was there any sort of apprehension about writing this very personal book?

SK: I have a real impulse control problem, so I don’t know how to not do stuff. As soon as I decide I’m going to do it, that’s it. That’s a bad thing sometimes, but in these cases it’s probably beneficial.

A book costs money. So if you would like to yell at me but you would also like to give me $16, I encourage it. Feel free. But most people aren’t going to pay the entry fee to call me the c-word. If you already don’t like me, this book just affirms what you already believe. If you think that I believe in white genocide — well, you’re not going to get any different information from this. Good luck! So it hasn’t felt any different.

JD: There was a really smart New Yorker article a few weeks ago about the end of the personal essay boom. Did you read it?

SK: Yes.

JD: What did you think? There are two kinds of personal essays, in my opinion. There are really horrible personal essays. But then, there are great ones, and you have a book full of them.

SK: It’s my understanding that the person who wrote that just got a deal to write an essay collection. So they’re not over by any stretch. I think her argument is that there was a time a little while ago when a lot of media outlets were buying kind of easy-disposable personal essays because they were cheap, so you could go to somebody and say, “I need to fulfill these diversity quotas, so I’m going to talk to a bunch of women of color and say, ‘Please write about being a woman of color.’ ” It’s an easy thing to do. It’s low labor, because you don’t always have to do research.

Some of those essays were really great. I was probably a part of that boon before this book came out, and I worked in that space, too.

JD: A lot of great writers came out of that.

SK: Totally. But at the same time, people write essays who are maybe not ready. They don’t always get the editing time they need. So you’ve got this mass of essays that are terrible, but they’ve been produced because they’re easy to make.

But I don’t know if you can say that essays are done, because people have been writing essays forever. I’ve made this joke 100 times, but dudes write essays about their wangs all the time and say, like, “This is my opus.” It’s not looked at as this trend thing. It’s just a book. But for some reason, as soon as people whom we don’t consider to be the majority — women or women of color or non-binary people or queer people — start writing essay collections, those groups get lumped into this idea that diversity is a passing trend.

JD: You’ve been touring, doing events since the book came out in the U.S. in May. Can you pinpoint one thing that people have come up and talked to you or emailed you about?

SK: I notice that a lot of brown girls tell me they’re glad there is something that explained things that they were having happen to them, so it gives them some sense they’re not entirely isolated. A lot of dudes have emailed me, like, “Oh, I’m terrible; I had no idea.” That’s been refreshing. But I think people find their own thing from it. A lot of people who have had bad relationships with their dads said that it either gave them some comfort because their dad isn’t around any more, or it’s gotten them to call him or whatever else. So he’s done one good thing.

JD: We have you!

SK: Well, my mother did that.

JD: He’s one-half.

SK: Well, who knows?

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Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 In a Lonely Place (just reissued by New York Review Books Classics) suggests that the current ongoing reemergence of American female crime writers from the ’40s to the ’60s may be approaching what occurred with the male counterparts of these writers in the ’80s, when Black Lizard and other presses began reissuing the out-of print work of Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, and others. One imprimatur of literary regard came in 2015, when the Library of America issued a two-volume set of female crime writers from the ’40s and ’50s in which Hughes shared space with, to name a few, the likes of Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, Margaret Millar, and Dolores Hitchens.

There will always be those whose reaction to women crime writers is to think they are delivering a compliment when they say that women can write just as tough as men. But that view reduces the work at hand — whether written by men or women — to little more than braggadocio. The unifying point of the best pulp writers was to drag the reader into squirrelly states of anxiety, guilt, complicity, and, over the typically brief lengths of these novels (usually no more than 200 pages), deliver the supremely uncomfortable experience of walking around in the bodies of the protagonists.

Those states are the “lonely place” Hughes refers to in her title, the moods of resentment, longing, paranoia, jealousy, and rage that her protagonist, the serial strangler Dix Steele, exists in. The implicit topic of In a Lonely Place is misogyny, but Hughes’s novel is one is which a serial killer of women is far weaker than the women he kills. As the crime novelist Megan Abbott points out in her Afterword, Dix Steele certainly foreshadows Tom Ripley, the much smoother psychopath who was to take center stage for much of Patricia Highsmith’s career. But Hughes’s vision of violence also prefigures Hannah Arendt’s 1970 On Violence. Faced with civil unrest and the often worse police response, Vietnam, and the calls for revolutionary violence among the radical faction of the New Left, Arendt set out to distinguish violence from the concepts of strength and force and power. With would-be revolutionaries fond of quoting Mao’s dictum that all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, Arendt wrote, “Out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of [violence] is power.”

Making a similar distinction between strength and violence, Hughes gives us a portrait of a murderer who, though calculating, commits his crimes in a febrile state, one so fragile and agitated the merest thing can break it. In the opening pages, Dix is stalking a potential victim he sees walking home alone at night (the M.O. for all his killings), and he’s enjoying the pursuit: “He didn’t walk faster, he continued to saunter but he lengthened his stride, smiling slightly. She was afraid.”

But like a coughing fit ruining a movie take, a sudden interruption shatters Dix’s fantasy of control:

She had just passed over the mid hump, she was on the final stretch of down grade. Walking fast. But as he reached that section, a car turned at the corner below, throwing its blatant light up on her, on him. Again anger plucked at his face, his pace slowed . . . The girl was safe. He could feel the relaxation in her footsteps. Anger beat him like a drum.

Hughes’s imagery amplifies the meaning of the moment: Dix is thrust literally into the light, cast from the safety of the hunt. It’s a slap in the face that Hughes follows this potential victim’s escape with Dix committing a successful murder, presented by chance, a few hours later, as he is on his way home from spending the evening with friends.

The friends are Brub Nicolai and his wife, Sylvia. Brub and Dix were stationed together in England during the war. What Dix doesn’t know about Brub when he looks up his old friend is that Brub is now an LAPD detective investigating the stranglings that are plaguing the city. There’s an off-kilter comedy in the scenes where Dix socializes with the Nicolais (almost always at Brub’s instigation). Dix is living off a monthly check from a stingy uncle back east. He’s convinced the old man he’s in L.A. to try his hand at writing a novel. That’s the line he uses with Brub and Sylvia, claiming it’s a mystery novel, thus giving him license to inquire about Brub’s methods and gain an inside line on how the hunt to uncover him is going. But the uneasy interactions between Dix and Sylvia, his seeing her as a rival for Brub’s attention and his (correct) hunch that she senses his sickness, are an echo of the relationship at the center of the novel: Dix’s affair with the aspiring actress Laurel Grey.

Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film of the novel, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, Ray’s wife at the time, replaced the novel’s plot with what was essentially Ray’s meditation on his failing marriage. By contrast, Hughes’s novel (though written from Dix’s point of view) is very much a woman’s take on masculinity and its limits. A male writer might very well have presented Laurel as a sexpot, if not a femme fatale, her assured manner and ability to verbally parry the men after her used as the mark of a hard little number. Hughes presents Laurel’s toughness as a necessary defense mechanism. Laurel is wised up but not unfeeling. Dix literally bumps into her at the L.A. apartment complex where they both live, and this is how Hughes describes her:

She stood in his way and looked him over slowly, from crown to toe. The way a man looked over a woman, not the reverse . . . He stood like a dolt, gawking at her.

And that’s the core of the relationship. Laurel falls into bed with Dix, but she can’t bring herself to fall in love with him. Her instinct prevents her, and a far more conscious part of her knows that Dix can never give her what she dreams of. To Hughes’s immense credit, she presents that recognition not as avarice but simply as the knowledge of someone who’s seen the horrible stresses money brings into love affairs and marriages and is determined to avoid them.

There is also, in Hughes’s line “He stood like a dolt, gawking at her” an awful shadow of the self-loathing that drives Dix. For Dix the ecstasy of falling in love with a woman like Laurel is the pathway to torment, an invitation to indulge his insecurities. The most reasonable and psychologically astute explanation for male violence against women is male feelings of inferiority, and yet in depiction after depiction, novelists and filmmakers often ignore the distinction between violence and power, the distinction Arendt insisted on. It doesn’t take long for Dix to go from feeling he’s found the girl of his dreams to wondering who she’s with if she comes home later than expected, to fretting about how he will afford to entertain her and clothe her, thinking of Laurel as an exquisite possession that must be displayed in an appropriately elegant setting. What Hughes is describing in these moments is common enough male possessiveness. What’s startling is that she’s placed it in the mind of a psychopath. This isn’t soapbox sociology, in the manner of Susan Brownmiller’s famous declaration that all men are potential rapists. It’s a psychologically acute perception of the continuum on which jealousy and feelings of emasculation and violence reside. Hughes puts the reader inside a dual consciousness, making us feel simultaneously women’s physical vulnerability and men’s worry that, in the eyes of women, they will never be man enough.

The kicker — and it’s a stunning one — is that Dix isn’t wrong. That appraising look Laurel gives him when she first sees him, the distance and suspicion he senses in Sylvia, are not paranoia on his part. They know something is off with him, intuitively grasping what all his artifice attempts to conceal. And there’s an even larger and more unsettling context. The lonely place of the title is not just Dix’s state of mind, not just the friend’s apartment he has obtained Tom Ripley−style and uses as a hidey-hole. The lonely place is America itself. In the opening paragraph, Dix stands on the shore of the Pacific at night, imagining he is once again flying one of the fighter planes he piloted in the war. “It wasn’t often,” Hughes writes, “he could capture any of that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky. There was a touch of it here, looking down at the ocean rolling endlessly in from the horizon; here high above the beach road with its crawling traffic, its dotting of lights.”

When he turns his back on the ocean, looks back at the land he returned to, Dix is just another man who, a short time ago, had a purpose and the respect that came with it. (Hughes offers a contrast here in Brub, who has turned his back on family riches to work and build a life. But he seems a happily adjusted exception.) As in William Wyler’s film The Best Years of Our Lives, which came out one year before this novel, showed, it’s not just crazy men who came back to a feeling of being lost, lost amid the postwar prosperity of America, back to a life whose goals and aims seem so paltry next to the wartime missions they have returned from. A mere two years after this country’s greatest triumph, Hughes, like Wyler, foresaw American loneliness as an internal exile. The horror of Dix Steele is just how much he is alienated from — and how close that alienation comes to what we still call masculinity.

 

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