From John Burnham Schwartz, one of the our most compelling and compassionate writers, comes a riveting novel about the complex, fierce, ultimately inspiring resilience of families in the face of life’s most difficult and unexpected challenges. Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, at fifty, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, Dwight manages a sporting goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn’t revealed the truth about his past. Then Sam, Dwight’s estranged college-age son, shows up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption in their attempts to rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past.
Praise for Northwest Corner
“A great American novel.”—Abraham Verghese
“One of the most emotionally commanding novels of the year."—NPR
“Exhilarating . . . In Schwartz’s hands, the narrative unfolds delicately, each chapter a puzzle piece that fits seamlessly into the whole. [Grade:] A.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A compelling tale of a family . . . finding their way back together again.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Stark and deeply affecting . . . Readers will grow to care deeply about whether and how [the characters’] lives can be redeemed.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The masterful Northwest Corner is that finest of things—a moral novel about mortal events.”—Dennis Lehane
From John Burnham Schwartz, one of the our most compelling and compassionate writers, comes a riveting novel about the complex, fierce, ultimately inspiring resilience of families in the face of life’s most difficult and unexpected challenges. Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, at fifty, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, Dwight manages a sporting goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn’t revealed the truth about his past. Then Sam, Dwight’s estranged college-age son, shows up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption in their attempts to rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past.
Praise for Northwest Corner
“A great American novel.”—Abraham Verghese
“One of the most emotionally commanding novels of the year."—NPR
“Exhilarating . . . In Schwartz’s hands, the narrative unfolds delicately, each chapter a puzzle piece that fits seamlessly into the whole. [Grade:] A.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A compelling tale of a family . . . finding their way back together again.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Stark and deeply affecting . . . Readers will grow to care deeply about whether and how [the characters’] lives can be redeemed.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The masterful Northwest Corner is that finest of things—a moral novel about mortal events.”—Dennis Lehane
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Overview
From John Burnham Schwartz, one of the our most compelling and compassionate writers, comes a riveting novel about the complex, fierce, ultimately inspiring resilience of families in the face of life’s most difficult and unexpected challenges. Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, at fifty, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, Dwight manages a sporting goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn’t revealed the truth about his past. Then Sam, Dwight’s estranged college-age son, shows up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption in their attempts to rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past.
Praise for Northwest Corner
“A great American novel.”—Abraham Verghese
“One of the most emotionally commanding novels of the year."—NPR
“Exhilarating . . . In Schwartz’s hands, the narrative unfolds delicately, each chapter a puzzle piece that fits seamlessly into the whole. [Grade:] A.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A compelling tale of a family . . . finding their way back together again.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Stark and deeply affecting . . . Readers will grow to care deeply about whether and how [the characters’] lives can be redeemed.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The masterful Northwest Corner is that finest of things—a moral novel about mortal events.”—Dennis Lehane
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780812980516 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/10/2012 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
SAM
“Arno—bus.”
Coach dips out of the locker room. Sam listens to the footsteps echoing down the long corridor and only now, knowing he’s the last, removes the towel draped over his head. He picks up the thirty-one ounce aluminum bat lying by his feet, jams it into the UConn duffel with the rest of his gear, and zips the bag closed.
The bus is already running when he climbs on. The row in front belongs to him now. The doors fold in with a sigh, and Old Hank shifts into gear for the three-hour trip back to Storrs.
Evening is falling. Sam slides his headphones on and tries to become just another shadow.
Into the athletic-center parking lot the bus doors open: high fluorescent lights, pools of blue night. A gangplank waiting, all lit up. He’s sitting right behind Hank and should go first, but it feels less bad to stay where he is, headphones on, eyes nowhere, deep in the stump of his own mortification. Teammates start to shuffle by, smells of glove leather and greased eye black, hail-like rapping of spikes.
A hand on his arm. It’s Jake, his roommate. Sam lifts one side of the headphones an inch.
“Heading back to the room?”
Jake’s voice is almost insultingly tender. The comfort you receive when, bases loaded and two out in the tenth inning of the college playoffs, you strike out without taking a swing, ending your team’s season.
“Shower up, at least. You look like shit.”
Sam shakes his head gratefully. The bat never even left his shoulder.
“Okay . . . see you later.” “See you.”
Then the bus is empty, except for himself and Hank.
“This ain’t your goddamn limo, y’know.” Hank’s voice a gravel bed, snowy buzz cut and jowly neck turned round on him from the driver’s perch. The dash clock reads 10:20. Out of respect, Sam pulls off the phones. A sigh from Hank as he levers the doors closed. “So, fuck it. Where to, DiMaggio?”
Where to is O’Doul’s, off-campus, third-choice watering hole in town, nobody’s date-night destination. The school bus pulls up outside. Neon fizzing through the windows, fun-housing the gloom.
He tells Hank to hold on, takes off his game jersey, and buries it in the duffel. He wishes the bag didn’t say UConn in big white letters—it’s not that kind of bar—but there’s nothing to be done about it now. He’s already down to the two-tone undershirt with the sleeves hacked off below the elbow and the dirt-stained away-game pants worn low, no stirrups, and the spikes that make each step sound like he’s chucking bags of marbles.
“You’re a million bucks,” Hank growls. “Go get ’em, tiger.” “Thanks for the ride, Hank.”
“We all got bad days, Sammy.”
“Yeah.” Suddenly, he’s blinking back tears. “Stay out of trouble, now.”
The bus doors start to close before his foot touches the curb. By the time he passes through the entrance to the bar, Hank and his caravan are gone.
• • •
O’Doul’s is hot and crowded, the walls painted dark. A long time, Sam stands drinking by himself. When a stool at the bar finally opens, he slides onto it, the UConn duffel shoved down into the sawdust-and-gum shadows at his feet. A Bacardi mirror with fogged glass hangs above the backbar next to a St. Pauli Girl clock, the clock’s hands frozen at twelve minutes to six, permanent happy hour.
“ ’Nother?”
The bartender, wiping under his empty bottle. “With a shot of J.D. this time.”
“Right up.”
He keeps forgetting. Trying to get back to just before—on-deck circle, pure ritual, mechanical drop of vinyl-covered doughnut over aluminum barrel, stretching the bat down his back and around, beginning to swing nice and loose. Watching the pitcher and timing the swing. Watching and timing till it’s second nature.
No such thing, he needs to tell Coach. Just the nature you’re born with, handed down through the generations.
He was thinking too much, even in the on-deck circle, before the first pitch was thrown. He can see it now that it’s too late. Not empty as he should’ve been, cleared out; too much junk in his attic. Thinking about what he’d do if the big chance came, what a game-winning hit would feel like. At the plate Stemkowski’s just taken ball three and Coach is in the dugout barking, “Good eye, Stem. Good eye, buddy!” The crowd (attendance announced at 683), roaring their heads off, as Stem watches ball four ride in tight under his neck and starts jogging up the first-base line, loading the bases. And Sam stakes the bat handle into the packed dirt, dislodging the doughnut, the weight slips off and the bat becomes a killing staff. And for about half a minute a raw brute strength he’s never personally experienced before comes surging through his shoulders down to his hands, and he strides into the batter’s box believing for once that it’s going to happen. The strength fills him, blotting out the past; till it takes him too far, tips the meter into the red; and because it’s raw and threatening and not really there, this illusion of power, already leaving, leads him to his father. It makes him think of his father. At which moment, the first pitch on its way, he knows in his sinking heart how it’s all going to play out.
DWIGHT
At 11:47 a.m., a man in a patterned vacation shirt not unlike mine steps out of his Lexus SUV, followed by his young son. I watch them through the front window from aisle seven (baseball, softball, more baseball) in a moment of commercial respite and quicksand reminiscence, a Rawlings infielder’s glove cupped over my nose, its hefty price tag flapping, inhaling the bicameral whiff of factory-fresh leather. Trying, as ever, to situate myself in actual time and space. Call it a voluntary hijacking: I’m no longer in SoCal Sports in Arenas, California, in the year 2006, but in Pat’s Team Outfitters in North Haven, Connecticut, circa 1966. Not fifty years old but ten. Staring up into my old man’s wide creased face. Absorbing that shark-skinned voice as he tells me he’ll buy me the glove I want, so long as I swear on my life to treat it right. But if he ever finds it food-stained or left out overnight on the lawn, abused in any way, he’ll thrash me with it, that’s a solid promise, and my playing days will be done. Do I understand? Already this dark shadow he’s casting over me and the thing I’ve always wanted. Which dooms me somehow, the little poisoned apple he’s offering. And still I crave the glove so much I’m going to give him the price he demands.
And then, before my first season of Little League is halfway over, early one morning he finds the Rawlings, that holy object of calfskin perfection, on our shitty, dew-soaked lawn. Just as he foresaw. I’m still in bed asleep, fielding grounders in my dreams, when he bursts into my room and beats me with it good.
Listen to me. These are the sorts of thoughts that too often come back while you’re spending thirty months in the hole. And after, too.
There’s violence in the air, even when nothing is happening. The idea of personal control is just a noble pipe dream. What comes at you feels bitterly, in the end, like some echo of what’s inside you. Like any vessel only more so, a place gets defined by what’s in it. A hive hums and buzzes. A fist is nothing without rage.
The glass doors open: in come the man and his boy. I pull the glove from my face and replace it on the shelf. Dust myself off, as it were. The boy trailing off his dad’s hip at four o’clock, but looking up into that trusted face and smiling. The guy turning back over his shoulder—a joke just passing between them, or a story, say, about soggy doughnuts, wafting in from the parking lot like a cool breeze in summer. Their outward physical details less interesting to me by comparison, though still notable: the dad’s big expensive watch, like a hunk of gold bullion clamped to his wrist, the boy’s pro-model Dodgers cap and special-edition Tony Hawk slide-ons. Upper-middleclass family, I’d say. He a rising associate in one of the investment boutiques in the recently developed Arenas business park or a tax lawyer taking a much-deserved post–April 15th day off; his boy, at ten or eleven a promising private-school student with an easy, winning personality, though perhaps too enamored of skate culture and the slackers down by the piers and so already being prophylactically primed by his parents for a future boarding spot at the exclusive Thacher School. Lacrosse, I decide, this kid’s going to learn lacrosse, as the father checks their progress at the front of the store, the better to assess the aisles of merchandise and the somewhat dubious prospects for service. He spots Derek stacking boxed volleyballs in aisle three. But a first lacrosse stick is serious business, and possibly Derek, who takes night classes in diagnostic massage at UCSB and is today wearing a purple sun visor backward, doesn’t look quite up to the task. So the man’s gaze turns ninety degrees—passing over Sandra, my boss’s fetching twenty-year-old niece, at the register—to land on me in aisle seven. I suppose that, ignorant of my résumé, he mistakenly considers me the safe bet for attentive shopping assistance in the store. And who can blame him? I am fifty years old, rel-
atively fit yet comfortably substantial. My red plastic SoCal Sports tag says dwight arno, manager in clear white letters. Under expected circumstances I would be a figure of rectitude and probity.
To which I can only add that I still want to be. I still remember what it feels like to be that man, and not a morning goes by that I don’t see his striving, confident image in the mirror of my thoughts. Which maybe is why, watching this father and son approach, caught in the glow of their radiant connection and prosperity, I can only stand in aisle seven, my mouth slack and my heart in lockdown. Still unable after all these years to relinquish my phantom grip on what I had and lost—a wife and son, whose health and happiness were my charge. I wore a suit to work and brought home year-end bonuses that make my current salary look like chump change. My young son and I used to walk into stores like this one and elicit from glovesniffing, minor-league salesmen like me silent cries of want and memory. Because, for fuck’s sake, the goal of life must not be to lose it all, to cause other people grievous harm and suffering, to wholly give up one’s pride and respectability. To drop so low in the order of things that years later in an outpost far from home, clocking in for work and stepping forward to help a customer and his boy, you find yourself besieged by ghosts and mauled by a crippling need for atonement. When, let’s face it, all the good folks really want is a lacrosse stick.
A girl squeezes in next to him at the bar, orders two drinks. Afterward he won’t be able to say what the drinks were or anything about her except that her hair was brown and medium-long and he never asked her to be there.
Leaning into him, her right side against his left, she hooks a heel over the rung on his barstool.
“You guys win?”
He shakes his head. “So, next year?”
A month from graduation, there’s no next year for him. “Yeah, I
guess.”
“You know my boyfriend?”
She gives a name, kind of foreign, that he won’t remember till later. He just shakes his head again, not looking at her, but she presses closer anyway, her right breast indenting against his biceps.
“He got cut from the team freshman year. Don’t tell him I told you, okay? He’s watching us.”
She’s drunk—he sees it now. Her face so close her lips are misting his left ear. Faintly repulsed, but not meaning harm, just needing space, he gives her a tiny nudge with his shoulder—to shake her off.
Too hard: his soft touch unbalances her. As if the wasted strength that earlier coursed through his body has cruelly lingered, turning back to waste. Her heel catches the rung of his stool and with a low cry and a surprising heaviness she tumbles sideways into the black woman on her left.
He’s in the process of standing, about to apologize, when a hand grabs his shirt from behind and jerks him violently backward: for a moment, eyes rolling wildly over the browned ceiling, he is airborne.
His spine slams the floor, the back of his skull thuds into ungiving wood.
Dazed, internal flares dilating his pupils, he comes to on his knees in the rank-smelling sawdust: his brain fogged like that mirror, past the bartender’s betrayed glare, which continues to serve down his own stunned reflection.
To his wonderment, a small clearing has formed around him. People staring from a safe distance, as if he still has teeth left to bite.
Stupidly he kneels there, pawing at the back of his head for blood. The lugged sole of a boot splits his shoulder blades, catapulting him over the fallen stool into the bottom of the bar.
He lands on the UConn duffel, the aluminum bat crowbarring his chest—a blow so ferocious it’s like smelling salts, waking some older, vestigial pain. Rage rises in him like animal blood. And suddenly everything but what burns inside him is underwater-quiet. He doesn’t think; at last he just becomes. In one swift move he unzips the duffel, pulls out the bat, and, levitating to his feet, turns on his assailant—just another young buck like himself, and so beneath his pity—and drives the bat two-handed, with all the strength he’s ever wished for, into the guy’s stomach.
Perched on the edge of the bed in her underpants, ivory-colored bra dangling like a shot pheasant over the back of a chair, she slowly massages the ruinously expensive homeopathic cream into the notched side of her left breast.
The surgical wound has healed well enough, leaving the excised spoonful of private flesh invisible to the uninformed eye in sixty-three percent of all lighting situations (her estimate). In any case, at this point it’s the Hippocratic approach, not the awkward visuals, that she believes matters most. Her healer in New Milford—as opposed to her oncologist in New Haven, whose relationship with the nonscientific branches of medicine is at best dismissive and at worst insulting—explained that the most important benefits of the cream, which contains some rare Peruvian or Senegalese bark and is of unknown medical efficacy but certainly can’t hurt, might well come from its application, the simple yet mysterious possibilities of human tactility performed in a manner harmonious with the ancient Eastern wisdoms. An elderly Romanian with dark haunted eyes, the healer went on to suggest that perhaps this laying on of hands was something her husband could perform, would perhaps even relish doing on a nightly basis. (He claimed to have received anecdotal evidence to this effect from other patients.) And, sitting in his tranquil, pleasantly scented office with the fourteen potted plants, Ruth couldn’t muster the courage or spunk to disabuse him of this idea, to tell him that, despite or because of the havoc wreaked by her rebellious cells last winter, she had sent poor Norris packing without informing him of her condition, and so would henceforth be establishing an unlicensed massage parlor of one.
Coming to the notch of missing flesh now, her fingers instinctively jump away, still refusing to acknowledge. She forces them back to the task at hand, to which they go reluctantly—showing, she guesses, that her mind is still strong enough to enforce its confused will. Nonetheless, the moment is disheartening. In the parlance of healing this is called spiritual, this not knowing whether something is going to kill you dead, this wool-over-the-eyes perplexity. And maybe it’s that. But, more than that, it’s simply a disgrace. At forty-seven, she has long accepted gravity’s attack on her better parts—she had great tits once, and the ass to go with them—but this cutting out of herself with a blade, this cold-blooded removal, however precise and necessary, is more than she can take. It makes her feel, unbearably and every day now, how little of her there was from the start.
The TV is on across the room, tuned to Good Morning America: a commercial for frozen pizza; another for hemorrhoid ointment. She is waiting with a certain embarrassing passivity for the preposterously jovial weatherman to come on and tell her where today in our great and hopeful nation there will be rain, and where there will be sun.
Where, indeed.
The cream is gone, traceless. She takes her fingers away. And the breast remains, inert yet screaming. She’ll try not to count all the things it’s saying to her—the stage whispers and threats, the self-pitying beseechments and raging monologues—because they are hers. Somehow, without ever intending to, she’s become the mad ventriloquist of her own body.
She thinks about Sam. Who is hers, too. Who will bring her back to wholeness, if anyone can. So many times during their years together (which seem to her now the only years she can remember with any color), no matter what was happening to her personally,
this small victory or that massive mistake, just the thought of him, mother to son, was enough to situate her in his life rather than in her own, to grab her by the hair if necessary and yank her out of the self-regarding muck of her own existence and into the fertile, ever-changing garden of his.
In order to see him she’s had to imagine him. To imagine him she’s had to truly love him. To truly love him she’s had, by some alchemical extension, to love herself, the mother she can be.
Reading Group Guide
A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ AND RANDOM HOUSE READER'S CIRCLE
RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE: Northwest Corner picks up twelve years after the end of Reservation Road. What was it like to revisit those characters?
JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ: The passage of time and the changes it brings are two of the great themes that novelists wrestle with virtually every time they sit down to write a complex story. Sometimes we do this explicitly: For example my novel The Commoner is one woman’s story told across seventy years of imagined time. Some- times we do this implicitly, by instead condensing time and appearing to inhabit it moment by moment, thought by thought, in an attempt to suggest its emotional weight and urgency for a particular set of characters at a particular point of intensity in their lives. Both Reservation Road and Northwest Corner would certainly fall into this latter category. The first book covers roughly four months, the second book roughly two. But in between these two stories sit twelve years, a vast wealth (from a novelist’s point of view) of undocumented time and un- mapped journeys. I was interested in juxtaposing these two kinds of time—the long and the short of it, you might say—and seeing what sort of sparks could be made. What I discovered along the way is similar to what my characters discover: Namely, that life is at once jam-packed and weirdly spotty; that whether we are aware of it or not, we carry our histories with us, leaving very little of sub- stance behind; that the meaning of the past usually presents itself in those present moments when we are least prepared, or able, to comprehend that meaning at all.
RHRC: Reservation Road revolves around the death of a young boy, the effects of which are felt in Northwest Corner as a father tries to mend his broken family. In between the two publications, you and your wife had a son. Did fatherhood change your perspective when returning to these characters?
JBS: I can’t help but think that becoming a parent has deepened my sense of how, by watching our children grow and succeed and suffer, we are inevitably faced with a view of the familial past not as a series of discreet compartments to be unpacked and analyzed in their own place and time, but rather as the river it so clearly is. It carries all—known and unknown, tales told and those forever un- recorded—along in its churning, inexorable path. Perhaps more than anything else except love, I’m coming to believe, this under- standing is what we parents and our children ultimately share.
RHRC: As in Reservation Road, the narrative engine of Northwest Corner is one violent act. How and why did you decide to once again open a novel this way?
JBS: I seem to be drawn in my fiction to narratives that revolve around moments of action that are simultaneously moments of, or catalysts for, significant and irretrievable loss for my protagonists. Given the familial relationship between the two novels, their mutual explorations of generational conflict and inheritance, I knew from the beginning that a violent act of some kind would be the inciting incident of Northwest Corner.
RHRC: In referring to her cancer treatments, Ruth says, “To live, then, means continually opening her most hidden self up to clinical scrutiny. No other way to do it.” What was it like writing a character who is in the throes of a disease, and how did you come to incorporate that plot point in the novel?
JBS: In the early months of thinking my way into Northwest Corner, I had an intuition about what the dozen years had been like for Ruth since I’d last encountered her in Reservation Road. Back then, unlike Dwight, she had seemed clearly to have the upper hand, to be in control. Life, of course, won’t support such a state for very long, and so it is with Ruth. I simply knew that she was battling her own ills, and that doing so would in certain ways alter and deepen her perceptions of Dwight, as the two were brought together again by events involving their son.
RHRC: Both Ruth and Dwight are strong presences in the novel, as are Emma and Sam. What do you find are the differences in tackling male and female characters? Is one more difficult than the other?
JBS: I honestly don’t find a significant difference in writing male or female characters, save for the possibility that, because I’m a man, I might feel a bit less restricted in my imaginative impulses when writing female characters. The training wheels of familiar auto- biography are clearly off to begin with, and one can get down to the real business of creation. Other than that, though, they are all one’s offspring, with all the love and difficulty that would suggest.
RHRC: One of the emotional crescendos in the book is when Ruth and Dwight meet in their old bedroom. How did you piece together this scene, and this very complicated relationship?
JBS: The complicated, difficult, surprisingly intimate relationship between Dwight and his ex-wife, Ruth, was one of the aspects of Northwest Corner that I simply felt in my bones from the start. It just interested me deeply for some reason, the idea of these two very different and scarred veterans of countless skirmishes being brought back together by forces that they still can’t, and never will, fully understand, except to acknowledge (without victory on either side) that there is seemingly no point at which one’s life history and one’s heart do not touch.
RHRC: Northwest Corner is told through five different points of view, with only Dwight’s voice in the first person. Why did you choose this particular structure?
JBS: Simple though it may appear at first glance, the structure of this novel was probably the most difficult thing about writing it. To tell the story essentially without authorial presence—to have the characters unwittingly hand the baton of the narrative off to one another after short, intense dashes of event, thought, and feeling—meant that I was forever switching hats and losing momentum. I might spend a week writing a three-page chapter from one character’s point of view, only to finish it and have to begin again from an- other’s, and so on. And because the emotional intensity of these chapters was part of the story too, I was relentlessly challenged to find that intensity within myself, day after day, over a couple of years. It was exhausting.
Dwight is the narrative carryover. I wanted his voice to be the bridge, the literal link to the earlier events of Reservation Road. His voice is somewhat changed from the earlier novel, of course, and so is he. I wanted to be able to show the added lines on him, and inside him, and giving him his own voice allowed me to try to do that.
RHRC: Do you have a character that most resonates with you and you most relate to in Northwest Corner? In all of your novels?
JBS: Dwight was the character I already had in me; writing him anew was a process of seeing him differently, or seeing more of him, but not of making him from scratch. Given some of his lesser qualities as a person and the many black marks on his record, I probably shouldn’t fess up to such an affinity. But the truth is that over the years I’ve grown less interested in what (and who) is immediately likable, and more interested in characters and stories that not only make room for but insist upon a certain degree of challenging contradiction, some darkness that acts perversely as a kind of beacon. We may all look one color to the outside world, but of course we’re not. It rains quite a lot in life, and the palette of whoever we are runs together. Naming and describing those newly made colors is one of the things that novelists do.
RHRC: You are also an accomplished screenwriter. Does writing screenplays inform your novels, or does writing novels inform your screenplays? How does approaching each art form differ for you?
JBS: The structure of Northwest Corner consciously reflects certain aspects of cinematic storytelling that I have been working with since I wrote my first screenplay (for the film of Reservation Road) six years ago. I enjoy screenwriting, and I’ve been fortunate to get hired by studios to write some interesting projects. But from my perspective, novels and screenplays are fundamentally different kinds of writing, which feel generated in separate quadrants of the brain. Above all, fiction writing is about language: the novelist’s—and reader’s—world is made of it and nothing else. Screenwriting, on the other hand, is primarily about structure; it’s about constructing the blue- print for how a story is to be finally expressed by the director and the actors. A screenplay is not the finished building but just its infrastructure; it is the building without the façade, the decorative elements, or the living, feeling people inside who will ultimately give it its expressive life. Which leads me to what in my personal experience is the biggest difference between the two forms as practiced. This is the question of mystery, of what cannot be known to exist until it is somehow drawn up from the depths of an individual mind and written in just such a way as to make it real and known to the writer and to others.
That is the province of fiction, and especially, for me, of the novel. It is why writing novels is the most challenging form of writing I know, and always will be. For it requires a kind of faith that no one else can give you, and which can be earned only by going straight into the temple of individual doubt for extended periods of time.
RHRC: What do you read in your spare time? What writers have affected you the most?
JBS: I read constantly and pretty widely, I always have, mostly fiction but also a lot of nonfiction, as well as essays and criticism and, once again thanks to my son, children’s literature. Most of it affects me in one way or another, though only some of it surprises me. And being surprised by writing—by any form of art—is the effect I crave the most. I don’t mean cheaply surprised, as with a trick or gimmick meant to shock, but rather deeply, humanely surprised as you might be if a window you didn’t even know was there is suddenly thrown open and you stood before it, amazed by the feeling of the wind on your face.
RHRC: What are you working on now, and what can readers expect next?
JBS: At the moment, I’m writing a film for HBO about Bernie Madoff and his family, in which Robert De Niro will play Madoff, and I’m enthralled by the story. I also have a definite idea for a new novel—in typical fashion, it’s taken me months of reading and thinking to feel certain about it—and am now looking forward, with the usual mix of intense excitement, hunger, and doubt, to beginning it.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What does the act of violence at the beginning of Northwest Corner tell us about the character of Sam?
2. How would you describe Dwight’s relationship with both his crime and his punishment?
3. What sort of mother would you say Ruth has been to Sam?
4. By the end of the novel, how would you describe Ruth’s feelings for Dwight? Dwight’s feelings for Ruth? For Penny? Sam’s feelings for his father? Penny’s feelings for Dwight?
5. How would you describe the role that memory plays in the lives of Northwest Corner’s main characters? In what sense is the role negative, and in what sense positive?
6. At one point, remembering a meal with her separated parents, Emma Learner reflects, “This is what it is like to know you are not forgiven” (page 94). Who do you think she’s talking about? Forgiven for what? Based on Northwest Corner, do you believe that forgiveness is possible between Emma and her mother? Between Sam and Dwight? Between Ruth and Dwight?
7. If you were to try to envision the future of the relationships among the five major characters in the novel, how would you imagine them?
8. How would you say the novel’s particular structure—the narrative continuously interwoven through five different points of view—affects the reader’s ultimate perceptions of the story and its meanings?
9. Has reading Northwest Corner changed your sense of what family is or can be?
10. By the end of the novel, how has each main character’s sense of familial inheritance been changed, and in what ways? Would you say that the parents and their children are closer together or further apart than they were at the beginning of the novel?