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In her deceptively straightforward fictions, Margot Livesey absorbingly explores the layers of the human heart

MARGOT LIVESEY HAS become known for writing the “literary page-turner.” In her novels, character becomes the action that drives a story forward. And the unpredictability of character leads to the twists and turns that keep readers intrigued. But Livesey isn’t all about turning pages. She writes close to the heart, revealing her characters’ tenderness and vulnerability as much as their manipulations and self-pity.

One of her fans is Julia Glass, winner of the National Book Award for Three Junes, who said of Livesey: “For her keen wit and wise heart, for her mingling of the tender with the diabolical–never mind her knack for holding the reader in thrall to a suspenseful story–she is a master, pure and simple.”

Livesey takes on new challenges in each novel–writing about ghosts in Eva Moves the Furniture, for example, or, in The Missing World, about a woman with amnesia as she regains her memory. It is a persistent ambition of hers, Livesey says, “to find new ways to deepen and improve my work.”

On the surface her novels are straightforward, told in dean, succinct sentences in a clear and deliberate voice. But she explores the darker and lighter aspects of the human heart, and as she does so, her stories contain stories.

The Missing World, for example, is a thwarted love story in which Jonathan tries to win back his former lover Hazel after she’s struck with amnesia and doesn’t remember leaving him. The narrative tension develops as Hazel regains her memory as Jonathan struggles to maintain his lies. Contained in that drama are the stories of Charlotte, a struggling actress with nowhere to turn, Freddie, a laborer with illusions of love, and other assorted characters with stories of their own. This suspenseful tale of one woman’s captivity and confusion becomes a meditation on memory, love and loss.

Banishing Verona similarly offers up a suspenseful story line when Zeke, a 29-year-old London housepainter with a mild autism-like condition, and Verona, single and pregnant, are united in the first chapters only to be separated and left seeking one another throughout the rest of the book. The tension develops as the characters contend with their ambivalent emotions and unexpected life circumstances. This love story between Zeke and Verona explores what it means to be part of a family, and how we reckon with the past so that we can live at peace in the present. Livesey offers up no easy answers, no pat solutions–she lets the characters and action speak for themselves.

Some clues to Livesey’s use of family themes may lie in her unusual childhood in the Scottish Highlands. “My father was 50 years old when I was born, and my mother, Eva, died when I was 2 1/2,” Livesey told fiction writer Carole Burns in an online interview for The Washington Post. “Subsequently my father remarried a woman of his own age, so at the age of 5, I was living with two 55-year-olds who were elderly 55-year-olds. I took refuge with a neighboring family who had four children. I think this early experience of inventing my own family is a major factor in the ongoing preoccupation in my work with what constitutes a family, how we sort out the competing loyalties of family vs. new affections. And I’m aware at this point in the 21st century that many people are in a similar situation of inventing and re-inventing their families.”

Livesey, who is also the author of the novel Homework and the short-story collection Learning by Heart, is everything Julia Glass describes and more: a master storyteller, a teacher and a critically acclaimed author. In a recent chat with her near Boston, where she now lives and is writer-in-residence at Emerson College, we explored how she finds and develops her interesting plots and characters.

Critics often refer to your novels as “literary page-turners.” How do you keep readers turning the pages in a character-driven narrative?
I think of my novels as being in the great 19th-century tradition where plot and character went hand in hand. So while I do aspire to have deep and complex characters, I also aspire to have complicated and intriguing plots.

How does a novel come to you–in an image, a scene or a character?
I’m usually slow to come up with characters. Most of my novels have come as some combination of idea and image. I picture a baby at a bus stop and I think, oh, I’ll write a novel about a banker who finds a baby in a bus station.

Once you have that glimpse into the book, do you draft straight through, or do you take it slow and make each paragraph, page and chapter perfect as you go?
At the moment, I seem to be going back and forth between these two strategies. I write a certain number of pages, then double back to revise, but that may be partly because my writing time is so broken up when I’m teaching.

In The Missing World, you explore issues of memory and morality in the wake of an accident in which the main character, Hazel Ransome, suffers from amnesia. What interested you in a character with amnesia?
When I first started writing the novel, issues of memory were very much in the news, with debates about, on the one hand, Alzheimer’s, and on the other, repressed memories. These caught my interest in part because living several thousand miles from my native land, I’m always acutely aware of how my life is held together by memory. The idea of a woman who loses part of her memory seemed a wonderful way to explore the degree to which memory and identity are intertwined.

Hazel’s name is interesting in that she’s in a kind of haze as she regains her memory. How do you go about naming your characters, and what is the importance of a name?
As William Gass so memorably says, proper names have a special excitement for a writer because we get to invent their meaning. I spend a good deal of time pondering names for my characters and trying to make sure that they’re neither too odd nor too familiar. In Banishing Verona, I called my heroine after the Italian city where Romeo and Juliet lived and loved. And I called my hero Zeke because the combination of the Z and the K seemed to suggest the way he’s on awkward terms with himself.

Hazel’s extinguished memories leave her vulnerable to her former boyfriend. He is taking advantage of her incapacity. What drew you to this particular moral dilemma?
Initially, I’m not sure that I did think of it as a moral dilemma. I read an article in People magazine about a couple who were getting married after their second engagement. The first had been broken when the woman was in an accident and lost all memory of her fiancé. He talked about the oddity of courting her again and of knowing so much more about her than she knew about him. That was what intrigued me, that lopsided relationship. As I kept writing, however, I did become increasingly interested in the moral dilemmas.

The siblings in your narratives have often wreaked havoc on each other’s lives. Henry in Banishing Verona, for example, drags pregnant Verona, his sister, across the Atlantic to help save him from hoodlums. What draws you to this complicated family terrain?
Having no siblings and no parents, family is always a challenge for me, and I think I’m still figuring out how to invent these strange tribes. Siblings strike me as particularly fruitful terrain because of what they share and how different they can be.

You have also written several characters with disorders such as amnesia and Asperger’s Syndrome. What kind of research do you do?
I first learned about Asperger’s Syndrome a number of years ago when two friends had children who were diagnosed with this condition. Over the years, as I learned more about it, I became increasingly convinced that I and most people I knew had Asperger’s moments and that this condition was a wonderful lens through which to examine the world. As for research, I went to the library and interviewed people with Asperger’s and people who worked with them.

Zeke in Banishing Verona bears a striking resemblance to Freddie in The Missing World in that they are both laborers with extreme sensitivity and social dysfunction.
Yes, there are similarities between Freddie and Zeke, although their origins are very different. I made Freddie a roofer in part to solve the problem I’d created. If Jonathan is keeping Hazel captive, what man can ever reach her? The answer is someone working on the house where she is held prisoner. In Zeke’s case, his profession [housepainting] grew out of his character and what I imagined as being possible for him.

You often write using a shifting point of view. What does the narrative gain from this?
I think the narrative gains considerable tension from having more than one point of view. It enables one to leave gaps, to show the blindness and biases of each character, to move the story along in surprising ways. In the case of Banishing Verona, although I adored writing in Zeke’s point of view, it was also fairly limiting and, for several kinds of reasons, I needed Verona’s more worldly and efficient point of view.

When I interviewed novelist Andrea Barrett, she emphasized the importance of her friendship with you, her reliance on your reading her work and sharing the literary life. How does that literary friendship inform your work?
My process of revision is that I send everything to Andrea and she tells me how to fix it. I try to follow her advice, and then I send the pages to her again and she tells what’s better and what’s worse. This continues for a while. Eventually, other readers, including my agent and editor, weigh in. I feel deeply fortunate to have so much help.

What do you do when you get stuck?
A) Ask Andrea Barrett. B) Try to figure out why I am stuck. In the case of Criminals, for instance, I originally had only two points of view, those of the brother and sister. Around Chapter 6 I began to feel bogged down. I still thought it was a good idea for a novel–banker finds baby in bus station–but there was something wrong. Eventually I realized that I had been entirely ignoring how the baby ended up at the bus station. Once I started pursuing that line of thought, the novel opened up again.

What would you say to new writers working on their first stories or novel?
Find readers for your work who know you first as a writer rather a friend. Ask, and try to answer, the question of why readers should be interested in your stories. Look at how rich and various the world is. I know my own imagination is very hack-neyed in terms of coming up with details for characters and landscapes, and my work is vastly improved when I actually spend some time observing people.

Write better sentences.

A LIVESEY SAMPLER
BANISHING VERONA is a love story about two people who spend a magical evening together, and then spend the next few weeks trying to locate each other to find out if their relationship is the love they believe it is. Zeke Cafarelli is a mildly autistic housepainter. Verona MacIntyre, who is seven months pregnant, is a radio talk-show host who flips-flops between wanting to rescue her troubled brother and wanting to save herself. Livesey keeps readers on edge wondering after the fate of these two lovers.

In EVA MOVES THE FURNITURE, Eva is accompanied by two ghosts, a girl and a woman, who ore there mainly in a protective role. But, they warn her, they are unable to change the course of her life, only to offer their guidance.

In THE MISSING WORLD, when Hazel is hit by a car and suffers amnesia, her former boyfriend Jonathan uses the opportunity to bring her to his house and convince her that they are still happily together. But friends and other observers are not so convinced, and events conspire to bring the truth to the surface.

CRIMINALS tells the story of a banker, Ewan Munro, who finds a baby in a bathroom while traveling north to spend a weekend with his sister Mollie, who is recovering from a bad divorce. Mollie is desperate for a baby, and this tale narrates how easily two lives can slip into chaos as the child’s parents appear on the scene and events grow more complicated.

HOMEWORK explores a child’s capacity for evil when she is sent to live with her father and his lover, Stephen and Celia. Celia believes that Jenny is trying to get rid of her, but Stephen refuses to hear anything bad about his daughter, so Celia is helpless to stop Jenny’s assault.

THE MARGOT LIVESEY FILE
LIVESEY, WHO WAS reading Dickens’ Great Expectations and Emily Barton’s novel Brookland when interviewed, says her reading life informs her writing life “intimately.” She advises in an essay that one “learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinery, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice to comprehend.”

LEFT MOTHERLESS AS a child, Livesey grew up as an only child and the daughter of a father who taught at a private boys’ school. “Living way out in the country,” she told interviewer Jill Maio, “there were few other reliable entertainments, and I can still remember the bindings (and the smells) of some of the first books I read: Kidnapped, The Little Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows. My father had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and as far as I recall I could read whatever I could reach. Most of the lower shelves were filled with authors like Thucydides–he had inherited the Latin and Greek library of his father, who was a minister–but there was also Evelyn Waugh, Colette, D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley.”

“AS A CHILD,” she recalls, “I read a story which claimed that on Christmas Eve animals could talk, and spent several years trying to converse with the family dog, a sweet-natured but mute border terrier.”

“I STARTED WRITING the year after I left the University of York in England,” she says. “I was traveling for a year in Europe and North Africa with my boyfriend, who was writing a book about the philosophy of science. After a while I got tired of visiting cathedrals and markets on my own and started imitating him. Not having a subject –I didn’t know enough to write, for example, a history of the Crusades–I wrote a novel.”

THE FIRST SUMMER she came to the U.S., she remembers, “I read [Jack] Kerouac’s On the Road and hitchhiked from Dayton, Ohio, to Athens, Ga.”

LIVESEY HAS A long-standing interest in megalithic sites–standing stones, circles and cairns. “I find these places mysteriously beautiful,” she says. “My favorite site, so far, is Callanish in the Outer Hebrides.”

When Zeke met Verona
HERE IS AN excerpt from Margot Livesey’s novel Banishing Verona. The novel is a love story, yet its main characters, Zeke and Verona, are seen together in only a few scenes. This scene is the first passage where the reader is introduced to Zeke, who has a form of autism.

He had replaced five lightbulbs that day and by late afternoon could not help anticipating the soft ping of the filament flying apart whenever he reached for a switch. The third time, the fixture in the hall, the thought zigzagged across his mind that these little explosions were a sign, like the two dogs he had come across in the autumn, greyhound and bulldog, locked together on the grassy slope of the local park. He had given them a wide berth; still, he had felt responsible when on the bus next day a man turned puce and fell to the floor. By the fifth bulb, though, he had relinquished superstition and was blaming London Electricity. Some irregularity in the current, some unexpected surge, was slaughtering the bulbs. He pictured a man at head office filling his idle minutes by pulling a lever. Meanwhile, hour by hour he emptied the upstairs rooms, slipping the bulbs from bedside lights and desk lamps.

He had just replaced the fifth bulb when the doorbell rang. Often, if he were up a ladder, Zeke didn’t bother to answer the knocks and rings of late afternoon; the owners of the house, the Barrows, were away and the callers were never for him. But now the pallor of the sky, the flashes of light and dark, the weariness of working alone, all conspired to make even the prospect of rebuffing a smartly dressed double-glazing salesman, or a disheveled collector for Oxfam, a pleasure. Last Friday, in a similar mood, he had found a boy on the doorstep, thin as a junkie, pretending to be blind. He had the dark glasses, the cane, the fluttery stuff with the hands. You’re a painter, he had said, sniffing slightly. Zeke had given him fifty pence. Later he had looked out of the window and seen the boy sitting on a wall, reading the newspaper.

He set aside the wallpaper steamer and went to open the front door. On the doorstep a woman, minus collecting tin or clipboard, filled his vision. He hadn’t replaced the hall bulb yet, and in the dim light her features took a moment to assemble. He made out abrupt dark eyebrows above a substantial nose and plump, glistening lips–the opposite of pretty.

Briefly, Zeke was baffled. Then he went through the steps he’d learned from the poster he’d been given at the clinic. Eyes wide, a glimpse of teeth, corners of the mouth turning up rather than down–usually these indicated a smile, which could, he knew, mean anger but often meant the opposite. Yes, she was smiling, although not necessarily for him. Her expression had clearly been prepared in advance, but he admired the way she held her face steady at the sight of him, and of his work clothes. His jeans and shirt were so paint-spattered as to be almost a separate entity.

“Good afternoon.” She stretched out a hand and, seeing his, white with plaster, faltered, neither withdrawing nor completing the gesture.

“Hi,” he said, hating the single stupid syllable. She was tall for a woman, his height save for the step, and dimly familiar, though not as herself. As she began to speak, he realized who she reminded him of: the bust of Beethoven on his father’s piano, something about the expansiveness of her features, the way her tawny hair sprang back from her forehead.

“I’m the Barrows’ niece,” she said.

From Banishing Verona: A Novel by Margot Livesey. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 2004 by Margot Livesey. All rights reserved.

Margot Livesey usually starts with an idea and an image, and from there crafts novels that have been praised for their blending of “the tender with the diabolical.”

By: Johnson, Sarah Anne, Writer, Oct2006