A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon
New book spotlight: a conversation with novelist, editor, & journalist Richard Babcock about his excellent new novel
Deadline tomorrow, Thursday, July 31 for hard-copy poetry submissions for The Paris Review. (Postmark must be 7/30 or 7/31). Include a brief cover letter and a SASE. Send to Poetry Editor, The Paris Review, 544 W. 27th St., Floor 3, New York, NY 10001
Flash Fiction Online will be open August 1 - 7 for flash story submissions that address the theme of regret. More info here; Submittable portal here.
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Today’s feature is adapted from an interview I did with Richard Babcock for Newcity Lit earlier this month.
One of the many pleasures of reading Richard Babcock’s new novel, A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon, is its arresting, multilayered characterization. Every character who moves across the page, from main to supporting, is drawn with pathos and acute psychological insight. Striking observations about the human predicament—our blind spots and self-deceptions, our joys and fraught, emotional alliances—abound in this novel.
One scene that skillfully conveys the author’s thematic interests and his exceptional compassion for his characters occurs when Ettie Calvert, one of the novel’s three main characters, meets with an attorney she previously had an unflattering impression of. “It occurs to her suddenly that she’s been wrong about people—she always assumed that the externals reflected the internals, that the flesh mirrored the personality, the character, the soul, something inside. But now this run-down little man had shown the bite of a lion.”
Reversals in thought—and fortune—inform this moving and suspenseful novel. Babcock is as gifted with plot as he is with character. Set over the course of several days in a small, remote Nevada town in October 1954, A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon is a gripping thriller that brings to mind Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Charles Portis’ True Grit. Tonally, Babcock’s novel is closer to Unforgiven, but the manhunt that serves as the focal point of A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon is brethren to the quest narrative in True Grit.
Above all, Babcock has written an enthralling novel with characters and a landscape he hauntingly and beautifully dramatizes.
Today and tomorrow—two bookstore events for A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon:
TODAY, Wednesday, July 30, 6:30 PM: Read Between the Lynes, on the Square in Woodstock, IL (815-206-5967)
TOMORROW, Thursday, July 31, 7 PM: The Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, Chicago, Richard will be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Eig (the store recommends RSVPs - 773-293-2665)
Christine/Bookish: A little over halfway through your new novel, there’s an arresting moment when deputy Tom Lang finds a photo of the boy he’s pursuing for the murder of his patrol partner Ronnie Calvert. “The boy looked so happy, joy lighting up his face. How do you get from that to a murdering teenager? The years, the days, the moments, so much changes.” This strikes me as the heart of any story, i.e., “How did we get from there to here?” Would you comment on this?
Richard Babcock: That photo grows from an experience I had years ago. I served as a law clerk to a judge in Washington, D.C., and one day a young man, fifteen or so, was brought in for arraignment. He lived in one of the rich suburbs, but he’d committed a crime in the city—a burglary, I think.
Because of previous run-ins with the police, the boy was being charged in an adult court. He was a handsome, well-dressed kid, and he was accompanied by both parents, who looked accomplished and concerned. By all indications, he’d enjoyed all the material advantages. And yet as he sat in the courtroom, facing serious charges, gripping himself with both arms, it was clear he was tortured in some way. In my imagination, he was the here, the end point of the photo of Adam Ott, the murdering boy in my book. How did he get here?
That is indeed the heart of any story. The very question suggests motion and transformation—action, the engine of good writing. I would even venture that for many of us, writer or not, the question is the heart of a lived life. Any moment builds from countless choices—some considered, others impulsive, even inadvertent. I’ve always envied people who can move forward, not dwelling on the past. (If such people even exist.)
All three of the main characters in my book—including the boy—agonize over the choices they have made, which only come into stark relief as the result of his senseless act of violence. And all three are seeking absolution in some way or another. Guilt is an extraordinarily powerful motivator.
CS: Hero or villain or somewhere in between, each of your characters is finely drawn and morally complex. Do you start with backstory or an idea of a forthcoming conflict, or is it a character’s voice?
RB: Three of my four novels have developed from an image or scene that floated into my head. The image won’t go away and eventually I start to build a story around it. My first book, “Martha Calhoun,” about a young girl who flees her loving, but wild and irresponsible mother, came from an imagined picture of a girl alone in a room madly writing in a notebook.
Bow’s Boy, which was set in a small Wisconsin town during the Vietnam War, is narrated by an alcoholic investigator for a local lawyer. Before I knew who he was, I had an image of a terribly hungover man waking up in a booth in a tavern. His drool has pasted his cheek to the plastic seat cover, and he feels a sharp pain when he tears his face away. He thinks: I’ve been shot in the face by a Viet Cong sniper.
The third novel, Are You Happy Now?, takes place in the publishing world, so that drew on the context of my career. But A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon grew from a scene of a cop climbing a barren, rocky slope, obviously in pursuit of someone.
None of these spurts of imagination open my narratives, but they all show up within the pages. I have no idea where the images come from (well, don’t ask me about the hungover narrator). The characters within them become central players in the novel. I turn them loose, and the story unfolds—through many iterations. As I always tell my students, God is in the rewrite.
CS: This novel has three point-of-view characters: the aforementioned deputy Tom Lang and the teenaged gunman Adam Ott, and Ettie Calvert, the wife of felled police officer Ronnie Calvert. Did A Small Disturbance on the Far Horizon always have three POV characters?
RB: Yes. I wanted to explore how the principals dealt internally with the aftermath of a traumatic event. Almost from the start, I had Lang, the deputy and Ettie, the adulterous new widow. I quickly realized I had to add Adam, whose impulsive crime sets in motion the story.
CS: The setting plays a major role in shaping the tone and action. What drew you to this particular location and time period, and what research did you do?
RB: I’ve always lived in the Midwest or the East, so to fulfill that igniting image—a cop climbing a barren, rocky slope—I knew I had to go west, and Nevada was an obvious choice. I like the way the harsh, arid environment brings the emotions of the characters into stark relief. And as a child of the fifties, I always associated Nevada with the bomb testing there in the decade after World War II.
I’d been to Vegas a few times, but never beyond, so I flew out and spent a week or so hiking in the desert and the mountains and visiting small towns. I went to the libraries and browsed local newspapers from the early fifties, soaking up the news and culture.
Wonderfully, most of the papers had not yet been digitized or converted to microfilm. They came in big, oversized volumes that I could lay out on a table and leaf through. I’ve done that sort of research for several of my earlier books, and it’s a remarkable way to close the gap in time. You are suddenly transported to life in another era—the petty crimes, the county fair, the price of a dress, the movies showing. In Nevada, I saw several articles about concern over radioactive fallout from the bomb testing, but the government always gave assurances.
CS: An atom-bomb test occurs late in the novel in the desert near Flora, which the characters have varying reactions to. Needless to say, there are all sorts of portents and connotations to attribute to this event. Would you speak to this?
RB: The shadow of nuclear devastation hung over the fifties. (It’s astonishing how the anxiety has dissipated over the years, though the threat remains as sinister as ever.) I imagine it was even more alarming to many of the people of Nevada, who could feel the earth shake or see the flash when a bomb went off.
The test that’s featured in my book is based on an actual event—the so-called Big Shot. Here’s how the Chicago Tribune described it: “A boiling purple fireball, speeding dragon shaped cloud, and rolling thunder ripped the dawn today in the most spectacular and one of the strongest atomic detonations ever set off in this country.”
Night turned to day; nature’s order was flipped. The characters in the novel react differently—Lang with disgust, Ettie and her daughter with fear, Adam Ott with the delusional belief that it’s a sign he’s been chosen. But afterwards they continue pretty much as before.
I think sometimes of Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach about Australians carrying on with life as a cloud of radiation from an atomic war makes its deadly way toward them. I think we forget that we’re all still on the beach.
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This looks great. Thank you!!
Great interview...thanks!