Schaffert’s Back with New Novel Delighting in the Curiosities of American Gothic
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by Leo Adam Biga
story’s central riddle: A local woman named Daisy claims a daughter, Lenore, has been abducted by an itinerant aerial photographer. Trouble is, there’s no evidence Lenore ever existed. The facts don’t prevent the tale from captivating the local community and the nation. Schaffert says he agonized if the narrative should explain the enigma or not. “A problem I had was to figure out whether the book needed to come to a conclusion about how Daisy came to have these delusions, and I went back and forth about that. There are some earlier versions where there is a kind of extended explanation and in talking to my editor it became clear that was just too complicated or it was just sort of muddying things. So there is nothing definitive — it’s not a mystery solved in a sense.” He says he was interested in writing about “how invested people get into situations that have nothing to do with them and how they adopt other people’s predicaments and apply them to their own conditions. There’s a reluctance to disown a narrative, no matter how far-fetched. No one wants to admit gull-
imothy Schaffert’s new novel The Coffins of Little Hope (Unbridled) takes its elegiac tone from Essie, the elderly obit writer and sage of a fading ag town. Her inquisitiveness and intuition make her the apt narrator for relating this rural gothic tale of faith on trial. Schaffert, founder-director of the Omaha Lit Fest and a University of Nebraska-Lincoln lecturer, has a predilection for idiosyncratic characters. Their various obsessions, compulsions, visions and flights of fancy seem anointed somehow by backwoods environs. He knows the territory — having grown up in Nebraska farm country. His keen observations elevate ordinary small town conventions into something enchanted and surreal. timothy schaffert Even desperate acts and heartbreaking loss are imbued with wonder. Joy and humor leaven the load. Schaffert satirically sets off his beguiling characters and situations with a sweet, never cloying sensibility. The reality’s heightened, not false. He says, “I don’t know why I’m surprised when people find the stories quirky or perverse, although certainly I’m aware of it as I’m writing it. But I don’t think they’re absurd and they’re certainly not held up for ridicule. You don’t want it to be a cartoon. “But it is definitely filtered through imagination. ibility. No one wants to spoil a good mystery. RuI guess it feels a little bit like magical realism without mors, myths and legends take on a life all their own the magic because, yeah, pretty much anything that the more attention we pay to them. happens in the book could actually happen. I mean, “What I’m really looking at is how a community there’s no one levitating, there’s nothing of the super- responds to a tragedy or a crime or an eccentricity that natural really occurring.” has far reaching consequence,” he says. “And we do see Schaffert’s first two novels, The Phantom Limbs of that happening, we see it on the news, we see this kind the Rollow Sisters and The Singing and Dancing Daugh- of perversion or distortion of the tragedy. It’s treated ters of God, trained his whimsy on bucolic nooks and as entertainment, it’s fed back to us in the same way crannies. For Devils in the Sugar Shop he turned his the movies are, with these narratives produced around wry, winking gaze on the bacchanal of the city. them. They are promoted and we are led along.” For his return to God’s Little Acre country in Essie’s grandson, Doc, editor-publisher of the Coffins, Schaffert uses Essie to guide us through the local County Paragraph, feeds the frenzy with install-
ments on the grieving Daisy and the phantom Lenore. Readership grows far beyond the county’s borders. Essie’s obits earn a following too. Her fans include a famous figure with a secret agenda. Then Doc comes to a mid-life crisis decision. He and Essie raised his sister Ivy’s daughter, Tiff, but with Ivy back, Tiff maturing and Essie getting on in years, Doc takes action to restore the family and to lay Lenore to rest. Coffins ruminates on the bonds of family, the power of suggestion, the nature of faith and the need for hope. It has a more measured tone than Schaffert’s past work due to Essie, the mature reporter — the only time he’s used a first-person narrator in a novel. He says the narrative naturally “has to be reconciled with her (Essie’s) own experience. And she’s spent her life writing about death, and now her own life nears its end and so as a writer you have a responsibility to remain true and respectful of that. So, yeah, I think her age brought a kind of gravity to the narration.” Essie’s the book’s sober, anchoring conscience. “And that has to work in order for the novel to work,” says Schaffert. “That what she tells us at the beginning of the novel is true, that she’s recording what she heard, that she’s paid attention, that people trust her.” Schaffert says he didn’t set out to write a firstperson narrative. “It just kind of happened that way. I mean, I definitely had the plot in mind and some of the characters and what I wanted to happen, but I couldn’t quite get started. I one day just started writing and it was in the first person, but I didn’t know who the narrator was. I figured that out shortly thereafter and even as I kind of wrote the first draft I still didn’t feel I knew her (Essie) that terribly well. “It was really in revision I figured out how prominent she needed to be, and that if she was going to be the narrator it really needed to be her story, in her voice, so once I figured that out it then came together in my mind.” He admires Essie’s grit. “She has a sense of herself of having a particularly special gift for writing about the dead, and she takes that very seriously. She’s not at all self-deprecating and I like that about her. She recognizes her importance to the community and the importance of the newspaper, which she really fights for.” Before Essie became paramount, he says Doc and Tiff took precedence. As an amateur magician Doc’s long pressed Tiff into service as his assistant. Doc, the surrogate parent, is tempted to keep her a child in the magic box used in their act. “One of the earliest images I had for the book was Tiff outgrowing the magic box,” says Schaffert. “I read something about a woman who worked as a
books
n There’s a dual book signing this Saturday at the Bookworm in Countryside Village at 87th and Pacific. Sarah McKinstry-Brown will sign copies of her book, Cradling Monsoons, and Amy Plettner will sign hers, Undoing Orion’s Belt, at 1 p.m. on Saturday. Both writers have received MFAs from the University of Nebraska — McKinstry-Brown’s in poetry and Plettner’s in writing — and both are promoting their first books. n Did you set your alarm clock early for Record Store Day last Saturday? Do you pride yourself on your knowledge of arcane movie trivia? Do you go out of your way to try the latest microbrew? If you answered “yes” to any of these (or even if you didn’t), do yourself a favor and check out the supremely amazing Indie Cred Test, an immense, impressive and hilarious takedown of hipsterdom in all its forms. Subtitled “Everything You Need to Know About Knowing Everything You Need To Know,” the lengthy quiz will inevitably hit close to home. Resembling an SAT or ACT test, the Indie Cred Test covers such topics as general wardrobe (“Is there any kind of T-shirt that can’t be worn ironically?”), food (“Do you ever find yourself in heated discussions about why barbecue is a noun and not a verb?”), music (“Has Henry Rollins spit on you more than once?”) and much, much, much more. There are essay questions — “Name five tolerable bands on Saddle Creek. (Bonus for non-shared members)” and “How did you handle your unexpected total disinterest in Fugazi after loving them for so long?” as well as checklists of journalist jargon: “Have you ever described a band or their record as ‘axe-wielding,’ ‘angular,’ or ‘visceral?’ and multiple choice questions. Given the book’s breadth and scope, it will inevitably hit way too close to home in some areas. Still, it’s laser-focused precision and egalitarian approach to skewering hipsterdom in all its forms is commendable. — Kyle Tonniges
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magician’s assistant and she had done this trick in this box until she couldn’t fit into it anymore. That seemed sort of profound to me and fit so perfectly this relationship between Doc and Tiff.” The tension of growing up, holding on, letting go, he says, “seems to be a theme I keep returning to — these delicate relationships between parents and children ... these constant renegotiations.” , For more information about Timoth Schaffert, visit the author’s website at timothyschaffert.com.
| THE READER |
april 21 - 27, 2011
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