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I love all your books that i've read. I think my favorite is Dingley Falls.
Where did you get the idea for such a story? Was it based on the paranoia of 'the times' and the worry about nuclear war (it was written in the 60's right?) Of all your novels, I found this one to be different than the others. While it dealt with human emtions, errors, etc, it also had a very 'science fiction' type feel to it at times (the worry and curiosity felt by the reader and characters about what exactly was going on out in those woods) did you do this on purpose? Have you ever considered writing a full-fledged horror novel?
I hope these questions are ok and made sense to you!
your fan,
frannie schertz
. Dear Frannie Schertz,
Thank you for your good words about my novels. And I'm delighted to hear of your special fondness for Dingley Falls because I sometimes feel that the book gets neglected in relation to its younger siblings like Handling Sin. And it's a book of which I am proud and fond.
I'm fascinated by your assumption that I wrote Dingley in the 60s. In fact I wrote it in the late 70s and published it in 1980. (There is an earlier novel of mine The Delectable Mountains, which is much more literally a sixties book. It's set in the catastrophic months of 1968 when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were killed, when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia, and the riots took place at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and so on.)
But you're quite right to intuit that the sensibility of Dingley evolves out of all the passionate conflicts of sixties politics that were very much a part of my college life--the civil rights and free speech movements, the Vietnam War protests and Watergate. My involvement in, and response to, what was going on in our country in those tumultuous years had a profound effect on the way in which I constructed Dingley Falls.
First, it is a town novel (a genre ranging from Middlemarch to Winesburg, Ohio to Peyton Place) but in its attempt to present a whole community in interlaced vignettes, it was also influenced by poetic works like Spoon River Anthology and Under Milkwood. That means the world of the book ranges over a whole community, a public rather a private canvas. And that local world is seen as a microcosm of the nation.
Second, it has a "creation" structure, taking place over seven days (the last day, Sunday, consisting of the sermon given in the church where all the townspeople have gathered), and that progression reflects its interest in our nation's history: the cultural shifts, the changing traditions out of which our nation has evolved.
And third, it has a "message," there are ethical concerns addressed: Each day concludes with a moral essay told as a political satire--it is these chapters in which the shenanigans of "The Secret Base" are exposed.
The story is set in 1976 because of the political emphasis to the novel that you astutely point out. 1976 was the year of America's 200th birthday and there was much celebration in the town of Dingley Falls about the local heritage. The town, you'll recall, was very proud of its past.
The decision to add the "science fiction" of the secret base was one with which a number of editors disagreed. They worried I had stretched the novel outside the normal limits of the "town genre." But that stretch was crucial to the kind of political underpinnings I wanted the novel to have. In that way, Dingley was (as you sensed) very much a "sixties" book in the tradition of Catch 22 or Slaughterhouse-Five.
Ironically, my satiric science fiction about a renegrade secret branch of the government developing germ warfare and testing out their experiments on unsuspecting locals has proved all too horrifically close to the truth--certainly in Iraq, if not elsewhere. I've always believed that fiction is very hard-pressed to dream up anything too outrageous for life.
So to answer your question about why don't I write a "horror" book, I suppose I think there's enough horror in the ordinary lives of fiction to make the point. And of course enough goodness too.
With best wishes,
Michael Malone