PART 3: CRAFT

 

Merchant’s nemesis Kyle Turner —the journalist who earned an on-camera assault for posing a variant on the age-old trick question “Do you still beat your wife?”—pops up halfway through the book to kick-start the soul-searching. Louis Kael, Merchant’s editor, has set up an interview about the stalking, and Turner comes primed with information that’s new to the horror novelist (and the police, too): the menacing phrases employed by the stalker are quotes from Merchant’s own books, including (oddly enough) the one written in dog’s blood by the copycat stalker, Marcus Graves. But that information isn’t what sets Merchant’s teeth on edge. He’s ticked off by a throwaway remark Turner makes in passing: “Glad to see you haven’t changed, Merchant” (p. 206).

    The problem is that, as a Christian convert, Ian Merchant should have changed. If he hasn’t—if he is still the dysfunctional high priest of horror—then what happened to him back in Utah when Howard Kepler put him under the water was a “shallow” baptism indeed. Merchant has doubts about whether his conversion was real:

 

He saw himself doing the same things now and in the past, saw himself glaring from the same leering eyes....Whatever had happened in Utah wasn’t real. He’d slipped under the water and come up again, but the old Ian remained. The new one was nowhere to be found. He was the same old person.

 

    Merchant knows enough about his new faith to realize that if he is in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things have passed away. As his wife tells him, “Unless this is just a phase—a Bob Dylan conversion—it has to affect who you are” (p. 219). At this point in the book, Merchant begins to realize that the story he is trying to tell is not about the stalking or even the writer’s block; it’s about his own salvation and transformation.

    Soon after, the lesson is reinforced by the arrival in the mail of Howard Kepler’s broken pocket watch. This watch, we discover, was Kepler’s symbol of new life: “I smashed my watch. That time is over, something new has begun” (p. 249).

    Over the next hundred pages, Merchant comes to realize that he has changed and that his conversion was real, but the questioning only comes full circle when Kyle Turner appears once more for a follow-up. This time Turner is alone, sweltering in the heat, and more sympathetic to Merchant now that he’s been betrayed by his editor, an experience Turner can relate to. “You’ve changed, Ian,” Turner says (p. 360), reversing his earlier judgment, and then follows one of my favorite scenes from the book:

 

The hardness [Ian had] felt so long was going, almost gone even. He grinned then and said, “You should be glad. Means I won’t have to beat you up anymore.”

        Kyle tried to keep from smiling. “I would have dropped you like an ugly first date.”

    It was the first time the men had even mentioned the incident. It felt good to Ian in a way to be talking about it, but he knew he shouldn’t be making light. He shook his head as the smile left his face and said, “Seriously, though, Kyle, I’m sorry about that whole thing.” He paused. “Just real sorry.”

        Kyle cracked his knuckles, raised an eyebrow, and said, “See, I told you you were going soft.”

        Ian shrugged and dropped his eyes. What more could be said? In that second, he saw his hose, water still dripping from the nozzle. Without thinking he dropped to a knee, grabbed, and came up pointing. They were back where they’d started, and Kyle raised his hands once more, broad swaths of sweat under his arms.

        “Put me out of my misery,” Turner said, and it sounded half serious to Ian.

        For a second there was nothing. Then Ian squeezed, and there was a mist and coolness and the shimmering of prisms in the afternoon light. Kyle closed his eyes against the water and let himself get drenched, saying nothing at all.

 

This is a baptism of sorts. Turner questioned the efficacy of Merchant’s baptism, and now that he acknowledges it, he goes under the water himself. Bracketed between Anne Oakley’s description of her mother’s baptism—so powerful that in her madness she still answers the “call of water”—and the arrangements for Rebecca’s coming baptism, the implication is clear. The scene with Turner derives its power both from the reconciliation at its heart and the sacramental overtones ascribed to the garden hose. This is the sort of sacramental sleight of hand Marilynne Robinson accomplishes so well in Gilead .

    There are many moments like this. Each appearance of the railway porter Trout, for example, is a welcome respite from Merchant’s anxieties. The old man’s voice is captured well enough to bring him to life, so that when Martin Hanover injures Trout, the reader cares in way that he might not if it had been Merchant himself who fell victim.

    The best example of Dave’s craft, though, comes near the end of the book when Merchant confronts Katherine Jacoby’s ribcage wind-chime and ties together all the threads that will be summed up as the “lesson” he’s learned:

 

He was aware of nothing in the moment but the movement of the sculpture and the sound of the pieces clacking against one another. He simply stared, a vague connection forming in his mind. He shut his eyes to concentrate, and the moment the bones sounded he had his answer.

        Typewriter keys. The bones’ clacking was the exact mimic of his old typewriter, the one on which he’d pounded out three novels. They trembled faster and Ian recognized a new sound, the memory of high heels clicking on a marble floor at his wedding. The bones shook with greater speed and he heard the thunder that rang down on the fairgrounds moments before the lightning came. The sound of a centrifuge in the fertility clinic where he and Rebecca had discovered they were never to be called Mom and Dad. The snapping of sticks as Ian and Howard tramped across the Utah desert. Finally came the image from a Bible passage he’d just finished.

        In an instant he had his inspiration.

        They remembered.

        These terrible dry things had once been alive, once were bound by muscle and sinew. Blood fed them and they lived until death pared them clean and bleached them white. Still, somewhere deep inside, they remembered that life, remembered what it was to move, and when the Master’s voice spoke they danced at the invitation to join him once more.

 

Merchant’s writing, his marriage to Rebecca, the horror of the storm at the fairgrounds, the disappointment on learning they would have no children, and his conversion are all assembled and connected by sound. The rattling bones gather it all in and Merchant supplies the tissue to hold all the pieces together. This moment, situated on the eve of the climactic Labor Day party, carries a lot of weight—so much so that Merchant’s recapitulation of it in the epilogue is probably redundant.

    At moments like this Ezekiel’s Shadow shines brightest. The writing is good, the ideas are engaging and the story has a sense of direction. Yesterday I mentioned some of the structural issues that I think detract from this strength, but the pacing problem is not just structural. In fact, the structural issues are secondary. The real challenge is about scenes and conflict. Turner’s metaphorical baptism and Merchant’s wind-chime epiphany are both strong points in the novel because they are strong scenes. Other scenes that would be equally strong are missing from the book—particularly in the first half. Let’s talk about that.

 

SKIPPING SCENES

 

In the first half of Ezekiel’s Shadow a pattern emerges. Ian Merchant has anxiety about some upcoming event, then there’s a section break and Ian Merchant worries about the event in retrospect. The event itself took place in the white space between the two sections. In other words, the scene the narratives builds up to is skipped and then summarized after the fact.

    Here’s an example. Ian and Rebecca go to the movies only to return home and find the cops surrounding their house and the words YOU CAN NEVER ESCAPE THE PAST! written in blood on the window. This reminds Ian of his terrible second date with Rebecca, when lightning skilled six people at the fairgrounds. After that recollection, Ian realizes that the blood on the window must belong to his dog Cain. At the end of the section we read, “Ian jumped from the bumper, racing to find anyone who could help.”

    You would expect Ian to rush into the house, scream Cain’s name and search all over the place until he locates his injured dog. You might also expect him to take an immediate interest in the stalker, who appears to be sitting in a patrol car. These would be dramatic, character-revealing circumstances. Instead, there’s a section break and the next chapter begins:

 

Ian roused a little after nine and couldn’t believe he’d slept so long. Perhaps it was knowing the stalker was in jail or having the vet’s assurance last night that Cain would recover from her stabbing. Most likely, though, it was just the exhaustion of dealing with this whole terrible mess (p. 200).

 

Now this is anti-climactic in the extreme. A few pages later we learn that the man in custody is not the real stalker, but a copycat. A few more pages after that, we discover in passing that the man’s name is Marcus Graves and that’s the last we hear. All of the dramatic possibilities of the scene and its sequels—the false sense of safety, the lifting of Merchant’s guard, the intricacies of Graves’ pathology and his police interrogation—are left to the reader’s imagination.

    The most frustrating skipped scenes are the ones between Ian and Rebecca. There are hints of conflict between them, but the hints are never realized because the raw, unfiltered back-and-forth that would bring them out into the light and let the reader get a grip on who these people are never materialize. Except for small talk and factual exchanges about Katherine Jacoby, the couple keep pretty much to themselves, and this has consequences for the story’s pacing.

    Instead of seeing Ian interact significantly with the important people in his life, we see him interact superficially with minor characters. We also spend a lot of time alone with Ian and his thoughts. We ride with him on the train to a contentious meeting with Louis Kael, and then we ride back to Titansburg with him, never actually entering Kael’s ofice. This pattern repeats frequently enough that I found myself marking the “skips” as I read. As a result, the story has a quiet, contemplative, interiorized quality, even when it should be extroverted and dramatic. Since so much of Ezekiel’s Shadow depends on puzzling over the past, it is important to have punchy, engaging scenes in the present.

    The trend is less pronounced, I think, in the second half of the book. Here, the stalking takes a back seat to other concerns until it almost falls away entirely. Kael is revealed as the mastermind behind it, Gruitt is all but forgotten, and even the eyebrowless Martin Hanover is redeemed when he joins the Merchants in adapting Katherine Jacoby’s cross as a battering ram to escape the freak house fire caused by the security system. What this suggests to me is that the stalking was never what Ezekiel’s Shadow was really about, and once it was established in the first half of the book Dave felt more freedom to pursue what really intrigued him in the second half.

    If this is true, then the first two hundred pages or so could have been revised down to half their size, with an emphasis on dramatic, conflict-conscious scenes bridged by exposition.

 

RAISING THE STAKES

 

Is the book avoiding conflict, or is there too little conflict to begin with? That’s the question. My theory about scene skipping assumes that there is conflict inherent to the relationships in the book and that the flash-points are being skipped. The alternative, though, is that the conflict—particularly in the first half of the book—is more gesture than substance.

    Do Ian and Rebecca, for example, have a troubled marriage? There are hints that they might, ranging from the innuendo about their problems conceiving to Rebecca’s bizarre reaction to Kyle Turner’s assertion that Ian beats her. Instead of denying it or getting angry, Rebecca weeps in the wings. But apart from the occasional melancholy note, there is no hint in their interaction that anything is wrong. We only learn about Rebecca’s conflicted thoughts on Ian’s conversion after the fact, when she gives her own testimony. They seem like a caring, well-adjusted couple, and it’s hard to believe that there’s really a “past.”

    Even the conflict between Merchant and Louis Kael, who is the closest thing to a villain we have in the book, is rather muted. It’s hard to believe that Kael is as desperate as his actions suggest, based on his conversations with Merchant. When we learn (from Rebecca) that he has double-crossed Martin Hanover—presumably by telling the police he was in earnest when he really wasn’t, but we never find out—it’s difficult to reconcile this with the image of the man we’ve seen.

 

WHAT LOUIS KAEL KNEW

 

Ironically, it is Louis Kael who sums up my concerns about the first part of Ezekiel’s Shadow best. His criticism of Merchant’s memoir-in-progress could apply equally to the first four “weeks” of the book:

 

“I have read it,” [Kael] said. “And I’m speaking as an editor now when I say that you don’t explain anything. I haven’t the slightest idea what’s happened to you” (p. 212).

 

A few moments later, Kael adds:

 

“In the end, all I’m looking for is a heck of a story, Ian. That’s it” (p. 213).

 

Merchant promises his editor that he’ll get one: “It’ll all work out,” he says. “Everything will clear up in the end.” Reading Ezekiel’s Shadow, this scene strikes me as pivotal. Kael may or may not be right about Merchant’s new book, but his critique is definitely on target when it comes to Ezekiel’s Shadow. Halfway through the book, there are a lot of questions about backstory that still haven’t been answered, and Merchant has been so oblique about his conversion and the resulting writer’s block that, like Kael, I feel I don’t know what’s really happened. And also like Kael, I am waiting for a heck of a story to develop, and all I have so far is a promise that it will.
    Dave delivers on the promise. After this conversation with Kael, the shape of the story develops and it’s obvious that Ezekiel’s Shadow isn’t what it seemed to be. It’s not a thriller. It’s the story of an artist trying to think his way into the story of his own conversion.

 

One does not, after all, simply wake up one day realizing he was wrong about his life unless there’s a compelling reason. Ian had that reason, and yet it hadn’t made it into the narrative.... He needed to explain the calling of his faith to step into water and let it wash him clean. In the same way that Ian had needed a new beginning, his story did (p. 216).

 

    This is as true of Ezekiel’s Shadow as it is of Merchant’s memoir. The conversion has made it into the narrative, but only obliquely. Now, all that is about to change. But it won’t be easy:

 

His intentions, however, did not lead so easily to results, and the time was spent trying to figure out the best way to enter the story of his conversion. He tried beginning with his shallow baptism but that seemed too abrupt. Introducing Howard Kepler only confused the issue and led him back to receiving the photograph of the rib cage as a Christmas present. Pushing further and further back, he had just come across the first time writing horror had seemed like a bad idea when the doorbell rang (p. 221).

 

This summarizes details the reader has already pieced together and gives a little bit of chronological structure to them, but without adding much to what we already know. Not until Ian gives his personal testimony verbally to the writer’s workshop (beginning on page 310) will we get a coherent, chronological account of his conversion and the events leading up to it.
    Thus, Ezekiel’s Shadow is a struggle to tell a conversion story, but instead of telling the story of Ian Merchant’s conversion, Dave tells the story of Merchant telling the story of his conversion. It’s a story within a story. There’s an appeal to this approach, but it depends on the reader wanting to plumb the depth of the mystery, too. Only, there’s no mystery. So many of the details have been leaked in the preceding three hundred pages that the testimony mostly brings together things we already know.

    What does all this mean? I want to bring these disparate observations together in a way that might be useful. If I’m right about these weaknesses, then the answer lies in taking a different approach to the first half of the book. We should know less about the details of the conversion and see more of the conflict the conversion has brought about. More scenes in which Merchant is confronted by his confused and begrudging wife, more scenes in which his editor badgers, begs and threatens, more friction between Merchant and Kevin Contrade (who seems to harbor resentments we don’t comprehend). If Merchant’s testimony is the answer, then the first half of the book should be devoted to making the question mark as large as it can be.

 

CONTRARIANS OF THE WEB UNITE!

 

The deeper i go into this analysis, the more I feel like Martin Sheen cruising into the heart of jungle darkness in Apocalypse Now. My theories about that might make this a stronger book are just that: mine. If you've read the book and you think I'm wrong, then I want to hear about it. Visit the new CRITICAL ANALYSIS section of the Faith in Fiction Forum and let your voice be heard.