PART 2: STRUCTURE

 

In the first paragraph of Ezekiel’s Shadow, horror novelist Ian Merchant asks himself two questions it will take 350 pages to answer: “How will I ever write another horror novel? And, Who am I if I can’t write anymore? ” Merchant is a blockbuster writer in the style of Stephen King whose backlist is a chronicle of ever-spiraling depravity. The hopeless nihilism of his last book seemed so unworkable to him in retrospect that he launched out on a spiritual quest that eventually ended with his conversion and baptism in a Utah river. The mentor who was instrumental in bringing Merchant to Christ, Howard Ezekiel Kepler, subsequently died of exposure in a literal valley of dry bones—a fate anticipated (and in some sense ameliorated) by Kepler’s art, which consists of landscape photography and self-portraits affixed with passages from Scripture. The horrific nature of Kepler’s death combined with Merchant’s change in outlook has sparked a bad case of writer’s block that has Merchant’s editor, Louis Kael, desperate for a breakthrough—so desperate, in fact, that he will resort to extraordinary means to bring it about.

    Kael hires an ex-convict named Martin Hanover to orchestrate a macabre stalking of his bestselling author, hoping to provoke Merchant to new heights (or depths) of creativity and garner some publicity at the same time. The escalating incidents of the stalking—from the eerie calligraphy of blind artist Norman Gruitt (Hanover’s former cellmate and also mentor to Merchant’s new friend Kevin Contrade) to the threatening extracts from Merchant’s work inked in his dog’s blood and the serious injury of Trout, a railway porter—provide a suspenseful backdrop for the quieter exploration of Merchant’s artistic and spiritual struggles.

    Those struggles eventually lead to answers for the questions Merchant poses at the book’s opening: “He wasn’t going to write another horror novel. That was finished” (p. 351). Instead of the spooky storyteller his publicity folks have made him out to be, Ian Merchant is going to be himself from now on. That resolution leads to another question—“And now what?”—that is finally answered in the epilogue:

 

“I’m going to write,” [Merchant] said. “It’s what I do. I’m going to write the book I was writing about this whole mess and explain the one thing I’ve learned through it all.”

        “What’s that?” Oakley asked.

       Laughing, Ian said, “You’ll have to wait for the book.”

        Oakley looked stunned.

        “Just kidding. Mostly what I learned is that you’re either living life as a dead man—just a walking skeleton—or you realize what it is you were always missing and live for that. I got so wrapped up in thinking about the skeleton underneath that I forgot for a time about living.”

 

So Merchant is giving up fiction for testimony, abandoning the nihilism of his previous work to write a book that will not only share his true story, but will also pass along a moral lesson to its readers. That lesson, in veiled language, is that the path to real living, the way to put flesh on walking skeletons, is faith in Christ.

 

EIGHT WEEKS, TWO STORIES, THREE MENTORS

 

The narrative in Ezekiel’s Shadow is divided into an eight-week chronology, with individual chapters taking place on specified days. At the beginning of the book, we learn that Ian Merchant and his wife Rebecca throw a celebrated Labor Day party every year, and this will be the climactic event of the story. From the late afternoon of Wednesday, July 10 until the early morning of Friday, September 6, two major plots run simultaneously: (a) Ian’s struggle to write, which will develop in three stages as he attempts fiction, then memoir and then personal testimony, and (b) Martin Hanover’s stalking of the Merchants. The two plots intersect at points, when Ian starts a memoir about the stalking, for example, and when he discovers that the whole thing is a publicity stunt put on by his editor, but it’s clear to readers which one is more important to the writer. Ian’s spiritual permutations are chronicled in great detail, while the stalking incidents remain mostly in the background and introduce a fair number of unanswered questions.

    If the week/day divisions and the two central plots serve as the main structural devices of the novel, there is a repeated artist/mentor relationship that is just as important. The world of Ezekiel’s Shadow is as rich in artists as it is in believers of one sort or another. There is Ian, of course, whose art consists in turning life into horror, but we also have his mentor Howard Kepler, Katherine Jacoby, and Norman Gruitt. Kepler’s photographs amount to a personal, artistic application of Scripture to life. Katherine Jacoby gives up trompe d’oeil fancies for post-conversion reality, becoming both a sermon illustration and spiritual mentor to Merchant’s wife Rebecca, whose “art” consists of turning Jacoby’s work into a master’s thesis. Norman Gruitt is a blind artist whose art has been reduced to the incision of words on paper, and he serves as mentor to the enigmatic aspiring artist Kevin Contrade. Rounding out the list of aspiring artists are Peter Ray—who starts off as a mentor-echo of Howard Kepler before fading into the background—and seminarian Jaret Chapman. At the end of the book, we’re introduced to yet another artist, this time a landscape artist named Ty Caller whose own feat of trompe d’oeil transforms the Merchants’ yard into Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones.

    The main mentor relationship, of course, is between Merchant and Howard Kepler, but it is closely mirrored by the tie between Rebecca Merchant and Katherine Jacoby: “Katherine was to Rebecca what Howard had been to Ian” (p. 325). In both cases, the mentor is deceased, is a convert to Christianity, and is principally known to the artist through an exploration of journals, letters and art. In each case, the mentor is the instrument of conversion. Howard administers Ian’s “shallow baptism” before the book opens and when Rebecca is baptized just before the climactic Labor Day party, she says, “I met an artist, Katherine Jacoby....And she was entangled with the same God, the same Savior my husband was. And I decided I needed that to be me” (p. 368).

    Each mentor also changes the nature of the artist’s work. Confronting the album of Kepler’s photos leads Ian to strongly identify with the series of self portaits Kepler made over the years, and Ian’s memoir/testimony amounts to a similar project in words. Rebecca undertakes her study of Katherine Jacoby for academic purposes, but continues it as a fellow-believer hoping only to know the deceased woman more.

 

 

Unfortunately, the enigma of Contrade’s beautifully written and repeatedly burned fiction and the nature of his relationship with Gruitt remains unexplored. Contrade tells Ian that, “[Gruitt] was to me what Howard was to you, I think. But I screwed up. Badly” (p. 350). We never discover how Contrade screwed up. In fact, Gruitt disappears without explanation in the latter half of the book. The last we hear of him is Detective Oakley’s, “We’re going to try to find Norman Gruitt” (p. 392), to which Ian replies: “Fine.” As a result, the structural balance that Dave seems to want the Contrade/Gruitt relationship to provide never really materializes.

 

TIME AND TIME AGAIN

 

The decision to structure the narrative in weeks and days contributes to one of the novel’s principle weaknesses: uneven pacing. If each book is a week and every chapter a day, then the writer begins with a template to fill—the equivalent of starting your manuscript not with a blank page but with a blank diary. It looks like a helpful crutch at first, but soon you realize that every day in the diary has a page devoted to it, whether anything happens or not. To his credit, Dave hasn’t given us a chapter for every day between July 10 and September 6. But even so, this structural choice prevents him from compressing time when necessary to keep the pace moving. Ian and Rebecca Merchant build a relationship with the Oakleys over the course of the book, but the day-per-chapter structure prevents Dave from stepping back and writing something like “over the weeks that followed, the Merchants and the Oakleys grew closer and closer.” Instead, he has to chronicle each milestone in detail—always showing, never telling, whether those details are really worth showing or not.

    Parts of Ezekiel’s Shadow seem to drag, and one of the reasons (I think) is that the week/day structure forces the inclusion of things that don’t need to be spelled out and squeezes out some of the ones that do. In essence, the structure denies recourse to one of the novelist’s most important tools, exposition.

    There is more to the pacing issue than this, of course, and I will address the problem from another angle in tomorrow’s consideration of pacing as it relates to dramatizing scenes.

    Some readers are going to find fault in my diagnosis here. After all, lots of books are structured this way, especially thrillers. The time stamps add a ticking bomb quality to the narrative, raising the stakes ever higher as the seconds pass.

    True enough.

    But how many ticking bombs are set on an eight week timer?

     Ezekiel’s Shadow would be strengthened by shortening the timeframe. Let’s say that instead of eight weeks the frame was contracted to eight days. That would provide a week for the build-up to the Labor Day party and the day after for an epilogue. It would force a lot of compression, but when you think about it, Ezekiel’s Shadow already depends on compression of a sort: one of the most important things happening in the book is the unpacking of back story, things that happened before the curtain raised. Compressing the action into a week would simply add urgency to the task.

     Another possibility—and this would be rather audacious—would be to take a page from Mrs. Dalloway and tell the whole story during the course of the Labor Day party. It could be done, but it would require a lot more work than cutting the timetable down to a week!

 

MENTORS, MENTORS EVERYWHERE

 

As I mentioned earlier, there are lots of artists, aspiring artists and mentors in the book. I like the idea of mirroring Merchant’s journey, but in the case of the Rebecca/Katherine Jacoby relationship, the resemblances are too precise, and the Contrade/Gruitt relationship isn’t developed enough to offset the Merchant/Kepler relationship. One way to address this would be to change the dynamic between Rebecca and Jacoby—this could be as simple as not making Jacoby’s resemblance to Kepler so strong—and develop the Contrade/Gruitt sub-plot more. Suppose that the Jaret Chapman character is eliminated and more time is given in the workshop to Contrade’s work, allowing it to serve as a keener antithesis to Merchant’s. Also, there could be more personal conflict between Merchant and Contrade, elevating Contrade from a bit player to more of a supporting cast member like Oakley. Consolidating Gruitt and Martin Hanover might help, too.

    Another possibility would be to take Rebecca’s subplot away entirely and to make her a more integral part of Ian’s story.

    All of these suggestions would simplify and clarify the structure of Ezekiel’s Shadow, helping to realize some of the hints that are already there. They would also allow some judicious cuts to be made that would shorten the narrative and keep the pace moving. Combined with the suggestions I will make in tomorrow’s analysis of craft, these structural tweaks might bring the author’s intentions closer to realization.

 

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

 

Am i on to something here, or have I missed the boat? To share your feedback on these structural observations and push the conversation farther, be sure to read Dave’s commentary today and join us in the new CRITICAL ANALYSIS section of the Faith in Fiction Forum for discussion.