Chris Fabry's "Not in the Heart"

I’m a fan of Chris Fabry’s novels. I loved Dogwood (2009), and thoroughly enjoyed June Bug (2010) and Almost Heaven (2011). All three are set in Fabry’s home state of West Virginia (although June Bug is more based than set there), and all three reflect a common theme – that of redemption. Fabry is such a good writer that you can almost inhale the mountain air as you read.

His fourth novel, Not in the Heart, is a departure, at least in setting. The place is Florida, and mostly Tallahassee. Truman Wiley, a celebrated but currently unemployed broadcast journalist, is facing a major family crisis. His 18-year-old son Aidan is in the hospital, facing certain death without a heart transplant. A donor exists, but he’s on Florida’s death row, awaiting execution for the murder of a woman. The inmate, Terrelle Conley, has become a Christian in prison, and he wants to donate his heart.

Ellen Wiley, Truman’s wife, persuades him to write Terrelle’s story; the Conley family is providing $15,000 to support the effort. Truman is persuaded, and as he develops the story comes to understand that Conley may be innocent. If he is, then there’s no donor for Aidan.

Truman Wiley is an unusual hero, at least for a Fabry novel. For the first third of the novel, he’s thoroughly despicable. Unable to face his son’s medical problems, he’s abandoned the family. He’s addicted to gambling. He cares more for his cat than for his children. He’s estranged from his daughter. He’s on the run from bill collectors and a mob figure to whom he owes a lot of money, but true to his addiction, he promptly blows the $15,000 at a local casino. In fact, for most of the novel, the only attractive thing about him is his ability to work and to write.

Fabry has drawn the character of Truman Wiley so dark that at times the only thing that kept me reading the book was sympathy for the character of Aidan. That and the fact that Fabry is a fine writer. He’s described what gambling addiction can do, and it’s very difficult to feel any sympathy for the character. I had to keep asking myself the question, does this kind of addiction mean you avoid a teen-aged son on his death bed, a son who’s repeatedly asking for you? I don’t know the answer, but at times the character of the hero seemed too much. Perhaps my problem is that I haven’t personally known people with that kind of addiction, or with any kind of problem severe enough to keep them from a dying child.

What I did like is how Fabry overlays a tragic family story on the politics of prisoner executions. The governor needs a confession of guilt before he will move forward on the appeal for the heart donation. That the governor has announced his candidacy for the presidency becomes a politically complicating factor, and Fabry does a good job in showing how politics and personal ambition can affect the lives of so many people, including innocent people.

Not in the Heart is, like Fabry’s other novels, a story ultimately about redemption. It has the author’s signature “how on earth are you going to resolve that problem in the story?” conundrum, and it rings true. But it is a very hard story to read.

(Note: I was provided an e-galley of this book by the publisher’s agent for review purposes.)

Chris Fabry's "Almost Heaven"

If I had known that I was about to read a book about a mandolin, an angel, a radio station and a lovelorn mail man, I don’t know if I would opened the cover (an angel?). But then, Almost Heaven is a novel by Chris Fabry, who is such a good storyteller (Dogwood, June Bug) that I would have read it even if there had been a picture of Barney the dinosaur on the cover.

And I wasn’t disappointed. Not one bit.

Almost Heaven is the third of Fabry’s “Dogwood” novels. The basic story lines are unrelated; what they have in common is the setting – a small town in the author’s home state of West Virginia. Dogwood is a love story about a young man who goes to prison for an automobile accident that killed three children and then tries to rekindle a romance with his girlfriend, who is now married (yes, this is Christian fiction; trust me). June Bug is a retelling of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, but it is also a story that stands on its own.

Almost Heaven is about a man whose life seems broken in so many ways but who still manages to do what he knows he’s been called to do, even if he doesn’t understand why. His name is Billy Allman. His life seems like a steady stream of tragedies and disappointments – the deaths of his father and then his mother; rejection by the girl he loves; his innocence taken from him; and living from hand to mouth while he tries to keep his dream – a small radio station – alive. What he doesn’t know is that he’s being watched over by a guardian angel named Malachi, even if the angel isn’t quite sure what the point of Billy’s life is supposed to be.

It would have been easy for this story to slip into melancholy or sentimentalism, but Fabry blends it with a strong undercurrent of optimism and faith. What results is a story of how God uses “the least of these” – people who are broken, often in multiple ways – to accomplish remarkable things.

Fabry, the author of children’s books with Jerry Jenkins (he of the "Left Behind" series fame) and co-author of Coming Back Stronger with New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, has written a remarkable series with these three “Dogwood” novels. They each contain enough interesting twists and turns to keep the reader fully engaged (and sometimes tense).

But most of all there is a tenderness that suffuses these stories, a tenderness for family, people and place.

Chris Fabry's "June Bug"

I think I’ve decided to stop reading the blurbs publishers put on covers of books.

I noted this in the review I posted this morning over at Amazon, but when I first saw this one on the cover of Chris Fabry’s June Bug, my mind went on autopilot: “Fabry’s retelling of [Les Miserables] is a stunning success.” I say my mind went on autopilot because, as I began reading it, I immediately began to look to the connections to the Victor Hugo novel.

It’s understandable. When you seen the Broadway production of Les Miserables two or three times; when you’ve saved the Susan Boyle rendition of “I Dream a Dream” to your favorites on YouTube; when you’ve listened to the soundtrack enough to sing along even with the more obscure songs, well, you know you have a case.

And that became a problem with reading June Bug. Because it’s not a simple retelling of Les Miserables. There are similarities, to be sure, but June Bug is a separate work in its own right, and it’s a terrific story. I bought the book because I had read Fabry’s Dogwood over Easter weekend this year and loved it, particularly with how he posed an immediate problem for a novel published by a Christian publisher: A man’s in love with a woman who’s married with three children.

I stopped reading June Bug and started over, determined to read it for its own merits and ignore trying to figure out how Fantine could be Dana or that the sheriff wasn’t anything like Javert. And where, by the way, was the street revolution?

I’m glad I did. June Bug is a great story. Fabry gets inside the heads of his characters and lets them speak in an authentic, believable way. That’s no small feat when you consider the characters range from a grieving grandmother and a local sheriff to a former Navy SEAL and a 9-year-old girl. And the story has a hook similar to Dogwood – the little girl was kidnapped as a toddler, and the man she calls “Daddy” seems anything but a kidnapper. As you see where the story is headed, you begin to fear what’s going to happen to the father. And you wonder, how is this going to be resolved?

It’s a great story. Don’t let allusions to Les Miserables confuse your mind about it.

Two Novels and Their Endings

Last week, I read two books that are clearly romance novels, and clearly aimed at women readers. They both have the theme of responding to and dealing with significant personal loss. Maybe this tells you more about me than it does about the books. While I’ve haven’t dealt with the kinds of losses these books are about, for some reason I’m attracted to stories about loss.

Neither book is a first novel. Both are good stories. I saw how one would end almost from the beginning. In the other, the ending was far less obvious and consequently far more intriguing. (No, I haven’t reviewed them on Amazon or mentioned them by name on this blog. And I won’t. I read a lot, and I only review and write about the books I really like. Cowardly? Yes.)

But both share a similar issue. The issue is not large enough to take away all the enjoyment of reading the stories, but it’s an issue nonetheless, and one I've run across before.

The issue is this: The ending gets in the way of the story. It’s as if the story is too long in the telling, or the author wants to keep telling the story, and suddenly the so-called word limit for the genre kicks in and resolution has to happen fast. So things get compressed. It’s like riding along at 40 miles an hour in a car, but you have to reach your destination within a certain time limit, and you’re running late, so you almost floor the accelerator. Some call it APD – accelerated plot development.

In one of the novels, resolution is developed in literally the last chapter, with no hint that it’s coming. In the other, resolution comes in the second-to-last chapter – but the last chapter is anticlimatic and superfluous. I had the distinct impression with both books that the authors loved telling the stories and wanted to keep on telling them, but their editors called a halt, and a quick rewrite created an ending. Or the original manuscripts were too long for what’s considered conventional for the genre.

This issue isn't typical of the genre, but I’ve seen it here more than in others, the others (for me) being literary and suspense. Examples of contemporary romance that I've read that avoid this problem include any novel by Charles Martin, Bonnie Grove’s Talking to the Dead, Susan Meissner’s The Shape of Mercy and Chris Fabry’s Dogwood. I don’t know if any of these authors had the ending in mind from the beginning or not, but at least at some point in the writing, the ending became clear and they began to write towards it. The writing is better for it, and it makes a better story. Martin, Grove, Meissner and Fabry know what they’re doing. (And while awards don't necessarily connote quality in any field, I would be remiss not to note that Chris Fabry’s Dogwood just won a Christy Award, a well deserved Christy Award.)

It’s caused me to go back and look at my own (unpublished) work, and make certain that there is indeed an ending I’m writing towards. Or do I want to keep telling the story?

Reading Charles Martin's "When Crickets Cry"

I've been reading Charles Martin's When Crickets Cry. I really like his novels, for much the same reasons I like the novels of Dale Cramer and Chris Fabry.

All three authors evoke a strong sense of place in their works -- Martin in Florida/southeast Georgia, Cramer in the Atlanta area (and Kentucky), and Fabry in West Virginia. Okay, so I like Southerners. I'm one of them. I count West Virginia as part of the American South -- they talk like us, although the accents, or actually the array of accents associated with "Southern," are being homogenized into American newspeak. (I'm the classic example of this.)

All three writers are also strong on story -- and they always tell a good one. Always. I haven't hit a bum one yet, and I've read all of Cramer, most of Martin and the one adult novel Fabry has published (his second, June Bug, is scheduled for publication this summer).

And all three don't smack you upside the head with the Christian message, or any Christian message. But it's there, informing and often saturating their novels, even more powerful because it's not overt. You get the themes of brokenness and redemption, and of sacrifice and debt paid, without having them shoved at you. It's done much more subtly, almost wooing the reader, in much the same way I believe God often woos us. Odd word, that -- woo. The dictionary says it means to seek the affection of, to court, to solicit or entreat, to seek to gain or bring about.

That's what their writing does for me -- woo.

Chris Fabry's "Dogwood"

In October 2007, my wife and I drove to Williamsburg for vacation. We spent almost exactly one week (had a great time), and then drove back to St. Louis. Crossing over the mountains of Virginia (and discovering what it’s like to drive in mountain fog), we arrived in West Virginia at the absolute peak of the fall colors. And it was spectacular. We’d never seen fall colors like those in West Virginia – and the colors went on for scores of miles. The state is an incredibly beautiful place.

It is that sense of place that permeates Chris Fabry’s Dogwood – the hills and valleys, the vistas, the back roads, and even the colors infuse the novel. And – no surprise – West Virginia is the author's native state.

Fabry is best known for writing novels for children and young adults. Last year, he shifted gears, and published Dogwood, aimed squarely at adult readers. And glad I am that he did.

It's a great story. Or more correctly, Dogwood is a carefully constructed layering of stories. It is the story of Will Hatfield, who’s gone to prison for manslaughter – killing two little girls in what was almost a hit-and-run. It’s the story of Karin, Will’s great love, who has created a new life for herself, with a husband who’s a pastor and three children. It’s the story of Danny Boyd, whose two sisters died when Will’s car struck them, and Ruthie, their grandmother who befriends Karin. Then there’s the town of Dogwood, which will not forgive Will when he’s released from prison and returns for one reason alone – because he still loves Karin. There’s the undercurrent of lawlessness and viciousness. And then there’s place and memory, which are characters in their own right.

The story of what happened when the little girls died is the heart of the novel, and Fabry uses it to structure the plot, gradually unfolding the individual but intertwined stories of the characters. As memories melt away the intervening years and the characters tell and live their stories, facts become less certain, nothing is what it appears to be, and something new is born.

I started reading Dogwood on Good Friday and finished it Easter Sunday. Like this time of the year we celebrate, Fabry’s novel is one of sacrifice, death and resurrection.

That Box from Amazon

I've been biding time with my reading, getting around to a few things I had put off for a while. Two books were related to work -- Roger D'Aprix's The Credible Company and Jim Shaffer's The Leadership Solution -- both about internal corporate communication. I also read the museum guide to a show I saw last May at the Chicago Art Institute on the painter Edward Hopper, the artist who painted "Nighthawks," among a number of iconic American works.

Just biding my time -- waiting for the box from Amazon. This afternoon, as I pulled into the driveway, I saw the box on the front porch. I'm like a kid at Christsmas when I know books I've ordered have finally arrived. In this box were Travis Thrasher's Admission; Chris Fabry's Dogwood; Marlo Schalesky's If Tomorrow Never Comes; and Charles Martin's When Crickets Cry. I'm waiting on Adam Blumer's Fatal Illusions from another supplier.

Ah, the delightful anguish of deciding what to read first...