Preview
ADULTERY
Richard B. Wright
WordFest: Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival
Saturday, October 16
Margaret Greenham Theatre
(The Banff Centre)
Richard Wright’s new novel Adultery gives everything away in the opening pages.
We meet Daniel, a middle-aged Toronto publisher enjoying a weekend fling with Denise, a younger colleague. We immediately learn of her sudden disappearance and of the discovery of her body the next day. Her murder is instantly solved, the culprit seized and a trial date set. If Adultery were a whodunit or a suspense novel, there would be nothing left to write about. But this is a story of the aftermath to a fateful moment. From the novel’s opening, Daniel is already on the far side of one of those fissures that split a life into "before" and "after." The real torment for Daniel lies in the way his private life becomes catastrophically public, and that he must endure this fact's impact on, not just his own life, but those of his wife, his teenage daughter and Denise’s family.
In creating the character, it was important to Wright that, while Daniel is an adulterer, he is by no means a philanderer. The ordeal of a man who cares deeply about his family, the author explains by telephone from Toronto, interested him far more than "the story of a guy in a mid-life crisis who wanted a fling." As Aristotle knew long ago, what’s most poignant is the story of the good man who suffers – in this case, because of a passing carelessness more than anything else.
"I think a lot of adultery happens this way," Wright muses. "I don’t think it’s calculated. And there are a lot of temptations, so I think it’s plausible this can happen on the spur of the moment. I think it happens all the time and people get away with it."
Just because Daniel does not "get away with it," Wright does not see his novel as a sort of morality play. "There’s no judgment," he says. "Certainly not by me. I’m not interested in what happens in the bedroom." Very little of the novel, in fact, takes place in private. Instead, the action unfolds through personal exchanges in domestic or semi-public places and situations – telephone calls, conversations on doorsteps and in dining rooms, car trips – which are charged with painful knowledge, anger, or emotions too multi-layered to be communicated, except through dramatization in a novel like this.
Because the story unfolds mainly in a southern Ontario, more-or-less WASP-y world, there can be no melodrama or overt displays of emotion. This makes Adultery a novel of simmering silences, of characters who may feel as if the "tops of their heads are about to come off," and yet would do anything to "avoid a meltdown." These characters truly believe in emotional privacy, a concept that may soon seem quaint in a world of TV dating and wife-swapping programs. As if to remind readers of this, voyeurs, news cameras and even e-mail bullying all have a presence in the novel, hinting at the difficulty in keeping any space cloistered.
Since 2001, Wright himself has been thrust into public view more than ever before. He spent long years of writing in the early-morning dark while teaching full-time at a St. Catharines, Ontario private school. Then his double Giller Prize and Governor General’s Award win for Clara Callan placed him under more glaring public scrutiny. But while happy to "do what I can for the book," he says, he’s simply not interested in the publicity side of the literary game. He’d far rather discuss his characters than himself, although he also shrinks from seeing this as a sign of virtue on his part.
"It could even be a form of vanity for all I know, but I have a hard time talking about myself," he says. While his wife archives reviews and interview pieces, he avoids reading them. Viewing his own television appearances is anathema. What interests Wright is the characters he finds, and the situations through which he follows them. And while he doesn’t expect to write much until the fall publicity season relents, he does expect that in three or four months, "new characters will come along and demand to be written about."
Richard Wright is appearing in the Banff Distinguished Author Series on October 16 at 7 p.m. |
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