by Dan Pope
As I said, this happened a long time ago. I would see this woman and her son when I came home to visit my parents. The mother and son would take walks around the neighborhood after dinner. The boy was blessed with a wonderful nature, intelligence, good looks. I never really got to know him or his mother. But we exchanged phone numbers, and whenever the malamute would appear, we would let the dogs play, then call to inform the mother or son of her escape.
A few years later, the story appeared in the newspaper. The son had died in tragic circumstances overseas. It seemed impossible that this young man could be so suddenly gone. The dog disappeared around that time, too. I don’t know what became of her.
That experience—the dog, the tragedy of the son—was the first germ for the book, although I had no intention of writing this novel then. But much later, when I began to form an idea for a novel that took place in my hometown, that episode came to mind and became, in some way, the spine of the novel.
How did the experience of writing an adult novel compare with writing your first book, a coming-of-age novel?
Housebreaking was a more difficult book to write, for many reasons. My first novel is narrated by a twelve-year-old boy, and the entire book runs on the mania of his preteen voice. Housebreaking, in contrast, has various perspectives, from a seventeen-year-old girl to an eighty-four-year-old man, all of which circle around the same time frame—the autumn of 2007. Getting the time frame to cohere in the different sections and to orchestrate all that overlapping action was also challenging, in a headache-inducing kind of way.
Housebreaking is set in the same area of Connecticut where you live. Why did you choose to set your story close to home? How similar is Wintonbury to your own town?
When I was forty-four years old, I returned to Connecticut after the death of my father to help care for my mom. My hometown, West Hartford—particularly the north side of town—is a quiet, comfortable place. Wintonbury, the fictional town in the novel, is just a fictionalized name for West Hartford—fictionalized because I wanted to have the freedom to change the town landmarks and architecture for my own purposes.
For some reason, I tend to write at night. After dark the suburban neighborhood shuts down, even in summertime. I would go out for walks at odd times of night—midnight, 2:00 am—and I’d be more likely to see deer than people. Once, a pack of coyotes ran past me, jumping over a split-rail fence and disappearing across a lawn. Another time, a black bear lumbered by me on his way to some garbage cans. The houses were silent and dark. Once in a while you would see a blue glow of a TV or computer monitor through an upstairs window. I got stopped by police officers more than once on these late-night jaunts: “Do you live around here?” I couldn’t blame them. Anyone in the suburbs out that time of night is suspicious. “Trouble sleeping,” I would tell the cops. I didn’t want to admit the truth, that I stayed up to 4:00 in the morning writing a novel, every night, and that the air cleared my head when I got blocked. Writers are, in a way, weirdos; they don’t really fit into the suburban vibe.
Being back there, in the rooms where I grew up, summoned, of course, a host of old memories. But what struck me, more than the past, was the tragedy and pathos that managed to find its way into this peaceful, affluent place, not just to the town, which is fairly large, but to my street and the two or three neighboring streets. As I started thinking about the novel, a high school boy died in a car crash on a sleepy side street. A troubled kid from the next street got his hands on a handgun and shot it off on his front lawn. Someone started breaking into garages and vandalizing homes.
All of this stuff, in some way, shaped the book I was writing and the feeling that came upon me, so different from how I used to view my neighborhood as a boy, that the beautiful houses, the fine lawns, the orderly streets—it was all an illusion of sorts.
How did you decide to tell the story from different perspectives, and whose to include? Whose perspective was the most challenging for you to write?
Telling the story from the different perspectives seemed to arise naturally from the material. At one point, I intended to expand the perspectives to include some of the more peripheral characters (the neighbor Franky DiLorenzo and also, in a moment of craziness, the dog Yukon). But it quickly became clear that I should restrict the perspectives to the five main characters.
The most difficult perspective was Audrey’s, by far. She internalizes her grief, more than the other characters, so much that it makes her nearly mute. I had trouble getting past that grief to find the person inside. Her sadness is drowning out the person she was, and it was difficult to get her emotions other than grief to come to the surface.
Is there one character you relate to or sympathize with the most?
Oddly, I think Leonard Mandelbaum was the easiest to write, which must mean I sympathized with him the most. My dad had died a few years before I started the book, and so had a lot of others I knew from that generation—aunts and uncles, parents of friends. I guess I spent a lot of time listening to them as a child, so I had channeled their way of thinking and manner of speaking. Leonard represented to me that entire generation, sadly all gone now, or almost gone.
Both families in the story have a dog that features prominently—are you a dog lover as well? Do you have any pets?
Love dogs. Had them growing up, and my brother had the akita I mentioned earlier, who was a lot of work. So I haven’t had a dog lately, but I’m often reduced to gawking at passing dogs in the street or park, as if they were supermodels. That sort of natural beauty—it’s hard to pull your eyes away, whether husky or boxer or some breed in between.
Did you know all along how you would end the book, or did you come to it at some other point in the writing process?
The ending! It was definitely the most difficult part of the book to write. It seems so obvious now to me in retrospect. But I think getting the ending right took me at least a year or more. I went through every possible scenario and then came to this ending, which seemed the right one for these characters. I had a different ending in mind at the start, when I was plotting out the novel, but in the writing of it, the book took many different directions. So I had to rethink the ending (and the structure too, which is another story!).
Does the story end for you with the pages of this book, or do you imagine futures for any of your characters?
One of the reasons I wanted to set the book in 2007 is so I could take the characters forward eight years to the present at the end, to get an idea how they turn out. I intended to include much more about them in the now and future, but it didn’t seem right to do so in the final calculation. But yes, I do imagine their futures, in an end-of-American Graffiti way.
What do you find to be the most challenging and rewarding aspects of being a writer?
The answer to both those questions is the same, for me: doing the writing. It’s terribly challenging to do it every day. One of the best feelings for me is waking up the next day with the realization that, Oh, I did some work yesterday; I can’t wait to see how that looks. If I fail to get any work done on a particular day, it usually seems to me that the day has been irrevocably wasted, even if it happened to be a great day otherwise (say, a day at the beach or slumming in used bookstores). It’s a really terrible way to live, in some respects.
What other writers do you feel inspired by?
Inspired by is a complicated reaction. It eventually gets around to inspiration, but first there is the wonder of reading the book—say, off the top of my head, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Great Fire, Underworld, or anything by those authors or Denis Johnson, Alice Munro, James Salter, William Trevor—and then the feeling of devastation that sets in afterward. Devastation in the realization that, Okay, you could try every day for the rest of your life and never write anything even close to that! But, fortunately, I’ll muster the troops after a while and say, Well, you still can try, though, right?
W
hat’s up next for you? Are you working on any new projects?
As I told my wonderful editor, Millicent Bennett, more than a year ago, “I’m working on four ideas for novels. Two of them are really good, and two of them are terrible ideas.” She said, after a moment, “Why don’t you just concentrate on the good ideas?” I had no answer for her then, or now, except to say that the bad ideas could be really fun to write. But, in short, I’m working on a novel, although I’m not sure at the moment which of the four ideas will win out.
About the Author
Photograph by Lynn Wilcox
DAN POPE has published short stories in Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, and many other literary journals. He graduated in 2002 from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first novel, In the Cherry Tree, was published by Picador USA. He lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.
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ALSO BY DAN POPE
In the Cherry Tree
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Dan Pope
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pope, Dan, 1961–
Housebreaking : a novel / Dan Pope. — First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
pages ; cm
1. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.O65H68 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014040481
ISBN 978-1-4767-4590-9
ISBN 978-1-4767-4592-3 (ebook)
