Underlying Aspects of the Novel, Philips Park

In my view, a novel is a long poem and poems only look for small, incremental bits of truth.  Stories and poetry are ways in which we gradually chip away at realities and puzzling circumstances to distill ultimate truths over the course of generations.

            In Philips Park, that’s all I set out to do, identify and illustrate a few, tiny truths that I felt confident enough to explore, as though I might have something to add to someone’s wealth of knowledge.  In doing so, I had no agenda at the outset, only an internal inspiration to tell the story I did.     I had only vague notions as to the truths I was intending to illustrate and learned much more through writing the story than I knew when I began.

            For one thing, I didn’t realize how prejudiced I was, even though I’m a guy who features himself as not being prejudiced, or at least one who is not inclined to keep anyone or any class or race down on account of thier status.  To make Jim Timmy’s teacher and mentor was a stretch for me when I began doing it, but a comfort and a friend to me as I finished.  It was a part of my own character arc, developed through the course of writing the story.  Drawing on the life experience of having had a colored [the word we used at the time] nanny for two of my children early in their lives and the things we learned and the love we shared with her gave me the life’s experience to draw on to continue to develop and grow comfortable with this tack.  My intellect was broadened through the experience, a part of my reward for the effort.

            On the subject of the abortions within the story, I tried to paint opposing viewpoints, compelling facts and circumstances on all fronts and not take sides, but, rather, let the characters speak for themselves.  To me, quality fiction puts one on the horns of a dilemma and not in the saddle of preconceived notions.  In a sense, that’s insurance against being wrong, dead wrong.  It guarantees residual value for my work, which I hope will live on, long after I’m dead.  I may be wrong in my own working hypotheses or theorem, but I’m confident the right answer is likely to be on the page somewhere, so long as I present as many plausible sides and competing views and emotions as I can through the course of the story and the interactions among the characters.

            (If you haven’t read Philips Park, but plan to, you might want to stop here and come back to this point afterwards.)

            In the course of telling this particular story, the main focus, truth, point where the rubber hit the road for me was when the main character, Timmy, had to decide whether to accept or reject Mudge’s (the main female character’s) romantic interest in, and reaching out to, him, as he drove her to obtain the abortion of another man’s child.  A lot of growing up and enlightenment was required to steer the right course on the road that day.  Whether the results were fulfilling, correct, incorrect, or tragic, the opportunity for growth was there.  And sometimes in life, growth is a delayed variable.

          In the end, the characters arced and their growth attained, simultaneously with my own as the writer—one of the great byproducts of writing novels on serious topics with themes which explore matters of broad public interest and concern.