Danny was still sensitive to what he read about himself in the American media, where he was frequently labeled “anti-American”-both for his writing and because of his expatriation to Toronto. In other parts of the world-without fail, in Europe and in Canada -the author’s alleged anti-Americanism was viewed as a good thing. It was written that the expatriate writer “vilified” life in the United States -that is, in his novels. It had also been reported that the American-born author had moved to Toronto “to make a statement.” (Despite Danny Angel’s commercial success, he had accepted the fact that his Canadian taxes were higher than what he’d paid in the States.) But, as a novelist, Danny was increasingly uncomfortable when he was condemned or praised for his perceived anti-American politics. Naturally, he couldn’t say-most of all, not to the press-why he had really moved to Canada.
What Danny did say was that only two of his seven published novels could fairly be described as political; he was aware that he sounded defensive in saying this, but it was notably true. Danny’s fourth book, The Kennedy Fathers, was a Vietnam novel-it was read as a virtual protest of that war. The sixth, East of Bangor, was a didactic novel-in the view of some critics, an abortion-rights polemic. But what was political about the other five books? Dysfunctional families; damaging sexual experiences; various losses of innocence, all leading to regret. These stories were small, domestic tragedies-none of them condemnations of society or government. In Danny Angel’s novels, the villain-if there was one-was more often human nature than the United States. Danny had never been any kind of activist.
“All writers are outsiders,” Danny Angel had once said. “I moved to Toronto because I like being an outsider.” But no one believed him. Besides, it was a better story that the world-famous author had rejected the United States.
Danny thought that his move to Canada had been sensationalized in the press, the presumed politics of their entirely personal decision magnified out of proportion. Yet what bothered the novelist more was that his novels had been trivialized. Danny Angel’s fiction had been ransacked for every conceivably autobiographical scrap; his novels had been dissected and overanalyzed for whatever could be construed as the virtual memoirs hidden inside them. But what did Danny expect?
In the media, real life was more important than fiction; those elements of a novel that were, at least, based on personal experience were of more interest to the general public than those pieces of the novel-writing process that were “merely” made up. In any work of fiction, weren’t those things that had really happened to the writer-or, perhaps, to someone the writer had intimately known-more authentic, more verifiably true, than anything that anyone could imagine? (This was a common belief, even though a fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story-as Danny had subversively said, whenever he was given the opportunity to defend the fiction in fiction writing-because real-life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.)
Yet who was the audience for Danny Angel, or any other novelist, defending the fiction in fiction writing? Students of creative writing? Women of a certain age in book clubs, because weren’t most book-club members usually women of a certain age? Who else was more interested in fiction than in so-called real life? Not Danny Angel’s interviewers, evidently; the first question they always asked had to do with what was “real” about this or that novel. Was the main character based on an actual person? Had the novel’s most memorable (meaning most catastrophic, most devastating) outcome actually happened to anyone the author knew or had known?
Once again, what did Danny expect? Hadn’t he begged the question? Just look at his last book, Baby in the Road; what did Danny think the media would make of it? He had begun that book, his seventh novel, before he’d left Vermont. Danny was almost finished with the manuscript in March ’87. It was late March of that year when Joe died. In Colorado, it was not yet mud season. (“Shit, it was almost mud season,” Ketchum would say.)
It was Joe’s senior year in Boulder; he had just turned twenty-two. The irony was that Baby in the Road had always been about the death of a beloved only child. But in the novel Danny had almost finished, the child dies when he’s still in diapers-a two-year-old, run over in the road, much as what might have happened to little Joe that day on Iowa Avenue. The unfinished novel was about how the death of that child destroys what the cook and Ketchum would no doubt have described as the Danny character and the Katie character, who go their separate but doomed ways.
Naturally, the novel would change. After the death of his son, Danny Angel didn’t write for more than a year. It was not the writing that was hard, as Danny said to his friend Armando DeSimone; it was the imagining. Whenever Danny tried to imagine anything, all he could see was how Joe had died; what the writer also endlessly imagined were the small details that might have been subject to change, those infinitesimal details that could have kept his son alive. (If Joe had only done this, not that… if the cook and his son had not been in Toronto at that time… if Danny had bought or rented a house in Boulder, instead of Winter Park… if Joe had not learned to ski… if, as Ketchum had advised, they’d never lived in Vermont… if an avalanche had closed the road over Berthoud Pass… if Joe had been too drunk to drive, instead of being completely sober… if the passenger had been another boy, not that girl… if Danny hadn’t been in love…) Well, was there anything a writer couldn’t imagine?
What wouldn’t Danny have thought of, if only to torture himself? Danny couldn’t bring Joe back to life; he couldn’t change what had happened to his son, the way a fiction writer could revise a novel.
When, after that year had passed, Danny Angel could finally bear to reread what he’d written in Baby in the Road, the accidental killing of that two-year-old in diapers, which once began the book, not to mention the subsequent tormenting of the dead toddler’s parents, seemed almost inconsequential. Wasn’t it worse to have a child escape death that first time, and grow up-only to die later, a young man in his prime? And to make the story worse in that way, in a novel-to make what happens more heartbreaking, in other words-well, wasn’t that actually a better story? Doubtless, Danny believed so. He’d rewritten Baby in the Road from start to finish. This had taken another five, almost six years.
Not surprisingly, the theme of the novel didn’t change. How could it? Danny had discovered that the devastation of losing a child stayed very much the same; it mattered little that the details were different.
BABY IN THE ROAD was first published in 1995, eleven years after the publication of East of Bangor and eight years after Joe had died. In the revised version, the former two-year-old grows up to be a risk-taking young man; he dies at Joe’s age, twenty-two, when he’s still a college student. The death is ruled an accident, though it might have been a suicide. Unlike Joe, the character in Danny’s seventh novel is drunk at the time of his death; he has also swallowed a shitload of barbiturates. He inhales a ham sandwich and chokes to death on his own vomit.
In truth, by the time he was a senior in college, Joe seemed to have outgrown his recklessness. His drinking-what little he did of it-was in control. He skied fast, but he’d had no injuries. He appeared to be a good driver; for four years, he drove a car in Colorado and didn’t get a single speeding ticket. He’d even slowed down with the girls a little-or so it had seemed to his grandfather and his dad. Of course the cook and his son had never stopped worrying about the boy; throughout his college years, however, Joe had honestly given them little cause to be concerned. Even his grades had been good-better than they’d been at Northfield Mount Hermon. (Like many kids who’d gone away from home to an independent boarding school, Joe always claimed that college was easier.)