Daniel Lowe book launch
With: Stewart O'Nan
When: 7 p.m., Feb. 17
Admission: Free
Where: White Whale Bookstore, 4754 Liberty Ave., Bloomfield
Details: 412-224-2847 or whitewhalebookstore.com
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Updated 3 hours ago
Daniel Lowe's debut novel “All That's Left to Tell” (Flatiron Books, $25.99) resembles a literary Russian nesting doll, with stories embedded within stories. Ostensibly the story of Marc Laurent, an American executive being held hostage in Pakistan, the book veers between narrators, leaving one question:
Which story is true?
“I was aware of the meta-fiction aspects of what I was doing,” says Lowe, who appears Feb. 17 at White Whale Bookstore in Bloomfield with Stewart O'Nan. “I wasn't trying to wink at the reader while writing (the story). I was aware of the construction I was working with … but I also was aware that I cared about characters even though their stories weren't, quote unquote, real. And I wanted the readers to care about the characters as well as if their stories were real.”
“All That's Left to Tell” opens with Marc being interrogated by an American woman he calls Josephine. When Josephine starts to tell stories about his daughter, Claire, Marc who is blindfolded, becomes more distressed. Within Josephine's stories are tales told to Claire by a hitchhiker, Genevieve, during a cross-country trip.
Lowe, who lives in McCandless and teaches at the Community College of Allegheny County on the North Side, says he started the book well before the rise of ISIS. An earlier draft of the novel had a reference to Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal journalist who was taken hostage in Pakistan and murdered in 2002.
“I was intrigued by the notion of what it would be like to have a character blindfolded while he was being interrogated,” Lowe says. “But also how storytelling is the ability to see who the storyteller is, how the story might unfold throughout his consciousness almost like on a movie screen because he can see the process in his imagination. That part of it really intrigued me.
Throughout “All That's Left to Tell” various characters step forward as narrators. Marc's interactions with Josephine seem to be reality, but when she starts to tell him what has happened to Claire while he's been in Pakistan, another scenario becomes plausible. Genevieve's stories during her trip with Claire also begin to seem real.
“The story plays with the notion of memory, what is real and what isn't real,” Lowe says, “and the point where we start caring about stories, even though we know they're coming out of the mouths of characters and are not true.”
While “All That's Left to Tell” is literary fiction, the story borrows from other genres. Trying to figure out whose story is real gives it a mystery element. Because of Marc's situation — blindfolded, trying to figure out what is real — the novel also becomes a quasi-ghost story.
“There's no question that Marc, the main character, is haunted,” Lowe says. “I think that depth of his haunting is in that story that takes place by the lake house.”
The lake house scene is told by Genevieve to Claire and creates an alternate story for Marc, offering a different history and point of view. Lowe points to Josephine and her interaction with the hostage as the keystone of the book, with all that follows emanating from this.
“There's no question that she becomes, either by deliberation or degree, a kind of living consciousness of (Marc),” Lowe says, “and I think that's one of the things that's fun about the novel. It's mysterious in the sense of what she takes from him and how much she is able to project as a result. Whether that is really her doing that, or is that an extension of Marc's consciousness … I don't discount anyone's reading of it because I think it sort of invites that discussion.”
Rege Behe is a Tribune-Review contributing writer.
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