_{In H.G. Parry’s debut novel, literary scholar Charley Sutherland has an ability that would make most book lovers weep with envy: He can bring characters out of books and into the real world. But since Charley can sometimes use this ability unconsciously, especially when he’s particularly interested in a book, it causes no end of trouble for him and for his long-suffering brother, Rob.}

_{When the villianous Uriah Heep escapes from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Charley and Rob race to find him and put him back. But is Uriah Heep a victim more than he is a villain? Parry explains why turning to Dickens was the key to unlocking her own story.}

When I started writing The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, I knew very early on that this was going to be a book about books and the many different ways we read them. I wanted to write about childhood reading after lights out, about reading curled up by the fire, about adventure stories and fantasies and connecting so deeply with a character that they come alive and never quite leave you.

I also wanted to write about literary analysis. I know studying books is often seen as a barrier to the pleasures of reading them—as though it’s impossible to feel a book if you think too hard about it. But doing a true, deep close analysis of a book is about doing exactly that; at best, it’s solving a mystery and falling in love at once. I wanted to try to capture the joyous intellectual discovery to be had in English Literature scholarship, as science fiction has often done for physics and electronics. I already knew that Charley was a literary scholar, for this very reason—and I knew that whatever he specialised in was going to shape the backbone of the plot. I needed a writer whose work was vast and malleable enough to be read in all these different ways.

And so, I turned to Dickens.

This wasn’t an obvious choice. I do, honestly, love Dickens, but there are many writers I love just as much or more. I don’t have a particular academic background in Dickens, or even in Victorian literature, though I’ve tutored on plenty of university courses that included both. But Dickens is one of those wonderful writers who bridges the gap between reading for scholarship and reading for pleasure. His works were and are intensely popular, and yet they’re also the subject of academic debate and research. His stories are given to or retold for children (controversial opinion: Disney’s Oliver and Company is still one of the best adaptations of Oliver Twist), and yet they’re also considered challenging for adults. He’s brilliant, socially conscious and plain hilarious, often all at once—as anyone who’s read the first page of A Christmas Carol can attest to.

David [Copperfield], bless him, is an idiot.

Dickens also has a lot of scope to play with. Many classic authors write beautifully tight, self-contained novels. Dickens’ worlds are sprawling and expansive; they’re riddled with gaps for a reader (or a writer) to work their way into. His plots meander—they’ll divert without warning to follow a promising subplot and halt entirely for a good joke (or a bad one). The pages teem with characters, vivid and memorable, who hint at stories of their own. It’s perhaps these characters, more than anything else, who linger—which is very helpful if you want to write a book in which characters come to life. Dickens undeniably writes caricatures: He’s very good at giving you a memorable name, a few repeated phrases and a quirk or two to create an instantly unforgettable person. Yet they rarely, if ever, feel like only caricatures. There’s too much truth in them, and too much going on beneath the surface of the narrative. When they drop their masks (as Jaggers does, or Miss Havisham, or Magwitch), there’s invariably a terrible social reality under it (the tragedy of childhood poverty, the vulnerability of women, the unfairness of the criminal justice system). There’s a lot of anger in Dickens, and a lot of secrets, and a lot of heart.

Once I’d decided that I was writing about Dickens, a lot of things fell into place—including many I can’t talk about without spoiling the story! One of the best things it gave me, though, was Uriah Heep. There are a lot of wonderful villains in Dickens’ work, but Uriah Heep is special. For one thing, he’s the nemesis of David Copperfield. David Copperfield was Dickens’ self-confessed “favourite child”—David is based on Dickens himself, and the book draws heavily on Dickens’ life. There’s something intensely personal about Dickens’ antipathy of Uriah, and it comes out in some of the most delightfully repulsive descriptions in all of literature. (He is so obsequious that he literally leaves a slime trail when he shakes hands.) And yet what fascinates me most is that his position is understandable, even sympathetic. Uriah’s grotesque mock humility isn’t just a matter of playing up to those in power: it’s a deliberate parody of what’s expected of him, one which he plans to turn on his social betters.

“Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys,” he explains to David. “They taught us all a great deal of umbleness, . . . We was to be umble to this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! . . . ‘Be umble, Uriah,’ says father to me, ‘and you’ll get on.’ . . . And really it ain’t done bad!”

David’s reaction to this confession is to blame Uriah’s father and mother: “It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.” David, bless him, is an idiot. The real seed, as Dickens knows perfectly well, is the entire foundation of the Victorian class system, which insists on humility and is flattered to receive it. Uriah is what it produces: a monster, but one that is self-begotten.

Uriah Heep is trapped in a system in which he can never rise. He is also, on another level entirely, trapped in a narrative that will never allow him success. The story doesn’t belong to him, but to David Copperfield. In the end, David marries the saintly Agnes Wickfield, exactly as Uriah schemes to do. He becomes a gentleman, by birthright as well as by education and effort—even though, as Uriah points out, his past (and Dickens’) as a child-laborer in a factory brought him lower than the Heeps have ever have been. Uriah remains the scapegoat: He exists to carry the guilt of the other characters, so that he can be punished and they can achieve happiness. I think, on some level, he knows this. I wanted to have fun with what he would do if he escaped the page—if, in short, he had the power to change his own story.

In the end, the story shaped itself around Dickens and Victorian literature in ways I never predicted it would. As well as being a book about reading books, it’s a book about family, and so many of the things central to David Copperfield and Uriah Heep are also central to Rob and Charley’s relationship: jealousy, childhood trauma, the feeling of being in someone else’s story. Figuring out how those threads entwined and played off each other was intensely joyful to write, and I hope it will be to read.

Writing is lot like literary analysis, in that it requires you to be both working with your brain and feeling with your heart. On the best days, it’s like solving a mystery and falling in love at once.

Author photo by Fairlie Atkinson

When I was growing up, there was a train that passed daily not far from our house. I loved the sound of it, and the whole neighborhood loved playing on the tracks. Even though we were told not to go there—admonished and threatened with the terrible things that could happen—we returned to put pennies on the tracks and watch them get flattened. There was always someone saying how destroying a penny was against the law and we could get arrested, but that fear usually dissipated with the flat copper treasure in our pockets and the view of the many miles we could travel, crosstie by crosstie.

Everyone has a secret. Everyone has a memory that haunts or lingers. Everyone has a door they want to close, but for whatever reason, time continues to blow it ajar.

My dad had another train story. He recalled the train crash that happened when he was an adolescent, a catastrophic event that made all the national papers and left the survivors hospitalized and stranded far from home. He had gone, as many had, to see the crash site, a memory that clearly haunted him. Though I knew it had happened 15 miles away, I pictured it there just beyond our neighbor’s backyard and the pine trees where I played. The details were impossible to forget: a freak snowfall, a stalled train crossing the track, a broken warning light, World War II soldiers heading home for Christmas. There were presents strewn, a bridal veil in the limbs of a tree, hospitals filled to capacity. 

I was an adolescent myself when I first heard the story. My dad was grilling steaks, our dog waiting for a bone, and the telling of his memory became one of my own. I imagined the crash and my dad as a boy, and I committed to memory the night I sat and listened, the glowing coals and the sadness in his voice as he described the scene and the many people waiting for news that would proclaim a loved one alive or dead: a clothing tag, a scar, a particular brand and size of shoe, words and numbers and objects with the power to represent a whole life. The dry-cleaning tag becomes an intimate object, as does the watch, the lucky coin, the button someone might have fastened in place before getting on the train. 

During the years I lived in the Boston area, I often heard references to the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, another catastrophic event that shocked and devastated a whole community. It was cold, it was dark, and people were left waiting and searching for personal items—a ring or necklace, a monogram or tag—anything that could bring news.

In the novel, two of my characters—Lil and Frank—are dealing with having parents who died in these tragic events. His father was on the train going home; her mother went to the Cocoanut Grove club without telling Lil or Lil’s father where she was going. These losses led them to each other in the beginning, and now they have a long marriage behind them. Still, there is so much they don’t know about their parents and, likewise, so much their own children don’t know about them. There is also Shelley, a young mother trying to raise her sons and working as a stenographer in the courts, her shorthand and recordings of local crimes helping her to blot out much of her own troubled past.

Everyone has a secret. Everyone has a memory that haunts or lingers. Everyone has a door they want to close, but for whatever reason, time continues to blow it ajar. Until now, Frank has avoided looking, unlike Lil, who flings hers wide open, determined to know all that she can. Shelley has locked and barred her door multiple times, but the wind keeps rattling all the things she cannot escape, while her son, Harvey, is just beginning to find his way, doing what all children do: imagining his future and, along the way, finding and collecting and hiding little things like matchbook covers and flattened pennies. 

In the early days of writing this novel, I read that when sites of orphanages or schools are excavated, there are often little caches of toys tucked away and hidden, evidence of children wanting to claim and protect what belongs to them. There are also the many versions of “Kilroy was here”—graffiti, handprints, notes in bottles—the desire to be remembered and, thus, immortal. In shaping these characters, I was thinking of the many marks we leave on our worlds, from the most visible knowledge to the tiniest keepsake or scrap of paper to what is secret or consigned only to memory. It is an endless excavation, no two alike. My hope is that the readers of Hieroglyphics will be entertained, but also that they will think of fragments from their own lives and experience the oldest and purest form of time travel—memory.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Hieroglyphics.

Author photo by Tom Rankin

For fans of J.D. Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher in the Rye, the vast emotional and existential explorations of the hero of J. William Lewis' debut novel will ring true. The magnitude of the adolescent burden found a home in Holden Caulfield, and so it has once again in Kit Biddle of The Essence of Nathan Biddle. Kit was inspired not only by Holden by also by the author’s teenage self, and here Lewis elaborates on these connections—and where they begin to fray.

July 16, 2021, will mark the 70th anniversary of the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. The first printing caused an almost imperceptible ripple in the publishing world, perhaps because it was a coming-of-age novel about a rich kid from Manhattan who has been expelled from his prep school.

The ripple became a tidal wave as young people, including me, found something familiar about Holden Caulfield’s angst in a troubled world. We loved the vernacular, the seemingly effortless use of language, Holden’s verbal skills and artistic perceptions. We identified with Holden even if we didn’t have the same experiences, because we shared his insecurities and bafflements. We had angst, we felt alone, and we struggled to work through the inscrutable quandaries of life. We knew we were reading a literary tour de force that would continue to resonate with readers for generations. The angst of young Holden is universal because we live in a world that, in the best of circumstances, is often harsh and incomprehensible.

When novelist David Armstrong observed that “The Essence of Nathan Biddle is like discovering The Catcher in the Rye all over again,” I was immensely flattered. I was also impressed by his perspicacity: I had conceived the notion of writing The Essence after rereading The Catcher in my late 40s. When I read the book as an adolescent, I mostly focused on the similarities, i.e., the actions and reactions, emotions and insecurities I shared with Holden. The peculiar thing was that when I reread the novel as an adult, I focused more on the dissimilarities: the sources of angst and confusion I had as an adolescent that Holden seemed only vaguely concerned about.

The angst of young Holden is universal because we live in a world that, in the best of circumstances, is often harsh and incomprehensible.

Holden was at once naive and peculiarly sophisticated for his age. (His age is not clear, but he was probably 15 or 16 when he left Pensey and maybe 17 when he began describing his adventure.) He had obviously read David Copperfield, and he knew his way around New York. He also knew how to find a hotel that would rent a room to a teenager, and he seems to have understood that the hotel he chose had prostitutes available. I knew no one at 16 who thought he could rent a hotel room. Despite his sophistication, many of us felt superior to him in some ways, particularly his perception of and interactions with the opposite sex. Indeed, Holden’s relationships with the novel’s female characters seem almost pre-adolescent. He mostly talks and watches and wonders. When I read the novel as an adult, it occurred to me that Holden is endearing precisely because he is both superior and inferior at the same time.

The dissimilarities in the actions and reactions of Holden and Kit Biddle, the protagonist of The Essence of Nathan Biddle, stem from the primary sources of their angst. Both are off-balance, but Holden is seriously unstable. Kit requires psychiatric attention, while Holden is institutionalized. The destabilizing event in Holden’s life is the sickness and death of his brother Allie from leukemia when Holden was 13. The destabilizing event for Kit is the murder of his cousin by Kit’s intelligent but unstable uncle. Both Holden and Kit suffer from post-traumatic stress that leads to disruptive behavior. Neither gets immediate help from a counselor, but Kit, unlike Holden, gets emotional support from his mother, who ultimately arranges for Kit to talk to a psychiatrist. By contrast, Holden is sent to a sanitarium in California, all the way across the continent, where visits from family and friends will be few and far between.

The disparate points of view of these protagonists stem from their responses to the tragedies in their lives. Both become isolated and obsessive, but Holden’s primary response is to declare the world absurd and “phony” and to dissociate from the realities of his life: In particular, he develops a hero complex in which he is the protector and savior of young kids (like his brother Allie). He imagines himself as a catcher if a kid falls off a cliff near a field of rye, mixing his emotional needs with his garbled lyrics from “Comin’ thro’ the rye.”

Most of Holden’s trek from Pensey prep is dissociative but not dangerously destructive behavior. In contrast, Kit’s reaction to the bizarre murder of Nathan is not only isolation and introspection but ultimately near self-destruction. Holden tells the story of his meandering trek from Pensey only because the sanitarium personnel demand it, not because he wants to tell it. Kit, however, needs and wants to tell his story and to tell the story well.

While the disparate points of view are defined by circumstances, the underlying angst is universal. To the suggestion that Kit will ever be the protagonist that Holden is, we in the Catcher cult demur vigorously. It is nonetheless a great honor to have their stories compared.

Visit J. William Lewis’ website for more information about The Essence of Nathan Biddle.