Although he was born in Cleveland and raised in Erie, Penn., William Kowalski lives in Novia Scotia with his wife and daughter.
How does that happen? It's the result of falling in love with someone from Canada.
Sounds like it could be a novel. But don't expect that to happen. Kowalski said he hardly ever uses personal experiences in his stories. "I prefer to start with an image and then let my mind wander. I'm not artistically inclined, but I transpose the picture into words. A scene comes to life in my mind almost like a postcard. Then I start asking the hard questions."
That's the way Francie and Coltrane, the principle characters in his fourth novel, "The Good Neighbor," came to be. "I saw them driving around the countryside looking for a house." When they find a large, empty, 150-year-old house in rural Pennsylvania, they immediately fall in love with it.
"I wanted the house to be a character in the book," Kowalski said by phone from his home in Novia Scotia. "I wanted it to passively inform the action of the story. I didn't intend to be weird or magical about it, but the house is an intimate place that shapes us unconsciously. There's so much history in this house."
To help him acquaint the reader with the house, he includes several "historical diversions," tracing the lives of those who lived in it in the 1850s. The reader gets to know these first inhabitants of the house as well as some of the problems they had. "I just had fun with it."
Kowalski studied creative writing for a year at Boston's Emerson College but yearned for a better balanced education. He got it, he believes, at St. John's College in Santa Fe, where a great-books program in literature, philosophy and the sciences helped him to "become a well-rounded thinker." "I graduated from St. John's in 1994, then became a science and physics teacher in the Mojave Desert and New Mexico until I sold my first novel, 'Eddie's Bastard,' in 1998. From then on, I have been a full-time writer."
Once he gets his mental image, Kowalski writes about 50 pages until he knows where the story is going. "Sometimes I junk the idea after 50 pages. But if it works, I try to map out the plot at that point, try to spot a climax — and especially what it's going to feel like. At the end of the day, I'm just an entertainer."
Kowalski knows some critics have referred to the book as "a morality tale" and that does not displease him, even though it caught him by surprise. "If the book has a message it is to wake up and be true to yourself. Neither Francie nor Colt were being honest with themselves."
Colt is a high-strung stock broker on his way to the top. "Even with his problems, I liked Colt, because I made him up. I also watch 'The Apprentice' on TV. I was living in Toronto when I was writing it, and I used to hang around Bay Street with some of the professional stock traders at a capital investment firm. I would just go and observe — and the action in that office is like the action in the book."
Kowalski is sadly aware that some people get so caught up in making money that they lose perspective. "I saw it on Bay Street. I wanted to stop short of pointing and teaching a lesson. But a lot of people believe that the more money you make the better you are. I wanted to explore that kind of character, but I wanted Colt to have real feelings, because in that world people bury their emotions. This is part of our culture. We have to admit it and look at it. It's one of the reasons people in other countries are appalled by America and see us as so materialistic."
He considers Francie to be more like himself than Colt. "She is a literary type who goes on antidepressants to try to solve something that she may have been able to solve in other ways if she was excruciatingly honest with herself. Too many people take the quick fix with the pill, as Francie did. Once she is taking the pill, she is blocked from writing. You need to live an authentic life. The way to self-expression is to feel your feelings rather than medicating them."
It is comedy that fuels Kowalski's novels, even though the stories he tells are serious. Many of his characters in "The Good Neighbor" are off-the-wall. "I always take comic liberties whenever I can. Randy Flebberman, Francie and Colt's neighbor, is supposed to be a funny character. He had even more stage time in early drafts of the book, but I cut it down because it was distracting. The clash between him and his new neighbors illustrated the totally different values he had as compared to those in the big city."
Some of Kowalski's characters, most notably Colt's rather irritating brother-in-law, are taken "from the baby-boomer generation that gave us casual drugs and casual sex. I wanted to take that to its absurd conclusion. This is what happens if you let that stuff get completely out of control."
Colt's father is in prison rather than dead, as he tells Francie, yet Colt is always imagining his father giving him instructions, as if he could hear his voice. "A lot of people hear a voice of authority in their heads — it's the superego. Often we realize that the voice is not as bad as we thought it was."
Having written screenplays, Kowalski is not surprised at the suggestion that his book could easily be translated to the screen. "Writing screenplays changed the way I structure stories — but I'm much happier being a novelist. I didn't intentionally write this book to be a screenplay."
Having gone through "three major revisions" of this book, each of which was "totally different," he believes novel-writing to be "extremely difficult." "It's a very strange job. I can't help but be a writer — whether I liked it or not. I'm miserable when I'm not writing something. One of my mentors said a writer either feels like a writer or a bum — there is no middle ground.
"I feel useless when I'm not writing, as if I'm not fulfilling my purpose on Earth."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com