The Key Question: Why?

Robert Frost’s poem " Death of the Hired Man" includes two quips that we all know, though we may wonder where they came from:  (1) to think of the right thing to say too late, and (2) home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. (Is there another poet short of Shakespeare who has pulled off such a two-fer?)

Since the book launch for my new biographical novel The Night Doctor of Richmond at Book People in early June, I’ve had good cause to nod at Frost’s first quip, thinking how I might better have answered some of the questions asked by guests. The one that really gripes me, a softball that I whiffed, was, “If you could meet your protagonist Chris Baker today, what would you say to him?”

What a lovely question! Hasn’t every author dreamed of meeting his main character?

But I didn’t even really answer the question, instead wandering off along some tangent like a politician might have about how an African American studies professor had said that the body snatcher Baker, were he alive today, might be a neurosurgeon. It’s a valid point, speaks to his intelligence and anatomical knowledge, and against his reputation as a simple ghoul.

But here’s what I wish I’d said:

As a novel unspools before us readers, we seek answers to questions posed along the way. Who dunnit is the classic in a detective story. But as we learn who, what, when, where and how in mapping out our understanding of the narrative (providing the answers to these questions being the first thing a young reporter learns in composing articles for their high school newspaper), the answer that we really seek, the one that keeps us going, keeps us pondering, and that most intimately engages us in the writer-reader confab, is to the question:  why?

As I worked on the book, drawing from a series of contemporary 19th Century newspaper articles that left the why hanging, I chose to make that question a teasing thread in the novel: Why, Mr. Baker, why? Why did you do this horrible work?

Baker’s wife, midway through the book, asks him this question point blank. Several partial answers are offered. Baker’s father counsels that you do what you’ve learned to do, especially when it’s a job no one else can or will do. A doctor at the Medical College of Virginia guesses it’s pride that keeps him going. Baker’s son suggests that his dad just likes it. And a ghost in what might be a dream gives Baker a whole other revelatory answer.

Some guidance then, but any final answer is left up to the reader, which is as it should be.  So yes, if I met Chris Baker today, that’s what I’d ask him:  Why, sir, why?

To which, I suspect he’d reply, a wry smile playing at his lips:  “Let me turn that around on ya; why did you write this book?"