The Reveries of Author John Domini on His New Tomb and the Power of Things

                  

John Domini's distinguished career has included fiction in the Paris Review, nonfiction in The New York Times, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his last novel, Earthquake I.D. Now he returns with A Tomb on the Periphery, which takes place in contemporary Southern Italy and features Fabbrizio, a fatherless twenty-something looking for work around, as the press release puts it, "the rotted husk of a turbulent urban hive." Encounters with the mob and a beautiful archaeologist provide the fuel for this intricate and nuanced novel. Jay Parini had this to say about the novel: "This is a delightful crime novel, with a setting to die for, and at the same time a moving story that should interest a wide range of readers."

I recently interviewed Domini. Here are his thoughts about the novel, and fiction generally, which form a kind of reverie...

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[Right now] I’m in my home office in Des Moines, happy among my papers and books. But let's look further: out a window is the patch that passes for a back yard in old neighborhoods, where we've got basil and tomato going. Beyond that, within a couple blocks, I have all the necessary: post office, copy-and-fax, coffee shop, a grocery, banks and dry cleaning and places to eat, even an independent bookstore. It's a Midwestern American pocket of the model originally developed in the cities of the Fertile Crescent--Christopher Alexander's “timeless way of building,” which every metropolis comes to sooner or later, even in a culture built on cars and, these days, communication satellites. From the human skeleton out to internet’s vertebrae.

My imagination tends to stories: to the crossroads of a situation and the ways in and out. A novel must select from among those. Myself, though, as I'm hammering the closed set of a novel into place, I’m aware of other possibilities, the fractals proliferating beyond. That's why I’m drawn to a city like Naples, fractals everywhere. Tomb is the second third of a loose trilogy set in that city.

In the situation or two that prompts a novel, there’s always a person with complications looped around the ankles. Those I follow, through months of rough drafts (years, back when I was hustling to pay the bills), working to shoo alternative plots back into their holes and place weight-bearing covers over the openings. The process offers plenty of satisfaction, sure--but never when the closure becomes too neat. Even on the umpteenth run-through, I’m trying to deliver story and character as they’re experienced, as a surprise. I think of Thelonious Monk, how he can trounce the ordinary and, in so doing, provide resolution and delight.

Is Tomb on the Periphery crime fiction? Maybe it's ghost fiction, or even cubicle porn (there's sex on a desktop, after all). But if we set labels aside, if we just talk good novels, crime figures again and again, crucially. Story itself, in presenting an alternative life, functions as an illegal alien. In Europe, too, the crime novel isn’t divorced from the literary novel. Among Italians, the best example might be Leonardo Sciasca. Thus, that old fedora and overcoat just won’t fit a novel like Tomb. Genre is all about the reassurance of closure; it can’t abide the untidiness of genuine depth, whether depth of personality, style, or theme. So I do read in the genre, but I never need more than a single sample out of a detective series. That applies even to the esteemed sourpuss, Commisario Brunetti.

If I'm seeking to avoid the predictable and still deliver the spin and satisfaction of story, then what I’m making has got to be full of knuckles. Full of lived-in density. At its best, it's like Ben Webster on sax, putting a whole moody season in a single note. The power of "things," as you put it, seeps down to the level of the arresting phrase or word. Syntactical flow can never be unvarying, since different scenes make different demands. Myself, I often need to work out choices by hand, or sound them aloud, going back to the technology of cave and campfire. Also, think about this: the Q-&-A tends to quip and aphorism. The interview tends to valorize the smart mouth. And I have one, yes. The cross I bear. But a smart mouth isn't nearly enough to sustain a novel of any complexity.

[As for the reader,] I’m asking, can he or she track this scene? To think of the reader and the whole... well, as a novelist yourself, you realize this can be paralyzing. Marketing takes one to the question of reportage: what news is this author bringing? But literary work doesn't offer breaking news so much as eternal quandaries, cloaked in idiosyncratic tribal gear. Fabbrizio’s gear is supposed to be interesting. His tribe is that of the Naples periphery, the breeding grounds of the mob, and so his ethical struggle has a context unknown to Americans. He's closer to a hand-to-mouth entrepreneur in New Delhi than to the cardboard figures who populate Under the Warm Tuscan Sun. Books like that--the chianti-dazed Anglo-American romance of Italy--are what I’m working against, and my reader shares my regard for a cross-cultural encounter that has more bite. He or she appreciates how a fantasy touch, like a voice from the dead, can enhance a story's reality. Ideally, too, such a reader will be interested in the entire Naples trilogy, all set after the next earthquake. This began with last year’s Earthquake I.D. and continues with Tomb (the speed of the followup is thanks to my luck with the national contest run by Gival Press). The final novel is titled The Color Inside a Melon, and I should finish this year. Each story stands on its own, entirely. The first is from the point of view of American visitors, the second of course from that of a native, and the third will be from that of an African immigrant. But all three share certain themes, and there are overlapping details, I hope illuminating details. I'm going for a 360-degree portrait of a place stippled by shadows out of history, out of myth and legend as well, and saddled besides with all sorts of brass-tacks problems, since Naples must be counted the multicultural urban center that's lasted, in its present shape, longer than any other in the West. And now it faces yet another new millennium and its shakeups. What reader, I ask you, wouldn't be interested in that?