STAIRCASE THOUGHTS: Third and Final Guest Post by Katharine Weber

I look forward to seeing any of you who can come to Kepler’s next week on Thursday, the 11th, where I will be delighted to continue any of these conversations with you. Here’s a change of pace for today.

The French call it l'esprit d'escalier, stairway wit. The witty thing you should have said that occurs to you only as you descend the stairs at the end of the evening. As a novelist, I find that I have these staircase thoughts about each of my novels, even though my first novel was published in 1995, which is getting longer ago all the time.

Sometimes it is a question of reading a small item in a newspaper, or hearing a story, or learning one more little factoid about an arcane subject you were keenly interested in a few years ago because of what you were writing at the time. Sometimes it’s an inspiration a few years past pub date sparked by something in a novel, or in a movie. Sometimes it is just a spontaneous thought about a wonderful detail that would have been just right to illuminate further some moment in a novel, some aspect of a character.

For example, the middle section of my first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, takes place in a New York suburban neighborhood very much inspired by my childhood surroundings, Forest Hills Gardens. As Harriet Rose bicycles through those "Oxbridge Gardens" streets, it would have been just right for her to observe the uncanniness of a certain Forest Hills Gardens street corner a block from my childhood home: the intersection of Winter and Summer.

With True Confections, I keep learning candy facts and lore. I regret very much that I didn’t know how Milk Duds and Black Crows each got their names while I was writing the novel. I completely forgot about Chunky. I didn’t go into the history of the Goldenberg Peanut Chew. I didn't consider a whole little episode that I can envision perfectly now about Alice playing fast and loose with requirements for Kosher certification of the candy.

Also, True Confections is not only about chocolate and a crazy family. There is also a part of the story that takes place in Madagascar over several generations. Although I mentioned orb weaver spiders, and Merina people, I did not know about the history of Madagascar spider silk-weaving. Producing spider silk requires dozens of people collecting spiders daily (using long poles) from their legendary webs strung across telephone wires, during the rainy season, which is when they produce silk. Trained people then draw out the silk from the immobilized female spiders. (Somebody has to determine the gender of these spiders first. So what do you call these jobs on your resume? Spider sexing? Spider milking? Spider silking?) An Orb Weaver spider's silk gland can produces some 80 feet of golden silk filament at a time. I dearly wish I had woven some spider silk into my novel.

What are your staircase thoughts about your writing?

REALITY VS. IMAGINATION: more from Katharine Weber

Continuing the conversation about what is real in a novel:

Monday night I gave a talk about True Confections at Yale to a highly educated audience. There was a lively discussion, with a lot of fun questions about candy and candy history (ask me about Lifesavers! Ask me about Black Crows!), as well as questions about how I wrote the book and what sort of research I did. It became evident that a number of people present thought that Zip’s Candies was a real candy company, or at the very least a thinly-disguised fictional version of a real company, while at the same time many (if not most) of the people there assumed I had invented The Madagascar Plan. Tuesday morning I taped an interview with the host of a popular Connecticut Public Radio affiliate. As we compared the nougat and peanut ratios in Baby Ruth, O Henry! And Snickers bars I had brought into the studio, she said that she had assumed that I made up The Madagascar Plan.

Sadly, I did not invent the Madagascar Plan. The credit goes to the Third Reich. An early version of the plan to locate all the Jews of Europe on Madagascar had been championed by Hermann Göring in 1938, but it was not until 1940 that the Plan gained sufficient momentum to become a near-reality. The Nazi official who masterminded the details was Franz Rademacher, the leader of the Judenreferat III der Abteilung Deutschland (aka Jewish Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). He wrote a memo outlining the logistical details in which he declared (in German, of course), "The desirable solution is: all Jews out of Europe." He proposed that the Jews transported to Madagascar would be useful hostages to help make guarantee "future good behavior of the members of their race in America."

Plans for this Jurassic Park for Jews fell apart when the British fleet was not available for transport after all (which is to say when the British did not lose the Battle of Britain, as anticipated by the Third Reich). And so this first solution was abandoned, and instead there was the Final Solution.

What does the Madagascar Plan have to do with True Confections, a novel Booklist declared has “a wacky comic sensibility” and the Cleveland Plain Dealer called “a hoot with an edge”? In my novel, Julius Czaplinsky, the left-behind younger brother of Eli (founder of Zip's Candies in New Haven, Connecticut in 1924), gets wind of the Plan, and so he leaves Budapest for Madagascar to get there ahead of the crowd, to stake a claim and get established before the other four million Jews of Europe show up. And so he does just that. But of course there are no ships on the horizon. Ever. He is the first, last, and only Jew on Madagascar.

But true to Ziplinsky form, he thrives and prospers, even in this unlikely setting. After the war, his remarkable cacao and vanilla plantations bring the next generations of Zip’s Candies Ziplinskys together with the next generations of Madagascar Czaplinskys, with very complex consequences.

And so I didn’t exactly rewrite history (unlike, for example, Michael Chabon’s very entertaining Yiddish Policeman’s Union, about a colony of “Frozen Chosen” in Alaska) so much as tuck my fiction neatly into an actual historic event.

Everywhere I go for readings and discussions of True Confections, I learn that many readers have assumed that the Madagascar Plan is fiction, while also believing that Zip’s Candies is real. I am bemused. Why are so many readers looking for reality in all the wrong places?