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?

GUEST POST BY KATHARINE WEBER, author of TRUE CONFECTIONS

In preparation for my appearance at Kepler's next week on Thursday, February 11th, where I will be discussing my novel True Confections with the wonderful Susan Karl, President and CEO of the Annabelle Candy Company (makers of Big Hunk, Look, U-No, Rocky Road, and Abba-Zaba), I want to talk here about aspects of reading and writing fiction, and I invite you to respond with your own thoughts. So this is the first of three guest posts this week.

I would also like to encourage visits to a website where the fiction of True Confections continues beyond the page, http://www.zipscandies.com/, where a musical contest with prizes for all entries awaits. There will be candy for all and prizes for the bold on the 11th, too, so do visit the Zip's Candies website, view the original 1960 commercial, download the sheet music, and start practicing your renditions of the vintage Little Sammies jingle, "Say, Dat's Tasty!"

How to Read a Novel, Apparently

At a panel discussion about book groups at last year’s BEA, I was not surprised to hear each of the panelists agree that the most successful way to lead a book group discussion is to research the author’s biography in order to discuss it and make connections between the author’s life and the chosen novel. I wasn’t surprised, because this focus has been part of my experience in the q & a at library talks, in bookstores, and in book group meetings each time I publish a novel, but perhaps it has become especially noticeable in recent years, when I was on the road for my last novel, Triangle, which came out in 2006, and now with True Confections, which has just been published. I recognize that this discussion strategy has become the default assumption about the best way to understand a novel, just as it has become the default assumption about optimal questions for the author. And whether or not the author is present, finding the links between the author’s experience and history and the novel’s characters, setting, and events has in many instances become the core of any conversation about the novel.

Why has identifying and checking off a factual basis for each significant element in the fiction somehow become the goal of many readers? Why do readers feel compelled to read through the fiction looking for the actual underlying facts, as if a novel is an autobiographical puzzle created by the author to challenge every reader? Why do so many readers approach a novel as if there is supposed to be a goal in reading, and that goal is solving this puzzle? This is not how people used to read novels, I am pretty sure.

We all know people (or perhaps we are those people) who can only go on a walk in the woods with binoculars, a bird guide, and a copy of their life list. We all know people who cannot simply gaze at the stars. They automatically begin identifying constellations. I do understand this impulse to organize the chaotic information the world throws at us in a skillful way that is reassuring to us because it makes us feel authoritative and competent and in control. But the Sudoko approach to reading a novel deprives the reader of the deepest and most satisfactory form of true engagement that fiction can offer us. What do you gain from knowing that the author of a novel about horses grew up on a ranch, or grew up in a city and never saw a horse until he was 27? What difference does it make to you as a reader? Why does it matter? Does it enhance your reading of the novel, or does it impair your chances at any sustained flight into the willing suspension of disbelief? If you need facts and facts and reality and more reality, why are you reading a novel?

Why do we read novels?