Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Read online

  Also by Susan Richards Shreve

  A Fortunate Madness

  A Woman Like That

  Children of Power

  Miracle Play

  Dreaming of Heroes

  Queen of Hearts

  A Country of Strangers

  Glimmer (pseudonymously by Annie Waters)

  Daughters of the New World

  The Train Home

  The Visiting Physician

  A Student of Living Things

  You Are the Love of my Life

  Memoir: Warm Springs; Traces of a Childhood

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2001 by Susan Richards Shreve

  Introduction and Readers’ Guide copyright © 2013 by Nancy Pearl.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477819456

  ISBN-10: 1477819452

  Contents

  Introduction

  To David Sedaris

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Discussion Questions

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  About the Author

  About Nancy Pearl

  About Book Lust Rediscoveries

  Introduction

  MY CONTRACT with Amazon Publishing to curate the Book Lust Rediscoveries series states that I am to write an introduction to each title, along with providing discussion questions and suggestions for further reading. I’ve especially enjoyed writing the introductions. Each one has been a marvelous opportunity to think back over my relationship with the novel in question (and for me, reading a book that I love is very much like being in a relationship): How did I discover it? When? Where was I? What has my experience with it been like? Did it have a lasting effect on my life? Have I thought about it over the years, at least occasionally? How often have I been back to revisit it?

  There are two reasons why it’s been very easy for me to remember how I discovered the books that are included in the Book Lust Rediscoveries series. First is that these are novels for which I have an enormous fondness; they’ve meant a lot to me at different times in my life. The second reason is that although I have a terrible memory of the facts and events of my (so-called) real life (I once entered the wrong date of birth for my husband on an important document; I remember very little about my children’s childhood, though I was a stay-at-home mom during most of those years), I have a terrific memory for books and authors. I can still picture my childhood library (the Parkman Branch of the Detroit Public Library system) and could easily show you today where the horse and dog books were shelved, where I was sitting when I first picked up Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet (I was 10), and what shelves I was standing in front of when I discovered Wild Decembers, a biographical novel about the Brontes that was so desolate it put me off from reading anything by Emily, Charlotte, and Anne for decades. Even today, just thinking about their lives makes me sad.

  And with Susan Richards Shreve’s Plum & Jaggers, remembering when and where I was when I read it is a no-brainer. Shreve has written eleven novels (and many more books for children), and I was with her (metaphorically) from the very beginning. In 1974, at the Stillwater, Oklahoma, Public Library, I picked up a copy of A Fortunate Madness from the display of new books. It’s not hard for me to understand why, all those years ago, a book with the word “madness” in the title would have attracted me: It was not a particularly happy time in my life. I had two small children and a husband who was in the early years of his teaching career at Oklahoma State University and working hard. It was terrifically hot for days, weeks, months on end. I was afraid of grass fires and tornados. I disliked air conditioning but couldn’t live there without it, and nearly everyone I met had blonde hair, unlike mine. It was very hard for me to leave the house, but I would take my daughters to a nearby park. While they played in the sandbox, I would sit on a nearby bench and cry because I felt so alien and alienated.

  And from the moment I began the novel—which I discovered was the author’s first—I was not only hooked, but I became a Susan Richards Shreve fan for life. In an early daybook in which I kept my favorite poems and sentences or paragraphs from novels I loved, I wrote this bit of dialogue from A Fortunate Madness, in which Peter, a grad student, addresses his wife, Susannah. It’s Christmas Eve, snowing hard, and they’re fairly newly married and are alone in a cottage in the wilds of England:

  “It sort of calls on your inner resources, doesn’t it?”

  “I have no inner resources, Peter. You know that.”

  That’s how I felt then: Devoid, perhaps fatally, of inner resources.

  So, after A Fortunate Madness, I’d eagerly await each new novel from Shreve, devour it with joy, and hope the wait for her next one wouldn’t be too long. I am still thrilled when I learn she has a new novel coming out.

  In the context of the Book Lust Rediscoveries series, however, Plum & Jaggers presented me with a problem. The introductions I’ve written don’t include a detailed plot summary (which is one of the ways that they differ from most conventional introductions). If I refer directly to the plot of the novel, the reference is always very short and lacks specificity. This is, of course, deliberate. I’m always more interested in telling readers what it is about that particular book that drew me to it and, hopefully what will interest them, than in relating what the book is about. I’ve long believed that readers should have the opportunity to approach a novel with no, or very few, preconceived notions of its plot or its popularity with reviewers and other readers. Even knowing the author’s name often prejudices us for or against a particular title. I’ve long had a fantasy that books should come in plain brown wrappers, distinguished from one another only by size and a one-sentence description. (One of the reasons I like Twitter as much as I do is because, for me, 140 characters is an ideal length for a book recommendation.)

  But with Shreve’s novel, what I want to talk about relates directly to the plot, and I fear if you read the introduction before you read the novel itself, it could quite possibly spoil your reading experience. So here’s what I propose: Stop reading the introduction at the end of this sentence and come back to it when you’ve finished Plum & Jaggers.

  Welcome back to the introduction to Susan Richards Shreve’s Plum & Jaggers. In 2011, when I first drew up the list of novels I wanted to include
as Book Lust Rediscoveries, Shreve’s novel was one of the original dozen on my wish list. I remember reading a review of it, well in advance of publication, in one of the periodicals aimed at the book industry (Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist) and immediately putting a hold on one of the copies on order at the library. When it became available, I checked it out from the library, read it, and immediately went to my local bookstore to buy a copy for myself, one that I could easily share with friends and family members.

  I think we’ve probably all wondered whether someone can really ever “get over” a traumatic event in his or her life, whether it be violence, abuse, the untimely death of a loved one, or some other cataclysmic event. I know that if there are children involved in any way, as victim or bystander or survivor, I have trouble imagining what their lives will be like, how their internalization of what happened will affect them in the years to come. And that’s the exact question that Susan Shreve asks us to consider. Plum & Jaggers is a novel about the ongoing psychological effects of an act of terrorism on a young child’s life. Sam McWilliams is seven when an explosion on a train between Milan and Rome kills his mother, Plum, and his father, Jaggers. Sam, who is the oldest of four children and the only one who remembers the event (and he remembers it all too clearly), is wounded in the attack. Not physically, which would probably have been easier to fix, but psychologically. As a response to the horror of that day, he develops an obsessive need to keep his brother and sisters safe. How this obsession plays out in the lives of Julia, Oliver, Charlotte, and Sam himself is the subject of Plum & Jaggers.

  I realized when I reread the novel just before I started writing this introduction that I had been thinking of it as the author’s response to the events of 9/11/2001, a day that surely changed the course of both American history and the history of each particular family directly affected by it. It wasn’t until I looked more closely at the copyright page that I noticed I was mistaken: Plum & Jaggers came out in 2000, and the bomb that orphans the McWilliams children explodes in 1974. And Plum & Jaggers is perhaps even more relevant today than it was in 2000, when the U.S. public certainly was not unfamiliar with terrorist acts—the Libyan bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, to name three—but that word “terror,” and the fear it engenders, didn’t have the common currency it has today. Not a lot of doctors, psychologists, and ordinary people were studying (or thinking about) post-traumatic stress. Now it’s hard to open up a newspaper and not read about PTSD, which Sam is clearly suffering from.

  These days viewers can catch a reality show on everything from losing weight to child rearing to dress design, and on and on and on. But in the late 1990s, “Plum & Jaggers,” the close-to-reality TV show written by Sam and featuring his siblings and himself, would have been a relatively new concept. I’d give anything to watch the episodes of this show. The set—the family sitting around a dining room table with an empty chair at each end and an unexploded bomb underneath it—was what I remembered most clearly about the novel. And Sam’s scripts always make clear that the parents, whose empty chairs are waiting for their arrival, have only stepped away for a while. Plum and Jaggers, in Sam’s vivid imagination and out of the great pain he’s living with, are not dead.

  Plum & Jaggers is a very special novel on so many levels. It’s psychologically acute, beautifully written, and brilliantly constructed. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

  Nancy Pearl

  To David Sedaris

  IT’S AUTUMN 1998 and I am traveling by Amtrak from Washington, D.C., where I live, to New York City, where my husband lives.—I am looking out over the thin stretch of railroad track that winds over the Bay between Baltimore and Wilmington.

  From my seat, all I see is water. Should there be a sudden stop, a twist in the car in front of us, or a coin on the track, the train could jump the track and tumble into the sea.

  I have an exaggerated sensitivity to possible disaster.

  That said, I’m thinking how fortunate that I have survived my children’s childhoods. Which is to say, I am not dead.

  As I often envisioned I might be for no particular reason whatsoever except that the stakes are high with children, and it would be a terrible shame for mine at least in the short term. If, for example, I were to have died any time in, say, the past twenty years, my four children would have been motherless. Their father now living in Houston, my mother deceased, my father long dead, and my brother in his own private Idaho.

  Now my children are grown up, in jobs, in college, in love.

  The familiar rocking movement of the train leads me to contemplation of a novel—and aware of this moment of averted death, I am imagining a story in which the mother and father do die and leave their children, unlike mine, as orphans.

  What then?

  There is a romance about orphans making their way in the world without parents to mess up their plans, but that is a romance. It has nothing to do with the life I have led as a mother haunted by all of the terrible things that could happen every minute of every ordinary day to my family, to the people next door, to the young mother, a fiction writer like me, standing on the steps of her apartment building on Spring Street, her baby in her arms when a New York City taxicab careens over the curb. Metro section front page of today’s New York Times.

  And into this ghostly scenario just as we pull into Wilmington, Delaware, steps David Sedaris.

  I have New York magazine in my lap as we stop at the station, open to the arts pages, and I notice a short story. It is just a paragraph, about a sibling comedy team playing at La Mama in a comic drama by David Sedaris with his sister, the actress, Amy playing the lead. I’ve heard the name. Maybe from NPR, maybe the New Yorker. He is not yet well known.

  By the time my train reaches Penn Station, I am in that fluid state of euphoria that comes when a novel is beginning to form. What I see are four young children with their parents on their way to Rome to witness, at their parents’ insistence, evidence of the past connecting to the present—what better place than Rome? For a moment, the parents leave the car in which the family is sitting to pick up lunch in the train’s diner.

  A terrible explosion erupts, and the parents never return with lunch, leaving Sam, the oldest, to take charge.

  Some time between that moment when Sam is seven and adulthood, he becomes the writer for a sibling comedy team—Plum & Jaggers—Charlotte, Oliver, and Julia: his charges, his responsibility, his life.

  That much of a story with the help of David Sedaris has come to me between Wilmington and Penn Station, New York.

  I go up the escalator straight to the bank of public pay phones and call information. David Sedaris, I say. There is one in the Manhattan phone book. I dial his number and he answers.

  I tell him I am planning to write this novel about a sibling comedy team and I know very little about comedy, which is the truth, and I would love to talk to him.

  He’s been cleaning apartments, he says, but he’s done for the day and will be right over.

  I give him the address of my husband’s office, and in a lightning flash, he is there at 50 West 29th, in the flesh, wearing a white tee and jeans. He needs to wash up, he tells me, and then he’ll be ready to talk.

  “Just talk to me about comedy,” I say, not knowing what to ask, not familiar with interviewing, not chatty by nature, second rate with small talk, at ease only telling stories.

  And he tells stories, one after another, mainly delicious family stories, darkly funny, wicked, and generous. Quotidian life with all its exasperations, pratfalls, and missteps, its small and enormous hurts. A hilarious afternoon balancing on a tightrope between laughter and tears.

  Coffee, then wine—the day goes on and on into evening, and then David Sedaris is gone, and I am left with that sen
se of the precarious balancing act of daily life, the role of luck, chance, and choice. How else to respond and survive without laughter?

  THIS BOOK IS FOR PO, ELIZABETH, RUSSELL, CALEB, KATE, AND ON AND ON

  ALWAYS FOR TIMOTHY

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  SAM MCWILLIAMS was the only member of Plum & Jaggers who remembered the afternoon of June 11 when the first two cars of the Espresso from Milan to Rome exploded, killing everyone on board those cars except for a four-year-old French boy and a conductor. Sam remembered exactly. He was seven years old, eight in November. Julia was too young for memory, sleeping in Sam’s arms, where their mother had put her when she left.

  “You take Julia, shoofly, and I’ll go help your father get lunch.”

  “I would like tea,” Charlotte said, looking up from her book. “And four cookies.”

  “I’d like a chocolate milk shake,” Oliver had said.

  “There are no chocolate milk shakes in Italy,” their father replied.

  “I want one anyway,” Oliver said pleasantly.

  “Then I’ll bring one,” their father promised.

  Had he returned with a late lunch, he might have brought tea instead, or milk, or mineral water.

  “Here’s your chocolate milk shake, Oliver,” he would have said.

  The explosion blew the door off the car where the McWilliams children were sitting, waking Julia, who screamed so long without a breath that Sam was afraid the air had gone out of her for good. Charlotte fell immediately asleep, a habit she would retain in emergencies for the rest of her life, and Oliver turned upside down and crawled under the seat, staying there until a woman seated across from them pulled him out, hurrying the McWilliamses to safety outside the burning train before the rescue team swarmed into the remaining cars and got out those passengers who had not already fled.

  The weather had been cool for June, a soft, pale, constant sun, not bright enough to warm the small corner of the globe where the McWilliams family was traveling “into history,” as James McWilliams had told his children.