Less than six months after his debut novel, Von Lagerhaus, Dave DiGrazie delivered his second, See John Play, this spring. The stories are quite different from each other. I caught up with Dave at a BEA conference in New York in New York and we had an interesting conversation about his somewhat unique approach to writing.
Digital Book Today: You’ve followed up your first release, which was a speculative fiction about the afterlife, with something quite different. “See John Play” sometimes reads like a romance, sometimes like a who-done-it and sometimes like a sports novel. Not a typical way for an author to build a brand…
Dave DiGrazie: Yeah. A hundred people could read both of these books side by side and not one of them know they’ve been written by the same person. There is a unifying principle behind all my literature, but it’s subtle and easy to miss.
DBT: More on that later. But first, talk about “See John Play.” Your main character is a golfer and you include a lot of details about the game itself in the book. Did the book grow out of your passion for the game?
DD: I never broke 90 on an 18-hole course, which marks me as a very mediocre player. I never had the passion for the game that some of my friends do, but I’ve hung around it enough to appreciate it. People who do well at golf are very good at turning their brains on and off – I mean that as a compliment. Important things happen on golf courses, business relationships and friendships are cemented out there and men take stock of one another. But the game itself hinges on your ability to empty your mind of everything as you’re about to hit the ball. You even have to forget your last shot.
DBT: So you’re not good at turning your brain on and off.
DD: Exactly. I have a tendency to keep turning things over in my mind, and on the golf course that’s a liability. In a lot of ways, I let myself experience what it would be like to have that lasar focus through my character John Kaminski. He’s very good at turning his brain off – and I’m sure his wife Connie, if she were here, would wholeheartedly agree with that assessment!
DBT: You portray John as being very talented and very charasmatic. But there are problems, too.
DD: John attracts trouble to himself like a magnet. He’s got a tough backstory, and it’s left him with self-destructive tendencies. But once he’s on the golf course, he’s able to escape into the zen of what he’s doing. And to the extent he can escape everything else in life when he’s on the golf course, he’s capable of winning a boatload of money. Which of course, attracts even more trouble.
DBT: The biggest asset in John’s life seems to be Connie. Clearly, you wrote her to be a siren. Where did you come up with her character – and what I really want to know – if “See John Play” is ever a movie, who do you see playing her role?
DD: Thanks for asking that question, Anthony! That’s exactly the reaction I want men to have to her. I drew upon probably a half dozen women, my wife included, to create Connie – but when I imagine the characters, I never see very clearly what Connie looks like! Then last night, my family was watching Spiderman II and of course, there’s a young Kirsten Dunst. Maybe her, or Kate Mara from the movie “127 Hours.” Anyway, readers’ reactions to Connie, especially women’s reactions – have been interesting and unexpected.
DBT: How so?
DD: I thought women would embrace her. She’s a woman whose virtue is tested severely. I wanted Connie to have a strong personality, clearly not codependent or desparate, and I wanted to show that she was in control of her situation. But she’s not beyond temptation. She struggles with her feelings toward the men who are inevitably drawn to her, and it’s not a slam dunk that she can remain true to her own code of behavior.
DBT: And women have told you that they didn’t identify with all that?
DD: One reader told me she didn’t like Connie because she was “too cool for school.” Which, by the way, I think is an excellent characterization – but can’t we root for her anyway? Another reader said Connie didn’t seem to really love anyone but herself. That was a bit harder to hear because I thought her love for John, and her daughter, and John’s caddy, and the PGA official whose cooperation she ends up gaining, was pretty clear. She loves these people, and she also realizes that she’s supposed to play different roles in each person’s life.
DBT: What went wrong, then? Are these ‘lessons learned’ for the next time you write about a strong female character?
DD: I wouldn’t make Connie different. I think people sometimes confuse love with some sort of emotional gentleness or even passivity, and Connie isn’t any of those things. But she still is capable of very deep love. One thing I will say: true love requires vulnerability, and “vulnerable” is not the first word that comes to mind about Connie’s personality. Yet, she does things in the name of love that makes her incredibly vulnerable, and she pays a price. So maybe she’s not gentle, but through most of the story, John doesn’t deserve her gentleness.
DBT: In contrast to “Von Lagerhaus” where nobody, including the reader, knows where they are, “See John Play” has a very definite sense of place. You’re from Buffalo, not Cincinnati. Why feature Cincinnati?
DD: The Nati is a very unique place, and I can’t really explain why but I’ve always been drawn to it. You could make an argument that it’s America’s northern-most Southern city, and also our southern-most Northern city. The geography even comes together in the characters. Connie’s a Kentucky woman who grows up with horses just fifteen or twenty miles from downtown in a little place called Independence. And John is all wrapped up in trouble with the old Italian mob downtown – a very northern phenomenon. Capone and his lieutenants really did colonize Cincinnati back in the 1920s.
I really wanted to get Cincinnati right. I love the authenticity that Jonathan Franzen builds into his novel “The Twenty-Seventh City” about his native St. Louis. I wanted to capture the spirit of the place. I wanted to honor its people and institutions by taking the reader there.
DBT: You said there is a unifying principle to all your literature but it might be obscure. Want to shed any light?
DD: The inspiration for all my literature is the Bible. “See John Play” was inspired by the the story of the Old Testament prophet Hosea, whom God tells to marry a prostitute and remain faithful to her. It’s a very moving story. I wanted to give people who would never crack open a Bible an idea of what it would look like in today’s world for one marriage partner to be as faithful as possible to a spouse who is completely undeserving of such devotion. “Von Lagerhaus” is supposed to help readers really enter into some things the Bible says are true about heaven. For instance, how shocking would it be to really be young again? If you had your youth back, could you manage it better than my characters did? If it’s really heaven, how will God make sure you behave better than you see DiGrazie’s characters behaving? With “See John Play,” maybe the question is, “Is it realistic these days for people to take their marriage vow as seriously as Connie did?” I hope that when people are finished reading my books, they’ll keep thinking and talking about what they’ve just read.
DBT: What’s next?
DD: My own hometown! In 2013, I plan to release my third novel, about two cousins from Buffalo whose with two extremely different life journeys, but who share a connection that’s much deeper than either of them realize. As a companion to that novel, I’m working on a memoir of what it was like to grow up in Buffalo during the 1960s and ’70s. A very different kind of project for me, but it’s really on my heart.
Visit is website: http://davedigrazie.com/
Follow him on Twitter: @pizzaguydave
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