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THE STORY BEHIND ENVIOUS MOON

7/02/2006

THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK

ENVIOUS MOON BY THOMAS CHRISTOPHER GREENE
    

    One summer when I was in college I had this great job shucking oysters and clams for tourists on Block Island, Rhode Island. I had my own cart and it sat on this incredible sloping lawn in front of an inn high on a hill. The views were of farms and then the village below and then the sweep of ocean. You could see the mainland in the distance. I worked during the dinner hours, arriving early to boil shrimp for shrimp cocktail.  Because of the views, the lawn was a popular place to gather and sit in Adirondack chairs and watch the sunset. The raw bar was a big attraction as well, tourists lining up to see me struggle to bust open stubborn clams and oysters as fast as I could. I used to do a running monologue while I worked and I created a fiction about who I was to add to the allure of what I was doing. As far as any of them knew, I was not some college kid from central Massachusetts who knew as much about the sea as they did. No, I was born of salt and tide, of marsh and spartina, and as a baby I had a converted lobster trap for a crib. There is a mythology to those who make their living from the ocean and for a brief time, I pretended to be part of it.
    The most common way to get to Block Island is from a ferry that leaves from Point Judith, on the mainland. Point Judith is part of Galilee, which I think most people who take that ferry do not pay much attention to. Perhaps they see it as an eyesore. It is a town that is a rarity on the coast anymore, especially in New England. For it is a working-class sea town, one whose whole economy is derived entirely from fishing. It has not yet been gentrified. The small harbor is full of gritty fishing boats, and around it are shanties where the men who work those boats live. There are neighborhoods with trailers and shacks built on cinderblocks. For tourists—and college students like myself—it was mainly a pass-through, a place where you grabbed the ferry without thinking, knowing you would soon be on the beautiful island.
    If you were to stop and pay attention, though,you would see that this town, like New Bedford and Gloucester and the other working harbors in this part of the world, is a hardscrabble place, a place where the work, the sea, defines who you are, especially for men. You would also find a people, many of them of Portuguese decent, who have a fatalistic view of life and manage to work and live and thrive in spite of it. Fishing is the most dangerous profession in America, and on the faces of those in these towns you can see the death of others who have left their lives out on the North Atlantic. You can see the transparent fear that the next trip beyond the breakwater might be the last for someone they love.
    My first two novels were both set in my adopted, beloved and land-locked state of Vermont. I have written about the hills and the mountains, the woods and the dirt roads, the brooks and the streams. I have written about this remarkable place and the people who inhabit its hills and valleys. While I don’t believe I could ever get tired of writing about Vermont, I felt drawn in my third novel to write about the ocean.
    And I remembered that small working harbor in Rhode Island, the smell of diesel fuel mixing with brine and salty air. I remembered the men standing in huddled groups in front of lobsterboats, smoking. And I remembered the contrast between the tourists who caught the ferry here and the people who labored in its shadow. I decided I wanted to see what happened when these two worlds collided.
    Around this time, a friend of mine told me a story about his apartment building. An elderly woman had died and she did not have any relatives. She kept to herself and no one in the building knew her.
    Once she was taken away, the door to her place was left open and other people in the building came and looked at her things. Some took furniture and other stuff they wanted. The whole thing sounded rather vulturish to me, but apparently this is a commonplace event in these kinds of situations. My friend told me about how he was standing by himself in the dining room when he decided—ostensibly to see what the floor was like—to lift up the carpet. Underneath it, five or so feet away from him, he saw an envelope overflowing with cash. He quickly dropped the carpet as others came into the room. It was only human, I suppose, that he spent that afternoon conspiring how to get the money out from under the rug. And once I heard that story, I knew how I was going to bring Anthony, my protagonist from Galilee, Rhode Island, together with the girl who would alter his life forever.
    In my mind I created the imaginative landscape I needed: Anthony’s house, his small boat, the island, the mansion on the bluffs where his best friend, Victor, had seen the money under the carpet while working at a wake.
    And then I had Anthony and Victor leave the harbor in the small boat that fateful night, and I knew he would see Hannah on the stairs and he would fall in love with her as only the young can. I knew he would be responsible for the death of her father. I knew that, in his mind, everything in the wide world would conspire to keep him from her.
    And once I had that, I had my novel. Narratives, like life, have an inevitability to them when certain choices are made. Anthony took a step off the normal pathway and moved into a trajectory of events from which there was no return.
    The result is a novel about the obsessive, blinding love of youth, about choices, about the sea, about families, about class and perception, and, ultimately, about the nature of truth itself.