Off the Page Literary Celebration Presents Chris Bohjalian, Part 2

Author Chris Bohjalian is a believer in Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule. In Gladwell's book, a person needs 10,000 hours of intensive practice to master a skill. I guess that's one reason my golf game never got better. Perhaps it's also a reason why Bohjalian's first bestseller was Midwives, a novel that came out almost ten years after the dismal failure that was A Killing in the Real World. Now on to his thoughts about some of his more recent books.

A little more than a decade ago, Bohjalian fell in love with shows like The Wire and The Sopranos. (He was a little late to the party.) He asked himself what it was about those shows that appealed to him. His conclusion: It wasn't the violence, but the feeling of dread that overcame him when watching. Given the popularity of these shows, he realized he wasn't alone. People like sitting on the edge of their seats knowing something bad is just around the corner. How could he incorporate that delicious feeling into his writing? 

His novel The Flight Attendant is an example of how he's done just that. The thought of waking up next to the dead body of someone you picked up in a bar the night before certainly qualifies as dread-inducing in my book. What had happened? While Bohjalian would of course like for you to buy the book, you can also discover the sequence of events leading up to that moment -- and more --  in HBO's adaptation of the novel into a two season limited series. 

Another evolution in his storytelling came about as a result of the ubiquitousness of the smartphone. In the olden days, Bohjalian would sit down with a novel and read uninterrupted for two or three hours. This is still theoretically possible of course, but it's unlikely unless his phone is on the other side of the house. It wasn't a leap to realize he's not unique in this regard. How could he adapt his writing to respond to this societal change? 

The answer soon became clear. He needed to write shorter scenes and include more cliffhangers. It's an approach that none other than Charles Dickens used in his writing. How else to get readers to return to the next installment of his story when it came out a week or even a month later? (Side note: Dickens truly was a master of this technique. Readers of his novel The Curiosity Shop were so keen to find out the fate of Little Nell that they stormed the ship carrying the magazine with the final installment of the story when it arrived in port. Wow.) This technique keeps the action moving and the reader engaged. 

Bohjalian's most recent novel is The Jackal's Mistress. The book grew out of a story Bohjalian wrote for Readers Digest in 2003 about a Confederate woman who takes in a wounded Union soldier who shows up on her doorstep. He began the book in 2022, a time when the murder of George Floyd weighed heavily on (some) people's minds and Confederate statues were being removed from town squares. He felt the time was right for a story about overcoming political divisiveness and healing. 

Bohjalian said he particularly enjoyed doing the research for this novel. He traveled to Shenandoah Valley and visited Civil War sites. He read letters and memoirs written by people of that era. He studied photographs from the war, the first conflict visually documented. He learned that many dead soldiers were found holding images of their loved ones against their hearts or their faces. I suspect that heartbreaking tidbit made its way into the novel. 

The Jackal's Mistress makes the reader feel the sense of dread Bohjalian mentioned right up front. The first sentence reads: "She took the carving knife from the pumpkin pine table and pointed it at the stranger, the handle hard in her hand." I don't know about you, but I want to know what happens next. 

Bohjalian's next novel is The Amateur, a story about a young female golfer who accidentally kills a caddy with an errant ball. I swear that I didn't know this when I wrote the lead-in to this post with its reference to my own days of golfing. Cue the theme song from The Twilight Zone. This is one book I am clearly meant to read. 

Thanks to the team at Sarasota County Libraries for bringing Bohjalian and the other authors to this year's Off the Page Literary Celebration. I'm already looking forward to next year's festivities. Keep on reading!