He settled onto a stool, looking out at Noriega, dotted with sleepy mom and pops -- bars, Thai restaurants, Asian markets, a low-key surf shop -- "the 'other' has definitely arrived."
The book, Greer said, was inspired by one of his grandmother's stories. She was a woman of the '50s, in rural Kentucky, who, for all of their stark differences, was in many ways much like Pearlie; hemmed in by life's circumstances. Early in her marriage, a family friend appeared bearing a shocking story; and, like Pearlie, his grandmother was frozen, unable to act. What threads through the novel is how inaction can be a more brutal force than action itself: The players go through their predetermined roles in a freighted, excruciating silence. "My grandmother was poor and she had two boys, and she was willing to stay in the marriage yet not fix the marriage." She, like Pearlie, "stopped her life for a while. Something a lot of women do. 'It's good enough right now.' But this whole episode breaks it open in all kinds of ways."
Essential to the book's working mechanisms, Greer had to inhabit Pearlie completely. And he wondered, quite frankly, if he had the chops to do it. He even found a photo of someone he pictured as Pearlie, which he framed and kept at his work table, even taking it to Europe on one writing retreat. "Research wasn't going to help me, I finally realized," he said, "because Pearlie had separated herself from that community -- I think in a hope of trying to leave her life behind, which left her really lonely. And so I just tried to imagine her trapped by the time she was born in. And forced to live a life she wouldn't choose but that might surprise her."
In a certain way, like Pearlie, his writing exercise forced Greer to push himself as a writer -- and it surprised him. There was the challenge of making Pearlie feel real, credible though impeded by a deep passivity; of evoking the resonances of a "forgotten war" and its residual effects; and of trying to spin a scenario that is both unthinkable and devastating but keep it taut and surprising -- and, above all, keep the secrets under wraps.
That final piece hasn't been as easy as he'd hoped. Already some reviews have revealed some if not all of the book's crucial turns. That has left him flabbergasted. "I sort of worried about it all along. I mean, for a negative review I sort of get it, but for a positive one I think it's kind of mean," he said. "So it's been a roller coaster here for me." But though the turns are as sharp as being jostled in the dark by a Play Land thrill ride, the book is not just smoke and mirrors. What stays with you once you're spit out of limbo into the light is the curative clarity of the truth, of seeing.
"Absurd as it sounds," Greer said, "I would hope a reader would put down my book with the sensation of X-ray vision: that they can see through people's facades, through the acts that couples put on for us. Even through the noise of our present era."
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lynell.george@latimes.com
Andrew Sean Greer will be in conversation with Mark Sarvas at the Central Library at 7 p.m. May 28.
