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"  There have been other times however when I was not so forthcoming. Why he wrote the last line: I wrote this line yesterday, in a manuscript that&amp;#039;s maybe half finished -- finished in its first draft, so maybe one-tenth or one-twentieth finished in terms of being an actual book that someone might hold in his or her hands. The woman speaking is the protagonist, a doctor, and she&amp;#039;s remembering a conversation with another important character. Some things were made clear in that conversation, but other things were left unsaid. In saying &amp;quot;I was not so forthcoming,&amp;quot; the narrator is referring to many other elements in the story, including her relationship with the reader. An astute reader will probably pick up on this. Will the line find its way into the finished book? I can&amp;#039;t say for sure right now, but I think it&amp;#039;s likely. After writing it, I stopped for the day, and like many sentences written in that situation, its purpose was in part to remind me of ideas that I wanted to keep at the forefront of my mind the following morning -- namely, themes of secrecy and concealment, of things being hidden from other characters in the book as well as from the reader. The process of reading this book will involve stripping away these layers of concealment -- to the accompaniment, I hope, of gasps of astonishment, disbelieving slaps to the forehead, and shakily-poured slugs of alcohol. So the storyline, at least as it stands right now, is dual in nature, involving suspense (&amp;quot;What will happen next with these people?&amp;quot;) as well as mystery (&amp;quot;What has already happened?&amp;quot;). This is something new for me. With the exception of my novel Fallen, which retells the story of Eve and Adam and Cain and Abel, most of my stories feature fairly plainspoken, forthright individuals. Even in Fallen, the characters are not particularly duplicitous -- much remains unsaid among them, but there&amp;#039;s little actual lying. Their omissions and silences are the result of discomfort and uncertainty, not deception. But the structure of the book, which begins with Chapter 40 and unwinds backwards to Chapter 1, surprises the reader as earlier events are revealed -- events whose consequences have already been experienced in the book. In part, this was a way to make the overly familiar Bible story a little less familiar, but it also has the effect of creating mystery, which is clarified later. The reader wonders, in Chapter 38: &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s the source of the bad blood between Cain and Adam, anyway?&amp;quot; Then in Chapter 30: &amp;quot;Oh, so that&amp;#039;s the reason?&amp;quot; Chapter 16: &amp;quot;Oh no, that&amp;#039;s it.&amp;quot; Chapter 11: &amp;quot;Wait a minute, so that&amp;#039;s really it.&amp;quot; And so forth. Again, though, it&amp;#039;s not the characters being reticent, it&amp;#039;s the structure of the story that acts this way. My other novels don&amp;#039;t use this mechanism much. The Preservationist is a multivoiced take on Noah&amp;#039;s story; there are many of points of view, a lot of humor, a lot of attitude, but not a lot of secrets. The Book of Samson is fairly self-explanatory. Apart from Delilah (whose secrecy is essential to her role), there isn&amp;#039;t much deceit in those characters either. Because Delilah and her purpose in Samson&amp;#039;s story is likely known to the reader beforehand, her sneakiness surprises no one but the big guy himself. In Monster, 1959, which comes out in February, the protagonist is a 40-foot-tall atomic radiation monster who can&amp;#039;t think or talk, who escapes a traveling tent show and goes on a rampage in New York City. He is described by the (third-person) narrator as &amp;quot;King Lear meets King Kong.&amp;quot; Not exactly a bucketful of duplicity there, either. So this new book -- the one that I&amp;#039;m in the middle of writing -- marks a change. Coincidentally or not, it&amp;#039;s also the first novel I&amp;#039;ve written that takes place entirely in the United States. Does this feed directly into the concealment theme? It&amp;#039;s possible. The States is the kind of place that lends itself to doubletalk, to covering up, to deliberate ambiguity and dissembling. Hey, look at our government. Look at our universities -- Douglas Giles, a professor at Roosevelt University of Chicago, was fired in 2005 for answering a student&amp;#039;s question about Palestine and allowing a Muslim student to speak in class. (He was warned by his department chair to do neither.) Look at the DOD&amp;#039;s restrictions on journalists in Iraq -- no photos of dead bodies -- and at the news media, where Jewish vigilantes are &amp;quot;ultra-orthodox&amp;quot; but Muslim ones are &amp;quot;terrorists.&amp;quot; Look at Newsweek calling Pakistan, where I&amp;#039;ve lived since 1998, &amp;quot;the most dangerous country in the world.&amp;quot; The examples just go on and on and on. Some company lays off a thousand workers and they call it &amp;quot;restructuring,&amp;quot; and so on. &amp;quot;Early retirement,&amp;quot; that&amp;#039;s one of my favorites. I&amp;#039;ve lived abroad for the past thirteen years, in Morocco and Pakistan. These years have been great for me and for my writing, because they forced me to expand my thinking past my own comfortable existence. In fact, I doubt I&amp;#039;d be published at all, had I stayed in the U.S.  People are often confused by this, so let me explain: When I lived in the States I wrote stuff that was set in the States, and for the most part it wasn&amp;#039;t that interesting. I worked, I watched TV, I bought stuff at the mall, I had a normal life. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn&amp;#039;t always nourish you, you know? I&amp;#039;d go hiking in the mountains and the desert and go on vacations when I could and lived a perfectly cushy existence, but the materials that that life afforded me for fiction were fairly sparse. The people I met in the course of my day were relatively heterogeneous; yes they were white and Mexican and black and middle class and poor and straight and gay (I worked in the mental health system in Arizona) but at the end of the day they were all Americans and all came from this same milieu and all had opinions about, say, democracy and politicians and popular culture and food and Thanksgiving that fell into a fairly predictable range. It was what I grew up with, it&amp;#039;s what fed my writing and it was, ultimately, pretty limited. So I went to Morocco and then Pakistan and all that shit went out the window. I think it&amp;#039;s important that I stopped being part of the dominant culture where I was living; I think it was good for me to be a minority, and a fairly conspicuous one, because being a minority is an uncomfortable position and frankly most white Americans never experience it, or they never experience it for any length of time. (Even though people in Pakistan treat honkies like royalty; nonetheless you never stop feeling like an outsider. You&amp;#039;re being treated so well, in fact, because you&amp;#039;re an outsider. And BTW, that Newsweek cover with the screaming fundos on it is bullshit.) Being a minority or foreigner forces you to look beyond yourself in very basic ways, to consider how you are being seen, and maybe question some basic assumptions. Add to this the fact that I was a teacher and had students asking questions all the time (&amp;quot;Why do Americans love war?&amp;quot;). This is all good, good, good for a writer, whose job is, more or less, to look at things through the eyes of somebody else.  Take religion as an example. This is something that people talk about freely in much of the world. I know that U.S. politics is all religicized, but that&amp;#039;s not what I mean; I just mean everyday stuff, ordinary people doing this or that because of the dictates of doctrinal belief. That makes quite an impression when you&amp;#039;re immersed in it. If I had stayed in the U.S., where talking publicly about religion is just sort of bad taste -- the realm of crackpots and gun nuts and murderous politicians (&amp;quot;Jesus wants me to bomb those villages&amp;quot;) -- I doubt I would ever have felt comfortable enough to write about religion so openly. I would have been embarrassed. I mean, in the States, religion is embarrassing unless you&amp;#039;re a fundo. I&amp;#039;m not. So instead I would have written another story about a guy at work, who goes to the mall, or whatever, and believe me, you wouldn&amp;#039;t want to read it. I&amp;#039;m not saying this is necessarily true for anybody else, but it&amp;#039;s what happened to me. Another writer will have a completely different experience. So then, what&amp;#039;s the connection between &amp;quot;returning&amp;quot; to the U.S. in this latest story, and the idea of things being hidden or unsaid? I&amp;#039;m not sure there is one. Maybe it&amp;#039;s just a matter of being comfortable enough with a story&amp;#039;s setting to be able to explore more a nuanced, more layered kind of narrative. Maybe I&amp;#039;m just getting better as a writer -- geez, five books into it, I hope so. Or maybe there&amp;#039;s something deeper after all. The thing about secrecy and dissembling in fiction, just as in real life, is that it leads to unexpected complications. Lies pile up, as one deception requires another to hold the story together. Right now, I&amp;#039;m fairly sure my narrator is a strong, capable, professional career woman. She&amp;#039;s also a head case. At least, I think she is. (I might find out, by the end, that she&amp;#039;s behaving perfectly reasonably, given the circumstances.) I&amp;#039;m having a grand old time playing with the idea that this sort of seemingly reliable person is actually host to a whole kaboodle of secrets and obfuscation. Some of her secrets are known to me; some aren&amp;#039;t. For me to discover them all, I have to finish writing the book. About the author: David Maine&amp;#039;s novels include The Preservationist, Fallen, The Book of Samson, and Monster, 1959, which will be released in February from St. Martin&amp;#039;s Press. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan. For thrills, laughs, scandal, and recipes, visit his blog, The Party Never Stops. As told to Anya Yurchyshyn "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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