I was recently interviewed and asked about The Speed of Life, an Illustrated Novel. I’m pleased to share that interview with you.
The Speed of Life, an Illustrated Novel is literary fiction in the cloak of a legal—or alternatively a psychological—thriller. At the outset the love of Estella, a federal prosecutor, for her twenty-year-old son, Andrew, is threatened when she becomes the victim of a savage crime that he is accused of orchestrating. Estella, Andrew, state, other federal prosecutors, and the defense lawyers are caught in a torrent of passion, a brutal legal system, the mythology of the Everglades, ancient shamanism, and the inhumane oppression of indigenous peoples in Florida and in Africa.
What inspired you to write THIS book?
When Gabriel García was asked what inspired him to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, he said: “Ice.” I cannot say that for me there was such a single moment of clarity. Over the years in short stories, I’d created a handful of characters who were still speaking to me, who wanted further development. I wanted to write about the Everglades as I grew up in south Florida, I wanted to write about shamanism, religion and spirituality because of my grandfather. When I imagined the crime, the novel came together.
Are there any parts of the story that may be true to life for you?
True to life? An excellent question. Superior fiction is about what is true, made up stories and characters that reveal truth. Based upon the overwhelmingly positive reviews of The Speed of Life, I’m going to venture the opinion that it achieves this lofty goal, that it is true to life.
Is there a message in these pages that you would like your readers to know?
Henry James opined that novels aren’t supposed to have a message, that the characters can have agendas, points of view, but that the author should be neutral. If that were true, then why have we canonized so many great polemics? The Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle, The Tortilla Curtain come to mind. I write to explore multiculturalism, justice, spiritualism, nature. Readers can expect to find those topics and themes in my fiction.
What’s next? Any more books in the works?
I am very excited about my new novel, still under construction. It’s titled The Hunter and the Hunted. It’s about a brother and a sister, twins, who are close until their father dies, and they discover and express fierce diametrically opposed views about how to settle his estate. The acrimony becomes so severe that eventually each twin comes to believe that the other plans fratricide. The brother is a semi-major character in The Speed of Life. So again, a character is telling me about his need to continue living in new literature.
