Dale Loves Sophie to Death (30 page)

During my twenties and early thirties I struggled with short stories, and they were published in some wonderful journals, and those editors were extremely encouraging. I began the first chapter of
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
as a story. And I was pretty pleased with the ending for once, but I didn’t send it out right away, and I began another story which in the back of my head I knew was not a story; it was a second chapter. But I was too terrified to admit it. By the time I had four chapters I admitted to myself that I was writing a novel.

How did the response to
Dale Loves Sophie to Death—
and, in particular, winning the National Book Award—affect your writing, your career, your life?

I was thirty-five when
Dale
was published and thirty-six when I won the Book Award, and for about five days I was simply elated. It was like being the homecoming princess at Westdale Junior High School. I felt just as Sally Field must have felt when she received her second Academy Award and said, “You like me! You really like me!” And then—since I had won it—it began to seem to me not all that special. And the following year when I was asked to be one of many judges for the award, I realized that my book was probably a choice that was a compromise for most of the judges. It really didn’t change my career as far as I know, although it probably made it easier to get publishers to read my manuscripts. But it didn’t alter the way I write or cause me to worry about succeeding with my next book.

In your third novel,
Fortunate Lives,
you chose to write again about the family at the center of
Dale Loves Sophie to Death.
Did you always know that you’d return to the Howells family?

You know, I really can’t remember. I know they stayed in my mind, but my second book,
The Time of Her Life,
was the obverse of
Dale.
It was about a less healthy family, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of the Howellses then. The Howellses were moving right along with me through my life, though. They were learning the most terrible things you can learn—which were passions and terrors that I only knew through them—and yet in the grand scheme of things they were incredibly lucky. I believe it was the irony of their being safe and comfortable—enviable to so many people on the earth—while suffering a loss that is as bad as anything that can happen to anyone that intrigued me about the Howellses. Well, I guess I was bound to return to them. And I think that in the trilogy I’m at work on now all the families from my books will end up knowing one another or possibly being related. I know there’s some sort of connection.

The setting of
Dale Love Sophie to Death—
Enfield, Ohio—is almost like a character in the book. Can you talk about the importance of place in your novels?

It’s something I don’t think about much except for the actual town or neighborhood—the immediate surroundings, the weather. When I first started writing, the South was the setting for all my stories—I grew up in Louisiana. But it was like struggling to grow while being suffocated by kudzu. I grew up during the civil rights movement—my high school didn’t integrate until I was a junior, in 1963. I cared passionately about social justice and race relations, and when I realized that I could not write about the South without tackling those issues on some level, I switched locales. I wanted my stories to happen in a place that didn’t need to be explained, because although I’m politically active, politics is unbearably distracting to me when I write fiction.

What are your favorite books, books that have influenced you, or books you enjoy recommending to readers?

Well, the usual suspects, I suppose. Austen, James, Virginia Woolf. And I’ve discovered that when I read many books when I was young I knew they were wonderful but I missed so much of what was brilliant about them. I’m rereading Eudora Welty right now.
Delta Wedding.
She’s so good that I didn’t realize just how brilliant she was until this reading. How it could have escaped me is mysterious to me. She has such tact and is so careful, but this book is like a pointillist painting. There are so many ways to understand her characters.

I was enormously affected by Fitzgerald, who’s so visual a writer, and by Peter Taylor, who has exquisite phrasing. I worked very hard for a long time trying to achieve his sense of ease—the sense that the story already exists and is just being unraveled for you. But the book that made me want to write—and which I came upon, oddly enough, in the Baton Rouge bus station when I was taking a bus to visit my cousins in Natchez—was
The Man Who Loved Children
by Christina Stead. When I got back to Baton Rouge it turned out that my mother had just read it as well. It’s an astonishing book. It’s a masterpiece, and it always seems to me the opposite, in a way, of
War and Peace,
which I also love for all sorts of reasons but especially for the wonderful story. Each of those books gives you an entirely believable world, but Stead’s starts wide and becomes so amazingly intense that finally it’s like a laser of compressed emotion. Tolstoy explodes into a universe and gets wider and wider.

Has it gotten easier, or more difficult, for you to write as you get older?

Oh, no. And that’s what’s so wonderful about being fifty-four. At last I thought to myself that whether or not anyone would acknowledge my right to assume authority, I was ready to take it anyway. And I was able to think…wider, bigger, with more reach. I was weary of concentrating on a relatively narrow range.

What are you working on now? You mentioned a trilogy…

The Evidence Against Her
is the first in a series of three novels, each of which will stand on its own. The second book is tentatively titled
Greenside Lane,
and the third book, also tentatively titled, is
Two Girls Wearing Perfume in the Summer.
The series is a tale of a particular American family from its inception, beginning with the gradual confluence through marriage of four midwestern families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and that family’s evolution through the 1900s and into the early years of the twenty-first century.

I’m interested in the careless, random, ironic, or merely accidental circumstances from which communal and familial myths and expectations are first derived, and of course, I intend to unravel the intricate—sometimes tragic—consequences of those myths.

I have always been interested primarily in an investigation of character, and that still absorbs me, but I also want to give readers a whole world, so that when they have finished any one of these books they will be able to revisit its landscape in their imaginations. I want any reader to believe that he or she grasps more about the essential lives of the characters than those characters understand about themselves. I want to make it clear that the accuracy of those legends and myths by which we all define ourselves is irrelevant in the long run. We inherit or grow into expectations based on who we are assumed to be because of family, class, gender, race, etc. And much of the struggle of discovering a way to be happy is choosing which myths and legends we embrace and fulfill, and at what point it’s necessary to discard the expectations of anyone else altogether.

Reading Group Guide Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. Discuss
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
as a portrait of a marriage. Do you consider Dinah and Martin’s marriage successful? How does it compare with other marriage portraits in the novel—for example, Lawrence and Pam’s marriage? Dinah’s parents’ marriage?

2. Why did Dinah, as an adolescent, consider dancing to be “far sexier than sex” (page 185)? Do you agree with her perceptions about dancing?

3. Discuss Dinah’s response to the birth of her first child (pages 174–175). Why was she both embarrassed and enraged?

4. Have you ever had a friend like Isobel? How does Dinah and Isobel’s friendship change in the course of the novel?

5. Discuss Dinah’s response to Toby’s illness. Was she irresponsible in not seeking medical help sooner?

6. The novel offers some very sensual and highly detailed descriptions of food. Discuss the special role that food plays in the Howellses’ domesticities.

7. Dinah realizes at a certain point that she has returned to Enfield every summer because she seeks an apology. “She wanted an absolute, blanket apology from Buddy and from Isobel and from Polly and from her father” (page 138). Does Dinah receive such an apology in the course of
Dale Loves Sophie to Death?
Why?

8. Do you consider Dinah responsible for the death of her father’s cat? Discuss the role animals play in the novel. Consider, for example, the lost dog that Dinah and her parents encounter on their walk through town. Consider also the kittens Dr. Briggs brings the Howells children at the end of the novel.

9. “The events that might astonish them now—the only things that could not be foreseen—were the
unpleasant
surprises” (page 187). Do you agree that Dinah’s fate is sealed? That there can lie in store for her no happy surprises?

10. Why do you think Robb Forman Dew chose the title
Dale Loves Sophie to Death,
particularly in view of the fact that Dale and Sophie are not characters in the book? Do you consider the title appropriate for the novel?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robb Forman Dew received the National Book Award in 1982 for her first novel,
Dale Loves Sophie to Death.
She is also the author of the novels
The Time of Her Life
and
Fortunate Lives,
available in paperback from Back Bay Books, and the memoir
The Family Heart.

…AND HER MOST RECENT NOVEL

The Evidence Against Her
will be published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company in September 2001. Following is a preview.

T
here are any number of villages, small towns, and even cities of some size to which no one ever goes except on purpose. There are only travelers on business of one sort or another, personal or professional, who arrive without any inclination to dally, or to dawdle, or to daydream. And yet, almost always in these obscure precincts there is a fine grassy park, a statue, perhaps, and benches placed under tall old spreading trees and planted around with unexceptional seasonal flowers, petunias or geraniums or chrysanthemums in all likelihood, or possibly no more than a tidy patch of English ivy. A good many visitors have sat on such benches for a moment or two, under no burden to take account of their surroundings, under no obligation to enjoy themselves. A stranger to such a place may settle for longer than intended, losing track of the time altogether—slouching a bit against the wooden slats, stretching an arm along the back of the bench, and enjoying the sun on a nice day, comfortably oblivious to passersby and unself-consciously relaxed—without assuming the covertly alert, defensive, nearly apologetic posture of a tourist.

By and large these towns are middling to small, and are never on either coast or even any famous body of water such as a good-sized lake or major river. These are communities that lie geographically and culturally in unremarkable locales: no towering mountains, no breathtaking sweep of deep valleys, no overwhelming or catastrophic history particular only to that place. In fact, with only a few exceptions, these unrenowned districts are all villages, towns, or small cities exactly like Washburn, Ohio, about which people are incurious, requiring only the information that it is approximately forty-five miles east of Columbus.

As it happens, Monument Square in the town of Washburn is not four sided but hexagonal and was a gift to the city from the Washburn Ladies Monument Society, ceded to the town simultaneously at the unveiling and dedication of the Civil War monument on July 4, 1877. The monument itself is a life-size statue of a Union soldier at parade rest, gazing southward from his perch atop a thirty-foot fluted granite column, the pediment of which is just over twelve feet high. Altogether the monument stands nearly fifty feet, and on its west face is the inscription:

Our Country!

By that dread name

we wave the sword on high,

and swear for her to live

for her to die.

—Campbell

Within a year of the dedication ceremony the common idea among the citizens of Washburn was that the stonecutter—imported all the way from Philadelphia, hurrying the work, eager to catch the train, and possibly with a few too many glasses of beer under his belt—had chiseled into that smooth granite the mistake “dread name” as opposed to “dear name.”

In the spring of 1882, Leo Scofield, soon after he and his brothers had cleared the woods and begun construction of their houses on the north side of the square, had written to Mrs. Dowd, who commissioned the statue but who had moved back to Philadelphia soon after its unveiling, to inquire if he might have the mistaken inscription altered at his own expense. He had attempted to cast his offer along the lines of being an act of gratitude for her generous gift, but Leo was only thirty-one years old then, a young man still, without much good sense. He was enormously pleased by the largesse of his idea—which had occurred to him one day out of the blue—and delighted that he finally had the wherewithal to make such an offer. A slightly self-congratulatory air tinged the tactlessly exuberant wording of his letter, and he was brought up short by her reply:

…furthermore, I shall arrange to have the statue removed piece by piece if need be, as it is I who pays out the money each year for its upkeep, should the inscription in any way be altered. I never shall believe in all the days left to me that the preservation of the Union was worth the price of the good life of my dear husband, Colonel Marcus Dowd, who left his post as President of Harcourt Lees College to head Company A. He died at Petersburg. The statue was undertaken at my instigation only as an honor to him. I shall live with nothing more than despair and contempt for this Union and Mr. Lincoln all the rest of my life. As my children do not share my sentiments in every respect, however, I have made arrangements to fund the maintenance of the monument and the fenced area of its surround. I have engaged a Mr. Olwin Grant who lives out on Coshocton Road as a caretaker, and any further questions you may address to him. I implore you, Mr. Scofield, not to raise this matter to me again.