In Person
Fri., March 13, 1998
Writers are complex folk, I suppose, given to irony and ambiguity, and the best among them are surely well-exercised in the arts of personal contradiction.
Consider the color-filled pages of Atticus (Harper Collins, $12 paper), Ron Hansen's prodigal-son mystery novel in which a quiet Colorado rancher finds both guilt and forgiveness when his son dies violently in Mexico. A former painter, Hansen roams the literary palette as the whites and grays of a Colorado winter give way to the jungle green and seven indigos of Mexico's Caribbean coast. Hardly a page passes when some detail is not rendered in brilliant color, from your common blues, greens, and yellows ("the simple colors of gumballs") to the rather more exotic ginger brown and lime-juice green. And he very nearly added a first-place silver to the novel's cover: Atticus was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. Yet for all that color, Hansen's reading, sponsored by UT's Texas Center for Writers, was oddly monochromatic. His delivery was serious, his diction precise; his coat gray, his shirt black. Reading to an appreciative and erudite crowd (presumably the Longhorn literati of the TCW), he wavered only rarely from a monotone, revealing little emotion as he read stirring passages from a novel of power and grace. My conclusion: He is better read than heard.
Consider also that Hansen has something of a penchant for probing the dark sides of human nature, for exploring bad motivations, for chronicling the slow slide from moral decency to abject evil. His novel-in-progress, Hitler's Niece, tells of Adolf Hitler's passion for and eventual murder of his (much) younger niece, Geli Raubal; an earlier novel centered on the violence of Jesse James. Murder, deceit, and grief are familiar themes in his work, and he readily admits to a taste for gloomy stories. And yet he is a downright amiable man - when loosed from the colorless restraints of a formal reading - given to a little humor and a throwaway joke here and there, fascinated but not too taken with his murderous subjects. "Most of the people who are psychopaths are actually quite boring," he told us with a decidedly unsinister chuckle. "It's the obligation of the writer to make them more interesting."
With a sheaf of solid work to his credit, Ron Hansen fulfills that obligation nicely. - Jay Hardwig
