Carol Goodman's debut novel, The Lake of Dead Languages,
stars Jane Hudson, a Latin teacher at Heart Lake, a semi-isolated girls' school
in the Adirondacks. While Goodman has taught Latin, her career was
absolutely nothing like Jane's, she assured me as we chatted in her publicist's
office. "But I think teenagers are pretty much the same anywhere," she
continued. "Everyone I've spoken to who's read the book and been to a girl's
school thinks the atmosphere reads true to them. Somebody told me that I'd
gotten the cliques right, and I thought, well, sure, we had cliques when I was
in high school, and where I taught." The novel is a modern Gothic thriller in
which Jane is thrust into the center of an unfolding series of tragedies that
mirror her own traumatic experiences as a student at Heart Lake twenty years
before. Be forewarned: in discussing how she wrote the book, I've asked some
questions that give away one of the crucial elements of the mystery!
RH: Why did you choose Latin as your college major?
CG: I think I was just being quirky and ornery. Everyone seemed to be majoring
in English, and I wanted to be different...I also wanted to understand more about the
origins of language. I started taking Latin for that reason. At first I thought I'd spend a few
years on Latin, then move up to Middle English, and finally end up in English, but I never
did get past Latin and Greek. I loved it, especially the poetry, and when I came back to
modern English literature, I felt like my understanding of it was enriched.
RH: So you were interested in literature and creative writing back
then?
CG: I've been writing since I was nine. I wrote a lot of tortured teenage poetry,
and when I was seventeen I was named Young Poet of Long Island, which is still my
favorite literary coup. (smiles) The four years I was in college were actually a
break from writing; I started writing short stories pretty soon after I graduated.
RH: When you started writing The Lake of Dead Languages,
did you feel as if you were ready to start a novel, or was it a story that just
kept expanding as you worked on it?
CG: I'd written two novels that have never seen the light of day and probably
never will. I went back to writing short stories. I was in the MFA program at the New
School and didn't want to work on a novel there because I thought it would be too difficult
to workshop a novel. After I got out of the program, one of the stories I'd written, about a
Latin teacher at a girls' school, stuck in my mind. It wasn't at all like the novel turned out
to be; there was no mystery, it wasn't set on a lake. But one of my teachers at the New
School told me that I should do more with the setting, and I finally decided to try a novel
again.
The first book I'd written was a young adult fantasy novel. The second was a more
conventional mystery. I like mysteries; I like reading them, though I usually end up
gravitating towards quirky books that are on the edge between mystery and mainstream
fiction. So when I started writing The Lake of Dead Languages, I felt like I could
give myself permission to write a mystery without sticking to the conventional rules of the
genre.
RH: How did you decide to create the three-part narrative structure
with the huge flashback in the middle?
CG: I knew that there was a story in Jane's past, but when I started writing, I
didn't know what the full extent of that story was. So at first, as I started learning the first
hints of what had happened to Jane when she was a student at Heart Lake, I was less like a
writer and more like a reader. I wrote about fifty or sixty pages of the first section of the
novel, then I stopped and wrote the entire middle section before going back and finishing
the first section. I knew I just had to write that story out at some point before I could
resolve her present situation.
In the earlier drafts of the novel, the past is confined to that middle section; in the later
drafts, I took some of that material and interpolated it into the final third of the novel. By
then I'd found an agent who was willing to support the book, but it was always with the
understanding that I'd make revisions, and we decided that you needed the suspense of not
knowing everything that had happened in the past, so there would still be revelations in the
last third of the book.
I love stories with these kinds of complicated backstories, and though I swore when I was
doing the revisions that my next novel would be a lot simpler, I'm using the same structure
in the book I'm working on now, so I guess I haven't learned from my experience.
(laughs)
RH: You also had to find a way to make it plausible for Jane not to
recognize one of her former classmates until the very end of the story.
CG: I've had different people respond to that in different ways. I don't recognize
people from twenty years ago, so it's credible to me that Jane wouldn't know who Albie is.
To me, it was more of an issue that nobody else would notice. Well, the dean
knows, but she never says anything about it to Jane...
RH: That, to me, was the bigger hurdle. It seemed like that information
should have slipped out at some earlier point.
CG: Well, she does mention it at one point, and two other teachers mention it,
but Jane completely misses the point. It's a difficult issue--you obviously want your
narrator to be an intelligent, perceptive person, but at the same time she can't be too
observant, or there's no story. What I tried to do is write about the type of character I'm
interested in, someone who's very capable but still has certain failings. Jane doesn't see
things because she doesn't want to see them, or because she's worrying about something
else. And she never really noticed Albie when they were students at Heart Lake, so she
remains somewhat dismissive and unobservant of her. People might criticize that point, but
what are you going to do? I tried my best. (smiles)
RH: Who are some of your favorite writers?
CG: My favorite author of all time is Charlotte Bronte, and I love nineteenth-
century British literature in general. I also love Dickens--one of the things I had to prune
out of this novel were the coincidences, and it still has plenty of them. But I love literature
with coincidences, the idea of a world where everyone you've ever met will turn out to be
an important part of your story. For modern writers, I love Sue Miller and Margaret
Atwood. I also like writers who take chances, so I really like Alice Hoffman's use of magic
realism. And in mysteries, I like a lot of noir writers, like Raymond Chandler and
Dashiell Hammett, and Ruth Rendell.
RH: You mentioned taking chances, which brings up one of the novel's
more interesting ambiguities. It's really not clear until the very end whether
this is a murder thriller or a supernatural murder thriller. Maybe there
is a curse on the lake...
CG: I didn't plan to do that too much. I wanted there to be an element of
irrationality, but I didn't want to write a horror story. At the same time, I didn't want to
mislead anybody, so I made sure that there wasn't anything in the story that isn't eventually
given a rational explanation, even with the eerie atmosphere. I love unexplained mysteries,
but I'm not going to write one. I feel as though I've got a covenant with the reader, and I
can't get away with not explaining things. I love stories with that kind of ambiguity, even
though there've been a few I've read that I think didn't quite get it right... I'm sure there
are people who won't be able to stand it.
RH: Well, nobody ever complains about "The Turn of the Screw."
CG: No, I've taught it in college, and people do complain. (laughs)
RH: Is the novel you're working on now a mystery as well?
CG: It is, but it's even less obvious in the first third than this novel is about its
mystery plot. This novel, Hotel Equinox, also has an extensive part of the story set
in the past; in this case, the narrator is trying to find out about her mother, who died when
she was twelve. So at first it's an exploration into what happened to her mother, but there
are other mysteries that are attached to that story. So it's a mystery, but still a very
uncovnentional one, brushing up against that mainstream fiction boundary.
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