DREAMING THE NEWS

In rural Illinois a man murdered his best friend and cut off his ear with a razor, a symbolic execution. The murdered man was sleeping with the killer's wife, who had left her husband and taken the children. In divorce court, where she denied her adultery, she was awarded all her husband's money, leaving him with nothing but sorrow and rage. All night he hid out near the barn, and when his best friend came to do the milking, he shot him point-blank. Then he weighted himself down, waded into the river and put a bullet in his head. The ear was never recovered.

At least that's the way the story came to me in William Maxwell's novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. It was one of several works of fiction I read on a week's vacation in a place where the newspaper arrived a day late and never before 9 a.m. I am an early riser, so the first two or three hours of my vacation mornings were spent getting the news from the likes of Maxwell, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Tobias Wolff, Frank Conroy, Alice Adams, Stewart O'Nan, Charles Baxter--short stories and novels--and from Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, a memoir so rich it might be a novel.

To begin the day with fiction instead of the news had a transforming effect on the news. When 9 o'clock came, force of habit drew me to the shop where the papers arrive, and for the time it took to read them, I would lay aside, say, Wolff's The Rich Brother, a brooding short story about two brothers joined by fear and hatred, or O'Nan's novel The Names of the Dead, about a man who cannot leave the Vietnam War behind him.

I would proceed from these crafted and layered texts of made-up events and people to the story about the mass suicide of the Rancho Santa Fe cultists who believed the Hale-Bopp comet summoned them to heaven, or the one about Martin Luther King Jr.'s son Dexter visiting James Earl Ray and saying he thought him innocent of his father's murder, or the account of George Bush parachuting out of a plane because his only other jump was during World War II, when Japanese gunners shot up his torpedo bomber and he was forced to bail out over the Pacific, getting banged up and badly cut. In his autobiography he cited that event as "maybe the most important" in his life. This time he wanted to "get it right," and the jump went perfectly. Exhilarated, he called himself "a new man."

What would happen is that I began reading the papers differently, as if the news story were an outline or sketch of a deeper (more crafted and layered) story that was being withheld from the reader and at the same time invited the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks. The stories in the news were no less interesting than the Oates story about Swimmers or Conroy's story about the curse of a mad father, but they were bare bones, hints. How could they be otherwise? If reporters had the license of artists, one would have been able to read the California cultists' last-minute thoughts as they slipped the plastic bags over their heads, and to understand their terrible bliss. One might have known if James Earl Ray (or Dexter King) was lying.