A good writing rule of thumb a professor once gave me is that you should never be smarter than your characters. I think this is mostly true: there is something singularly dispiriting about reading a story in which an oblivious narrator or protagonist bumbles jerkily around like a marionette pulled by the invisible strings held by a smug, superior author. It isn’t a matter of realism—people do behave like idiots all the time in real life—but a reader can sense when a character’s stupidity is a matter of authorial convenience.
And yet, it’s a fine line because an author must perforce know more than their characters. An author has, or should have, the larger form of the story in mind, the moral and thematic superstructure, the reasons things that happen matter. In a sense, characters are like us as we live our lives, only half-aware at best of why they want things, why they do things—we are more like authors in memory, as we make sense of what has happened and assign (sometimes falsely) narrative and moral form to the chaos.
I have mentioned in this project more than once Grace Paley’s famous line about granting characters the open destiny of life; while I find this ideal, or rather the aesthetic authorial ideal it has come to embody, dubious at best, I also find Nabokov’s position—that characters are pawns, slaves in his stories—less than ideal, as well. For me, the ideal position is somewhere in the middle: the author needs to know more than the character, but the character should ideally be graced with a grasping awareness of the terms of the story they’re in. Characters perhaps do not, in the grand narrative sense, have agency; but then, neither do we.
“Coffee with Oliver” offers an example of the difficulty of finding this sweet spot. Oliver is 47, a British expat living in the half-finished Perugian house his ex-wife granted him as a term of their divorce, along with a small monthly alimony check. The story begins with Oliver spying a young woman who looks like his daughter, Deborah, whom he has met only once in the two decades of her life. We think perhaps he is delusional, but it turns out he’s right: a few days later, he finds her again. They have an unpleasant coffee date, during which Deborah makes clear she wants no further connection with him. We leave Oliver in his hovel, considering that Deborah will eventually come, and that it was okay for him to have stuck her with the coffee bill.
Oliver’s obliviousness about his pathological cheapness (he routinely rips off the cafe where he gets coffee, and only has running water and furnishings in his house thanks to having taken advantage of an itinerant laborer some months ago), is rendered with a skillfully light touch by Trevor, and yet as with many Trevor stories, one also feels the finger on the psychological scale. Oliver (for me) is just one notch too dense about himself and his relationship with his deceased (as he learns in the course of the story) ex-wife, Angelica. His emotions toward Angelica are simplistic and monochrome: she blamed him wrongly, and she was bad to him. And when Deborah evinces no interest in getting to know him—in fact, quite the opposite—he slides effortlessly into confident delusion.
The thing is, there are, of course, people like this in the world. Many, many millions of people. The question then becomes whether or not those are people worth writing about. My general feeling is no, simply because they are not that interesting. Dullness is obviously uninteresting, and delusion at its simplest level—a refusal to see or accept upsetting things—is no more interesting than sitting in a dark room. Choice of character, in a way, becomes part of the moral character of a story or narrative. We should want to write about interesting people, people capable of change and insight, even if they do not achieve change or insight. And if we choose to write about a delusional character, we should probably try to grant them a rare moment of lucidity. The dullest person can, on occasion, become surprisingly sharp.
In a sense, there are two basic Trevorian character arcs. Either a character’s delusionality is tested and broken, or, as in “Coffee with Oliver,” a character’s delusionality is tested and it emerges stronger. I almost invariably prefer the former, the stories when the veil is lifted, if only for a moment that is subsumed by further delusion.
