The Distance From Normandy
A Novel
by Jonathan Hull
List Price: $24.95
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0312314116
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Jonathan Hull is the author of Losing Julia, a Booksense 76 Selection and bestseller, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, and a Denver Rocky Mountain News bestseller. An award-winning journalist, he spent several years as Time magazine's Chicago and Jerusalem bureau chief before turning to writing fiction. The father of two children, he lives in Marin County, California with his wife Judy.
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Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Distance from Normandy?
Jonathan Hull: The book essentially sprung from a single inspiration: namely, that it might be interesting to take two of the more strikingly dissimilar members of the American family --- an upright and aging World War Two vet and a drawer-drooping, despair - filled teenager --- lock them in the same room and let them at each other. As the narrative took hold I realized I could bring together several subjects of interest: the experience and moral consequences of war; the sometimes lethal disaffection among today's youth, which at its worst has led to almost incomprehensible tragedies in our schools; and the unique and often intense affinity between grandparents and their grandchildren. Also, it seemed to me that our near-exhaustive efforts to adequately eulogize America's so-called "greatest generation" beg a crucial question; namely, how far from greatness have we since fallen? Put another way --- and this explains in part how I came up with the title --- how might one measure the distance from Normandy ?
In creating the character of Mead, I wanted a front-line witness to some of his generation's greatest trials --- D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, the final conquest of Germany --- only with a burden of guilt, complicating the notions of good and evil. For his grandson Andrew, I relied on a combination of my own memories of teenage turmoil --- admittedly dated --- as well as my experiences reporting on the topic of youth violence, which I'd covered extensively.
Q: How long did it take you to write?
JH: Less than nine months start to finish, which is quick for me. By comparison, Losing Julia took me over two years and I spent another two years on a manuscript that didn't go anywhere. Hopefully I'm learning. Or maybe I just got lucky.
Q: The Distance from Normandy and Losing Julia both dwell on the issue of loss. Would you consider this one of your central themes as a writer?
JH: And as a reader and husband and father and son as well. It seems to me that dealing with loss is the single greatest challenge we each face, whether it be lost youth or lost love or lost opportunity or what have you. So the great question becomes: how do we fully embrace life while at the same time preparing to one day let go of everything we hold dear, often under the most difficult and painful circumstances? I'm still working on the answer, but I'm convinced it involves a robust sense of humor.
I think this also explains why I'm so drawn to history, both as a reader and a writer. Somehow it strengthens me to feel a part of a much larger human struggle to make some sense of our place in the universe; to know that millions of others who have gone before have asked the same unanswerable questions as they stared in awe at the night sky. And it inspires me to see how others have managed to find meaning and dignity in their lives even under the most terrible conditions, reminding me of just how fortunate I am.
Q: In Losing Julia, Patrick Delaney faces enormous hardships both as a young soldier in the trenches of World War One and later as an older man. Do you believe he is ultimately defeated by those hardships?
JH: I leave that to the reader, but I'll certainly say he's been around the block a few times. Some readers have found his story quite uplifting and often humorous while others have closed the book with a sense of unremitting tragedy. I suppose that says as much about people as it does about the novel.
Q: Both of your books are set against the backdrop of war. Why does the battlefield attract you as a writer?
JH: Probably for many of the same reasons that it repels me so much. No other human experience so fully and graphically reveals the very worst - and yet also the very best - in us. Good and evil, love and death, courage and cowardice, faith and despair; it's all right there. And I think it's impossible to understand how we got where we are today without some appreciation of the two greatest cataclysms in modern history, which I believe still haunt us to this day --- and rightly so. As a writer I think it's vitally important that we confront and examine and mourn our enormous capacity for violence and evil. That said, I cringe at the glorification of violence, so frequent in our media, where brutality and suffering take on an almost pornographic quality.
Q: How did you go about your research?
JH: I've always had an interest in military history, partly inherited from my father, who was something of a Revolutionary War scholar. Yet after my years as a reporter I made a deliberate decision not to go out and interview vets because I wanted to find the material in my imagination rather than my notebooks. Still, I was obviously concerned with getting the facts and atmosphere right and I read a great many diaries and letters and memoirs from soldiers of both wars.
During my research for Losing Julia I visited the battlefields of Verdun and the Somme, certainly two of the loneliest, most wretched places on earth, the landscape still violently churned like a stormy sea. I returned to France to gather material for The Distance from Normandy, this time seeking the sad harvest of a different generation. More than once as I walked among old bunkers and cemeteries it struck me that the combatants of the Second World War could literally take cover behind the innumerable headstones of their fathers who had fallen in the previous war. In some cases, the monuments and memorials to the Great War actually bear the scars of bullets and artillery shells fired in the Second World War, a desecration that makes those memorials --- and the sacrifices of those they honor --- all the sadder still.
Q: You obviously have no firsthand experience with either old age or the wars you write about. Did that make the writing more challenging?
JH: Perhaps, but in some ways I think it made it more refreshing as well. I've never subscribed to the writing school mantra write what you know. I think that puts writers on far too short a leash. What's the imagination for if we're all just going to rehash our childhoods, careers and marital traumas? I think I'd rather tell a young writer to write about any subject that profoundly moves and fascinates you, whether or not it's part of your personal experience. You have to be possessed by the subject matter to finish a book, and if the writer isn't possessed the reader sure won't be.
Q: Did you find the transition from journalist to novelist difficult?
JH: Though I'd heard many cautionary accounts, I found the switch both painless and pleasurable. After years of being constrained by facts, quotes and the accessibility of sources, it was wonderfully liberating to toss aside my reporter's notebooks and plunge right into other people's hearts and heads, which of course is where all the really interesting stuff lies hidden. Fiction strikes me as far better equipped to get at the deeper and more compelling truths of our lives --- our unspoken fears and hopes, our secret desires. I enjoy writing fiction for the same reason that I enjoying reading it: it's the best way I know of to experience the world through the eyes of others.
And best of all, I get to spend a lot more time with my family.
Q: What are your writing habits?
JH: Five or six hours a day, if I'm lucky. I write in a windowless room, accompanied by my dog and fortified by a constant stream of music, usually classical or acoustic with some soundtracks and a bit of bracing rock thrown in here and there. While much is made of creativity's exhausting toll, I can't wait to get to my keyboard each morning. A real nine-to-five job, now that's agony.
Q: You have now written books with backdrops of both World War I and World War II. You spent three years as Time's Jerusalem bureau chief, covering Arab-Israeli affairs, the Palestinian uprising and the Gulf War. Can readers expect you to write a novel set in that part of the world?
JH: When I left Jerusalem I thought that the last thing the world needed was another book on the Arab-Israeli conflict as it seems that just about every journalist who has so much as a brief layover at Ben Gurion Airport feels compelled to write about their experiences. But it's tempting for very obvious reasons: few conflicts so purely and dramatically and tragically demonstrate the elemental human capacity for divisiveness, with good-hearted people on both sides. We'll see.
Q: What are you working on now, and when can readers expect to see it?
JH: At the moment I'm well into another novel set against the backdrop of World War Two --- I'm not done with that conflict yet --- only this time from a woman's point of view and set partly in Italy. After writing about veterans in my two previous novels I decided it's time to write about a veteran's wife. But it's much less a war novel than a love story, and maybe even two love stories. I'm in the middle of it right now so I feel a bit like a tunneling gopher who is not quite sure where he'll pop up. As for just when I'll be finished, well, I've learned better than to make predictions as I always seem to be wrong. But if the process is at times slower than I'd like, I'm at least heartened by the knowledge that very few of my favorite books were written in record-breaking time.
Q: What are some of your all-time favorite books?
JH: In no particular order I'd have to include:
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, Siegfried Sassoon
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
Sophie's Choice, William Styron
Demian, Hermann Hesse
Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
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Excerpted from The Distance From Normandy © Copyright 2012 by Jonathan Hull. Reprinted with permission by St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved.
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