Wide Blue Yonder
A Novel
by Jean Thompson
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0743229584
Publisher: Scribner
Jean Thompson is the author of Who Do You Love: Stories, a 1999 National Book Award finalist for fiction and a New York Times Notable Book. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she lives in Urbana, Illinois.
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Wide Blue Yonder
Like all my books, Wide Blue Yonder began with something small -- the idea of a man watching the Weather Channel -- and grew to fill a space. Early on I knew who Uncle Harvey would be: innocent, damaged, isolated. Once I found a language for the dialogue of his inner life, many of the specifics about him seemed to follow naturally. Of course he would live in a run-down house with a spoiled cat, of course he would grow a haphazard garden, eat ice cream straight out of the carton, and so on. When I tried to imagine who else might be involved with such an unsocial character, I naturally thought of family, and then invented a health crisis that would cause the family to intervene. Josie and her mother, Elaine, and all the secondary characters that branch off from them, derive from that basic plot necessity. Rolando Gottschalk, of course, is the wild card, a force of will, personality, and nature, that disrupts the expected course of events and, I hope, expands the book's scope.
The wonderful thing about the Weather Channel, for Harvey and I suppose anyone else who watches it, is that you can sit alone in your own living room and feel like a participant in matters of global import. I wanted to make that connection between individual lives, even seemingly insignificant lives, and the metaphysical. Harvey constructs his own version of the afterlife, while Elaine ponders the requirements for happiness, Josie decides the purpose of living is love, and Rolando berates the universe for causing his rage and pain. What I like best about novels, Wide Blue Yonder or any other, is the opportunity to give such abstract ideas features and flesh, make them move and talk and surprise us.
Excerpted from Wide Blue Yonder © Copyright 2009 by Jean Thompson. Reprinted with permission by Scribner. All rights reserved.
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