Art And Life Mix In A Good Doctor's Son, A New Novel By Colorado State University Professor Steven Schwartz
Wednesday, February 4, 1998
FORT COLLINS--When he was a teenager, Steven Schwartz,
associate professor of English at Colorado State University,
almost ran over a young girl.
"I was with some friends and somehow we got the idea to drag
race," Schwartz said. "I had a slower car, so to even things out
we decided to race backwards. A friend's sister came running out
into the street behind my car and I missed her by just a few
feet. I still get chills on the back of my neck when I think
about how close I was to killing her."
David Nachman, the 16-year-old narrator in Schwartz's new
novel, A Good Doctor's Son, isn't as lucky. The teenager in the
novel agrees to a drag race with friends, but accidentally kills
a three-year-old girl. David and the small-town community
struggle from that moment on to deal with the horror of the
tragedy.
Schwartz will read from his novel 7:30 p.m. Feb. 10 at the
Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver and 7:30 p.m. Feb. 25 at the
Boulder Book Store on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder.
David's struggle is the central theme of Schwartz's novel,
but the story also explores the era of the 1960s and issues of
race, identity, class, faith, and, ultimately, redemption. The
novel, set in Schwartz's hometown of Chester, Pa., took two and a
half years to write, but after showing the completed work to his
wife, Emily Hammond (author of Breathe Something Nice), Schwartz
had to contend with a struggle of his own.
"At first Emily was excited about the novel, but the more
she read the more quiet it became in the house. Then she started
avoiding me, and I knew I was in trouble with the book."
Schwartz soon realized that, out of 460 pages of the draft, only
about 40 pages worked. He threw out hundreds of pages and, in six
weeks, rewrote the novel.
"I realized I was backing away from the core story,"
Schwartz said. "After David's accident, I moved the characters
through all this action much too far into the future and didn't
really face the strange survivor's guilt that David was grappling
with.
"It was my job to fully inhabit the character of David, but
I wasn't really doing that because I was afraid of being
melodramatic, afraid of confronting David's demons. So in my
revision I listened to David when he said: 'I just killed a small
child. I need to tell my story."'
Schwartz, who has been teaching at Colorado State for 14 years,
said that his writing projects typically give him new ideas and
inspiration that fuel his teaching.
"You learn something every time you write a sentence, and
it's always fun to share that with students."
Schwartz's previous works include the novel, Therapy, and
two story collections, To Leningrad in Winter and Lives of the
Fathers. His fiction has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the San
Francisco Chronicle, Redbook, Ploughshares and the Missouri
Review.
He has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood
Anderson Prize and two
O. Henry Awards. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship in 1993.
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Fort Collins, CO 80523-7015
(970) 491-6432
NEWS@Vines.ColoState.EDU
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