Sometimes, saying sorry just isn’t enough

The difference, or the interplay and the confusion, between public and private is a recurring theme for Jonathan Dee. He explains all to Declan Burke.

A Thousand Pardons

Jonathan Dee

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AMERICAN author Jonathan Dee has heard it said that all writers have to have experienced some kind of early loss. “But that can take a lot of forms — it doesn’t have to mean a miserable Dickensian childhood. I think there’s a sense in which the whole impulse to write fiction in the first place, at least in your early years, comes from your wanting to redress something, to make something come out if not better, then at least differently. So you can take control over events in a way that you maybe couldn’t as a child.

“I’ll give you the short version of my own childhood and protect people’s privacy and say that my family was relatively well off when I was born, and then gradually fell upon very hard times.”

That fall from grace is mirrored in Dee’s sixth novel, A Thousand Pardons. When her high-flying lawyer husband, Ben, spectacularly crashes to Earth during a mid-life crisis involving a law student half his age, Helen Armstead moves to New York city and takes a job for the first time in two decades, in order to support their daughter, Sara. Working in the public relations industry, specialising in crisis management, Helen discovers that her simple, pragmatic advice to clients — apologise and mean it — is revolutionary.

“Helen definitely brings a kind of home-spun wisdom to the PR industry,” says Dee. “And it’s true that there might be something traditionally feminine about the idea of expert crisis management, and yet the business itself is dominated almost entirely by men. To me it was more important that Helen was bringing things to the job that came not from her domestic life, but from her childhood, from her own Catholic school upbringing. She believes that what was imparted to her then shouldn’t work any less well in the secular realm, and for a while it seems as if she’s right.”

Born in New York in 1962 and raised in a rural part of Connecticut, Dee studied fiction at Yale under New Journalism pioneer John Hersey. Shortly after graduating, he got his very first job at the literary magazine The Paris Review, where he worked for the “very entertaining, very generous” George Plimpton — “a wonderful adventure”, he adds dryly. He published his first novel, The Lover of History, in 1990, at a time when he was influenced by writers such as Raymond Carver, William Maxwell and James Salter. “I’m afraid to go back and look at my first book,” he laughs, “because so much of it is trying to be James Salter.”

Dee is married to the literary agent Denise Shannon, although she doesn’t represent him: “That seems to work for some people,” he laughs, “although I don’t know how it could.”

Dee’s fifth novel, The Privileges, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2011. A recurring theme in his novels, he says, is “the difference, or the interplay and the confusion, between public and private”. That’s very much the case in A Thousand Pardons, as Helen Armstead mediates between clients who have publicly blotted their copybook — corrupt politicians, disingenuous clergy — and the crucial difference between a contrived and genuine apology.

“At the beginning,” Dee says, “when Helen’s clients are individuals, then what she’s doing appears very manageable and she can make it work. She can look into the eyes of this individual and say, ‘If you don’t apologise abjectly and sincerely, then it’s not worth doing at all. You have to do it correctly and that’s your only path to salvation’.” Later in the novel, as Helen becomes increasingly successful and encounters corporate bodies and the Catholic Church, her homespun wisdom grows less effective.

“When her clients start to become institutions, then she starts to become confronted with two questions: one, how do you tell the difference between the sincere and the strategic, or contrived; and two, if you can’t tell the difference, is there a difference anymore? And that’s her disillusionment as she succeeds up the ladder, and she realises that what she’s doing can only go so far. It’s not just a question of trying to divine a person’s intent, but the literal difference between a sincere institutional confession and a contrived institutional confession — does it exist?”

A Thousand Pardons is mostly set in contemporary New York and against the backdrop of the thoroughly modern world of the public relations industry, but Dee uses language with religious undertones to suggest that Helen’s experiences are more timeless than the setting might suggest.

“The public relations industry is a secular, profane industry that I think has sacred roots. I think that like a lot of things, particularly in American public life, as contemporary as it seems, it also hearkens back to an older and very different form of American public life, which was centred around religion. Whenever I see all these highly orchestrated press conferences, or the Oprah appearances, all of that stuff that’s part of the ritual — it just seems to me like a kind of old religious vessel into which is poured all this secular content. If you look at certain aspects of contemporary culture head-on, in the corner of your eye you can see the ghosts of a previous age.”

Helen’s personal morality and professional success become compromised when she encounters a crisis generated by a childhood friend, a Hollywood actor named Hamilton Barth. Barth goes on the run after committing what he believes is a heinous crime — but why is Barth an actor as opposed to a politician or a bishop?

“I was thinking of Hamilton mostly because I just wanted a person who is a figure who is somehow up for grabs,” says Dee. “That who he is, is negotiable. That he could be any number of people — and in fact, professionally, he is, at least for a short term. His identity is fungible, so that he believes he is perfectly capable of being a murderer.”

Barth is a classic case example, says Dee, of the way in which Americans are more conditioned to accept the idea that your past is something you can negotiate your way away from. Barth’s willingness to confess to a crime that he may or may not have committed underpins the recurring motif of A Thousand Pardons, which is the public’s desire for a genuine, uncomplicated public sincerity.

Dee doesn’t really think of her Helen character as political. “It doesn’t really work out for her in the end, so I’d worry that if the story is seen as political then it would be seen as politically cynical. But I guess it is political in the sense that Helen is voicing a common desire. You can see at the beginning, in other people’s response to that desire, how important it is generally — that desire for people to be straight, to just be sincere.”