Time Bends

When writing a period novel, the question always emerges, how do you establish the historical moment? How many signposts do you need, and how many are too many?

I’ve written three books set in 1940s through early 1960s America. Since it’s a time and place I’ve been fascinated with ever since I was a young girl, I tend to want to saturate the stories with period detail to such an extent that the research process can begin to take over, because it offers so many immediate pleasures. I’d be embarrassed to admit how much time I’ve spent on the Los Angeles Public Library Web site, browsing through its glorious menu collection to determine, in one instance, what a young woman might order, were she to find herself at the Starlight Roof Restaurant on top of the Chase Hotel in St. Louis back in 1949 (perhaps the Baked Sugar Cured Ham was savored while watching “Merrill Abbott’s Ice Revue” accompanied by Nick Stuart and his Orchestra).

The dangers of writing in a particular time period are many. Inevitably, mistakes are made and discerning readers usually spot the anachronisms. More dangerous, it seems, is the kind of heavy-handed period stamping that truly pulls you out of the historical moment and leaves you in a flat montage of Big History. (We’ve seen this happen on TV when, to mark, say, the 1960s, directors cue the Beatles, segueing into Cream, love beads out, etc.)

To me, the most successful novelists writing about any given period avoid big signals and hand-waving. Instead, they offer a world so steeped in its period that you can feel it not just via songs on the radio or the clothes characters wear, but in every phrase, every action. Consider William Kennedy’s legendary Albany cycle. Here is a passage from the first book in that trilogy, Legs, which places at its center the famed bootlegger Jack “Legs” Diamond:

Alice gave Flossie the fish eye when she kidded Jack about pigeons in the loft and fondled his earlobe. Then Frances gave Flossie the fish eye when the Floss kidded Marcus about pigeons in the loft and fondled his earlobe. Then Floss moved alongside the piano, and while the pianoman played, “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” she shook her ass to that sweet and gracious waltz, turning, pivoting, shaking. Disgusting. Gorgeous. Oh, Floss, ya look like Mae West. Harpy, Sweetmeat. Goddess of perfume.

“Who is she?” Alice asked.

“Flossie, she works here,” Jack said.

“She knows you pretty well to play with your ear.”

“Nah, she does that with all the boys. Great girl, Floss.”

“I never knew anybody who liked ears like that.”

“You don’t get around, Alice. I keep telling you that.”

You are deep, deep in the world of Prohibition-era America, so deep you may not even get all the idiom, catch everything. You’re looking at it through a sepia lens thick with cultural moments both remembered and forgotten. And yet it’s also as fresh as if written this morning. How Kennedy does it, I don’t know.