By Jay Richards
Face Rock Press
344 pages
ISBN: 978-0988589001
About Jay Richards:
DR. JAY RICHARDS, PHD, is a forensic psychologist and expert witness with over thirty years of experience in diagnosing, managing, and studying psychopaths, sex offenders, and mentally disordered offenders. He is currently on the faculty at University of Washington and Seattle University, and appears as a psychopathy expert on a variety of media, including NPR, Dateline, and The Washington Post. His fiction explores how people (normal and disordered alike) make choices in a world that is simultaneously predetermined and stultifying–unpredictable and dangerous. His first novel Silhouette of Virtue is based, in part, on actual crimes that occurred on a university campus during the mid-1970s, and is also informed by experiences gained by the author while studying and teaching African literature in West Africa later in that decade. Richards believes that task of fiction is to create and share a vision of the world that is worthy of humanity.
About the Book:
It is 1973. A small college town in Southern Illinois is terrorized by a spree of sadistic assaults. The rapist tells the victims–all Asian women–that he is making them pay for America’s betrayal in Vietnam. When the only other Black faculty member is accused of the crimes, African American philosophy professor Nathan ”Ribs” Rivers struggles to suspend his doubts about his colleague’s innocence.Rivers reluctantly yields to the urgings of his students and takes up leadership of a campus coalition formed to advocate for a fair trial. Professor Rivers embarks on a vision quest for the truth that is as much about his character as it is about the crimes–a quest that threatens to topple his family and career, ignites in him a spiritual crisis, and plunges him headlong toward lethal unknowns.
1.
What made you
want to write a book after decades working as a forensic psychologist?
Actually, I tinkered around with writing
fiction for decades. I say tinker, but I
was deadly serious about it. Sometimes
too serious to open up and create without perpetual, harsh self-criticism. At some point, I decided to act on the old
injunction “Physician, heal thyself.” I
stepped away from my perfectionism and got down to work.
2.
What does a
forensic psychologist do?
Forensic psychologists practice
psychology in legal contexts. They
perform evaluations to answer psycho-legal questions, like: Is a defendant psychologically fit
(competent) to participate in a trial? Was their crime a result of the person’s
mental illness impairing their ability to know what they were doing or that the
act was wrong or illegal? How likely is
it that a sexual offender or domestic violence perpetrator will repeat these
kinds of crimes? Forensic
psychologists also provide forensic treatment.
This is similar to clinical treatment for mental disorders or problem
behaviors, but the focus is on preventing the recurrence of dangerous behavior.
3.
How have your
experiences shaped you as a writer?
My work as a forensic psychologist involves
evaluating and treating dangerous people with mental disorders. This work has given me license to be nosy
about people at a very deep level, a level of deep wonder about how people
experience life.I am always aware that the stakes are high in this work. A risk assessment that is off target or a
serious misstep in therapy can obstruct the patient’s progress, expose others
to unnecessary risk of violence, or lead to my being assaulted.
Doing intensive forensic assessment and
forensic therapy with dangerous people required me to spend long periods of silence
across the table from my patients. At times these extended silences were filled
with an empty void. But at other times, they were pregnant with something
(terrible or fragile) that had a momentum, something that wanted to emerge and
take its chances in the external world of speech and action.
This is great writing practice, learning
how to sit with powerful emotion—those of your own, those of your patient (or
character)—while you work to open up a space for something new. Of course, the
exotic, often perplexing personalities I have encountered in this work have
contributed to some of my characters, but the experience of sitting with them
has informed everything else.
Another experience that shapes my
writing is a persistent sense of justice that I’ve had my whole life. Ever
since I was a child, I’ve sometimes felt an intense sense that something unfair
or unjust was happening to me or to others and that no one would listen. This
often led me to writing letters to my parents, teachers, and romantic interests
that I was usually wise enough not to send. Writing those letters was
cathartic, but they would sometimes become more than self-solace and take off
on wings of their own. I would then see
my personal complaint as experiential ore for poetry and fiction, stuff that I
could refine into something valuable to others through character, story and
self-reflective language.
The themes and character development of
my fiction parallel this personal process.
Key characters often have a poignant awareness of injustice that sparked
them to action. Many characters—including
some of the criminals—long for completion through a performance or exchange,
but the experience continually eludes them until an injustice is addressed.
4.
What made you
decide to write fiction in particular?
I decided to write fiction largely
because I believed I had an aptitude for it and that this capacity, or talent, came
with a responsibility. It’s similar to
how the responsibility to stand witness comes from having been present for a significant
event and having some degree of unique knowledge about it.
I believe that fiction, like all the
arts, is a mode of knowledge. It is valuable because it allows us to feel and
perceive in new ways. Those new points of view are often introduced to us by characters
who are unlike the people we know in our own lives. And if the characters are
familiar to us, we get a more intimate look at them. Fiction brings us “inside”
these characters and shows us what the world looks like from their perspective.
Fiction is the one creative art that
gives us this inside perspective through language. It is not exact knowledge. It’s
more like the kind of knowledge you acquire by intensely playing a game until
you dissolve into the flow of it. There
is no substitute for fiction, although you don’t need it to live. It doesn’t bake bread, it opens hearts and minds.
5.
What inspired
the plot for Silhouette of Virtue?
The plot is loosely based on a series of
sexual assaults that actually occurred on the campus of a Midwestern university
that I attended in the mid-70s. In the
real case, a popular African-American graduate student was accused of being
involved in the crimes. Early on, I viewed these happenings as having cultural
significance, especially in regard to how it forced students into two camps:
one that viewed the charges as racially
motivated, and the other that insisted that race had nothing to do with his
being a suspect. I observed these events
from the fringes, and after I left the university town I got only fragmented
glimpses as the chain of events played out over several years. There was no internet and the local papers
buried the story, so I had no way to follow it closely. As a result, my
imagination was given considerable rein.
I bumped up the ante by accelerating the pace of events and by making
the both the accused man and the amateur sleuth who tries to find the truth
African Americans on the university faculty.
6. How did
people you’ve met in your years of work shape the characters for the book?
In his poem “Little Gidding,” T.S. Eliot
writes of a poet who meets “a familiar compound ghost, both intimate and
unidentifiable.” I consider the characters in my book combinations of real and
imagined people. One of the criminals in the novel is a combination of a close
childhood friend, a sadistic patient I had in a therapy group in a forensic
hospital, and a black Trickster-figure character (Skeeter) from John Updike’s Rabbit Redux. There’s also a character (with
a nod to Superman’s Lex Luther) that
is based on an eminent scientist who tries to hide his mean streak and use his
authority to mastermind crimes. The protagonist and sleuth, Dr. Nathan Rivers,
is the admixture of a perpetual grad student in philosophy who had a noble and
compassionate soul, and my impressions of several African-American poets, whom
I’ve never met in person. And, oh yes, I shouldn’t forget, a good pinch of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes in the 1939
film Hound of the Baskervilles.
I’m
playing with the elements of what may become a sequel to Silhouette of Virtue. It would feature the philosophical sleuth
from the first novel, Dr. Nathan Rivers, but in a totally different setting,
and perhaps even a different era. I would like that book to have some of the
adventure, suspense, detective themes, and investigation of racial and sexual
identity (as well as wry humor and parody) that are in Silhouette.
I
also have a book in progress. It’s a Bildungsroman along the lines of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. It
portrays a kind of coming of age story over the course of a decade and captures
the tone of culture and society during that passage. The story is set in both
America and Africa, and is inspired by my travels in Nigeria during my own
coming of age (mid 20s) and my brief friendship with novelist Leon Forrest.
Forrest was a writer who was deeply African-American and also somehow African
in his sensibility, which was more like that of a lyrical epic poet or African
praise singer. Remembering and thinking
about him gives me hope that I can pull together something that covers all this
territory in an interesting way.
8.
What’s one thing
you want people to take away as a message from your book?
A
suspense novel tells the story of a mystery about the identity and whereabouts
of evildoers. The most important clues
are in the aberrant or flawed personalities of the criminals, which are always
partially revealed and partially concealed in the crimes they commit. The big message of the Silhouette of Virtue, like many detective mystery stories, is that
by trying to untangle a mystery like this, we readers learn more about the mystery
that is all around us and within us and others.
In other words, the take-home message is that the real world around us is
a terrifying, beautiful, and mysterious place and we are part and parcel of
that world.
9.
In
Silhouette, does your protagonist, Dr.
Nathan Rivers, reflect your own view of the world and how
it operates?
Yes,
I think so, but he acts on that worldview more consistently and courageously
than I can. He’s a lot less worried
about making big mistakes. Like Rivers, I’ve always been drawn to people of
diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, and complexities of all kinds. Also, I’ve
always wanted to understand what it means to lead a well-lived life, which is a
central motive that drives Rivers in the book. Finally, as a black man myself,
I share with Rivers the “double-consciousness” that African Americans often
develop as being in the American
society, but not of it in many ways.
This dual identity frees me, like Rivers, to look at America from “the outside”
and propose something that I believe is ultimately more American.
