Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

avoid descriptions of the mental states of your heroes; the effort should be to make these clear from their actions.” In the same letter, Chekhov writes: “In descriptions of nature, one should seize upon minutiae, grouping them so that when, having read the passage, you close your eyes, a picture is formed.” Raymond Carver, who for many years read Chekhov daily, understood this. He placed his characters amid details, revisiting objects until their essence conveyed their importance; he gave us sparse details about the characters themselves. We don’t think of a Carver character and envision that character vividly, as we do in Dickens. Weremember that a character was wearing a belt because even that ordinary belt might have been put to use in an awful way. Carver had also assimilated the famous maxim attributed to Chekhov that if a gun is introduced early on it will have to go off by story’s end. Details in Carver might be used or, more often, remain extraneous, like useless touchstones. Carver, of course, would never have a character offer an unexpected perspective on himself, as Dmitri does, with his ostensible explanation of how he acts, how others react to him, and what might therefore be expected. At the end of Chekhov’s story, one character clutches his head while the other cries. We are told “that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning,” which seems to unite the prescient writer with the character as perceiver. The author freeze-frames the ending but alarms us enough that we fear seeing things set in motion again. It is almost as if, in Chekhov and Carver, the story must end where it does for maximum scariness.
    Those of us with vivid memories of the Nixon years might share just such a freeze-frame, remembering when Nixon stood in the door of the plane that would take him and his family away from the White House for the last time. Their actual departure, had it been a moment in literature, could have been a conventional conclusion—the end of something—seeded with some suggestions about how the future might turn out, but for me, this moment was interesting as it pertained not so much to the major character but to the minor. Whether we interpreted him as tragic, terrible, or any other number of things, for me, this moment provided a hyperawareness of Mrs. Nixon. What seemed mysterious was that a specific person had determined her fate—and how often does that happen? It was also done very publicly, calling attention to her in exactly the way she tried to avoid revealing herself. (This,of course, is something fiction writers have to be aware of, being neither judgmental nor cruel toward their characters, but also not avoiding painful revelations.) Often, writers say that, while they are writing, a character suddenly seems to be out of control (usually a good thing), or that, while concentrating on the main character, they noticed a face in the crowd and couldn’t break eye contact—something like that. My eyes and my curiosity riveted themselves to Mrs. Nixon at her husband’s side. I had accepted her as relatively unimportant; she was the antithesis of a role model; sure, I felt sorry for her, but wait a minute: who was she?
    RN told himself many stories about himself. Most of them—the lies included—he was willing to have carved in stone. He didn’t just read from a script that was written by his advisers or speech-writers; he worked on draft after draft of his speeches. For all I know, Mrs. Nixon might have been a storyteller, too, but I have my doubts because she rarely spoke for the record, let alone repeated herself, except in the most banal clichés. We’ll never know if she saw through her boyfriend, then fiancé, then husband but loved him anyway (and was never happy with him).
    Dmitri’s last uttered words are a question. “‘How? How?’ he asked, clutching his head. ‘How?’” The question echoes, catapulting the reader