WILMINGTON — F.D. Reeve says he has no idea how long it took him to write Nathaniel Purple, which will be published Jan. 1.
“There was an earlier version which some friends remember, some years back,” the Wilmington-based author said of his 31st book, his first novella. “Much was transformed, and the writing itself was very quick. It was a matter of a couple of weeks.”
The title of the story refers to its distinctively named narrator, Nathaniel Purple, the librarian of a small Vermont village, who observes the lives, connections, and happenings of those who live in a small town.
As described in a publicity blurb by poet and writer Lucille Lang Day, Reeve “renders a small Vermont town where everyone knows everyone else and everyone's life is part of a tapestry cross-stitched and woven with everyone else's.”
“As in all human communities, terrible things happen - betrayals, violence, conflagrations - but here each event belongs not just to individuals, but to the whole village,” she continues.
“Nathaniel Purple, the town librarian, absorbs it all, responds when he can, looks on, but at the same time continues to savor such simple pleasures as a morning ride with his horse Crystal and picking violets for the woman in his life,” Day writes.
Reeve cites “the temptation to describe something violent” as his main inspiration for the novella.
“[I wanted to] take the main ingredients of popular fiction - you get sex, violence, wild scenes - and turn that all around,” he says.
The author does so by putting those elements into “an entirely harmonious, positive, fond setting.”
Reeve, a novelist, poet, essayist, translator, and academic who purchased his first Vermont home 40 years ago, set out “to try and release in fictional - therefore in exaggerated - form a great deal of what we do, but don't express,” he says.
“So a lot of some of the episodes may seem excessive or crazy, but it brings it back to what we dream, what we think [or] imagine, and it makes it entirely credible.”
Reeve says the name for his protagonist was inspired by common local names such as White, Brown, and Green.
“Why can't we have a 'Purple?'” he asks.
The author did find some real-life historic Purples and refers to them in the book.
“I wanted to have Nathaniel be a slight oddball, sympathetic enough to follow the town and like the people,” Reeve says. “He was born and grew up in the town, he's very proud of the town and what it stands for.”
“And if the name Purple, which is a real, true historic name, can draw attention to him, I'm delighted,” he says, calling his character “a very decent man.”
'Love poem to Vermont'
Nathaniel Purple is published by Voyage, an imprint Brigantine Media, a small publishing house in St. Johnsbury, whose editorial director, Janis Raye, describes it as “a wonderful work of fiction.”
Reeve is “doing what I believe is his best work of his long career,” she says.
Brigantine Media describes Nathaniel Purple as Reeve's “love poem” to Vermont, and Reeve can vouch for this sentiment.
“That's true. Vermont is small, there's a kind of intimacy here that, sure, there's corruption and stupidity and error, all kinds of fault, but there's such goodness, almost in the ground itself,” he says.
“There's a difference in Vermont, and you feel it,” he says. “It's open in a way, and it's very optimistic.”
On whether the story had been influenced by current or personal events, Reeve responds with both “no” and “yes.”
“There's nothing you can write that is not going to have some aspect of your consciousness in it,” he says.
“After you've been writing for a while, you're going to have a style; the way in which you put words together is going to characterize you. There's going to be that aspect of yourself there unavoidably.
“Necessarily, there's autobiography even when it's not there. The episodes are not autobiographical. The thing is, there are many Vermont towns that can be made to seem like the one in the book. But it's no one place.
“For example, in the doctor's office, there's a blood pressure machine on the wall. Think how many doctors' offices you've been in, and that's exactly what's there. So a lot of what Nathaniel sees is what I've had to see, but it's all coming from him.”
Reeve says that the most enjoyable part of writing the story was describing the climactic event of a barn burning, and the challenge of getting the feel of an entire town as his characters reacted to the series of events.
“It's not just merely to enjoy writing it, but to realize how difficult it would be to write it,” he says.
“The other challenge is trying to get the whole feel of the town in a series of separate episodes, put in such an order that they will all seem to follow in the development of the plot,” he says.
“If you put [the behaviors of various townspeople] all together, you admit that this is what makes up a village, what brings a village together,” Reeve says.
Reeve hopes that the story of Nathaniel Purple reminds people of aspects of their own lives.
“I hope they will be reminded of the underside of their lives, the sides which are very real and which they don't think about or face up to ordinarily,” he says. “And accept those sides are a real part of life.”