Departments
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Week of 11 June 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 35 |
Feature Article
Epstein's Pandaemonium receives 1999 Kahn Award
By Eric McHenry
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Leslie Epstein |
"It's wonderful to receive an award, especially one that sees value in reaching a wide audience -- I only wish I had," says Epstein, noting that sales of the book for which he is being recognized, Pandaemonium (St. Martin's, 1997), have been strong enough to warrant a paperback printing, but have not yet recouped his advance.
"It certainly was meant to have broad public appeal," Epstein says of the novel, "because it's a book about a popular art: the movies. And my sense of movies and my connection with movies definitely informed the book."
Pandaemonium is the story of a well-known European film director, Rudolph Von Beckmann, who has fled Germany in anticipation of the Second World War. Resuming his career on location in the Nevada ghost town of Pandaemonium, he hopes to transform a standard western into a modern telling of the Sophoclean tragedy Antigone, believing the archetypal tale of tyranny can serve as an instructive allegory in the time of Hitler. But it is Von Beckmann, isolated in an otherworld of absolute power and alkali desert, who is transformed. He becomes a charismatic, Kurtz-like dictator, the microcosmic embodiment of all that he had sought to warn American audiences against.
Epstein, director of the BU Creative Writing Program, is the son and nephew of Casablanca screenplay coauthors Phil and Julius Epstein (both of whom make an appearance in the novel). He grew up in Hollywood and has had a lifelong fascination with film, he says. Pandaemonium is a new story with old origins.
"One source is my childhood involvement in movies," he says. "Another is my more adult interest in the Holocaust. And a third, which was the real catalyst, was a remark made in 1963 or 1964 by a friend of mine at Yale Drama School: he said he'd always thought Antigone would make a great western. That has stuck in my mind."
Much of the novel is narrated by Peter Lorre. Speakers, protagonists, and principal characters in Epstein's novels, which include Pinto and Sons (Norton, 1992) and King of the Jews (Norton, 1993), are often asked to function in environments or idioms that are somewhat foreign to them. For this and other reasons, UNI Associate Professor Rosanna Warren says, the narrative voice in Epstein's fiction is often slightly estranged. There is a subtle sense of detachment from language, culture, and events that lends the work a genuine moral authority.
"I think, finally, it's an ethical position," says Warren, who served as chair of the Kahn Award Committee. "That foreignness of perspective and voice becomes an ethical position from which the grotesqueness of human behavior, whether it's the behavior of Hitler or a crazed film director, can be judged. It's a particular kind of astonishment. The characters have an innocence about them, and they're constantly being astonished by the awful things that people do to each other.
"Epstein is just a master of voice," Warren says. "I think he's a really significant contemporary American novelist, and the public hasn't fully discovered that, but I hope they will."
While he's delighted to have the committee identify such qualities in his work, Epstein says, when he sits down to write he doesn't do it with thoughts of taking an ethical position, developing a particular timbre of voice, or even constructing an elaborate allegory.
"I came to Pandaemonium thinking, Antigone: that would make a swell western," he says. "The story is always foremost for me."
And he encourages graduate students in his fiction writing workshop, which convenes on the second floor of 236 Bay State Road, to approach their work in the same way. Literature courses, he reminds them, are held two flights up.
"I always tell them, 'Please, leave that stuff to the people on the fourth floor,'" he says. "'Stay on the second floor and tell the story. If you care about telling it well, all those things will be in there.'"