LAURA ADAMS
199
Int :
And Cherry?
Mazier:
I didn 't mean Cherry to be all good by any means . To the degree that
she 's better than she ought to be , she 's too sentimental a character. A
gangster 's moll is not the simplest kind of goodness we arrive at . But I
wanted to indicate some characters had more purchase on good than others.
Int :
Cherry seemed to have a hard kernel of goodness even though she was
surrounded by corruption .
Mazier:
I think she 's finally an enigmatic character. In my opinion , she's the
weakest character in
An Amen·can Dream .
I think people who don't like
the book have their strongest argument starting with Cherry. To a great
degree, I'm afraid she's a sentimental conception . We don't really know
much about her. We 're asked to believe that this goodness exists in her but
we don't have any idea of the real play of good and evil in her. She 's a
shadowy figure . Of course , my cop out is that she's seen through Rojack's
eyes. He's in an incandescent state of huge paranoia and enormous
awareness. He 's more heroic and more filled with dread than at any point in
his life . So he comes in like a lighthouse in the fog . What else does one do in
such a state but fall madly in love for twenty-four hours and lose the love?
It
would have taken more wit than I possessed
to
have made her a character of
dimension under these circumstances . Perhaps she did have to appear as
a sentimental figure . Still I think there's no getting around it, she's the first
weakness of the book.
Int:
But it's a highly metaphorical novel. One of the mistakes many critics
made in first reviewing it was
to
take it too literally . Isn't Cherry seen
metaphorically as love , the reward of courage?
Mazier:
Well , no . I don 't believe a metaphorical novel has any right to exist
until it exists on its ground floor. You know I never start with my characters
as symbols. I'm unhappy if! can't see my characters . I mean , I not only have
to know what they look like , and how tall they are , whether they're good
looking or plain , but I also like to have some idea ofwhat they smell like . So
I had a pretty good idea of Cherry
physically,
a very clear idea in fact, but I
would have been happier if her character had emerged somewhat more. I
think Deborah , for instance , is vastly more successful. Deborah is worthy of
a book in herself. In fact, at one time I thought idly of doing a book on
Deborah , and then chose not to. But how she drew coincidences to herself.
One of the things about
An Amen·can Dream
that's not often realized is my
little theory , if you will , that as events become more dramatic so does the
play of coincidence become more intense . You can reverse it. You can say
that coincidence may fail to occur unless events are dramatic. I think there's
a reason for that . If you believe in Gods and Devils, and I choose the plural
because not only is God on one side, Devil on the other but they certainly
