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Vigil Harbor was titled, until the 11th hour, In a Time of Tempests. I loved that title the way one loves a garish dress that you secretly suspect makes you look more clownish than elegant. I wanted the reader to picture storms, hurricanes, typhoons--high drama! (And if there were an intimation of themes Shakespearean, so much the better.) In the near-future era of this novel, the volume's been turned up on many existential threats, but none more prominently than climate change (though I would not call this novel cli-fi).
Ultimately, however, that title was a diva. At heart, this is a story about a place, the forces that its history and topography have exerted on nearly five centuries of inhabitants. I thought of David Ebershoff's Pasadena, Richard Russo's Empire Falls (such a great pun); Sebald's Austerlitz, Eliot's Middlemarch. All good company. (My fictional town Vigil Harbor actually harks back to a previous novel of mine, The Widower's Tale.)
Last week I got a wonderful note from a close writer friend, praising the title: "What a terrific name for where we are this day, this year, now! I think all the time about how to characterize the sense of parlousness and the need not to give up hope, both more intensely felt than ever before in our lives. Vigil Harbor covers the ground in two words." Never mind that...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Vigil Harbor.
Q&A with Julia Glass.
--Marshal Zeringue
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