Sometimes sad can be interesting, grief can be engaging. Not with this one. The Local News just made me feel depressed and I wanted to shake her protagonist out of her stupor.I was initially intrigued by the idea of a sister who loses the brother she didn't particularly like in the first place. How complicated, how genuine, how will the guilt/love/frustration tsunami play out in such a situation?Guess I'll never know because after 50 pages, I just couldn't handle her maudlin teenage ways anymore. WARNING, THERE ARE SPOILERS, ESPECIALLY IN THE Q&A!The Local News is one of the those books that grabbed me and pulled me in because of its protagonist and narrator. To me it was really a story about grief, and the different ways in which people deal with losing someone. The book is aptly named as the story deals so closely with the rallying of a small community around tragedy. However, this is where the rather cliche grieving story comes to an abrupt halt.I don’t own a T.V. and make a conscious decision to get my news from the internet–alternative sources. I remember when I was a kid, my mom and dad watching the news and it was always about a kid going missing, a murder, a missing person, a car crash that took the lives of some high school kids just weeks before graduation (that happens all too often in the town I grew up in). In the aftermath people always say the nice thing. How great of a person these people were, how kind, how noble, how they were universally liked–which in the end, isn’t actually true, because nobody is universally liked. This is the deeper issue touched on in The Local News.Characters:As a writer myself, it always amazes me when I can talk about a character in a book as if they were more than just words. This character has feelings and ideas to me, she is a person I could speak to, or speak about, debating her decisions. For me, this is what I want from a character, and Lydia Pasternak is that.Lydia is the other side of the picture. When her brother, star football player at the high school, super popular, jock, hearth throb, disappears, she is the only one to not be sorry about this. “Going missing, I wanted to yell from some deep, dark pit in the middle of me, was the only interesting thing my brother had ever done.” This is the crux of the story. Lydia sees her brother, Danny, as the most cliche, boring, and harmful person she has ever had the misfortune of knowing.As Lydia is the narrator of the story (perfect narrator, I should say) the rest of the characters can feel stereotyped, but in context with Lydia’s constant judgments of people, it makes sense. Her parents are only concerned with her brother’s whereabouts. They are frantic and jittery and nearly incapable of doing anything other than worrying about their son. It is as though Lydia doesn’t even exist.Plot as a segway into more characters:In the wake of her brother’s disappearance, Lydia has found herself in a powerful position in terms of the high school hierarchy. Her brother’s friends all feel like she needs taking care of. They give her things like food and treat her as though she can fill her brother’s shoes. But when a private detective is hired by Lydia’s parents her social life takes a back seat as she becomes part of the investigation to find her brother. (Yes, you do find where he’s gone, in the end).The Crux:I loved this book because it tells a story not usually told. Lydia has such a keen eye for what draws people together. She is likable in the way she is broken, she is broken in the way she is treated. She understands the reason for peoples actions, at times, better than they understand themselves, and to top it off, the one person she can’t understand at all is herself (and actually, maybe Danny, but that’s for you to decide on your own).My favorite line of the book that, I think, shows Lydia’s perceptiveness, “And I thought too of how the whole spectacle must have delighted the crowd–such a pitch-perfect closing act to assembly, such fuel for their insatiable, morbid glee.”If you are going to order this book, please order it from a local bookstore, or at the very least from Powell’s, but I’d like to encourage all of you to buy local! Bookstores need our help.Alright, now I want to warn you, this Q&A has many SPOILERS so if you haven’t read the book, maybe it would be best to leave this part until you have! You have been warned.Alex Clark-McGlenn: I was most impressed with the characterization, voice, and temperament of Lydia Pasternak. How and when did she come about?Miriam Gershow: My very earliest ideas about the book were framed around the notion of a missing person story, though without the typical grieving survivor left behind. I wanted the narrator to be a family member who felt ambivalence about the missing person. “Going missing was the most interesting thing my brother had ever done” was one of the very first lines I scribbled down before starting to write the book in earnest. So Lydia’s sensibility was there from the very start. However her voice really didn’t emerge until I started to write my first scene, which comes early in the book, when she’s talking to a gas station attendant who won’t let her hang a poster for her missing brother. In the process of writing that scene, Lydia’s precociousness, her intelligence and her constant internal patter emerged. This was all a surprise to me, and a very pleasant one at that.ACM: I know all characters are part of the authors who write them, but how do you relate to Lydia and who is she to you?MG: First off, Lydia is far smarter than I am. She knows stuff – lots of facts, lots of current events. But I certainly relate to her sense of estrangement, particularly in high school. I immediately distrust anyone who experienced high school as anything but profoundly estranging. Who is Lydia to me? I love Lydia. I loved every day I spent with her in writing this book. But it’s been five years since the book was published, so she’s like a cherished child who’s been away to college for a while now. She’s still dear to me, but I’m busy with the kids still at home.ACM: Lydia is the perfect person to tell this story. Did you know this when you began to write The Local News or did you play with other narrators?MG: I knew before I ever sat down to write. And I’m not someone who knows much about a story before I sit down to write. But like I said, I wasn’t interested in the typically grieving narrator. So I was driven by Lydia’s point of view. I wanted to know what the secret underbelly was of a missing person story. I wondered, what if someone was, in part, relieved to be rid of a family member. I never considered anyone else to tell that story.ACM: What might the differences have been if Lydia’s mother or father had told this story?MG: It would have been an entirely different book. There was no ambivalence about Danny’s disappearance from the point of view of the parents. There was no relief. Many writers have told that story very well, including Stuart O’Nan, Jacqueline Michard and Alice Sebold in the recent past.ACM: The term “world building” is something usually reserved for Fantasy and Science Fiction writing. It seems to me that you did a lot of world building, incorporating Lydia’s worldview seamlessly into the plot. How might world building and character development compliment each other?MG: I see them as entirely intertwined. Since I traffic in the here and now – or the here and then of the 1990s – I don’t have to consciously scaffold a world different from our own. But every character sees the world in a unique way. I don’t know any other way to build a character’s world than to simply immerse myself in her point of view in every scene. What does she pay attention to? What does she care about? What does she fixate on? What worries her? From there comes the world. I’m a big believer in specific detail. Whether you’re writing about an imagined solar system or about suburban Detroit, the details are what are going to sell the world to the reader.ACM: You tackle the way different people deal with grief head on in this book. What made you want to explore these issues?MG: I’m not sure I know the answer to that. Sometimes an idea just grabs you. I wasn’t interested in grief as much as the complications of grief, or in grief as the backdrop of a coming of age story. ACM: How much research went into exploring the psychological ways people deal with grief?MG: None. Research went into figuring out the current events of the times and about learning the names of straits, all of Lydia’s book knowledge. But the rest was that same immersive process, imagining what the sister of a missing person or the parent or the classmates or the ex-girlfriend would do in any given situation, how they would react, what they would feel. That’s the joy of fiction writing for me — playing make believe! ACM: I was really hoping Danny had left and would come back. My hope was that he had some deep reason for not wanting to deal with popularity, his parents and sister, all the expectations people put on him. When I found out he had been abducted and murdered I felt empty. Was this your plan all along? To leave your readers (at that point of the book) with a hopeless emptiness? At what point in writing The Local News did you know Danny’s fate?MG: I knew his fate very early on. I didn’t mean for you to feel hopeless! I suppose that’s a compliment, since it means you were invested. But it’s also kind of sad. I think because I knew from nearly the beginning what would happen to him, I never had the same reaction to it as readers, even though I loved Danny just like I love all my characters. I more was interested in how Lydia would be changed by it and survive it. Had he simply returned from some big lunkhead adventure, I don’t think Lydia would have been compelled to tell the story twelve years later. It would have simply faded in her memory as one more dumb thing her dumb brother had done in their childhood.ACM:The Local News was a book I never wanted to put down. What can readers look forward to from you in the future?MG: I find it bad luck to talk about my work. But I will say, I am beginning to find my way through a very unexpected non-fiction project. It’s too early to say exactly what it will be in the end, but it involves my earlier childhood neighborhood in Detroit.
What do You think about The Local News (2009)?
My notes say I really liked this, but I don't remember anything about it anymore.
—oceanbreeze89
Oddly, I got on a kick of lost teens books with this one. Unlikable characters.
—Saoirse
This book was written by the daughter of some friends of my parents.
—Trixie
