Laura
11-04-2007, 01:29 PM
http://www.poststar.com/articles/2007/11/03/ae/today/13047385.txt
Author explores loss and language in debut novel
By Lisa Bramen,
lbramen@poststar.com
Published: Saturday, November 03, 2007
A life without words is a lonely one, as the protagonist of Dave King's debut novel, "The Ha-Ha," discovers.
Decades after a bomb blast in Vietnam left Howard Kapostash unable to speak or write, he has withdrawn into an isolated existence carefully engineered to avoid human interaction. He lives in his childhood home, though his parents are now dead, and retains contact only with his high school girlfriend, Sylvia, the one person left he believes understands who he used to be.
King's brother, Hank, was profoundly autistic and did not speak, although he did not model Howard after his brother.
"Howard acquired his disability as a young man," King said in a phone interview from his home in Brooklyn, "whereas my brother Hank was born with his and probably never had any understanding of what it meant to be so-called 'normally abled,' and that's a big distinction that I think the book makes."
Advertisement
*
When King was working toward his MFA in fiction at Columbia University in the late '90s, a colleague pointed out that he often included disabled characters on the periphery of his stories. For his thesis project, which evolved into "The Ha-Ha," he decided to make disability central to the story.
"Because I'm a writer and so I'm a language wonk, I decided to make it a language disability," he said.
King will discuss his book, which won a number of awards and was named one of the best books of 2005 by
The Christian Science Monitor
and
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
, Monday at Crandall Public Library as part of its Fall 2007 Writers Series.
"The Ha-Ha" begins with Howard's near-solitary life being disrupted when Sylvia dumps her 9-year-old son on him while she goes into rehab for cocaine addiction.
"He's forced to acknowledge the necessity of some kind of human contact," King said, "but he also has a renewed sense of rage at what the war cost him."
King, who is 52, barely missed going to Vietnam himself.
"For me, having Howard injured in Vietnam rather than a car crash or a botched robbery opened the book up to bigger themes," he said, "including a certain loss of innocence, ... questions of duty and the American dream and how we fulfill our expectations."
King studied painting and film at Cooper Union and was an East Village artist in the '80s. Later, he started a business painting murals and trompe l'oeil decoration for well-known clients, including Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.
He gave it up in 1997 to become a writer.
"I realized that I had really wanted to live a creative life and had become more a businessman," he said. "I think on some level that killed my excitement about painting."
King currently is working on his second novel, which he described as "more of a social comedy." It's expected to be released in 2009. He originally began a story that was also about illness before he decided to change course.
"I liked the project," he said, "but I wasn't prepared to spend another several years dealing with mortality."
Author explores loss and language in debut novel
By Lisa Bramen,
lbramen@poststar.com
Published: Saturday, November 03, 2007
A life without words is a lonely one, as the protagonist of Dave King's debut novel, "The Ha-Ha," discovers.
Decades after a bomb blast in Vietnam left Howard Kapostash unable to speak or write, he has withdrawn into an isolated existence carefully engineered to avoid human interaction. He lives in his childhood home, though his parents are now dead, and retains contact only with his high school girlfriend, Sylvia, the one person left he believes understands who he used to be.
King's brother, Hank, was profoundly autistic and did not speak, although he did not model Howard after his brother.
"Howard acquired his disability as a young man," King said in a phone interview from his home in Brooklyn, "whereas my brother Hank was born with his and probably never had any understanding of what it meant to be so-called 'normally abled,' and that's a big distinction that I think the book makes."
Advertisement
*
When King was working toward his MFA in fiction at Columbia University in the late '90s, a colleague pointed out that he often included disabled characters on the periphery of his stories. For his thesis project, which evolved into "The Ha-Ha," he decided to make disability central to the story.
"Because I'm a writer and so I'm a language wonk, I decided to make it a language disability," he said.
King will discuss his book, which won a number of awards and was named one of the best books of 2005 by
The Christian Science Monitor
and
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
, Monday at Crandall Public Library as part of its Fall 2007 Writers Series.
"The Ha-Ha" begins with Howard's near-solitary life being disrupted when Sylvia dumps her 9-year-old son on him while she goes into rehab for cocaine addiction.
"He's forced to acknowledge the necessity of some kind of human contact," King said, "but he also has a renewed sense of rage at what the war cost him."
King, who is 52, barely missed going to Vietnam himself.
"For me, having Howard injured in Vietnam rather than a car crash or a botched robbery opened the book up to bigger themes," he said, "including a certain loss of innocence, ... questions of duty and the American dream and how we fulfill our expectations."
King studied painting and film at Cooper Union and was an East Village artist in the '80s. Later, he started a business painting murals and trompe l'oeil decoration for well-known clients, including Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.
He gave it up in 1997 to become a writer.
"I realized that I had really wanted to live a creative life and had become more a businessman," he said. "I think on some level that killed my excitement about painting."
King currently is working on his second novel, which he described as "more of a social comedy." It's expected to be released in 2009. He originally began a story that was also about illness before he decided to change course.
"I liked the project," he said, "but I wasn't prepared to spend another several years dealing with mortality."