The stranger

Maine novelist Robert Harnum has found alienation from US publishers, but the French can't get enough of him

by Lance Tapley

Robert Harnum, a 53-year-old high-school French teacher in the Penobscot Valley town of Brewer, Maine, would appear to have made a success of his career as a novelist. His publisher is bringing out a book a year. Newspapers and magazines hale his writing. The critics love him. He appears on TV talk shows and national-network radio.

There's only one problem for Harnum -- and for you, the reader: you can't buy his novels in this country, and all this attention is not taking place in the United States. Bob Harnum, who writes in English, is published in France in French translation. And the biggest press he has received has been in French-speaking Quebec.

American publishers thus far have refused to touch him. Practically speaking, Robert Harnum has been banned in the United States, his native land.

Why? "A Novelist Who Scares America," shouts the headline in a French magazine about his latest book, The Last Patriot. The French and the French Canadians tend to see American publishing's resistance as a result of the book's perhaps-too-hot-to-handle subject -- a school shooting.

Maybe it's natural that the French would take to him. From many years of living in France, he has in part a French point of view. For example, The Last Patriot feeds into a prevalent French perception of the United States as a violent, gun-obsessed country. The novel's teenage protagonist shoots up his Maine high school with an AK-47 assault rifle.

But, in fact, kids do get shot in American classrooms. This rarely if ever happens in France and Quebec. And the book is a lot more than a crime novel that scandalizes the French about American society. Indeed, it has hardly any explicit violence. Much of the action takes place in a courtroom.

The Last Patriot's French title is La dernière sentinelle, which literally means "the last sentry" or "the last guard." After digesting the book, the reader asks: Who is this last sentry, guard, or patriot? Could it be this boy killer, which indeed seems to be the case? What does that mean? The book raises profound questions. It is a philosophical novel.

The French literary world likes philosophical novels. In his recent author tour of Quebec for Patriot he appeared on a Montreal TV talk show, all the newspapers and the CBC radio network interviewed him, and he was feted at bookstore signings. "This wasn't a novel they were talking to me about. It was reality," he says. The deep, hard reality, that is, of a violent American society.

So why can't such a philosophical novel with an important subject get published in this country? Because, Harnum believes, American publishers have "this erroneous idea that we're still so immature we can't face serious stuff, that we only want to be entertained."

Although the Quebec press looked at him as a literary novelist, and although he has gotten serious attention in France, he feels he has to struggle for more recognition in the French world, too. To his chagrin, some journalists in France consider him a writer of thrillers. French readers tend to be loyal to publishers' imprints or collections, and his publisher, Hachette, France's largest, has placed him in Editions du Masque, which is synonymous with mysteries.

He was put into this pigeonhole because his first novel, When Lions Feed, is a murder mystery. "Although it's much more than that," Harnum says. Like all his books, it is set in Maine -- the cover has a reproduction of Andrew Wyeth's famous Christina's World painting. Le festin des lions sold out its initial printing of 4000 "without any particular promotional effort," says his editor in Paris, Hélène Almaric.

His next novel, out this fall (he's in France right now "correcting" the translation into French), is entitled Fin de Siècle. In addition to Maine, the book has French and North African settings. This volume originally had been scheduled to appear before The Last Patriot, but the killings at Columbine High School in Colorado last year convinced Hachette opportunistically to rush Patriot out first. Next year he expects Hachette to publish An American Rhapsody, which he describes as a parody of a contemporary novel.

THE LAST PATRIOT strikes a particularly French chord because it is, in effect, an updating of The Stranger by Nobel-prizewinner Albert Camus. L'étranger is the most influential French piece of fiction of the 20th century and the "existentialist" novel that in this country everybody has to read in advanced French class in high school or college.

Existentialism asserts the individual's freedom and responsibility to create meaning for his life in an absurd society in which he is imprisoned or from which he is alienated. Instead of the alienation in pre-World War 2 Algeria of a young French colonial clerk, Meursault, that in The Stranger leads him to kill an a Arab on a beach in an "absurd" gesture, The Last Patriot shows the alienation of a 17-year-old American, a promising student and athlete, Philip Andrew Carmichael. His alienation leads him to open fire in the corridor of his school, killing and wounding a large number of schoolmates and adults.

from The Last Patriot a novel by Robert Harnum "Look," I said, "it's only so violent because I did it." "Excuse me?" Jack said, looking out between his fingers. "I mean think about it," I said. "It's only so violent because you know me, and I'm the one who did it. I mean if you'd like seen it on TV or in a movie, it wouldn't seem all that violent to you. Or at least it would for a while, but it wouldn't last I mean. Because . . . " "Philip," Jack said, real stern, "you better stop yourself right here." "No listen," I said, "let me explain. I know it was violent, and it was wrong to do. I hate seeing those people dead, I do, but it wasn't all that violent. What about those two kids in the South, for example? I mean they ambushed a whole school and did it on purpose. They killed and wounded a lot more than I did. And they did it on purpose, too. And then that kid in that Christian school, you remember? He walked down the hall when everyone was praying and shot them all in the head. I didn't do that. So do you see what I mean? It's only so violent because you know me, because you're here. If you were some place else reading about it you might feel upset for a few minutes, but it wouldn't really bother your day. You'd still go to work, you'd still have a home and a wife and kids and stuff, because it's not close to you, it ain't you and you see lots more violent stuff than that all the time." Jack just stared at me. Danny too. For a long time they just stared. "Holy shit," Danny then said, real quiet. He turned his eyes away. "Wrong plea." "No," Jack said, looking down at the table. "No. But at least he's answering the question on whether we'll have him take the stand or not." "No shit." "And we didn't hear any of that, did we?" "No, we didn't." copyright 2000 by Robert Harnum. Reprinted by permission

"Philip is the Meursault of his time. Like Camus's anti-hero, he lives as a stranger to life," proclaimed a reviewer in Montreal's biggest newspaper, Le Devoir. "A masterpiece," wrote another Quebec reviewer about Dernière Sentinelle. "Voilà, a novel that is everything," wrote another.

"This book, for the first time, lets an ordinary young person speak who seems to have everything to be happy but who, without any remorse, like he's detached from everything, commits an unbelievable act," says Paule Bolduc, the Canadian publicist for Hachette, trying to explain the appeal in Quebec. But what she expresses is the mystery of what has become an almost-common contemporary act.

Yet Philip's alienation is not a mystery. He is surrounded by the empty American obsession with materialism. By the pursuit of "success" above everything. By our broken families, including his own. By the constant absence of parents. (An irony: Philip's mother is a social worker.) And then there is the constant violence mass-marketed to the young in films, video games, television, and magazines -- a daily conditioning to violence.

" `As Seen on TV' one could put on the book jacket," says an ironic Parisian reviewer. "Philip isn't aggressive," Harnum tells a Canadian writer. "He's violent, but we're violent."

"People don't know they're infected anymore," he tells me. "But we're just bathed in violence. We demand it. Look at the popular shows on TV."

Psychologically, Philip is self-absorbed, but in a childlike, innocent way. In the novel a psychiatrist diagnoses him as a schizoid narcissist. "That more or less defines the whole country for the last few decades or so," dryly observes the shrink to the defense lawyers. But in the end even Philip's own life doesn't seem important to him because it has no meaning. And if his life has no meaning no one else's does for him.

Harnum admits he painted the atmosphere of Philip's high school from his experience teaching in Brewer. He saw the isolation and alienation of many students. These days, he says, "you have to be teacher, mentor, substitute parent" for kids.

Of course, we can say that, like Philip, we adults, too, are victims in this society. But, as Harnum suggests, individual responsibility has to be recognized. The Last Patriot asks us the question: When? And we want to answer that question because Philip is a sympathetic monster. The first-person narrative successfully puts the reader in Philip's adolescent mind.

I FIRST MET Bob Harnum last year at a university party in Orono in which everyone spoke French. He stood out. He looks like a Left Bank intellectual: trim, handsome, stylish. Long white hair which he tosses back from time to time. Wire-rimmed glasses. Extravagant gestures. Somewhat tense in demeanor. Even at a university get-together where everyone is speaking French, somewhat foreign.

Page 1 | 2 | Next

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.