By: Deanna McFadden
Victor Lodato was in town for a reading at the Harbourfront this week to celebrate the publication of his first novel, Mathilda Savitch. Gutsy and heartbreaking at the same time, Mathilda Savitch barrels through her thirteen-year-old life with a tenacity that catches a hold of you and doesn’t quite let go. After the stability and security of her young life is marred by unmistakable tragedy, Mathilda copes in the only way she knows how – by almost completely falling into her “inner” life, her imagination, where she can be as bad, as wicked, and as safe, as she can possibly be. Yet, the real world creeps in, both as her parents also come to terms with what happened, and as she grows up ever so slightly by the end of the novel. Experience Toronto spoke with the lovely, kind Victor Lodato in Toronto by telephone.
Deanna: Mathilda has such a strong voice. How did the character evolve as you wrote the novel? Was it difficult in any way writing from her perspective?
Victor: Strangely it wasn’t, to answer the second part of that question first. Primarily, my work as a writer has been as a playwright, so I’m used to beginning a writing project with a voice in my head that I find compelling. It really wasn’t a choice to write a novel featuring a thirteen-year-old girl. The first chapter of the book just landed in my lap: I woke up one morning and heard this voice, and just kept writing it. It was very strong, very alive, and I followed the voice for a long time before I even know what the story [would become]. I just knew this was a voice that I found very compelling and a sensibility that I was intrigued by. I just started with the voice, it’s mysterious to me where they come from, but when they arrive, a writer feels lucky.
Deanna: Did the voice change at all or was she Mathilda from the beginning?
Victor: She pretty much was Mathilda. Her voice was very strong. [Later on], the trick was going through the book [trying] not to put my imprint on it too much. Feeling like I wanted to say certain things thematically that she wouldn’t say. And trying to remain as true as possible to her voice even though she’s a highly sophisticated child, precocious beyond her years. I wanted to make sure it always felt authentically Mathilda and like it was coming from a child, and not feel the adult writer was manipulating that too much.
Deanna: How different did you find writing this novel from writing plays? What were the similarities?
Victor: I usually don’t start writing a play thinking that I want to write about this subject matter or that subject matter. I hear a couple of voices just having a conversation so I just keep writing that dialogue until the story reveals itself. So, in that way, I was comfortable with the territory of just hearing a voice, following it for a while, and trusting that the story would reveal itself eventually.
The difference, which was a wonderful thing, was that usually with a play, it’s a much more compressed kind of writing. Usually, if I fall in love with characters in a play, I have lots and lots of scenes that I write that I absolutely can’t use just to make the structure of the play work. This was delightful to have a larger canvas to allow [the novel] to maintain a kind of lean and muscular story but allow [Mathilda] to take some detours of thought and action and have her in a number of situations. The storyline evolved in a more generous way than it can in a play.
Deanna: There's a real urgency to the narrative, that familiar feeling of adolescence that you capture so well. And I think part of the reason why the novel is so effective is because it's written so close to Mathilda's point of view, her inner world as she navigates both terror and tragedy. More traditional narrative techniques sort of fall away in this story, concrete senses of time and place, were those conscious decisions you made as a writer telling this story?
Victor: It’s funny -- it’s a question that often comes up in my plays as well. When I go into rehearsal process, the actor/director asks where it’s taking place exactly and [about] the time period. Is it contemporary? Are we in the United States, the northwest, the south? I often say, “I don’t really know. We can work together we can the clues that are in the play and sort of figure it out.” But [during the writing of the novel], I had the general sense of where it was taking place, yet it wasn’t that important to me. It was, as you said, following the urgency of not only the storyline, but just what the heck Mathilda was going to be thinking next.
My process is so much about allowing myself to be in the dark for a while and just follow this voice. I let the voice ramble not knowing what she was going to say or what she was going to stumble on to next. As I was crafting the book in later drafts, I wanted to maintain that sense of urgency for the reader. That’s why a lot of the book actually takes place as things happen. Mathilda’s comes back and reports to us after a series of events as opposed to her telling a story about something that happened a year ago. She reports back in a very journalistic or a diary-like way of what’s happening day-to-day in her life. That’s the way it came to me, with this sense of urgency and danger, and I tried to preserve that for the reader.
Deanna: You get the sense Mathilda's trying to fill up the void left by the tragedy in the only way she knows how. Her inner world reminds me a lot of Joan Didion's ideas of “magical thinking.” Not to compare the two books in any way,but Mathilda's vivid imagination acts both as a means of coping and an impediment to her healing in a way. What would Mathilda be like as an adult? Would she ever reconcile her "secret life" with what happened to her family?
Victor: I feel like Mathilda, even as she gets older, is going to have a certain eccentricity. It’s just her nature. I’m sure she’ll be marked by this tragedy and she’ll be marked by that magical thinking. I see over the course of the novel that as Mathilda finds out more about her sister and comes to terms with her own position in her family’s life and in relation to her sister’s death that she’s more grounded. Like the epigraph of the book [“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy” G.K. Chesterton], Mathilda, at the beginning, is on a wild campaign for justice. She wants to assign blame. She wants to name the person who has done wrong, whose fault it is. By the end of the novel, she’s at the beginning stages of being able to offer mercy and can forgive, even her mother.
My sense is that at the end of the novel she’s in a more grounded place. And her wiles and deceptions, against others and herself, the way she deceives herself, will be less necessary as she comes to terms with her own position in this emotional landscape, and in the specific situation of her sister’s death.
Deanna: Do you have a favourite Mathilda observation?
Victor: [laughs] Oh boy! It always sounds a little strange when one talks about the things that I like that Mathilda said as if I didn’t say them because I wrote it. But when I was writing the book, she made me laugh so much, and it didn’t exactly feel like my sense of humour, it felt like this other person visiting my brain. I don’t know, I think I like some of her perspective on education (her parents are professions), how books and education can be limited. How it’s closed the world of her parents a little bit or it’s a place they can retreat into and not be fully expressive as emotional creatures.
Deanna: Were you influenced by any other novels while you were writing Mathilda Savitch?
Victor: You know, I wrote this book over six years, but there are two books that I’ve always loved that I felt this book was a strange marriage of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a book that I loved growing up and still reread occasionally, and I love Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. But I remember when I was mid-way through the writing of this book I read Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It just gave me permission. I felt like I wasn’t crazy and it’s valid that people might be interested in the voice of a very idiosyncratic young person.
Deanna: What are you reading right now?
Victor: I just finished a book of short stories by Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, which I thought was brilliant. I’m also reading a new translation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinnochio. It’s very different in the original Italian, very different from the Disney version. It’s an amazingly strange, beautiful, and bizarre story about childhood and reality. It’s just wonderful.
Deanna: Where is your favourite place to work? What does your writing space look like?
Victor: Well, I write best at home. I live in Tuscon, Arizona, but I spend part of the year in New York because that’s where I grew up and where I have family. I have a very quiet apartment in Tuscon with two grapefruit trees out my window and a view of the mountains. So, I sit at my desk, look out at the view, and write from there. I’m not the kind of person who writes on the road. I need to be home. I need to be in a place where I’m really comfortable because I can’t write without talking to myself. I have to be in a safe place where no one’s going to come and say there’s a crazy person in the room!
I live in an adobe apartment that was built in the1950s so it’s very modest, and lovely. I live with a painter so there’s lots of art on the walls. Probably even more than books, going to museums and looking at paintings is something that I always find inspirational.
Deanna: What are you working on now?
Victor: Because I’m so intrigued by this form, and it’s still so new to me, the main focus of my attention is a new novel. I know nothing about it yet but I’ve got a couple characters that I like and they’re real enough now that I think I’m going to stick with them.
 About Mathilda Savitch.:
Fear doesn’t come naturally to Mathilda Savitch. She prefers to look directly at things nobody else can even mention:for example, her beloved older sister’s death. She was pushed in front of a train by a man who is still on the loose, and after a year of searching for clues, Mathilda has come no closer to the truth about Helene’s murder... until she cracks her email password and a whole secret life emerges — one that swiftly draws Mathilda into her sister’s world of clouded motives and strange emotions. If she can find the keys to Helene’s past, she’s sure she can wake her family from their nightmare of grief. But in crossing into that underworld and tracing her sister’s footsteps, she has to risk everything that matters to her.
Mathilda Savitch is a poignant, furiously funny, and tender page-turner from an extraordinary debut novelist.
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