Rich Characterizations Propel Debut Novel to May Picks

Renee Manfredi

"I never think about plot," Renee Manfredi said in a recent interview. "I don't think about theme. I think about characters. And these characters became very real to me. I dreamed about them." It's no wonder, then, that the people in Manfredi's gripping, interweaving debut novel and May Book Sense Pick, Above the Thunder (Anchor), are so convincingly rendered.

The novel focuses, in part, on Anna Brinkman, a middle-aged Boston medical tech who becomes an AIDS support-group facilitator. Anna later establishes a relationship with a HIV-positive patient named Jack, a promiscuous gay man who has been unfaithful to his partner Stuart -- one of the most likeable characters in the book. "I see Stuart as the sane, logical center of this book, and while Anna gets caught up in Jack's charisma and flights of fancy, Stuart never really varies from his center."

Anna also eventually begins helping to raise her troubled 10-year-old granddaughter, Flynn, whose mother, Poppy, has become a heroin addict. It's the strange, imaginative Flynn (she hears spirit voices and believes in angels) whom Manfredi relies on to help the cast intersect in surprising ways. "With Flynn's flights of fancy and talking to the dead, it really made me think about things," Manfredi continued. And weird things would happen, in turn, while she was writing Flynn. "I can't tell you how many times fuses just blew in my home," the author reported. "Things were always going wacky with the electricity. A furnace spontaneously combusted, with black smoke and ash spilling everywhere. I don't believe in an afterlife or angels and I don't think people, at least sane ones, can see dead people. But it did open my eyes to the possibility that there are things that are inexplicable and mysterious, and Flynn is all about mystery and embracing the mysterious in the everyday."

As implausible as it seems, an agent working with Manfredi suggested that the author eliminate Flynn from the story entirely. "She told me that I should cut her out to make it a really good book, and this woman is very intelligent and a very good reader." Manfredi did try to cut Flynn, but the story fell apart like old fabric. "It didn't hold together without her," Manfredi said. "I see Flynn as the moral center, the character who will say things as they are without pulling punches or lying. She tells it like it is."

Manfredi spent about five years creating Above the Thunder, and the idea for the novel began with Flynn. The other characters accrued over the years. "Originally, Poppy had much more of a role than she actually ends up having in the book."

The characters in Above the Thunder are a composite of people Manfredi has known over the years. She also draws from some real-life events -- and one that had been experienced by a colleague. "He was visiting San Francisco and he had a head cold, so he went into a 24-hour Walgreens," Manfredi explained. "What happened to him was what happened to Jack -- when Jack goes into the Walgreens and meets Stuart for the first time. That gay man who had curlers in his hair and has a cart full of makeup, and the little boys who were shoplifting vitamins? All that happened almost word-for-word."

The book entered a whole new realm for Manfredi, when Jack and Stuart entered the picture. "Until that point, it was just Anna and her family and Flynn, and I just got bored," she revealed. "When the two gay guys walked on, that's when the book kind of quickened and came together in terms of a unified focus."

Even though Anna holds such an important role in Above the Thunder, she is actually the character whom Manfredi identifies with the least, and the Anna chapters were difficult for her to craft because she didn't understand Anna very well. "I think of her, at least in the beginning of the book, as being very rigid, very fixed. I think she's a limited character," Manfredi said. "The people whom she loves, she loves deeply, and permanently, and with abiding loyal affection, but everyone else can go to hell. Originally she was just a complete pill all the way through, and I didn't like her anymore after a certain number of years. But Jack centers her life. Then I liked her more."

At certain points, Manfredi realized that Above the Thunder began to seem like two separate novels: one about Jack, Stuart, and the gay community; and one dealing with Anna and her family. "The doorway opened," she said, "when Jack became sick and I decided to have Anna work as the support group facilitator, and that's how their paths cross. But I couldn't have planned for the merging of their lives, and eventually, the creating of a new family. That was completely serendipitous." --Jeff Perlah