Stefan Merrill Block spins a Texas tale
If you’re a student of the American West, you’ll probably recognize the name Oliver Loving, a 19th-century cattle driver and legend in the Lone Star State who inspired Larry McMurtry’s novel “Lonesome Dove.” The title character of “Oliver Loving,” the third novel from Stefan Merrill Block, is a Texas legend of a different kind: an introspective teenager who becomes a symbol after a school shooting leaves him in a persistent vegetative state. The shooting exacerbates tensions between white and Mexican American residents of the West Texas town of Bliss.
The novel follows the Loving family over the years as they fall apart, indulge in unhealthy behaviors and wait for Oliver’s return, even as they know he’s likely never coming back.
Block, who grew up in Texas, spoke to The Times via telephone from his home in Brooklyn. This conversation has been edited. How did the idea of writing a novel that centers around a person who’s in a persistent vegetative state come to you?
The story of Oliver Loving is very fictionalized, but follows loosely the story of a Belgian man named Rom Houben. He was a media sensation around 2010. He was a young man who got into a severe accident and had traumatic brain injury and entered into what doctors diagnosed as a persistent vegetative state. After more than two decades, an enterprising doctor had just come up with a new diagnostic program using a fMRI to assess levels of consciousness, and they subjected Rom to this new round of neuroimaging and stimulus tests and found that Houben’s brain responded almost like any ordinary brain. He could hear and perceive and process information.
His parents in the hospital were, on the one hand, horrified that he had been locked in his body without being able to communicate all that time; on the other hand, they were so happy at the possibility of having Rom back .... The part of the story I was fixated on was Rom’s family — they must have had some sense that this couldn’t be as true as it appeared to be, it was too perfect. And yet you could understand how a family would so need a lost child back that they’d believe anything. Why did you choose to set the book in West Texas?
West Texas is to me the mythic Texas, the Wild West, the most rough-hewn, pristine part of Texas. It’s also just outrageously beautiful. There’s a real pleasure in that sense of moving deeply in this one space, that I can name every blade of grass and know it so well.
I started my novel when I’d just turned 30 and was living back in Texas for the first time in my adulthood, and going back to visit my hometown. Plano has a troubled history; it was a wonderfully prosperous boomtown — during my childhood, it was the fastestgrowing city in America. But underneath that prosperity was this tremendous darkness. In the ’80s, there was a spate of suicides, and Plano was dubbed the suicide capital of America. When I was in high school, there was another spate of deaths, a huge number of kids dying from heroin overdoses.
Then there was another wave of suicides , including people I knew really well and my school counselor. It was a time of tremendous change for me, going from being a home-schooled kid in the prairie to this massive school and being a teenager. When I went back at 30, going to my hometown and seeing the way it’s transformed even further, I felt like I was in conversation with a former prior version of myself, that 17-year-old Stefan was still kicking around somehow. Rankings are based on chain results and a weekly poll of 125 Southland bookstores. For an extended list: www.latimes.com/books Join us online at Jacket Copy for the latest book news, live video chats, quizzes, author interviews, photo galleries and reviews.