San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Of crape myrtles and murder
Chris Cander bookends her new novel, “A Gracious Neighbor,” with murder. At the book’s outset, the victims are crape myrtles in a Houston neighborhood, whose advocates frame excessive pruning in hyperbolic terms. The death at the end is best left to the reader to discover.
Crape myrtles are fascinating and frustrating: The deciduous tree at times is a radiant entity, with its canopy of blossoms and sinuous limbs. The crape myrtle, though, serves as a villain for those with white cars. And plenty of people have strong opinions about how it is best pruned. Cander says she chose that tree for those opinions: “It was a great way to foreshadow a murder. But it also foreshadows disparity among neighbors.”
Cander also appreciates the resilience of the tree. “People cut them back, and within a few months, they’re back in full bloom.”
Those sorts of divisions, deaths and regenerations gently grow through “A Gracious Neighbor.” A century-old short story presented to Cander by her daughter — then in high school — seeded a story that blossomed during the pandemic.
So before Cander presented a word of “A Gracious Neighbor,” she dedicated a page to the dictionary’s presentation of “gracious”: courteous and kind; elegant and tasteful; condescending; and merciful. Each one finds an assigned character in the book, a spinning, panoramic look at the rickety architecture of community systems.
Finding a universal emotion
Cander’s first page sets up all that comes in “A Gracious Neighbor.” We meet Martha Hale, a woman considering her crape myrtles. As she ponders pruning, she decides to follow the lead of others on her block.
“Frankly, Martha wouldn’t have minded leaving hers alone,” Cander writes, “except perhaps a little deadheading later in the season to coax a second round of blossoms. But
she would do so only as long as everyone else did. Her family stood out too much as it was.”
Martha struggles with acclimation, isolation and anxiety, even though she’s lived in her neighborhood since she was pregnant with her only childHer manic thought processes whir. A new neighbor, Minnie, exposes her desperation, as she reaches frantically for connection with a women she knew when she was a child. That desperation takes a character study and infuses it with a slow and tense hum as Cander considers past and present with an unreliable narrator’s wobbling perspective and actions that cross the line into dubious.
Cander says, “We’ve all had
that feeling of not fitting in. I pulled that from my own perspective.”
She did take a circuitous route to writing, having been a firefighter and a competitive bodybuilder.
“What was interesting to me, I gave some pages to a few early readers and every one of them asked me, ‘Am I Martha?’ ” she says. “I think we all are. We don’t all do what she does. But I recognize now, I didn’t mean to write it so universally. I was writing from my own experience. But in retrospect, who among us doesn’t know what it’s like to be an outsider? Who doesn’t occasionally find themselves with their nose at the glass looking in? I hope that’s what people focus on, not Martha’s
antics. Her antics are unique to this story, but her emotions are universal.”
Another pandemic
Cander’s previous novel, “The Weight of a Piano,” similarly let characters quietly run their course through questionable decisions. With “A Gracious Neighbor,” she worked off an idea that took shape before the pandemic and blossomed.
Cander’s daughter brought to her a short story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” by Susan Glaspell. It was adapted from a play Glaspell wrote in 1917. In the story, a woman (also Martha Hale) accompanies a sheriff to the home of a woman held in jail and accused of killing her husband. Their initial response to the disheveled home is one of distaste and judgment. But they gradually see there was more to the woman’s story, and their takes on her life and actions change. The story touches on disparities between genders. That it was written and set just before the Spanish flu pandemic has no bearing on the narrative.
Cander’s daughter brought the story before our world shut down.
“It felt timeless,” Cander says. “Reading it 100 years later, it was disheartening how little has changed. I was captivated by Glaspell’s economy in distilling the misogyny of the time, the disparity in gender roles inside and outside the home. I was struck by the women’s loyalty to each other. Instead of starting with empathy, this character had to earn it. And that hasn’t changed a lot.”
Character names connect the short story to Cander’s novel and some of the themes she stated. But she found a new path for the story in a contemporary setting.
Shortly after starting the book, Cander enhanced her ability to connect to Martha. Cander had only begun the story when things shut down in March 2020. She pushed the story back to 2019, using the pandemic to her needs, without making a pandemic novel. “That proximity to neighbors but with the feeling of isolation,” she says.
With her daughter leaving for college, Cander says, “I would’ve suffered more emotionally if I didn’t have Martha’s world to inhabit for a while.”
Getting to know you
Birds chirp throughout the book, and one pet bird plays a sizable role. Cander attributes this in some way to moving out of her home office into the outdoor space at her home, a reprieve from being inside in the early days of the pandemic.
Other places the novel touch on our times without addressing them directly. Martha has a testy get-together with her mother that her mother obliviously views as wonderful time spent together. And Martha at one point offers a truly American maxim: “I guess we mostly believe what we want to.”
To hear Cander talk about her life is to hear a different story than Martha’s. She describes people on her block having text threads and children comfortable enough to raid others’ refrigerators.
Which sounds like an idealized notion of a neighborhood. At least for those on the inside. For those with their noses, as Cander described, pressed to the glass from the outside, things look very different. And the definitions of “gracious” come into focus.