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“Gramp, if you could tell a story after you were dead,” said Jacqueline as she threaded a worm on her hook, “then you would be God.“
“If I could tell a story after I’m dead,” replied Dave, “then I would be you.”
FROM THE GOLDEN FIELDS BY PAUL HURTEAU
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Stories.
Narratives about others across time that inform us about ourselves. Passages through which we communicate with the generations that precede and follow us on the journey of being human.
Since my childhood, I have been haunted by one story. About a boy who turned into a monster. And was taken away to a place where the monsters were kept.
It haunted me not only because of what happened to the boy. But because the same thing might happen to me. And I could imagine nothing worse.
And it haunted me because, in time, I sensed that the same thing was happening all around me.
When I was small, I didn’t know much about schizophrenia. Only that my uncle, once a valedictorian and a star baseball player, had sunken into it when he was a teenager. He was the boy.
What I understood, as a child, was that my uncle and the mental illness he suffered were profoundly frightening. Profoundly tragic.
What I did not understand until later was that his was a disease of dissociation. A pervasive severing of connections at the neural level that resulted in the severing of connections at self, family and community levels.
Nor did I understand the various ways we humans similarly sever the connections between ourselves and others. By race, religion, sex, politics. And how this rends the fabric of humanity. That our human dissociations are symptoms of a long-ingrained societal pathosis.
So I decided to write a story. To perhaps discover a truth about the monster in ourselves.
In my story, a teenage boy belongs in his 1950’s rural New York community, but wants to win. Especially against his kid brother, a budding baseball star. Then the boy meets a girl who does not belong, a “monster,” separated from the community by religion. And she introduces him to other “deviants,” separated by race and sexuality. Then the boy’s brother descends into schizophrenia. And the boy desperately clings to the only things he knows that will keep him from becoming monsters like them. For he is conditioned to win.
But years before, the boy’s father had gone to war, and returned with PTSD. And he had seen first hand the devastating cost of the drive to win. For the Nazi’s, too, had been sending “monsters” away. Criminals. Homeless people. People with cerebral palsy and other physical illnesses. Jewish people. Gay people. Brown people. People with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.
So the father wrote stories, in his isolation, with the hope that, through them, his boy would see that the “monsters,” in fact, were no less human than he. And so he would consider who we become when we sever others from ourselves.
And that’s my story. It’s called The Golden Fields. It explores how societal structures offer “belonging” to some, but accommodate damaging biases and norms that deny it to so many others. It probes our complicity with hatred, illuminates our deep need for community, and offers hope of overcoming one to find the other. It’s about family, baseball and religion. It’s about war and mental health. It’s about dissociation, trauma, and transcendence. And it’s about defining ourselves—and separating ourselves from those who do not meet the definition.
I hope you will have an opportunity to read it.
Kate McQuade – Author of Tell Me Who We Were
“The sweeping family history of The Golden Fields represents a true domestic epic — one that spans loss, faith, belonging, and coming of age in a family divided by war and mental illness. Paul Hurteau writes characters who are not only believable, but haunting — ghosts of a past era who nevertheless feel timely and new, and whom I couldn’t stop thinking about when I put down this gorgeous novel.“
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When the time is right, I’ll be adding blog posts that explore themes in the book. I’m currently seeking an agent and look forward to offering the book for sale one day. Please sign up to be notified about these developments.