When Sabina Murray pushes the envelope, there's nothing ladylike about her literary shove. Her latest novel, A Carnivore's Inquiry, out this month from Grove Press, is a gloriously written psychological thriller about the ultimate off-the-charts subject—cannibalism—and her heroine, mordantly witty Katherine Shea, is a woman unafraid to get her hands wet with blood as she devours warm flesh. While most of this gory action takes place off camera, so that the reader only gradually realizes the lacunae in Katherine's account of her activities, Murray adroitly mixes horror with fascinating references to the prevalence of her taboo subject in history, myth, literature and art. It's a tour de force written with brio and sangfroid.
Murray in the flesh, so to speak, seems the antithesis of her ruthless heroine. She's tall and thin, almost frail in appearance; her complexion is pale, and her black hair falls to her shoulders from a central part. She's wearing beige cotton pants, a shirt with the tails out and red flip-flops, but in appropriate Victorian clothing, she could resemble a daguerreotype of a neurasthenic poet. She speaks in a demure voice that trills with a disarming little lisp.
Her house, on the outskirts of Amherst, Mass.—Murray teaches in the M.F.A. program at UMass.—is also a surprise. One cautiously ascends a vigorously crumbling driveway along a yard sorely in need of a lawn mower into a pristine white kitchen and a peaceful silence. Murray's husband is at work in his office upstairs; their two-year-old son is napping; the six-year-old is at school. (Her office is on the opposite side of the house, Murray says, in an unheated area off the porch. "I like very cold, hard-to-get-to places. The kids get discouraged by the arctic chill.") Even their dog, Sophie, a setter with mournful eyes and good manners, sits quietly when admonished. When the cell phone rings repeatedly—with a strident version of "Für Elise"—Murray stashes it in a kitchen drawer for the duration.
One wonders how a bloodthirsty heroine came to fruition in this domestic atmosphere. The roots of her interest in cannibalism, Murray says, derived from two sources. Her father is an anthropologist, so she was always fascinated by "the idea of people who lived according to other standards than we do." When she was a child, she was obsessed with a reproduction of Saturn Consuming His Offspring, which she found in her mother's book of Goya's prints. "I don't think I've ever been as frightened of anything as of that," she says. "I'd open the book, look at the picture, and close it quickly—but it sat in my head." That painting, and others by Gericault figure in the novel.
An art major at Mount Holyoke, Murray became "very comfortable" writing about art, and she has never lost her enjoyment of what she calls "the scholarly rigor" of research. "I go at my books as though I'm doing a research paper," she says. For ACarnivore's Inquiry,she read widely and in depth—about the Donner Party, the Franklin Expedition, the Monster of Montluel (the real-life inspiration for Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd); the 1884 wreck of the Mignonette, whose survivors cannibalized a cabin boy named Richard Parker (a name familiar to readers of The Life of Pi). Dante's Count Ugolino, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hansel and Gretel and other literary icons figure in the novel. "I felt I was constantly expanding my frame of reference," she says. Only a writer of true literary gifts could integrate these disparate stories into a narrative that grows ever more suspenseful.
The story germinated for 10 years. Originally, Murray says, Katherine was going to be a vampire or a werewolf. One element was essential: she had to be a person who on the surface seems innocent. Murray acknowledges that it's difficult to portray a character whose true nature and nefarious deeds become apparent only gradually, through various clues in the narrative. Thus when, early on, Katherine decides not to order lobster in a restaurant because she prefers "to eat closer to my own species," the comment seems mundane. Once the reader twigs on to Katherine's carnivorous appetite, the humor emerges.
In fact, Murray determined from the beginning that Katherine would be funny. "She was easy to write because she is witty. I'm willing to forgive any amount of bad behavior if people are funny." Cannibalism itself, Murray asserts, is "funny as well as scary." The visceral horror of cannibalism is grounded in reality, however. "You don't have to believe in phantasms to believe in cannibalism."
The reason she is drawn to this subject remains essentially mysterious, yet she attempts to explain. "I try to make sense of things in an ordinary simple way. In The Caprices [her 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award—winning book of short stories], I tried to make sense of a war that affected my family." Like the rest of us, she feels a lack of comprehension about how ordinary people freely indulge in atrocious acts. In that spirit, "I try to write books that move me, books that disturb me. I've always liked scary stuff," she says, perhaps the closest she will get to explaining the springs of her creativity.
The settings Murray uses in ACarnivore's Inquiry—from Manhattan to Maine, Italy to Mexico City—are easier to explain. "I always wanted to write a road-trip novel," she says. Katherine's hegira also gives her a chance to meet many different men—victims all. The male characters evolved from research material—she says she'd read of a situation and then invent a character to typify it—and Murray's sardonic sense of humor. Émigré novelist Boris Naryshkin, whose apartment and life Katherine appropriates, represents cultural dislocation and the spirit of bloody Russian history. Several characters are Texan, because "there's a Texan sense of humor that's so witty and edgy. I like to fill my books with funny, smart people."
Gallows humor also resonates through the nine harrowing stories in The Caprices, each set in a different Southeast Asian country during World War II. Murray literally looked at a map, she says, and followed the Japanese advance in the Pacific theater. The original inspiration came from Murray's mother's memories about the war. She had been brought up in a privileged Philippine family, but she was forced to hide in the provinces during the conflict. Her father and brother, taken prisoner by the Japanese, were never heard from again. Murray's curiosity about the grandfather and uncle she never knew prompted her need to commemorate that inhumane period of history. Her husband's grandfather, an Italian-American, remembered discrimination because of his ethnic background. Other narratives focus with stark reality on the brutalities of war, including an account of the Bataan death march. There's a funny, frightening story about two soldiers lost in the jungles of New Guinea and a poignant encounter in a Japanese POW camp in Singapore. Each story rings with unflinching authenticity.
Murray found much of her information in first-person POW accounts, which she read and reread so she could get the voices right. While not professionals, "these people wrote very affectingly. It humbled me and made me work harder. I had a strong feeling that I was the right person to write these stories."
Apparitions figure in several of the stories. Murray matter-of-factly reveals that visitations are common in her family. To intuit news from an apparition is "almost as mundane as getting a letter. In the Philippines, you see ghosts all the time. It seems normal to me."
She lived in the Philippines from the time she was 11 until she went to college. Only after she had graduated did she begin to feel more like an American. She functions in both cultures, she says, but she's adamant that she'll "never write one of those books about three generations of Asian women."
Even so, Murray's first novel, Slow Burn, is set in the Philippines, "a romp through the upper crust of Manila society," she says. The novel was her bachelor's thesis, written during her senior year, and sent by her professor, Valerie Martin, to her own agent, Mickey Smith, who sold it to Ballantine. Murray had to wait several months, until she was 21, to sign the contract. Published in 1990, the novel was anointed by Vanity Fair as "bright lights, big palm trees." The book was pirated in the Philippines, where that practice is commonplace, but its author doesn't care. She takes pleasure in thinking that the book became a small hit among the elite group whose rigid social structure she depicted.
After that promising beginning, Murray's writing career slowed down. She spent three years "bumming around" Portland, Maine, before relocating to the University of Texas to earn her M.F.A. There she was beguiled into a lucrative screenwriting assignment. An Austin producer, Terrence Malick, was looking for young writers to develop ideas that he didn't have time to write himself. After going through various directors, Murray's screenplay for one of those ideas became Beautiful Country, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in the spring and will be released in the States in 2005 as a Sony Pictures Classic. An enormous poster advertising the movie dominates the kitchen wall, somehow looking perfectly appropriate. It shows a drenched Tim Roth and a nubile co-star ready to embrace, while below is a cluster of refugees from a shipwreck in Malaysia. The movie is set "everywhere," according to Murray; "it's an odyssey—the poster calls it 'an epic story of hope.' I didn't write that," she says dryly.
While she didn't have anything to do with the actual filming, Murray says, "I won't pretend it wasn't fun to sit at a Paris bar and have a beer with Tim Roth and see Liza Minnelli at the next table." Screenwriting is much easier than fiction, she says. "It's a limited format. You write five minutes here, 10 minutes there, and it adds up to a whole life. In a book you have to write everything."
During her years in Texas, Murray married poet and teacher John Hennessey and had a son. They came back East when she was awarded a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard. Then they moved again when Murray got a job teaching at Phillips Academy. "Writers are like that. We're migrant workers. We're always ready to pack up and go where the jobs are."
Murray wrote The Caprices while she was at Phillips Academy and sold it herself to Houghton Mifflin. The crunch came when Houghton passed on ACarnivore's Inquiry, although it was the second book in her contract. After she won the PEN/Faulkner, Houghton expressed interest in whatever her third book might be, but meanwhile, she had connected with agent Esmond Harmsworth. Esmond really understands the book, Murray says, and his conviction sold it to Elizabeth Schmitz at Grove/Atlantic. Schmitz, Murray says, "makes you feel well taken care of. She's a tough editor; she goes line by line. She has you strip away everything you can from a sentence, and that's good. I'm always worried about being melodramatic. I have to rein it in by saying something funny."
Humor doesn't mask the deeper themes of ACarnivore's Inquiry, however. The hunger that her heroine feels for human flesh is a symbol of the hunger that keeps the human race alive, Murray suggests. "Human beings have a limitless hunger for power. In America, there isn't enough for everyone to survive. Only the strongest will," she says, with gloomy Darwinian conviction.
Suddenly, she gasps, her eyes go wide. There's a moment of horror. "I think I missed my son's school bus!" In a nanosecond she has dashed out the door and down the hill. Simultaneously, her husband rushes down the stairs, a just-awakened two-year-old slung over his shoulder. Sophie barks. A crisis has been averted, however. The school bus driver, forbidden to let a child leave the bus unless a parent or surrogate is waiting, has released the boy to a neighbor. The family reunites in the kitchen. Sophie wags her tail. It's a common domestic scene, only incongruous when juxtaposed with the dark subject of A Carnivore's Inquiry, yet expressive of Murray's ability to compartmentalize the themes of her work and the demands of parenthood.
"I made a decision that I was going to write Katherine the way she was in order to grab maybe 50% of readers. It's not a book for everyone. I'm sure some people will get turned off. I don't expect that everyone will love Katherine. But, ultimately, I hope she's a good character for a thriller—someone who will make you keep turning the pages."
Take it from one reader: she does.
