Vendela Vida on Christopher Bollen’s A Beautiful Crime
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(Guest post by Vendela Vida)
I don’t always enjoy picking out what I’m going to wear for a particular occasion, but I absolutely love picking out clothes for my characters. Characters who are uncomfortable in their outfits make me feel at home.
There’s a clothing description at the start of Christopher Bollen’s recent literary thriller, A Beautiful Crime, that I deeply admire because it highlights the discrepancy between who the protagonist, Nick Brink, is and who he’s pretending to be. These paragraphs appear in the first chapter when Nick has just arrived in Venice to execute his plan to sell counterfeit antiques to a wealthy American living in a grand palazzo.
Nick patted his body for the folded square of paper, the panic building with each breath. He was in danger of botching up the plan on his very first morning in Venice. It didn’t help his search that most of the clothes he had on were borrowed, the pockets still as unfamiliar to him as rooms in a stranger’s house. Usually he’d wear jeans or sweats for such a long flight, but he’d wanted to enter Venice dressed like he belonged. He wore a pink button-down shirt underneath a billiard-green blazer that was already proving too hot for April in Italy. His twill pants were ocean blue and they felt heavy on his legs, as if he were indeed climbing out of an ocean in pants. The shoes were his, black alligator loafers that he’d saved up for months to buy and therefore rarely wore. Closet dust was still embedded between the scales.
The expensive borrowed clothes might have been a mistake. Yesterday, in New York, as he dressed for the airport, he tried to shove his wallet in the back pocket of his pants, only to discover that it was sewn shut. Nick couldn’t decide whether he was supposed to rip open the seam or not. Ultimately he tore the stitch loose, but his ineptitude in operating a simple pair of pants hadn’t been a boost to his international confidence. Now here he was, frantically frisking himself down outside the airport. He fought the urge to toss the ridiculous, too-heavy blazer in the garbage. Who was he fooling by wearing it anyway?
The fact that Nick is dressed in new, expensive shoes and borrowed clothes and doesn’t know what to do with the pocket that’s sewn shut reveals so much aspiration: he’s trying on a more moneyed and refined presentation. Increasingly more insecure, he contemplates discarding his heavy blazer, the sign that he’s coming from a colder climate and has just arrived in Italy. I love how much discomfort is exhibited in two paragraphs.
I read A Beautiful Crime just after I’d finished my recent novel, We Run the Tides, and I related to the choices Bollen made when outfitting Nick because I’d sought to make my protagonist stand out in her attire as well. For example, I wanted the narrator of my book, 14-year-old Eulabee, to be enthralled with Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; to emulate the character of Sabine in that novel, she buys a bowler hat in order to appear seductive and wears it to a party where she’s already persona non grata. I wanted her outfit, the bowler hat worn in conjunction with a black and white polka-dot dress she buys on Haight Street—and the contradiction between how she wants to view herself versus how she’s viewed by her peers—to show how young she is, how wrong she is, and how tender and tragic and, yes, comic it is when there’s such disparity between how one presents oneself and how one is viewed. She thinks she looks glamorous and mature, while half the guests at the party are thinking, “What’s up with the stupid bowler hat?”
After I published the book, a friend sent me a video clip of Elizabeth Taylor in Winter Kills wearing a red dress to a party where everyone’s wearing black. That’s it, I thought, that’s the feeling I was going for—the self-consciousness, the stares. We’ve all worn the wrong outfit to a party, and in real life this can lead to humiliation, but in books, dressing a character in the wrong outfit can offer illumination and an opportunity for empathy.
Photo credit: Lili Peper
Vendela Vida is the award-winning author of six books, including We Run the Tides, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. She is a founding editor of The Believer magazine, and co-editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. She was a founding board member of 826 Valencia, the San Francisco writing center for youth, and lives in the Bay Area with her family.