In the final pages of Francesca Lia Block's deftly written new novel, Violet and Claire, one of the main characters wonders to herself: "Maybe there had really been a kind of murder that night." This salient assertion comes from Violet, the whip-smart teen who, along with her friend Claire, wonders loudly about life. Besides forcing her characters to face big questions, this scene illustrates Block's current foray into storytelling in which events reflect a more hard-edged reality -- one where, if people are not physically dying, then, perhaps, their spirits are.
"Instead of genies and fairies, demons and lovers, it's very grounded in reality," Block said during a telephone conversation this past August. "It definitely has that tragic reality, and it's more plot-oriented than my other books." The 36-year-old author, whose widely acclaimed Weetzie Bat series for young adults has catapulted her to the top of the teen books scene, was forthcoming with her current interest in reality-driven storytelling.
Violet and Claire reads almost like a film script, which was originally the projected medium for the story. "I wanted to write a script, and I had a cool idea in my head," Block explains. "I woke up in the middle of the night and I typed 30 pages, and my legs were shaking -- it was really weird." The script-turned-book, however, still retains a scriptlike format ("fade in" and other stage directions are utilized throughout), and Block employs the Faulkneresque literary technique of shifting points of view. Hence, the book is divided into three sections: Part I is narrated in first person with Violet speaking; Part II is narrated in first person with Claire speaking; and Part III is told in third person through both Claire's and Violet's points of view, as well as through the narrator's.
Since her first book, Weetzie Bat, which she has referred to in many interviews as a "love letter to my friends and family," Block has had an intimate alliance with her characters. In Violet and Claire, she takes parts of herself and apportions them between the two main characters; in addition she draws on a real-life encounter to bolster Violet's character. "Violet is a very strong, forceful character, but there's some darkness to her," Block says. "She takes things very far. Claire has this ethereal quality, this sort of innocent, childlike quality, and both of them are seeking something that is missing in themselves." Curiously, toward the end of the story, Violet aptly renames herself Ambition and Claire Innocence. These are tools of the fable trade; both allegory and metaphor strongly inspire Block's work.
When the story begins, Violet, 17, is working on a screenplay she hopes to make into a film. In her first-person narrative, she shares her personal philosophies and practices: "And what else is filmmaking about if not a series of perfect and potent images strung together like the words of a poem?" Later in her monologue, we learn how she went from "wanting to save the world in sixth grade" to her "Goth" phase at 13, all the way up to her screenwriting venture, which came from years of studying storytelling and "renting two movies a night." Claire, on the other hand, is the flower of the two, the peace-loving, poetry-writing child whose fantastic dreams of making a living as a poet contrast with Violet's dreams of a life as a Hollywood screenwriter. Violet, Block says, was drawn mostly from a person she met through her recent encounters in L.A.'s film business, in which she is currently immersing herself.
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