Hypertext Magazine asked Willie Davis, author of Nightwolf, “Why don’t your characters ever fall in love?”
By Willie Davis
The question I wish I was asked about my novel is: “How, with a genius as self-evident and palpable as yours, have we waited all this time to give you this Nobel Prize?” To which, as I am humble, I would answer, “Oh gosh, gee, thanks, I don’t know, you’re really sweet.”
But for the purposes of this essay, I’ll take the opposite approach and answer a question some early readers asked me that I wished they hadn’t (as I am unsure of my answer): “Why don’t your characters ever fall in love?”
Nightwolf tells the story of Milo Byers, a remarkably unhappy seventeen-year old dropout. His mother is dying of dementia, his brother has run away ten years prior to the book’s opening words, and he makes a living through petty crime. What Milo has in his favor, however, is a large passel of friends. As with most people who have lots of friends, he enjoys about 12% of them. There are those he detests, those who bully him, those he wants to impress, those he fears, and, yes, even those he likes. As with most groups of friends (particularly friends who drink), they sometimes fall into bed with one another. They regard sex like an extra generous tip—they appreciate it, but it’s not an emotionally fulfilling moment. So are any of these characters even capable of love?
Sure. Presumably. Servings from the emotional buffet are parceled out to us unevenly, but it would put this book in the fantasy shelves if none of the characters felt love. As the book is in first person, people are asking specifically about why Milo, who’s unafraid to get into sticky emotional situations, acts like love never occurs to him. Of course, I’m talking of romantic love. A boy abandoned by his family, who tries to preserve his mother’s dwindling memories, who counts on the kindness of his friends to stay sane and fed, surely knows love by both its presence and absence. Yet he acts like romantic love remains a foreign land for him.
My answer is this book, all of it, is Milo’s best estimation of how to love. Love is an attempt to control that over which we have no control. In winter, when nature tries its hardest to kill us, we turn on all the lights and sing in celebration and defiance. Love works the same way. When we love, our life feels doubled. It’s a shield against the creeping sense of insignificance that comes with growing up. When Milo was a boy, his mother would tell him terrifying fables to scare him into following rules. Though her tales still frighten him, he tells his dementia-riddled mother his own fables as a way of helping her piece the world together, as an act of love. For Milo, there is no difference between love and storytelling.
But it’s also frustrating because love is staring Milo in the face. He talks about his friend Shea Stanford as if he loves her, and she may love him as well. Other characters assume they’re dating, though they both deny it. The book starts in the year 2000, when they are seventeen and best friends. In the second section, they are twenty-three and the only ones that can save each other. The two of them falling in love could bring a little joy to their increasingly difficult and dramatic lives.
At one point, there’s a brief mention of the future, the present day. Shea Stanford has vanished. She had a husband and a daughter, with a baby on the way, and then she disappears. This is the context in which Milo tells his story. He’s older now, and his most tangible understanding of love has vaporized.
That Milo tells the story means Milo is in love. Every part of the book is a tribute to his loss. The novel is a series of searches: Milo tries to find his runaway brother, to find the mysterious vandal “Nightwolf” to find a neighborhood boy in trouble. Telling us of these searches is Milo’s way of coming to terms with the one search he can’t yet bring himself to undergo: the search for the woman he loves. This book is Milo’s imitation of love, but for the moment, it’s all he has to offer.
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Pick up Nightwolf HERE.
Willie Davis’ work has appeared in The Guardian, Salon, The Kenyon Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, and storySouth. He is the winner of The Willesden Herald Short Story Prize (judged by Zadie Smith) and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize (judged by Amy Hempel). He received a Waiter Scholarship from The Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. He teaches English at Kentucky State University.
