Entanglement: Quantum and Otherwise
By John K Danenbarger
Genre: Literary Crime Fiction
About the Book
They look like the perfect family.
But every family has its secrets.
Can we ever know the people we love?
Imagine flipping through old family albums. The faces are familiar; their true stories lost to time—half-forgotten family anecdotes woven together by generations of proud aunts and kindly grandmothers conceal more than they reveal.
"Entanglement" explores the blank spaces in our family trees.
The lives of eight souls intertwine in a sprawling family history. The family story is a legacy of addiction, kidnapping, crime, and murders unresolved and unforgiven.
Enjoy this epic achievement in the experimental tradition of David Mitchell and Ian McEwan, with the darkly exotic undertones of books like Mexican Gothic and The Cutting Season.
Author Interview!
What do you find most challenging about the writing process, and how do you deal with it?
Most challenging. Hmm. Getting started takes weeks and months of thinking about what the underlying theme should be and then how to illustrate it without pontificating. This process seems to depend on the time of year and my brain. I can’t explain the time of year. Maybe it’s the weather, but I write best when it is not cold. I suspect my brain freezes easily, like eating ice cream too fast. I probably live in Italy for that reason. On the other hand, writing is like gelato to me; I love it. And when I am in the groove, nothing seems to be difficult or challenging. I don’t even need to plot out the story threads, but obviously, I have to go through all the processes of revision as anyone else and drive myself crazy trying to decide if this-or-that version is a finished piece of literature. I tend to hire professional editors to help me decide. You would be amazed at the difference in recommendations between one professional editor and another.
When and where do you do your writing?
I have a seclusion room with a view. Very lucky that way. I write any time of day, except nights. I let my resting mind work up new ideas, so sometimes I have to write down that idea first thing in the morning, before I set up breakfast for the family. I am also so fortunate to have married a woman who is my best critic and support.
What have you learned about promoting your books?
Being an old marketer, I reckoned that I should know how to market my novel. But I was wrong. I knew one should segment the market to find how large the market is and all the who, what, where of that market. But that is not always possible with books like mine since the reader could be anyone, anywhere, at any time. If one’s novel does not fit specifically into one of the major genres, whoops! My novel is literary crime fiction. “Fiction” is way too broad a market. “Crime” is a popular segment of the reading public, but “Literary” means that my novel does not have the formula to fit that genre. It will only be appreciated by those who do not want predictability. Those people are the smallest segment of both readers and movie-goers. I think this phenomenon is just an older-human’s version of the child’s desire to have a story read to them over and over.
What are you most proud of as a writer?
That I have written a novel that should live on for a while because people will discover it long after I am dead. Also, at the time of writing this, I am aware of a literary award situation yet to be announced.
If you could have dinner with any writer, living or dead, who would it be and what would you talk about?
Jodi Picloult, because of her brilliance as an author and incredible capacity as a human being. Sitting at the dinner table, I don’t know whether I would be able to eat or talk since I am in such awe of her. She has done with several novels what I have done with only one. She puts philosophical concepts into an interesting story. I would just like to have absorbed her talent. But, if she was too busy, I wouldn’t mind picking Lisa Genova’s mind. Go ahead. Set it up. I’ll dress up to cover my ineptitude.
John was a merchant marine captain, sailing the New England coast (including round-trips to Bermuda), and now writes literary crime fiction. He spends much of his creative time in Italy with his wife.
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Excerpt
Glacial ice. Layered. Thick. Forming after the bewildering storm in her head and creeping up her spine. The courier’s delivery from Joe Tink lies like a white patch of snow on her desk. Being alone in her office, she doesn’t have to explain to anyone why she is waiting for it to melt. But it doesn’t. Finally, with curiosity spreading like hoar-frost, she feels forced to open this unwarranted denunciatory thing in front of her. To decide if she should leave.
Your father is dead.
That’s it? She’s vexed. Almost angry. What’s with this couriered letter? He could just as easily have called her from Bangor. Always had. They were close, weren’t they? Closer than normal.
Besides, she had long hoped her father would kill himself.
But Joe wrote more. Pages and pages.
This late-September afternoon, in some sort of unfamiliar circuitous telepathy, Geena has been thinking about Joe—Pickled Tink Joe—more than usual. She was reminded of him earlier by two different women in her Kansas City office asking Geena about the fall season back in New England, presuming that she knew all about New England and its leaves.
You know, Geena, how beautiful it must be!
With Geena’s children out of the nest and her ex a near-forgotten fugitive from marriage, she had moved to a smaller apartment in Prairie Village, west of Kansas City, to live alone, but rarely feeling alone. Her two boys, or more probably their spouses, dependably call about visiting her with the grandchildren during holidays, and neighbors in the building complex drop in daily to see if she needs anything.
While early on in younger years if she had lived there in Prairie Village—if she would have had time to think—she might have found this neighborly spontaneity a bothersome lack of privacy. Now, in her fifties, she loves this place and the midwestern populace who go nowhere. No New Englander had ever seemed as outgoing and optimistic as these Kansas busybodies. And, although Geena found that the religious tethering of the Bible Belt could be a nuisance, she has several local social friends who are comfortably unbridled and who distract Geena from her shrouded pathos, often recruiting her into playing bridge on Sunday afternoons and in occasional local tournaments.
Geena would never tell any one of these people, or anyone else for that matter, how she had grown up seeing the fall season as death-and-dying. Invariably depressing. Kansas is nosy neighbors, but still, New England is the epitome of fall presenting itself in all its dispiriting glory. In New England she had thought she smelled the dying in the rotting leaves, and she had heard death’s unambiguous footsteps in Maine’s ice and snow, inwardly cringing with the sound of each bone-crushing footfall in the long, dark winters.
Or maybe not. Maybe the winters are not the reason at all. Maine reminds her, in overkill, of the past, the shivers of buried darkness, ruining sleep. Anguish, grief, agony. Words that mean nothing compared to the reality.
Thus, many years ago, when offered a full-time position after temping in Kansas City during college, she decided to continue living in Kansas, away from New England. Geena is running her own construction consulting business, her towering height underscoring her authoritative presence, both for her few employees and for her clients. She has made sure her office staff have only seen her as a stoic engineer, a just but distant boss. Thus, the arrival of Joe’s letter forces her to leave the office as if struck by a sudden illness, which is, in fact, substantially true. She has escaped—not remembering the drive home—to hide her soul in the bedroom corner with her mother’s memories, in the few things she has kept: the cushioned chair—a maudlin carver chair she would never have bought—and the dorm-room lamp, as stringent as its droll Ikea name, that her mother bought Geena years ago.
Lost in the bedroom corner to scrutinize this bewildering letter, she doesn’t remember having ever screamed before, but at the end of this letter, she has screamed. Now crying quietly, the soft reverberations of her emotional outburst, Geena feels a punishing sensation sweeping harshly over her with the intensity of a squalid wind, a punishment for all things hidden inside her.
