Robert Levy is joining us today with his novel The Glittering World. Here’s the publisher’s description.
In the tradition of Neil Gaiman (The Ocean at the End of the Lane), Scott Smith (The Ruins), and Jason Mott (The Returned), award-winning playwright Robert Levy spins a dark tale of alienation and belonging, the familiar and the surreal, family secrets and the search for truth in his debut supernatural thriller.
When up-and-coming chef Michael “Blue” Whitley returns with three friends to the remote Canadian community of his birth, it appears to be the perfect getaway from New York. He soon discovers, however, that everything he thought he knew about himself is a carefully orchestrated lie. Though he had no recollection of the event, as a young boy, Blue and another child went missing for weeks in the idyllic, mysterious woods of Starling Cove. Soon thereafter, his mother suddenly fled with him to America, their homeland left behind.
But then Blue begins to remember. And once the shocking truth starts bleeding back into his life, his closest friends—Elisa, his former partner in crime; her stalwart husband, Jason; and Gabe, Blue’s young and admiring coworker—must unravel the secrets of Starling Cove and the artists’ colony it once harbored. All four will face their troubled pasts, their most private demons, and a mysterious race of beings that inhabits the land, spoken of by the locals only as the Other Kind…
What’s Robert’s favorite bit?
ROBERT LEVY
The Glittering World is the story of four friends on vacation in rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and all the wondrous and terrible things that happen to them in the seemingly idyllic landscape of Starling Cove. The novel was written in four parts, each told from a different point of view. The end of the third section of the book happens at a critical juncture in the story, when two of the four friends have joined forces to penetrate the existence of another world beneath the cove, a shadow land both within and beyond our own, and find themselves ready to share their knowledge in order to better face what is to come. It’s at this moment that one of them says to the other, “Tell me everything. And start at the beginning.”
This line of dialogue is my favorite bit! It was inspired by Hitchcock’s seminal film “Rear Window,” specifically the moment when Grace Kelly’s character says to Jimmy Stewart’s snooping wheelchair-bound photographer, “Tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means.” Those words have always carried a powerful resonance for me, and I think it’s a particularly meaningful phrase for a writer. What else do we writers attempt, after all, than this very same dual exercise of representation and interpretation? The old writing commandment of “show, don’t tell” is really a canard, because in showing anything we are necessarily telling what the reader should be experiencing; otherwise storytelling would be a far more simplistic cataloguing of facts and events. Showing is telling.
But it’s not just the refashioning of this particular line of dialogue that’s my favorite part; it’s also the function that it serves in the larger story. Right after those words are spoken, the third part of the novel ends, and Part Four—the one told from the perspective of young, idealistic Gabe—gets underway. And just as the line says, we do start at the beginning. Or rather, we start at Gabe’s beginning, his origin story, if you will. Not only does the opening of this final section travel back in time to Gabe’s childhood, it’s where we first learn that he’s actually been privy to this secondary shadow world from a very young age, a secret he’s been keeping from the other characters until now.
One of the recurring themes of The Glittering World is the excavation—both literally and figuratively—of what is buried and hidden, and each successive shifting of perspective yields its own fresh angle. A return to Gabe’s past, where we “start at the beginning,” serves to throw the supernatural undercurrent of the novel into stark relief, and also gives the reader a new lens through which to absorb and reinterpret what has already transpired in the previous three parts. This new information changes what we thought we knew about the characters, the hidden corners of the land, and the larger world of Starling Cove and the novel. It’s the moment when the thin curtain between places is finally thrust aside altogether, and we are left standing in bright and blinding wonder. Nothing is as it once seemed.
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BIO:
ROBERT LEVY is a writer of stories, screenplays, and plays whose work has been seen off-Broadway. A Harvard graduate subsequently trained as a forensic psychologist, he lives in his native Brooklyn near a toxic canal. His debut novel, The Glittering World, was published this week by Gallery/Simon & Schuster.
Hello
Can I ask if you had come my interview?
If you can not answer or if you lack the time there are no problems.
My respect for you is high in any case.
Thanks Again
Nick Parisi