JOHN KATZENBACH ON THE ANALYST AND HART'S WAR

The engine that runs The Analyst is different from the drive train in my other books. While any suspense novel still functions with the cylinders defined by character, plot, setting, and style, this novel is fueled by a source that is, at least for me, a departure. After finishing my prior novel, Hart's War, with its World War II backdrop, I insisted to myself that I do something utterly dissimilar.

In the past, I have used race, family, or betrayal as sources for the impetus of each novel. This time out, I wanted to do something I thought was unusual. I wanted to use innocence. Not innocence in the legal sense, but instead a naivete delineated by the moral perspective. I wanted the protagonist of this novel to be someone who'd had no idea he was doing something wrong when he did it. And, when that misstep came back to haunt him in a devastating fashion, I wanted them to be as lost and dazed by events as is the reader. I wanted a character that would fall into a tangled web the threads of which he'd had no idea were busy ensnaring him.

The idea of using a psychoanalyst came, curiously enough, from my mother, who has been a practicing Freudian analyst in Manhattan for decades. (After using my father's World War II experience as the basis for Hart's War, this choice seemed weirdly logical.) Analysts live in worlds defined by their patients and their troubles. Ideas about truth, veracity, and honesty are all redefined in the analytic setting. I once asked my mother if she was ever concerned that a patient had lied to her, and her response was what I recalled when I set out to write the novel: A lie often speaks as loudly about someone as the truth.

Every fiction contains a challenge for the author, and, by proxy, the reader. In The Analyst the hurdle I set for myself was to create a situation where things are being done to the primary character without the context that we ordinarily expect. Fromthe opening page, he is unsure what is taking place, and all that he really knows is that the design of what he is caught up inside is far more complex than he could ever imagine. It was an intriguing dilemma for the writer to unfold the story exclusively through the eyes of a single character - when at the same time that character isn't privy to the large picture, and is in as much darkness as the reader.

As Doctor Frederick Starks strives to see what is happening to him, to outline the problem he faces, and to find a way to extricate himself from the trap that encloses him, I went through the same process as the writer. I hope the same tension and smothering sense of desperation occurs to the reader, as well. All the forces arrayed against Ricky - including those defined by his own past and his own personality - are outside his immediate grasp. Consequently, not only does he have to find his way out of the most difficult of mazes, he must also find himself while he does it.

For any suspense writer, this is what makes writing fun. In Hart's War, the adventure for Tommy Hart, the main character, was uncovering a truth concealed within layers of lies, and in doing so, help define himself. For Ricky Starks in The Analyst, the issues are different. He has no idea what is truth and what is fiction, but in the end, he, too, must search deep inside himself. Each character describes the type of person he or she is: the first a lawyer, the other a doctor of the imagination.

And there was one other aspect, probably true for both books, that I found engaging as a writer. There is a tendency in suspense fiction today to simply design horrific bad guys as the antagonists of the novels:  serial killers as cartoon characters -- each just a bit more nasty than the last. In both cases, I wanted to get away from the predictability of those sorts of characters. I wanted Tommy Hart to confront a different sort of evil in that novel. And in The Analyst I wanted Ricky Starks to be up against an adversary who is both genuine and elusive at the same time. Like the memories that he was so accustomed to deal with, the good doctor's antagonist would have to be someone skillful, sophisticated and relentless. All of that Rumplestiltskin is. The challenge, of course, was whether Doctor Starks could find the same qualities in himself.

John Katzenbach

Amherst, Massachusetts

January 2002