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A John F. Blair, Publisher Reading Group Guide 
Caveat |
A word from Laura Kalpakian:
For eighteen years, the ideas for this short novel have hovered over my imaginative life. I began developing Caveat almost immediately upon reading a little article in the Los Angeles Times in 1980, about a flood in 1916 occasioned by a rainmaker, and the city’s refusal to pay him unless he accepted responsibility for the damages the flood had wrought. Why notice of this 1916 event should have appeared in the L.A. Times, I have no idea, but I tore it from the paper and carried it with me in my wallet till it disintegrated. I knew instinctively that this rainmaker’s story suited the central themes of all my work: the past, its power, and the individual’s ambivalent need both to escape and to embrace it. Moreover, the historical ramifications of water and drought have fascinated me from the time I first began to write (especially since my favorite fictional terrain is the desert town of St. Elmo). From reading that small article, Hank Beecham appeared to me almost instantaneously: I could see him getting off the train at the St. Elmo station, greeted by Art and his cronies. All this was fine, but it did not make the writing any easier. I knew that to understand, to approach an individual as complex as Hank, both the narrator and the reader would need the balance and the humanity offered by Lucius Tipton. But in utilizing setting and characters from These Latter Days, this new novel had to be placed within the framework already imposed by the earlier book. This was too daunting. These artistic considerations aside, I first began to write Caveat at a time when I could least concentrate; I had an infant and a preschooler at home, and I was still suffering from difficult domestic upheavals. So I wrote some fifty pages and put them aside, certain always I would return to this material. Not certain when. Four or five years passed before I reread the script. In the meantime, I had written the novel Crescendo (1987), some of the stories in Fair Augusto (also 1987), and some of the stories in Dark Continent (1989). I began earnest work on Caveat, and over about a year, I wrote it through all the way to the end. I wrote over and over to the end, and I was moved, but not satisfied. Before I next returned to writing Caveat, I did extensive, if erratic, research on the very thing that Hank had learned from Jeremiah: that after every battle, rain ensues. Indeed, my research bore this premise out. And so I needed to know more about meteorology and gunpowder than I might otherwise have ever thought necessary. I am no chemist, but I believe the ingredients of Hank’s secret formulas are correct, as is the “phossie jaw” he eventually suffered; it was an ailment common to workers in match factories, people who handled phosphorus over a long period of time. The bit in the L.A. Times had mentioned that the rainmaker got his ideas from listening to the stories of his father, a Civil War veteran. For a novelist, “Civil War” is too broad; the novelist can only invoke the universal by evoking the particular. I chose the Battle of Shiloh for reasons that were personal, historic, and artistic. After all, the word Shiloh means “place of peace” in the Bible, a cruel irony given what happened that April in 1862. Moreover, this battle, so early in the war, could have ended differently. Unlike many of the later battles, the Union victory at Shiloh was not at all assured. Quite the contrary. As a battle, Shiloh continues to be rehashed, re-thought, refought in armchairs and textbooks, the subject of quarrels both personal and academic. Indeed, the only certainty that emerged out of Shiloh was that the war would be long and bitter and hard-fought. In researching Shiloh (the battle itself, the armies, the commanders, the music, what the troops ate and wore and suffered), I read volumes about General Patrick Cleburne, who I found an absolutely fascinating individual. So much so that for a time I considered writing a novel about him, but settled for making General Cleburne a presence, even a sort of thematic tuning fork in Caveat. And though the nocel takes place in St. Elmo, I wanted it to echo larger and more tragic themes. Thus, I placed it carefully in November 1916, contemporaneous with Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico and the Battle of the Somme, that months-long inconclusive bloodbath fought in the trenches of northern France. Not until a few years ago did I once again put the manuscript of Caveat into the typewriter. As I made significant structural changes, the book enlarged, the story deepened and broadened. In the intervening years, my notion of Hank’s character had changed. And when his character changed, so did his fate. Miss Emmons changed, and far from being a wisp in Hank’s past, she became a powerful force in the novel. Lucius Tipton, however, remained as he has always been, as readers of These Latter Days have found him: tolerant, wise, whimsical, passionate, a man of capacious intellect and understanding, though impatient with humbugs. Lucius Tipton is one of the great challenges of my writing career: it’s very difficult to create convincingly a character who is smarter than the author. Editors at John F. Blair did my novel a tremendous service with their questions and considerations. I again did a major revision in the fall of 1997, and now, eighteen years after the idea came to me with such force, vivacity, and color, it will see print. I’ve long since lost the tattered article from the L.A. Times, but surely I was meant to have read it. Caveat has enriched my imaginative life, one of the books I care most passionately about.Questions to consider:
More information: Caveat title page |