By Laurence Ross

I felt an unexpected rush of excitement. I was at Book Passage in Corte Madera, listening to James Houston give a rather routine talk, promoting his latest novel. But towards the end of his talk last Thursday night, Houston turned from the routine to the sublime.

Before I continue, let me give you a little background.

The Bay Area Intellect was begun, in large part, to explore the mysteries that underlie every good novel. Mysteries such as: How did the writer come up with the story? What is the writer trying to accomplish in the novel, if anything? How does the writer know so much about the human heart? Does the writer begin with a theme in mind and then create characters and a story to illustrate the theme? Is the novel a means of self-discovery for its author? Does the novel have any point at all? Would only a Neanderthal ask whether a novel had a point?

OK, back to James Houston. At the end of his presentation, unexpectedly, Houston went into a riff on the mysteries that underlie his novels. Of the six people in the audience, I suspect that I was the only one in ecstasy.

Houston is perhaps best known for Farewell to Manzanar, which he co-authored with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki. Farewell to Manaznar tells the true story of the internment of Wakatsuki and her family during World War II as part of the government’s detention of Japanese Americans. The book is in its 67th printing and is taught in schools throughout the United States.

At Book Passage, Houston was discussing his most recent novel, Bird Of Another Heaven. The novel contains two story lines, set one hundred years apart. One story takes place in California, the other in Hawaii.

The novel is narrated by a character named Sheridan Brody. Brody is a San Francisco Bay Area radio talk show host who is in his thirty’s and in a rut. One day Brody receives an on-air call from a woman who turns out to be his grandmother. She eventually leads him to a family history he knew nothing about. Brody goes on a quest to learn about this history – his history. He discovers that his great grandmother was none other than Nani Keala (a real person who Houston fictionalizes in his novel).

Nani Keala, whose father was Hawaiian and mother American Indian, is a “bird from another heaven.” She is the central character of the novel. She grew up in a village in Northern California. In 1881, Nani Keala met the last King of Hawaii, David Kalakaua, who at the time was on a tour of the United States. When King Kalakaua returned to Hawaii, Keala went with him. She apparently became his confidante and occasional lover. In the novel, Keala’s diaries suggest that the King was murdered by a group of people who sought to annex the Hawaiian Islands to the United States.

Houston said that he had heard about Nani Keala, was intrigued, and set out to write a novel about her. But as he worked on the novel, he discovered that he wanted to write about “his own ethnic mystery.” His grandfather, he said, was half Cherokee, and Houston had not found out about that fact for a long time.

Then Houston went on a riff: These kinds of discoveries, he declared, “come up from your latent memory or from your unconscious into the narrative and tell you, that’s what this novel is about. You did not always know that when you started. You think it is about one thing and it starts to be about something else. That’s what makes writing an interesting path to be on. Because every story is in a way a mystery story.”

He continued: “There is something lodged in the material that is a mystery that you explore with words. Going in I do not know what it is. I still get this buzz across the top of my scalp which I have come to call a literary buzz . . . . It says somewhere in this thing that just came to mind there is a mystery that I have to enter and solve with words.”

He explained that he had “thought about his background a lot, but it never occurred to me to write about” it. He had never considered, he said, giving “that kind of history to a character. And then suddenly it just popped in as an obvious and inevitable feature of the story.”

Waxing lyrical about Brody, Houston went on: “Placing him in San Francisco, giving him an apartment that faces out over the bay, suddenly, I thought wow, this guy can voice all the stuff about the San Francisco bay that interests me. I had never thought of a way to write about the bay except in a nonfiction essay, and that is different. That kind of history, that kind of attention to a character is a feature of a novel.”

Here is how Houston concluded: “One of the fascinating things about writing is that you have these places in yourself that are looking for a way to be released. And you give them a way. We have a lot of voices within us that are looking for a way to be released. So you let those voices speak.”

Sometimes a talk begins routinely, but ends beautifully.