Lauren B. Davis: Escaping Pessimism Is Key In Author's "Radiant City"

Candace Braun

On September 11th, Princeton author Lauren B. Davis was in Paris working on her book, The Radiant City, when her father called from her hometown in Canada to tell her the news. The author recalled the tears streaming down her face as the reality of what was happening hit her.

"I was devastated," she said. "I would stand there looking at the Eiffel Tower wondering if it would be next."

Ms. Davis, 49, spoke about The Radiant City at the Montgomery Center for the Arts last Wednesday, telling her audience that when she first began writing her book, her characters were based on the personalities of people had she observed in Paris.

"They were trying to find something there that they couldn't find at home," she said.

After 9/11, her novel went through drastic changes, as the author began thinking about other horrible disasters that had occurred in other parts of the world over the years, including the incidents in Rwanda in 1994, when one million people were brutally murdered in the course of three months. While these atrocities were taking place, O.J. Simpson was making the headlines in the U.S.

"Bad things have been going on in the world for a very long time," she said, adding that after 9/11 her view of the world had changed. "I realized what I had been writing about didn't matter anymore."

On the Front Lines

It was then that Ms. Davis decided to have her book focus on journalists, the ones who put themselves close to the line of fire to bring home the important story.

"I wanted to know what it was that got them there.... There's something in them that gets them to do this," she said, adding that she also wondered how they got past incidents that would make anyone a pessimist.

She personified her ideas in the character of Matthew Bowles, a war correspondent who was on the ground for some of the deadliest incidents in the world during the late 20th century. After his last assignment in Israel, which took him from reporter to combatant, he moved to Paris to escape his past. But because of the nightmares that haunted him, he was unable to start the memoir for which he had already received a sizeable advance.

The book is filled with tales of survivors living in Paris, including an ex-police officer, a prostitute who has lost a child, and a Lebanese family. All of the characters have one thing in common, said the author: they are motivated by what they try to hide from others and themselves, rather than what they let people see.

The author explained that the title of her book came from an idea created by the architect Le Corbusier. He believed that the ideal way for Parisians to live would be to tear down the heart of the city and build tall skyscrapers in its place, what he called, "a radiant city."

"It was a good sense of how one person's sense of utopia can be someone else's dystopia," she said, describing how the characters in her novel view their lives in Paris.

In order to research her book, the author hung out in seedy parts of Paris with her husband to study the characters living there.

"Poverty is poverty, wherever you go," she said, recalling the sad story of an Arab friend she had there who was unable to get a job because no one would trust. "Within six months he was the local drug dealer."

Finding Her Voice

Born in Montreal, the author went to Paris in 1994 with her husband, Ron Davis, an executive with Zurich Financial. Last year, after living in the city for a decade, the couple decided to come to the U.S. They were looking for a place to settle on the East Coast that was accessible to major cities and airports; a French friend had suggested the couple look at Princeton.

"I fell in love immediately," said Ms. Davis, who now teaches a creative writing class for adults at the Princeton YWCA, and plans to start teaching another class at the Montgomery Center for the Arts in the near future.

Ms. Davis is the past European Editor of the Literary Review of Canada, and has taught fiction writing at the WICE in Paris, The American University of Paris, The Geneva Writers' Conference, and Seattle University's Writers' Conference.

The author's two previous books are Rat Medicine and Other Unlikely Curatives, a collection of short stories published in 2000, and The Stubborn Season, which became a national best-seller in Canada following its publication in 2002. Currently working on her fourth novel, she said she likes to be onto her next project before the reviews come out on her most recently published work.

"I'm lucky; I've had three books published and no bad reviews so far," she said.

Ms. Davis wouldn't disclose any important information on her next novel: "I always feel the energy you take to talk about a book could be better used on the page."

The author's latest book, The Radiant City, is available at Micawber Books, located at 114 Nassau Street, or online at www.amazon.ca, the Canadian Web site.