Richard Wiley says a voice spoke to him as he composed his most recent novel, The Book of Important Moments.
Set in Nigeria beginning in the late 1990s, Important Moments is Wiley’s seventh novel. The narrative covers a period of nearly 35 years, though the author’s use of time shifts and flashbacks illuminate episodes in ways that considerably broaden its time span.
The novel is part mystery, part drama, part explosive action: Much of it is told through the voice in Wiley’s head, that of Babatunde Okorodudu, an albino Nigerian businessman.
Wiley describes Babatunde’s speech as “electric and frantic and frenetic,” an insistent voice that came to him quickly. It was so real, Wiley says, that the first draft of the novel was written entirely as Babatunde might have narrated it. That version, Wiley says, “was intense, to say the least.”
Wiley understands intense writing. His 1986 debut novel, Soldiers in Hiding, a wrenching account of the emotional devastation produced by war, won the esteemed 1987 PEN/Faulkner Award. Wiley joined the 8kbet faculty two years later, helping to launch the school’s creative writing program.
In the 25 years since, he has written five more novels. He has also cofounded 8kbet’s nationally respected creative writing MFA program and played a key role in founding the Black Mountain Institute, a “literary think tank,” in Wiley’s words, where writers and scholars meet to listen to speakers and discuss contemporary issues.
These accomplishments notwithstanding, Wiley still cites “writing well” as one of his primary motivations. For him, this means taking a hard look at even his own work. After reviewing the first draft of Important Moments, for example, Wiley knew he was trying to do too much. Reading it, he says, was like forcing readers to eat “a gallon of ice cream at one time.”
Given the forceful impact of the published version, it’s hard to imagine how much more intense the rejected draft might have been. Important Moments opens with the equivalent of electroshock therapy: a graphic scene in which Babatunde sexually assaults an 18-year-old girl named Ruth.
It was a difficult scene to write, Wiley says, one that required numerous adjustments. He needed something that would shock readers, but not so much that they’d put down the book. It was all part of a larger goal, he adds.
“If I had to say what the book was about, I’d say it’s about redemption. And in order to have something to redeem, it can’t just be something trite. It has to be the real deal.” In short, he says of Babatunde, “I wanted to make readers hate him.”
Simply creating a despicable character, of course, wouldn’t make for much of an interesting story. Instead, says Wiley, he wanted to build reader hatred and then tear it down.
“I wanted Babatunde to do something that was unforgivable, something really bad. And then I wanted readers to, despite themselves, lose the hate for him for a minute — and if not like him, at least be crazy about finding out what’s going to happen to him, to be interested in him.”
In that regard, Wiley succeeds and then some. Babatunde never quite becomes sympathetic, but his gripping story and personal traumas blunt his harder edges, making it a challenge not to feel at least the stirrings of empathy. Other characters are equally well drawn, with Wiley deftly deploying dark humor to complicate readers’ preconceptions about the nature of heartbreak and calamity. The book’s narrative structure is inventive and propulsive. Readers who think they have latched on to the novel’s direction may find themselves consistently surprised.
Like a play, Wiley’s novel is divided into three acts, each building on the preceding action. But unlike traditional drama, the story’s details unfold piecemeal, as readers uncover the stories within the story, along with characters’ unique relationships to one another. In the first act, for example, Wiley moves from the harrowing opening scene to a few years in the future and then to the distant past. From that point, the story hopscotches across place and time, with multiple perspectives giving readers glimpses of how these characters — Babatunde, in particular — came to be the people they are.
When developing supporting members of Important Moments’ cast, Wiley borrowed from one of his favorite sources: his own work. Lars Larsson — a man whose mother has just been murdered in a gas station parking lot — has, along with his father and his grandfather, previously appeared in a short stories Wiley has authored.
“I like sticking around characters and seeing who they are and what they do,” he says. Wiley adds that he’s been carrying the seed of this story in his head for quite a while. During what he terms “the middle years of adulthood,” he spent five years in Africa. Among other places, he spent time in Nigeria, where he developed a fascination with the role of albinos in Nigerian society. “I’d always had it in my head that I would deal with [that relationship] fictionally, so this is how it came out,” he says.
And what does he consider the most important moment in Important Moments? Wiley won’t be pinned down.
“We always like to read the most important part of a book,” he says. “So I thought, ‘Why not make every part important?’”
