The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair

In Chapter 9 we see Marcus finally recover from his “writer’s illness” and start to write: “It was as if I had come back to life. It was the feeling of being a writer” (424). Once again, the author emphasizes the idea that a true writer needs to write to live and that the desire to create has nothing to do with commerce or money. Marcus is well on his road to redemption from being Marcus the Magnificent—a man with without many scruples in his ambition to succeed. Further supporting this idea is the contrast the author creates in juxtaposing Marcus’s thoughts with Barnaski’s within the same scene. Barnaski tells him, “I’m so sick of all your morals and lofty principles.” Barnaski’s sentence—“You have to use ghostwriters to get this done”—especially shocks Marcus, who calls doing so “cheating the public” (425), proving his moral compass is set in the right direction.

In hindsight, we will realize that the book Marcus is writing is still not the true version of events and that there are several key misconceptions that Marcus harbors, indicating that his journey of self-realization is not yet completed: namely, his belief that Nola’s mother was alive at the time of Nola’s death, and his suspicion of Luther Caleb. Since we have learned much of Caleb’s history, it is becoming clear that the misfortunes of life have afflicted his character as tragically as they have Nola’s. In this way, although Marcus still believes there is a chance Caleb might be the killer, there is a clear parallel between Caleb’s and Nola’s characters and their fates, which makes this denouement unlikely.

This chapter also shows us what lengths Nola is ready to go to protect Harry and his work, which proves her love for him beyond doubt, even though the way she expresses it (posing nude for Caleb, offering oral sex to Chief Pratt) demonstrates her unsound mind as well. The author combines the two extremes in the personality of a very young girl to construct a complex character who occupies the center of his novel. In order for a character to be the axis of a work, it must be strong, layered, and fully developed, so that the reader finds sense and appropriate motivation in everything the other characters do in relation to this central figure. It is Nola who initiates the whole plotline of the novel, and it is her character’s personality that keeps the novel’s past and present so undeniably connected. The final image in the chapter of Chief Pratt “stretched out on the floor, blood all around him” (446) confirms the melding of the two levels of reality within the novel, as he is both the participator in past events and one of the culprits, and his death marks the start of events leading to the denouement.

In Chapter 8, Dicker employs another useful and innovative device: He offers us Perry Gahalowood’s theory on the events of the past as a separate, stand-alone sequence that reads like any other switch to the past in the novel thus far. This is useful because the reader’s habit by now is to accept these visits to the past as truth, so Perry’s hypotheses gain a strength of persuasion that they might otherwise not have. The third-person perspective helps as it ostensibly removes Perry as the source of the text, which develops from a false but seemingly logical omniscient point of view. Positioning Caleb and Stern as culprits achieves another layer of misdirection for the reader, utilizing a similar technique to that which the crime fiction writers of the Golden Age employed: The detective would offer numerous possibilities as to how the crime could have happened, each one indicating a different culprit, showing how realistic each scenario is. This often confounds the readers’ horizon of expectations and makes the denouement more thrilling and unexpected.

This chapter also marks the first mention of “Writers’ Heaven,” which is a concept further explored in Chapter 6 and also lends itself, in somewhat altered form, as the title of the third and final part of the novel. In Harry’s words, a writer “has power over life and death; he has the power to change everything. Writers have more power in their fingertips than they imagine. All they have to do is close their eyes and they can change an entire lifetime” (497). This quote not only speaks of Harry’s desire to alter the past, which includes Nola’s death, but is a commentary on the craft of writing, through which writers create worlds and shape them according to their own wishes. In this way, Dicker reminds us again of all the choices he makes within the novel to offer us the story as he wishes it told, in order to emphasize the points he wishes to make.

Chapter 8 gives us first glimpses into Robert Quinn as a character who possesses agency and is not only a passive recipient of his wife’s criticisms. This is a significant shift, as the author needs Robert’s character to perform significant actions in the final part of the novel (drugging his wife and burning Harry’s note to Nola, which destroys Tamara’s opportunity to accuse Harry; hiding evidence of his daughter Jenny’s arson, and disposing of the evidence linking his daughter and her husband Travis to the murders). Dicker achieves this exposition through shifting the focus within the text from those surrounding Robert to Robert himself.

In Chapter 7, the author again places us solely in the past, and this chapter reads like genuine time-travel. Through most of it there is no mediation of narration through centered characters (except for the brief but significant moments of Harry’s imagined shared dinner with Nola, when he gives he a puppy as a Christmas present, and Jenny’s pining for Harry). The perspective is third-person omniscient, and the jump to 1985 serves as a sober reminder that people forget, as “the specter of Nola and her kidnapping had faded” and “life had long returned to normal” (481). Through this novel, we have learned, however, that the past is never really behind us.