Lessons from Fan Fiction: Why Disengagement Ultimately Doesn't Appeal

Disengagement--hiding oneself in a monastery, taking vows that absent one from the daily grind, giving up the difficulty of paying bills and interacting with people--does appeal. Of course, it does! Simon & Garfunkel's "I am a rock/I am an island" wouldn't attract otherwise. (Even if the verses are meant ironically or tragically or maybe just grumpily.)

And as the final act of a story, disengagement might work. But for an engaging, ongoing narrative arc, it doesn't much. 

For my Emma Lathen fan fiction, in which I make her detective, John Thatcher, ten years younger and gay, the issue of disengagement arises around Come to Dust, the 8th Thatcher novel.

My fan fiction combines material from the books with my own interpretation: a fiftyish, gay banker previously married and fathered three children; the time period is the 70s. (I picked the mid-range since, like many detectives, Thatcher's books cover a thirty year period yet Thatcher never ages). A widower at the beginning of Book 1, he forms a relationship with a male lawyer at his bank.  

They break up at the end of Stitch in Time. The two men, Thatcher and Damien, are fundamentally conservative (a reality that activists often miss, believing that "gayness" is somehow the same as "interests," which is a weird conflation all by itself). Thatcher was faithful during his marriage though not out of romantic or religious inclinations. Rather, he has a deep distaste for the complications of affairs: all that lying and prevaricating and fibbing and hiding and so on and so forth. That attitude continues into his new relationship.

Damien is more willing to compromise but understands where Thatcher is coming from. He isn't the type to get angry and put his and Thatcher's jobs at risk. So they have a non-angry breakup.

Of course, then I had to get them back together. 

Enter one of the most interesting of Lathen's novels, Come to Dust. 

*Spoilers Follow*

In Come to Dust, a prim, remote, aloof man, Elliot Patterson, decides to leave his wife of many years and his two little daughters and become a monk. He supposedly tries to tell her his plans (a later character believes that he did try but the wife simply couldn't hear what he was saying, she was so devoted to the "I and my perfect husband in perfect simpatico in our perfect marriage" story). So he simply leaves. 

But he leaves in such a way--and with certain documents--that immediately cause problems for those around him. An unconnected accident with the car he sold complicates matter. However, the real complication is that another character takes advantage of his disappearance to steal a donation (believing the theft will be blamed on Patterson) and then commits murder. 

In the end, Thatcher figures out where Patterson has gone. At the very end of the book, he visits the man, who took a classmate's name to enter the monastery. That goal is now naturally on-hold. Yet the man himself remains clueless about the fall-out of his actions.

Thatcher thinks the following:

[Patterson] was the slow, careful driver entering a speedway at a thoughtful twenty-five miles an hour. Behind him, brakes are jammed on and seventeen cars pile up in a chain collision. Or, as in this case, he leaves in his wake a murdered boy, a middle-aged man sitting in a jail cell, a wife and mother suddenly staring at her daughters in wild incomprehension. (251)

Whenever I read praises of Leo Tolstoy pursuing radical beliefs for the sake of a noble end while treating his wife with near contempt, I think of this paragraph. 

In my fan fiction, his encounter with Patterson is Thatcher's wake-up call. Throughout the book, after the breakup, Thatcher acts as "the unattached friend of the family" to fellow alumnus, George Lancer and his wife. He attends shin-dings and dinner parties and acts the part. And he's mostly bored. 

Sure, having an ongoing relationship with a male lawyer from the Sloan will be difficult, complicated, and potentially messy. But abandoning a strong relationship with a decent human being, who is certainly not going to make life more difficult, for the sake of orderliness doesn't accomplish anything. 

He and Damien are clever. Why not apply that cleverness to a bit of subterfuge that doesn't actually cross ethical lines? 

I don't have them split up again since revolving door romantic fiction bores me. But hey, it had to happen once!  

And it raised the interesting issue of disengagement versus engagement, how far it goes, and when either should occur.  

In this case, no re-engagement, no more stories to create! (Imagine if Scully said, mid-Season 1, "You know what, I think I will just go back to medicine. Visit me sometime.")