Gail Benick

Author of Memory's Shadow

Notes on “State of Terror: A Novel”

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A match made in heaven! If ever two women were meant to collaborate on a high-stakes political thriller, it is Hillary Rodham Clinton, former U.S. Secretary of State, and Louise Penny, best-selling Canadian author of crime fiction. Drawing on their areas of expertise, the dynamic duo created State of Terror, a smart and often humorous novel that is both entertaining and dead serious in its warning on the threat of terrorism, whether homegrown or globally cultivated.

The novel’s protagonist is Ellen Adams, U.S. Secretary of State for a newly elected president whose candidacy she had opposed. In her late 50s, with no previous diplomatic experience, Ellen Adams immediately faces an international crisis. Bombs have exploded on buses in London and Paris. No individual or organization claims responsibility. Plus, there’s the imminent danger that nuclear devices hidden in three American cities will detonate at a specified time. The State Department lacks information on where. In a race against the clock, Ellen Adams flies from nation to nation, meeting with world leaders in order to save lives and quell the terror unleashed by these threats.

State of Terror succeeds as a carefully plotted narrative, twisting and turning with suspense. But the novel shines most brightly in its portrayal of an accomplished woman in a universe of condescending men. Clinton and Penny show the way women are undervalued in the upper echelons of politics, including in the Oval Office and the Kremlin. As the authors write: “Maxim Ivanov stood in the middle of the room, not moving. Forcing Ellen to go to him, which she did. These petty gestures, meant to insult, had no effect on her.” Ellen knows that men like Ivanov, the Russian president, “would always undervalue and underestimate women.”

State of Terror

For Clinton and Penny, it was “a kind of mini mission” to reverse that diminished view of women in politics. They wanted to write female characters who did not often appear in geopolitical thrillers. “It was really important for us to put them at the centre of the action,” Clinton has said.

The warmest spot in State of Terror is reserved for the relationship between Ellen Adams and Betsy Jameson, her oldest friend and a State Department counselor, who serves as Ellen’s most trusted confidante, always by the Secretary’s side. The character of Betsy Jameson is modeled on Clinton’s best friend, Betsy Ebeling who Penny had also come to know and admire. Betsy Ebeling died in 2019. In the acknowledgements, Penny explains: “Hillary and I wanted to reflect the profound female relationships we both have…and we wanted Betsy to figure large. State of Terror is about terror, but at its core, its heart, it’s about courage and love.” Theirs. The courage and love required of Clinton and Penny to co-author this intriguing book.

Pachinko: Timing is Everything

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In 2017, the Korean-American author Min Jin Lee published her novel, Pachinko. Now, five years later, the book is widely read in high schools, colleges and universities. At the same time, Min Jin Lee—born in Seoul, Korea and raised in a blue-collar neighborhood of Queens, New York—has achieved international acclaim. 

Yet, the success of Pachinko and the author’s rise to literary fame are not entirely accidental. In literature as in life, timing is everything. Lee’s novel Pachinko arrived at a pivotal moment for Korean culture globally. The Netflix blockbuster Squid Game, made in South Korea, is one of the most watched series in Netflix history. The popularity of Squid Game reflects the growing international prominence of South Korean culture in the past decade. This trend is evident in the growing audiences for Korean soap operas (K-dramas), K-Pop music, and Korean cinema. When the subtitled South Korean movie, Parasite, won the Oscar for best film in 2020, one observer noted that “Korean films, dramas, and music have taken over the globe.” 

Pachinko also succeeds because it opens a window on little known historical events, time periods that have slipped past us, and places that we’ve always wanted to visit, but will likely never reach. And even if we do travel in Japan, the inner workings of Japanese society described by Min Jin Lee may very well escape our scrutiny.   

In Pachinko, Lee chronicles the lives of four generations of an ethnic Korean family, first in Japanese occupied Korea in the early twentieth century, then in Japan from the years before World War II to the late 1980s. Drawing on newspaper accounts and interviews she conducted while living in Japan as an adult for four years, Lee depicts the harsh treatment of Koreans in Japan and the discrimination that Koreans in Japan face in employment, housing, and education. The first line of Pachinko sets the stage for this sweeping tale of family struggle and resilience: “History has failed us. But no matter.”

Emotional authenticity is at the core of Pachinko. Lee abandoned the first draft of the novel, afraid that her characters sounded stale. They were chiefly defined by their suffering. However, “the Koreans in Japan didn’t see themselves as victims,” Lee explains in an interview. “They were so tough that I felt foolish for having pitied them. The things that happened in history were horrid, but the Korean-Japanese I talked to weren’t waiting for an apology…They’ve moved on and adapted.”

Lee titles her novel Pachinko to underscore the adaptability of Koreans in Japan. Pachinko, a cross between pinball and a slot machine, is not only an extraordinarily popular game in Japan, generating billions of dollars in business. Pachinko parlors also provide one of the few ways for Koreans to climb the social ladder and gain financial security. As in the novel, Koreans in Japan often begin working in pachinko parlors and later become managers or owners of these parlors.  The characters in Pachinko know that the game is rigged, but they believe that there is always room for randomness and hope. 

So, too, Min Jin Lee’s success as a novelist demonstrates that it’s worthwhile to take the gamble and play the game. Readers will be glad she did.

Pachinko

Meet Me in St. Louis

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When I began to write Memory’s Shadow, my second novel, I knew the story had to be set in St. Louis. As the old adage goes: ‘Write what you know.’ Although I have not lived in Missouri for decades, St. Louis is my birthplace and the site of my fondest childhood memories. Among my favorites, I have always counted visits to the Jefferson Memorial in Forest Park where I absorbed the glorified history of the Lewis and Clark expedition opening up the American west; regular outings to the zoo and the art museum, local institutions dating back to the St. Louis World’s Fair; day trips down the muddy Mississippi River on the excursion steamboat, the SS Admiral; attendance at Cardinals baseball games at the old Busch stadium and the Veiled Prophet parade. Without hesitation, I felt sufficiently tethered to the history and culture of St. Louis to write a novel in which the city is not only the setting, but also a character in the story.

Yet, few of these glossy memories grace the pages of Memory’s Shadow. Like many novelists, I wrote the book on a hunch, an unsettling sense that something was amiss in those curated scenes of St. Louis life. As I waited for the publication of Memory’s Shadow my gut instinct was put to the test. Flipping through the newspaper one night, I saw a review of a new study on my hometown. “Book explores the violent history of St. Louis and America itself,” the subhead stated. I promptly joined the long wait list at the library for Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. In the interim, the library offered a sample chapter. That’s all it took. I needed to own this book rather than borrow it—and own the troubled history meticulously described in it. Herein, I suspected, were the bedtime stories which eluded me while growing up there.

Curious readers often ask me the standard question put to novelists: How autobiographical is your work? Are Memory’s Shadow and my debut novel, The Girl Who Was Born That Way, true stories? The short answer is that most fiction reflects the author’s perceptions of the world and draws on the writer’s deep memory. Reading Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America illustrated for me the myriad ways in which fact mingles with intuition to create fiction.

The-Broken-Heart-of-America-Book-Cover

Here’s an example. Early in Memory’s Shadow three sisters visit the St. Louis zoo. Toni, the most politically astute of the three, rails against the outing. She loathes the very idea of a zoo, sensing something sinister in caging animals and dressing monkeys in frilly clothes to perform circus stunts on a stage for besotted audiences. But the history of the zoo, as described in Johnson’s book, is much more disturbing than that. During the vaunted 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, there were “living exhibitions” of indigenous peoples gathered from North America and around the globe, showcasing their exotic food, clothing, architecture, and religious rites so that fairgoers could gawk at them in their “natural habitat.” The organizers of the World’s Fair devised this human zoo with the express purpose of demonstrating white, Western superiority.

Memory’s Shadow also aligns with Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America in the importance bestowed on the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project. Indeed, the implosion of one of the thirty-three buildings in the residential complex is an inciting incident in my novel. The demolition heightened conflict between the sisters and foreshadowed the violence that will tear apart their family.

For Johnson, the political decision to destroy Pruitt-Igoe, home almost exclusively to African Americans, was another spectacularly violent episode in the city’s long history of Black removal and structural racism. The St. Louis Police Department castigated Pruitt-Igoe as a cesspool of humanity, a living nightmare, a combat zone, and Fort Apache. They used police dogs whenever they entered the housing project, giving the city’s police force the dubious distinction of being among America’s first to deploy canine units in crime detection.

I didn’t have the benefit of Johnson’s searing analysis when I wrote Memory’s Shadow. Perhaps I didn’t need it. What I had were the tools of a novelist’s trade—slumbering nightmares, shadows lurking from the past, and a broken heart.

Memory’s Shadow is now available for pre-order at Amazon.