Force of Will

George Hagen’s debut novel combines love, loss and lots of laughter.

By: Ilene Dube

Former Pennington resident George Hagen will return to the area to read from his much-heralded new novel ‘The Laments’ at Writers Block Oct. 2.

   George Hagen’s first novel, The Laments (Random House, $24.95), is being compared to The World According to Garp. Like the well-loved 1978 novel by John Irving, it mixes tragedy with great laughs, serving up mischief, wisdom and dismembered body parts along the way.
   "There is an admirable and enviable range and ambition in ‘The Laments,’ and something lucidly democratic in the novel’s insistence that a wandering life grants perspectives and perceptions that stay-at-homes can’t achieve," wrote Jonathan Wilson in The New York Times Book Review. "The appearance of George Hagen on the literary scene is a gain for readers everywhere."
   Mr. Hagen, who has lived in Lawrenceville and Pennington, will return to the area Oct. 2 for a reading at Writers Block in Princeton.

   "A child’s name is his portal to the world," thinks Julia Lament after the birth of her first son, delaying the naming until she can make just the right choice. Not surprisingly, the names Mr. Hagen gives to his characters are closely linked with their fate.
   The story begins in South Africa in the 1950s. Julia and her husband, Howard, an engineer who specializes in the "conveyance of liquids through valves," have just produced a healthy baby boy. Their obstetrician — an advocate of preserving such mothering traditions as breast-feeding and slinging the baby in a sack, close to the mother’s heartbeat — makes a strange request. He asks Julia if she will lend her baby as a surrogate to another mother whose baby was born prematurely. Dr. Underberg fears the mother of the preemie will lose her ability to bond with her own child if she doesn’t have a newborn to hold.
   The surrogate mother bonds so well, she kidnaps the unnamed Lament baby. After a fatal automobile accident, the Laments, at the urging of Dr. Underberg, adopt the premature orphan left by the surrogate mother. Will is the name the Laments give him, for his "will of astonishing fortitude" to survive such a sad beginning.
   Not fitting in and always seeking better work, the family moves to Rhodesia, Bahrain, then England and, finally, the suburbs of New Jersey. By the late ’60s, Howard Lament lands a job on the U.S. 1 corridor, and the family moves to Princeton. But when the president of Howard’s company dies in a mysterious yachting accident in the Coral Sea and the company folds, leaving Howard without a job, the family downsizes to Queenstown, a fictionalized Pennington. During the early days of feminism, Julia takes a job selling real estate and becomes the breadwinner. Howard stays at home, attempting to repair the hopelessly decrepit house.
   Mr. Hagen, a former screenwriter, has used much of his own life to base his first novel on. His family lived on the same three continents as Will’s, but much of the drama, particularly the tragedies, is invented. Even Howard Lament’s struggles with an old house are based on Mr. Hagen’s experiences renovating a brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, where he lives with his wife, a lawyer, and their three children.
   When Lola Hagen, 3, was born, Mr. Hagen, a stay-at-home dad, started the novel. The newborn set him thinking about his own birth in Southern Rhodesia in 1958, when a concerned doctor did ask his mother if she would share him with another mother whose baby was born prematurely, allowing the woman to hold him for a while.
   "I started to think, what if the surrogate mother got more attached to this baby than her own?" says Mr. Hagen. "It would have been hard to start without that scene. It just started spinning from there. I would think about this other child, this premature infant who never left Southern Rhodesia, and I decided to make a character who yearns for stability and to live in one place. We were always moving and I never felt linked. It was a wish I always had. Every time my parents picked up I would have to leave my friends. You always entertain the road not taken.
   "Very simply, I wanted to capture the hilarity, and the obvious tragedy, behind a rather stubborn family’s attempt to find the promised land," he continues. "That place we all yearn for that embodies our moral ideals, but also offers good plumbing, a gratifying job, happiness, harmony, cheap household help and perfect neighbors. The Laments seek these things and find none of them, but it doesn’t stop them from trying, with bloody-minded determination."
   When Mr. Hagen’s own father had a job in Princeton, the family moved first to Lawrenceville, then to Pennington, where Mr. Hagen spent four years at Hopewell Valley Central High School. His mother ran the Queenstown Frame Shop from the first floor of their home and became interested in Zen Buddhism and feminism, says her son.
   "Like my character Will Lament, I was a shy kid at 13, unable to shake off my English accent and frustrated by the amusement people got from hearing it," he says with a slight hint of that accent. "Inevitably, I was seduced by American culture through my FM radio, horror films and subscriptions to ‘MAD’ and ‘Rolling Stone.’"
   Mr. Hagen studied filmmaking at New York University and moved to Los Angeles in 1988 with his entertainment lawyer wife. He wrote screenplays that were never produced and rewrote scripts. The Hagens’ middle son was born in L.A. and named Brooklyn because the family longed for the East Coast. "The name is evocative of the immigrant part of my life," says Mr. Hagen. "Brooklyn is the beginning place for immigrants."
   The Hagens found that all conversations in L.A. revolved around film, and seeking more diverse topics for stimulation the family moved to Park Slope, where 30 languages are spoken in the childrens’ schools, from Yemeni, Russian and Lithuanian to Arabic and Chinese. "You hear all these languages in the (Brooklyn) Botanic Garden," he says. "Teens from dozens of cultures wear their native dress and carry Walkmans."
   Although his screenwriting career enabled him to put a down payment on the house in Park Slope, Mr. Hagen was frustrated. "My plan had been to become a director through screenwriting, just as (Francis Ford) Coppola and (Paul) Schrader did, but it became harder and harder to hold on to that idea. I always wanted the final cut and control over the characters — it’s all about megalomania — and that’s what writing a novel is. A script is just a blueprint open to interpretation."
   Mr. Hagen found novel writing "a real liberation."
   "Screenplays have to be 120 pages and demand you convey things with pictures, but in a novel you can keep going and use narrative voice to get inside people’s thoughts. Writing a novel let me loose."
   As for the comparison to Garp: "I read it in college and loved it. It was the first time I thought I’d love to write a book like that, but I never though I’d write a book. I do like black comedy; a lot of my favorite books combine humor and tragedy." His favorite film to do this is Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). "I love stories that are unsentimental but tremendously moving. Life goes on."
   Mr. Hagen’s next book is a 19th-century novel "with a lot of characters and places. It’s about a father and son trying to reconcile their love for each other," he says. "I always thought the first scene of ‘King Lear’ needed explanation."
George Hagen will read from The Laments at Princeton Writers Block, Paul Robeson Place, Princeton, Oct. 2, 4 p.m. For information, visit www.princetonwritersblock.com. The Laments is available at area bookstores.