Turning Angel has turned out to be the most controversial novel of my career. It’s the Peyton Place phenomenon in which a small town turns on the writer that it formerly embraced, for spilling what the town believes to be its darkest secrets. This reaction took me quite by surprise, since I had published Blood Memory without incident, and Blood Memory, to my mind, was far more “dangerous,” in the sense of being about a forbidden topic, than Turning Angel. But what I learned from this was that most people are in such denial about sexual abuse in “good” families that they really don’t allow themselves to think about it, even when confronted by it on the written page.
Turning Angel, on the other hand, is about the secret lives of high school students, and also the phenomenon of sexual affairs between older men and high school girls, which have been going on ever since high schools existed. Some critics—those with their heads buried firmly in the cultural sand---seemed to think that I wrote this novel as some sort of mid-life fantasy, but nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone intimately involved with the running of a high school can tell you that the things I wrote about in Turning Angel are happening all across America.
Conversely, those on the other end of the spectrum, who say, “Things like that were going on thirty years ago, too” are wrong as well. The world has changed profoundly since the Baby Boom/Cold War era, and perhaps most profoundly in the youth culture. The old sexual double standards that separated male and female–the Madonna/whore or good girl/bad girl dichotomy–have largely been erased, or at least have been significantly redefined. These days, a lot of “good girls” do, and not only that, they talk about it quite freely.
Some critics, such as Patrick Anderson of the Washington Post, understood what I was trying to do. Others, like Jennifer Reese, of that august intellectual journal Entertainment Weekly, didn’t have a clue. In comparing Turning Angel to another thriller in which a young blond virgin was murdered, Reese intimated that it’s all right to graphically depict such murder if the victim has no complicity in her own death. But if you depict a young girl as actually drawing violence to her by making bad decisions, you have commited some moral crime. Any cop can tell you that some victims are at least partly to blame for the crimes that befall them. We all have a responsibility to use our common sense to protect ourselves, even high school boys and girls.
That said, I wish the citizens of Natchez, the setting of the novel, would realize once and for all that these novels are indeed fiction. Trying to “figure out” who my characters are has become almost a blood sport, and vicious rumors abound after every publication. The thing is, people in any small town could pin people they know to these archetypes: the greedy doctor, the bored housewife, the precocious high school girl, the angry black politician, the dead civil rights worker. In fact, when I go to Greenwood or Oxford or Jackson, Mississippi, I hear conjecture about who my characters might be in those towns. The simple fact is, my characters are amalgams of many traits and personalities I have observed throughout my life. Natchez makes a wonderful setting for books, but trying to extrapolate real life from my novels is pointless. You won’t find it, except in the sort of meta-reality that is created by the magic of fiction. In that sense, a novel can be “truer” than real life. The Natchez in my novels can, in a sense, be more real than the Natchez I actually inhabit, because empirical reality is too specific; it lacks the mystery and hidden energy that can sustain a fictional reality through three or four successive readings.
So, please enjoy Turning Angel for what it is, a heartfelt and rather shocked portrayal of a part of our culture that most adults know far too little about, and which we should do all we can to understand. The future is in the hands of the children in this novel, and others like them.
Finally, to those Yankees who claim it’s unrealistic that some students of “St. Stephens Prep” in Natchez would be going off to Harvard or Brown in the fall, I just shake my head. Friends from my tiny alma mater attended Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, etc, and I declined opportunities to go to Princeton and similar universities to attend Ole Miss. I know other Mississippians who have done the same. The North has no monopoly on intelligence.
for the issue of race in my novels, I’ll deal with that on another page.
Enjoy the book!
After winning the most dangerous case of his career, prosecutor Penn Cage
decides to remain in his Southern hometown to raise his young daughter in a
safe haven. But nowhere is truly safe -- not from long-buried secrets, or
murder....When the nude body of prep school student Kate Townsend is found
near the Mississippi River, Penn's best friend, Drew Elliott, is desperate
for his counsel. An esteemed family physician, Drew makes a shocking
confession that could put him on death row. Penn will do all he can to
exonerate Drew, but in a town where the gaze of a landmark cemetery statue
-- the Turning Angel -- never looks away, Penn finds himself caught
on the jagged edge of blackmail, betrayal, and deadly violence.
Turning Angel is available in paperback beginning November 21, 2006!
Praise for Turning Angel
"Turning Angel will have you wondering where Greg Iles has been all your
life."
-- USA Today
"Powerful....heartfelt....entirely gripping."
-- The Washington Post