Sibling relationships are ripe with conflict, and Gordon Chaplin channels that in his new novel Paraíso

About ‘Paraíso’

Peter and Wendy—their mother chose the names—felt as close as twins, despite their difference in age. As teens, they fled their gothic Philadelphia home in the family station wagon and headed for Mexico, only to be discovered sleeping in the car on the banks of the Mississippi, in Huck Finn country. Now, many years later, estranged by an apparent betrayal as profound as their family’s disfunction, the two live separate lives, Peter as an editor in New York, Wendy as an edgy sports photographer with a taste for risk With a new book out and an invitation to Los Cabos, she drives the old Mercedes inherited from their father down Baja California, finally completing the trip begun twenty years earlier.

But when the engine fails near a small town named Paraíso—Paradise–she finds herself trapped in a dangerous affair with her psychopathic mechanic and almost inexorablybecomes witness to a vicious murder. Meanwhile, in New York, Peter watches the Twin Towers fall on a beautiful September day and realizes it’s time to find his sister and to finally make peace with her. A noirish tale reminiscent of David Lynch or the Coen brothers, Paraíso traces the journey from a mother’s dark secret to a place where love, even perfect love, is possible.

Gordon Chaplin on siblings and their role in his book ‘Paraíso’

I grew up in the fifties, alongside America’s first reality TV show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. I was about the same age as Ricky Nelson, the couple’s younger son, aged 12 when the show opened. You’d think that he and his older brother David would have been my role model siblings as they negotiated various crises of the times, such as getting a date for the prom and asking Dad for the car keys. They lived in a modest two-story Colonial, and a lot of the action happened in the kitchen where Harriet presided with her apron, pitchers of lemonade and plates of brownies. The genial Ozzie, in his alpaca cardigan, solved problems with a wink and a smile. Ike was president and all was well with the world.

Fast forward about 50 years. Now we have Keeping up with the Kardashians. Things are a little different. The Kardashian sisters live in a mansion, drive fancy cars and hang out with the rich and famous…in fact they are desperate for celebrity and they’ve discovered that to be one all you have to do is convincingly act the part. You can be famous just by being famous.

But there are some striking similarities to the world of Ozzie and Harriet. In spite of their eccentric, flamboyant, often bizarre lifestyle, the Kardashian family stays close, the most important thing in their lives. Family problems always get resolved. They might be obsessive climbers, but they’re in it together. The happy family formula is a gold mine. Keeping up with the Kardashians has lasted almost as long as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. And it’s still going.

I used to envy the safe, secure world of Ozzie and Harriet, but I knew my own world wasn’t like that at all. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I became a writer: to try to come to grips with the strange things I’d grown up with. Some wise person once compared a writer to an oyster that finds something very irritating and painful inside its shell and begins to coat it with nacre to protect itself. The irritating grain of sand or whatever eventually becomes a priceless pearl.

Writing seriously about sibling relationships is a long way from the Kardashians and Ozzie and Harriet. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” wrote Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. In other words, only unhappy families make interesting subject matter for a serious writer.
Sam Shepard has written some great plays about siblings. So has Tennessee Williams. Jonathan Franzen writes wonderful books about them. None of them are very happy. Some are actually tragic.

The key thing to keep in mind about writing on sibling relationships is that every gesture, every word of the protagonists resonates through their whole lives, from the moment it’s uttered right back to their first memory. The history of the family comes into play all the time, so the writer has always to be aware of the whole complex web. It’s really hard.

Plus, it’s almost impossible to keep your own family experience out of such writing. Tennessee Williams famously had a sister who was eventually lobotomized; she appears in many of his works, most notably The Glass Menagerie, which made his name. Who knows what his sister would have said about her brother’s portrayal of her if she’d been able to comment? Most siblings resent their portraits, and some vicious family feuds have erupted for this reason.

In the end, though, the drama of sibling relationships is, after romantic love, easily the most intense available to a writer. It’s universal: almost everybody in the world has experienced it in one form or another. There’s love, hate, competition, misunderstanding, rescue, banishment and a whole raft of other red hot feelings. And it’s all there in your own home, just waiting for you to put it into words.

My new novel Paraíso features just such a complicated sibling relationship. A brother and sister, two years apart, suffer a Gothic childhood in Philadelphia dominated by their probably psychopathic mother. The mother has somehow seriously abused the sister but the brother refuses to believe that anything is wrong, even though he and his sister are very close. He’s got other problems.

They run away from home together, headed for Mexico, but never make it. The sister ends up in a mental institution where she has an affair with the director. The mother finds out, and tells her that her brother ratted. This is the beginning of a 20-year estrangement between the siblings.

So the central problem of the book is how to resolve this estrangement. I’ve chosen to do it though a dramatic rescue in Mexico where the villain gets entombed in honey, a kind of Coen Brothers south of the border. The brother and sister are named Peter and Wendy, so it’s also the dark side of Peter Pan.

Why did I choose action and violence over thought and reflection to resolve the sibling relationship? Because only through action and violence could I access the necessary force.

About the author

Gordon Chaplin is the author of the novel Joyride and several works of non-fiction, including Dark Wind: A Survivors Tale of Love and Loss: Full Fathom Five: Ocean Warming and a Father’s Legacy, and Fever Coast Log: at Sea in Central America. A former journalist for Newsweek, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Post, he has worked on marine conservation with the Baja group Niparaja and since 2003 has been a research associate with the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He lives with his wife Sarah and young daughter Rosie in New York City and Hebron, NY, and is the father of two older daughters, Diana and Julia.