Charles Martin. Unwritten. Center Street, 2013.

Unwritten is a terrific book. I would recommend it to anyone above the middle school (i.e., young adult) level. I will be thinking about it for a while, I am sure.

Like Tigers in Red Weather, one should not judge this book by its cover. The cover has a couple walking on a tropical beach. All I could think of are those stereotyped personal advertisements: “Likes quiet walks on the beach.” It is not like that at all. To call it a romance is to do it a real injustice.

Our narrator calls himself Sunday. He is a complete recluse. It is clearly deliberate. He lives most of the time on an island in the Everglades. To a great degree he lives off the land. Before he was a recluse, he worked with charter fishermen, so he knows when and where to fish. His island provides him with a variety of tropical fruits.

We know, though, there is more to his story. Once in a while he drives north to Jacksonville to visit a hospital. There he secretly gives gifts to children who are in the hospital for a long term. He signs his gifts “Pirate Pete.”

The one human being he keeps in touch with, at least somewhat, is Father Steady, a priest at a Miami church. Father Steady has his own troubled backstory. He is a veteran of World War II and was a medic after the Allies had begun to re-take France. Tending the wounded and dead during the Battle of the Bulge affected him greatly. One is reminded of some of the trauma witnessed by Hemingway as an ambulance driver in World War I.

Father Steady enlists Sunday’s help one evening. He says a parishioner of his may need some help. We know she has recently gone to the father for confession. (Father Steady keeps his confessional confidential.)

This parishioner is not an ordinary person. She lives on the top floor of one of the most exclusive condos in Miami Beach. The security guards, all former military, let the father in, but Sunday has to sneak in. Father Steady has keys to her apartment. He lets himself in, and they arrive just in time to rescue the woman from a suicide attempt.

This woman is Katie Quinn, the Ice Queen, the unparalleled star of stage and screen at the time. Her recent film contracts were in the seven figure range.

Father Steady is not trying to be a matchmaker. He just knows that Sunday has lived off the grid for ten years and knows how to do it. If Katie wants or needs to do something similar, Sunday can show her.

Katie manages to stage her death and cause a Princess Diana style mourning. Sunday does not generally pay attention to the news and has never heard of Katie Quinn, but even he is struck by the media attention her death attracts. This reviewer delivered newspapers back in 1962, and I recall that for two weeks there was virtually nothing on the front page but news about the death of Marilyn Monroe. Katie was like that.

Sunday is our storyteller. Gradually we learn a little about his backstory. Why did he go off the grid? We get some hints from the name of his two boats: Gone Fiction and Jodie.

And we learn a little more about Katie, too, as her escape takes the two of them to a remote village in France where she owns some property. Sunday—like most who read his story—begins to see that Katie is out of his class, not that there is much of a hint of romance in the story. There really is not. Unwritten would probably make a great film, but no doubt the Hollywood treatment would turn it into a love story.

Instead, it is a story of redemption, and one of effective literary quality. It is told well. There is a subtle but significant use of symbols—rope is one recurring image. Another are the caves in France. The underground labyrinth, some of which is used for storing wine, suggests that both of our protagonists have to dig deep in order to get real.

And the psychology is real.

When Sunday sees the near-dead Katie and is told who she is, he realizes that, as Kipling tells us, fame is an impostor.

Man, or woman, is not made to be worshipped. We are not physically cut out for it. Life in the spotlight, or on the pedestal, at the top of the world, was a lonely, singular, desolate, soul-killing place. (42)

Since the story is told by Sunday, if anything romantic develops between Sunday and Katie, he is not telling. He is also not telling much of his story, but the reader begins to realize that he has to do so as much as Katie does.

I give credit to the author, if not to his creation Mr. Sunday, that he exercises some self-control. Self-control is such a necessity these days, and it seems so few want to use it. “Be yourself”; “Be free,” people say. But to really be free, we have to handle our impulses. It is good for us. It is better for others. We hear the broken, exploited actress tell us:

“I’m on display for all the world to see and show them this perfect image, so what…so a bunch of people can make money off their wanting to be like me. But those girls…they shouldn’t want to be me. I want to tell them all that the guys…once they’ve had you, all they want to do is brag that they did. They want to know they conquered me. But so what? What have they gained? Certainly not my heart. And more importantly, what, or what else, have they lost? Have I lost? Is there a limit? I mean, to how much we can lose?” (213, ellipses in the original)

Where are the real men who can control themselves?

We learn at some point that Sunday was an orphan and shuttled among foster homes and orphanages. Here is his metaphor for what that was like:

Being an orphan is illogical. The brain never makes sense of it. Ever. It shelves it in the “miscellaneous” file. It’s like a book with no place on the shelf, forever relegated to the cart that circles the library, never stopping to slide between two worn covers. (235)

Unwritten also tells us a little about writing and how to write, and not only by demonstrating what good writing should be like. This reminded me of the novel The Family Corleone. The edition of that Godfather prequel that I read had a great essay by Mario Puzo titled “The Making of The Godfather.” In that essay, Puzo tells us what it was like not only to write a best-selling novel, but what it was like working for publishing companies and working in Hollywood. Like Martin, Puzo expressed sympathy for actors and actresses like Miss Quinn most of whom “are badly exploited by their producers, studios, and agents and assorted hustlers.”

Unwritten does not go into as much detail about the writing experience, but it includes a brief afterword titled “Doc Snakeoil.” It reminds us of what it takes to make good writing and how important truly constructive criticism can be. The afterword itself can make reading the book worth it. Don’t skip it.