He's turned the Stuart case into fiction

By David Mehegan, Globe Staff  |  July 11, 2006

NORTHAMPTON -- Anthony Giardina remembers hearing about Charles Stuart's suicide in an NPR newscast.

``Instantly I thought, `Grief. He did it out of grief.' And I felt pity for him, because I had believed his story completely. And then as we learned the truth, the novelist part of me didn't want to let go. The notion of lying successfully for so long, how do you do that? How do you go through your daily life having constructed a lie and living it out? I started thinking, this is a story I want to write, not because I can say anything about Charles Stuart, but because I want to invent a Charles Stuart."

Nearly 17 years later, the invented Stuart is named Billy Mogavero, the protagonist of Giardina's new novel, ``White Guys."

Charles Stuart, 29, fatally shot his pregnant wife Oct. 23, 1989, in Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood, after the couple had attended a childbirth class. He also wounded himself, then told police the shooter was a black man.

Attempts to save the baby failed. After an intensive police dragnet, a suspect was arrested. The following January, when police unraveled the truth, Stuart leaped off the Tobin Bridge into the icy harbor.

Countless novels have been based on historic events, from Tolstoy's ``War and Peace" to Joe Klein's ``Primary Colors." But not many have adapted notorious recent crimes, in such close detail, as Giardina has done in ``White Guys." Lest anyone not know about the background, publisher Farrar Straus & Giroux's promotional copy explicitly calls attention to it.

``White Guys" is a story of four male friends from Winship, a down-at-the-heels coastal town that resembles Revere. Three of them get married and have respectable middle-class lives in higher-toned towns. The fourth, Billy Mogavero, is tough and a little wild, and though he marries eventually, he can't transcend his roots. The story is narrated by Tim O'Kane, one of the foursome, who lives in a lovely home in a lovely suburb with his lovely wife and two lovely daughters. Tim is ambivalent about the life he has chosen, and can't break his links with the tormented Billy.

For a writer, the blending of fact and fiction is a challenge. ``It can be quite tricky," said Cambridge-based novelist Margot Livesey. ``You're encouraging readers to map your fiction onto the real world in a specific way, while not writing a history or memoir. It can be dislocating for the reader, either because events are followed too faithfully or the departure from events is dislocating."

With its wealth of accurate Boston details, including housing projects, restaurants, newspapers, and a certain high bridge, ``White Guys" parallels the Stuart case in gross outline. On the level of character, scene, detail, and dialogue, it's completely different: a story of marriage, class, loyalty, and personal ambition. However, as Giardina researched police investigatory techniques, prosecutorial practice, and Boston's social strata, he found that many people assumed he was writing about the real Charles Stuart.

``People would want to get me in touch with people who knew things about the real story," he said. ``This one knew Stuart's brother, or `I can get you in touch with so-and-so,' and I was saying, `No, I'm not telling the Stuart story.' I'm going to invent my version of this murder, and it's going to connect to themes I want to write about. I'm no longer interested in Charles Stuart."

Raised in Waltham and living in Northampton for the past 23 years, Giardina, 55, has had a busy writing career, but fiction was the second act. He went to Fordham University, graduated in 1973, and stayed in New York to be a playwright and actor. His seven plays, including his most recent , ``Custody of the Eyes," have been produced in major cities, and he has taught writing at several colleges. He and his wife have two daughters.

Though he always loved fiction, writing his own ``seemed a step I didn't know how to take," Giardina said in an interview at his home. ``I read and read, but I thought writing novels was the grown - up occupation and writing plays the boy's occupation." Then, in the early 1980s, he unexpectedly unearthed a memory of his Italian immigrant father, an insurance salesman, who went to visit a Lexington widow whose husband, a farmer, had killed himself.

``I remembered him telling my mother about this," Giardina said. ``He was very depressed about it. I sat down and started writing a story. It's about an immigrant insurance salesman who goes to see a widow whose husband had committed suicide. That was the factual basis, but as I was writing, what came to me was a sense of what my father's life must have been like, coupled with the notion of what I was inventing." It became his first novel, ``Men With Debts," in 1984. He has since published three novels and a collection of short stories.

Until now, none of Giardina's fiction has been based on an event that was already seared in the public mind. Other writers have used such a model, while some shun the practice.

Novelist Ward Just of Martha's Vineyard, who has written 14 books, said he has avoided ``trucking around with other people's lives, imagining what is going on with somebody, whether a friend or someone you read about in the news. Seems to me you're better off creating your own people, setting up your own universe."

Duxbury novelist Liza Ward based her 2004 novel, ``Outside Valentine," on the murder of her grandparents in 1958 by serial killer Charles Starkweather. The novel's main character is based on her orphaned father.

``I could depart from the facts and make up my own characters," Ward said, ``but it was complicated, because people familiar with the case would say, `Is this the way it happened?' and I would say, `No, I made my own artful truth.' I almost got confused at times between what was true and not true."

With some writers, the confusion is not accidental, and readers get sucked into it. The most notorious example occurred in January with James Frey's supposed memoir, ``A Million Little Pieces," which proved to be largely invented. Many readers didn't care; the book continued to sell. Today's saturation media coverage of notorious crimes, and the TV dramas that soon follow (such as the 1990 ``Good Night, Sweet Wife," based on the Stuart case), has conditioned some readers, and tempted some writers, to think of fiction as a dramatized version of reality.

Adding to the confusion, some say, are such novels as Michael Crichton's ``State of Fear," which presents global warming as a hoax perpetrated by radical environmentalists, and Dan Brown's ``The Da Vinci Code," whose historical accuracy has been much debated.

But for Anthony Giardina, there's no confusion of fact and art.

``I hear frequently that people want factual things from a novel," he said. ``I was talking to a novelist who said, `I'm writing a novel that's going to be market-based, because people want to find things out.' For me, the pleasure of reading fiction is, I'm going to tap into someone else's dream, it's going to take me someplace unrecognizable, as opposed to reading a novel so I can learn about coverups in the Catholic Church."

The horror on Mission Hill was long ago and far away, and Giardina says the man who committed it is not to be found in ``White Guys." ``I don't even like looking at pictures of Charles Stuart anymore," Giardina said. When he sees them, he thinks, `` `It's not about you. I know what Billy Mogavero looks like.' "

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.