Home » Reading & Literature » Contemporary Fiction » Cris Mazza Explains It All

Cris Mazza Explains It All

© Robert Powers

Cris Mazza defines fiction as "a communication device that works more like a mirror than a speech." In her recent novel, Dog People, Mazza examines the similarities between canines and their human relations. With humor and often exquisite writing, Mazza writes about people that, despite quirky attributes, seem real.

The characters in Dog People all really believe they are saying exactly what they mean, she says. "This was crucial to me: every character is, in his or her own way, earnest about what they're trying to do. And yet, from another character's point of view (or from some readers' points of view) sometimes the characters may seem deceptive, sneaky, or manipulative. . . . But I don't believe any of us are 100 percent honest in how we represent either our motives for current action or in how we represent events from the past."

For Mazza, "There's probably no such thing as objective, pure, direct communication." She's an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As such she's learned "there's a different way of communicating in each different situation and 'saying exactly what you mean' actually means something different in each arena, from one-on-one in the hall to faculty meetings to classroom discussions."

In the novel, her seventh, Mazza says the character named Morgan encourages his wife to experiment with a lesbian relationship: "His expressed motive may be for her emotional welfare, and he may even have that motive, too, but obviously he has some other motives that he does not want to express to her nor admit to himself." When another character in the book "tries to break from his wife slowly so she won't feel the pain, he honestly believes this is the best way, even though it causes far worse repercussions for everyone than if he'd made a clean break."

In calling fiction a mirror device, Mazza says she finds out about her characters as she plays and live with them. "Afterwards," she says, "this 'message' is contained in the reader's similar experience 'living alongside' and watching the characters." Mazza says the mirror device occurs in different degrees to different people. Reactions range from embarrassed laughter to indignant rejection. She says one reader complained, "These people are lunatics."

Dog People contains six principal characters. She says, "Not all of the characters will get to any kind of turning point. These are 'lost characters,' and they exist in real life as well . . . people who go on claiming victimhood or who deny their complicity in their failures and problems. Perhaps the lost characters in Dog People are more lost than anyone I know . . . but how can I be sure? In the book, the 'dog people' are the characters who arrived at their moments of honest assessment, some more forcefully than others. The non-dog people, by the end of the book, are isolated and have either refused to look honestly at themselves or didn't know the mirror was available."

The copyright of the article Cris Mazza Explains It All in Contemporary Fiction is owned by . Permission to republish Cris Mazza Explains It All in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.