‘Atticus’: A Father’s Search For Understanding Of Son

Here are two sides of Atticus, the title character in Ron Hansen’s new novel:

Having traveled to Mexico to claim the body of his dead son, Scott, the 67-year-old rancher-turned-oilman sits in the kitchen of Scott’s house, talking to the woman Scott once loved.

She has just revealed to him the contents of his son’s suicide note. “No one is to blame,” the man had written.

“Weighed low with grief, all Atticus could manage was, ‘We didn’t raise him to - ‘And then he fell silent and held a hand to his eyes and cried.”

Some 70 pages later, a little more than halfway through the 247-page book, Atticus is walking on a beach where he is approached by a young American panhandler.

“The kid falsely smiled and in a soft Southern accent asked, ‘Say friend, would you happen to be able to maybe help me out?’

“A handful of rings and studs glinted from his ears, and there was a kind of silver tack in his nose. ‘You need pliers?’ Atticus asked.”

This is Atticus Cody, a throwback kind of modern man whose attitudes have more in common with the old West than they do with a world where MTV dictates fashions and talk shows mandate morality.

Yet Atticus is no Wyatt Earp. He can let himself cry. Even in front of a woman.

“He’s based somewhat on my grandfather,” Hansen said recently in a phone interview from his office at Santa Clara (Calif.) University. Born in the 1860s, Hansen’s grandfather is long dead.

“But I grew up in awe of him, and writing about him is a way of keeping him alive in my memory,” Hansen said. “He had all the qualities that I admired in Atticus - his loyalty, his steadfastness, his nobility and his integrity.”

Hansen, 49, has written five novels in all, four of which have been published. He’s also the author of a short story collection and a children’s book.

His settings, not to mention themes, have ranged from the old West and outlaws to Vietnam and soldiers accompanying corpses on their long trips home. Perhaps his most noted book, “Mariette in Ecstasy,” reflects Hansen’s lifelong absorption with Catholicism: It involves a nun whose turn-of-the-century life is disrupted when her hands and feet begin to bleed (a condition known as stigmata).

“I’m just intrigued by a lot of different subjects, and I have to worry about keeping myself engaged in the material,” Hansen said. “The only way I can do that is if I’m curious or if I’ve presented different challenges for myself.”

The challenges in “Atticus,” a National Book Award finalist, are obvious. One concerns the book’s style. On the surface a study of father-son alienation, it plays out like a murder mystery.

Why the reversion to genre-type writing?

“My experience is that people have these awful things happen in their lives,” Hansen explained. “And at first, it just seems like a calamity. And then it feels fishy. … And for the longest time people have a hard time accepting the fact that there might have been a murder instead of a suicide.”

Then again, he added, “I think part of the novelist’s responsibility is to entertain, so I was looking for an entertaining medium to get my point across.”

The other challenge Hansen faced was in going against prevailing attitudes, which seem to say that in any parent-child conflict, the child is automatically right.

Especially when we’re dealing with fathers.

“I think that the father has gotten a really bad name in literature lately,” Hansen said. “It seems almost as if you can’t write about a father unless you make him a real jerk.”

Thus Hansen presents Atticus, who bears the same name as the gentle, all-knowing, lawyer/father figure of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and who though “curmudgeonly at times, mostly is a person who just comes straight at you.”

“He is who he is,” Hansen said. “I like that about him.”

It is this mix of attitudes - the rancher-oilman who rises at dawn to ride his range and the grieving father determined to plumb the depths of his troubled son’s life - that provides “Atticus” with its narrative drive.

That, of course, and Hansen’s prose skill.

Those skills were honed during his youth in Omaha, Neb., where he was graduated from Creighton University. They were further developed at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where he studied under John Cheever and John Irving and with the likes of T. Coraghessan Boyle.

After living the nomadic life of novelist/writing instructor, Hansen settled in northern California a few years ago. He now teaches creative writing at Santa Clara.

And one of the lessons he teaches, no doubt, is the same one he used in crafting “Atticus”: trust your memory.

The novel, he says, came from a blending of several occurrences: a summer teaching gig in Mexico; his uncle’s vain search for a brother’s killer; while in Mexico, watching an “old cattleman walking from one posada (house) to the next showing a picture of his daughter, saying, ‘Have you seen this girl?’

“So I just combined a lot of different experiences and put them in a Cuisinart and turned them into a novel,” Hansen said. “That’s basically how I come up with all my subjects. I just read something that’s terribly intriguing and I just have to write about it.”

As for “Atticus,” Hansen has converted the novel into a screenplay, and he’s negotiating to make it into a movie. Robert Duvall’s name has come up in conversations.

And just in case you wondered, curmudgeonly Atticus ends up handing a $5 bill to the multi-earringed panhandler mentioned above.

He has several sides to his character. But like the father we all wanted, Hansen’s Atticus is no jerk.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: Ron Hansen will read from his novel “Atticus” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Auntie’s Bookstore