IN MEDICAL THRILLER, BEWARE THE CURE
By Elisabeth Townsend, Globe Correspondent
Boston Globe, MA
June 15 2006
The idea for "Flashback," Gary Braver’s latest suspense novel, occurred
to him when he was visiting his Aunt Nancy in a Watertown nursing home,
where she was dying from Alzheimer’s disease.
"At one point, something very creepy happened," Braver said. One minute
"she was kind of babbling incoherently," and the next "she began to
talk baby talk . . . in that high, thin, violin-wire, little-girl
voice intonation. Then she began to talk in Armenian to her mother,"
he said. But her "mother died before she was 5, so in her head she
was 80 years back."
Suddenly, he had the idea for the book that became "Flashback." What
if there were a new wonder drug that restores lost memory? Who
wouldn’t want a cure for Alzheimer’s disease? Some of the patients
in Braver’s newest novel might have second thoughts about it. They
are the guinea pigs in a tale in which a cure for Alzheimer’s is
found but has an awful side effect that causes either blissful or
terrorizing flashbacks.
His novel has just won the first fiction "Honor Award" for a medical
thriller from the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Boston Globe
reviewer Hallie Ephron called "Flashback" "a thoughtful book with
an intriguing premise and a sprawling plot, pulled together with a
twist at the end" from an author who "has made a career of spinning
be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios."
In addition to literary awards, two of Braver’s books have been
optioned for movies. He is a vivid storyteller in novels and in person.
"I’m very cinematic, only because I was brought up on movies," said
Braver, who lived down the street from a theater in Hartford. "I
see the movie inside my skull, and I just kind of take dictation. In
writing, you’re always doing psychodramas in your head."
A wiry man with curly, salt-and-pepper hair, his vibrant energy belies
the stereotype of the middle-aged tenured college professor.
"The first 18 years of my life" were in Hartford, Braver said,
"and then I went to college and never went back."
He was the only child of an Armenian refugee family. His parents
divorced when he was 5 years old, so Braver didn’t see much of his
foundry-worker father. His mother, the most educated person in his
family, encouraged him to read and excel in school. "Some outside
folks gave me scholarships" for poor but bright students heading into
science, said Braver, who majored in physics at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute.
During his sophomore year, Braver realized he was having more fun
writing for the newspaper, yearbook, and a humor magazine he founded
than doing physics. But he said the turning point came when he studied
with the late James Hensel, "a fabulous English professor" who became
a mentor to Braver. "There were five of us who were literary nerds,"
elaborated Braver. "We wanted to talk about literature after class and
so he brought the five of us up to his office after hours . . . and
we talked about books."
He said he wanted "to grow up to be just like him."
In 1970, after completing his doctorate in English, Braver joined
the Northeastern University faculty to teach linguistics. When
his English department chair sent out an "SOS looking for jazzy new
courses . . . to boost the body count in enrollments in the electives,"
Braver suggested a science-fiction course.
"They gagged, and they said, `This is not real literature;’ it was
kitty litter stuff," said Braver, who as a child had "read science
fiction by the pound."
But he persuaded them by naming such iconic authors as Mary Shelley
and Aldous Huxley, eventually filling his class with 600 students.
Braver is on sabbatical and scrambling to finish "Skin Deep," a
psychological thriller about the dangers of women’s cosmetic surgery,
the second of a three-book, biomedical thriller contract.
He described thrillers as a lucrative if unpredictable genre. But
"textbooks pay the bills," explained Braver, who is finishing the
11th edition of one his four college composition textbooks written
under his legal name, Gary Goshgarian. For his recent fiction, Braver
adopted a pen name that is a translation of his Armenian grandfather’s
first name, Garabed, meaning "braver person or leader."
A disciplined author who believes writer’s block is a cop out, Braver
begins a typical day with a cup of coffee and works either at his
desk or in the Robbins Library in Arlington. He regularly puts in
15- to 16-hour days, but takes breaks to dine with his wife in local
restaurants, such as Flora near his longtime Arlington home.
Whether Braver is writing novels or teaching his favorite courses —
modern bestsellers and horror fiction — he seems to have an unerring
instinct for compelling plots.
Always looking for the what-if story, Braver doesn’t always find
his ideas so close to home. He discovered the scheme for his first
novel, "Atlantis Fire" (1980), while scuba diving around a Phoenician
shipwreck near Mallorca, Spain.
"I had no idea we’d stumbled upon a major black-market operation
selling ancient treasures to museums.
"It scared the hell out of me."
And now he does that to his readers.
Gary Braver will sign his books from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Barnes
& Noble in Burlington. Authors Among Us is an occasional series about
writers of distinction in the northwest suburbs.