BOOKS A Lonely tale of Lackawanna By Christopher Schobert Gary Zebrun’s Only the Lonely is a perceptive work of modern fiction, a gripping tale of dreams dashed amidst the dust of 9/11. And it takes place in Lackawanna, a place that found itself in the center of a political whirlwind. While the Buffalo native’s second novel—following his widely acclaimed debut, Someone You Know—is not about the Lackawanna Six, the reader cannot help but ponder the links. It’s a truly involving narrative about a teenager named Asim, his father’s dying wish, a passion for cinema, and a country hurtling toward September 11. Zebrun, the Sunday news editor at the Providence Journal in Rhode Island whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New Republic, remains a WNY devotee at heart. I couldn’t help but think about the Lackawanna Six when reading Only the Lonely. Was their story an influence? Is your book, in a sense, a fictionalized version of that story, or is that too literal a reading? I had wanted to write a novel set in Lackawanna for a long time. My father managed a movie house there, the Abbott Theater, and when I was a kid I used to spend weekends—from the matinee to the last show—watching films. I tried to write about the place, but it never worked. A year after 9/11, when the six Yemeni Americans were arrested as a suspected terrorist cell, I couldn’t get Lackawanna out of my head. The Lackawanna Six was the spark that caught. I don’t, however, try to tell their story, even though there are parallels such as the imam who arrives in the city to recruit young men for fundamentalist religious training in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Tarik Zahid, the wannabe terrorist in my novel, is nothing like any of the Lackawanna Six suspects. He’s a loose cannon, a psychotic-loner. The Lackawanna Six, as far as I could gather, were mostly curious and misguided. How do you research a topic like this, and how do you get in the heads of these characters, whose life experiences might be very different from your own? When I got hooked on the idea of writing about two Arab-American brothers—one gay and the other devoted to extreme fundamentalist Islam—I read extensively about young Muslim men. After 9/11, there was a ton of material to go to: books, documentaries, articles in newspapers and magazines, and of course, the Internet. But I needed a way to turn my research into something personal, or as you say, a way to get in the heads of these characters whose experiences are so different from mine. Movies were the way for me to do that. The three main characters in Only the Lonely all interpret their lives through films. Asim Zahid loves John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, Sonia Markovich is fascinated by Charlie Chaplin, and Tarik nearly becomes Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Your new book is very different from your first, Someone You Know. Was changing your topic a conscious effort, or something that developed unexpectedly? Someone You Know was, in a way, an autobiographical novel, even though I was never a newspaper columnist, never married, and never stalked by a serial killer. But I was closeted for about as long as the protagonist, until I was almost forty-five. It was a classic coming-of-age first novel, though in my case, the coming-of-age was about thirty years late, and really a coming out. Shifting topics isn’t conscious; my head, like the heads of many other writers, is just waiting, often longing, for the next new idea to capture me. Pieces of an idea swirl around for a long time, years even, before I think I can begin writing the story. The events of September 11 and the aftermath play an important role in Lonely. From a writer’s standpoint, how did you approach dealing with this day? The events surrounding 9/11 were the most difficult aspect of the novel for me to approach. Writing any fictional account dealing with that day, even now, years later, taxes the imagination with questions like: How do you not exploit it? How do you avoid clichés? Once I chose to write a story that included a wannabe Islamic terrorist from Lackawanna, a perspective on 9/11 was unavoidable. For nearly the entire novel, which begins in February 2001, that day remains in the background in the readers’ minds, since the characters don’t find out about it until the last day of the story. When I did, at the end, write about the events of 9/11, I tried to re-create them factually as they were presented on television, and then I imagined the reactions of Asim, Tarik, and Sonia as they watched the events unfold. Is there a political message you would like readers to take from the book? Or is the message somewhat ambiguous? I think there is a political message, one that was central to me as I was writing the novel, even though I wasn’t always aware of it. Terrorism is mostly a criminal act, not a political one. That kind of violence is fueled by a person’s isolation—from family, from friends, from society. Sometimes an outsider steps over the edge, as Tarik does in the novel, and becomes a psychotic loner. Tarik might attach himself to social or religious issues such as his intolerance of homosexuals or his twisted notion of what Allah expects, but in the end these mean less to him than his unbearable isolation, which becomes a trigger for violence. What role does your past in WNY play in your writing? Clearly, your knowledge of Lackawanna impacted Only the Lonely, and the very first page references the Buffalo News, while the book also refers to Canisius, Doug Flutie, and the Buffalo Sabres. I loved growing up in the Buffalo area. I lived in Cheektowaga, a few blocks from the Buffalo line, until high school, when I moved into an apartment not far from the airport with my mother and Italian grandparents. I graduated from Bishop Neumann High School. I remember gymnasium dances and drinking beer in the woods near the school. I remember seeing Led Zeppelin at the Aud and concerts at Kleinhans Music Hall. I remember wandering around the old UB campus. I remember friends I thought I would have died for. Buffalo was that kind of place for a kid. Those emotions cemented in childhood are a big part of my imagination. And years after I left, I lamented the bad luck of the Buffalo Bills and Scott Norwood—the only others outside of Buffalo who understood the heartbreak were Viking fans. What’s next for you? Will you continue writing novels? I just finished a novel about a violinist in the Buffalo Philharmonic who leaves his wife and twin children to search for the Catholic priest who molested him for nearly ten years when he was a kid. There are all kinds of stories in Buffalo. And how often are you able to return to WNY? Do you still have family here? What are some of your favorite things to see and do in the area? I’m sad to say I haven’t been back to Buffalo since my grandparents died and my mother moved to be near my brother and his family in New Jersey. That was more than fifteen years ago. But by the time this interview appears, I will have been back to read from my novel at Talking Leaves. I will have also seen some old friends I should have seen long before this reunion. Why haven’t I returned? I don’t know. I guess because I’ve been going back to Buffalo in my imagination ever since the day I left—thirty-five years ago. Christopher Schobert is a Spree associate editor. SUBSCRIBE NOW Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top