David Payne

Reviewing David Payne's 1993 novel, *Ruin Creek, Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe wrote: "David Payne* may not be the most publicized American novelist homing in on 40, but he is certainly the most gifted." Still unpublicized – though no longer under forty – Payne lives on a remote mountainside in rural Vermont with his wife, their daughter, and a Plott hound named Leon, a reformed biter prone to relapse under stress. Payne's youthful sojourn in the Atlantic scallop fishery surfaces in his latest novel, *Behold This Dreamer Cometh, due from Doubleday in the summer of 2000. Payne's protagonist, Joe Madden, is a cultural anthropologist from Duke practicing ethnography in Little Roanoke, an isolated village on the North Carolina Outer Banks. High up on Joe's list of problems: falling in love. Having charted the vicissitudes of Joe's parents' marriage in Ruin Creek*, Payne says he felt compelled to know how the son would navigate – or fail to navigate – the same shoals his parents foundered on. Lumberjack? Oh, well, another story.

		The following is an excerpt from chapter one of David Payne's first novel, Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street My first exposure to him was through a photograph, one the monks found tucked in with the wadding of the pillow I lay on when I came to them. . .
His crop of dark hair bristles straight up on his head, tilted to the side as he looks into the camera, flashing a quizzical smile for the folks back home, or for the photographer, or for me – a smile I could never quite pin down, but which nevertheless (and maybe for that very reason) charms me fatally. Perhaps the ambiguity results less from the smile than from the dark glasses that loom above it, concealing the expression of his eyes. They’re the kind worn by aviators and policemen, with the black-green tear-shaped lens. The cool, anonymous melancholy of those glasses above the puckish smile – the one a modern mask that seems to hide some immemorial, standard human suffering; the other, the smile, largely innocent, perhaps incapable of the suffering the mask implies – the juxtaposition always struck me as impertinent, almost monstrous . . . and at the same time, wonderful. How can I explain? Years of lingering over it with an orphan’s hungry fondness worked my longing to a strained, exquisite pitch. When I gazed too long and too hard at that photograph, my imagination grew degenerate with surfeit, dreaming of him. But dreaming was my only recourse. For I never saw my father. Except once . . . perhaps . . . at the very end, after it was too late, standing on the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange. But that is the end of my story, not the beginning.

		Early From the Dance Payne is currently collaborating with his wife, the writer Stacy Huntington, on a screenplay of Payne's popular second novel, Early From the Dance, the story of a successful Manhattan artist who has an intense encounter with the portion of his past that he changed his life to lose. For details, read Stacy Huntington's article *"Translating" a Novel into Film*.