SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Light duties on a private island where he can spend a few weeks swimming and sailing with his young daughter, Natalie, who lives with her mother after Nick's divorce. But who owns that island? Who's even there? And what's set off when Natalie is invited on a playdate? "The Girl In The Red Dress" (ph) is the new novel from Frank Huyler, who is a writer and ER doctor in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He joins us now. Thanks so much for being with us.
FRANK HUYLER: Well, thank you for having me.
SIMON: Things are off from the outset. On the flight to the island, Nick notices they're not going where they were told.
HUYLER: That's right. So they're told that they're going to the South Pacific. But on the way, Nick, who is a experienced sailor and a navigator, realizes that they're actually not going to the South Pacific. They're going to the Indian Ocean. He can see the stars out of the side of the plane, out of the window, and he has a watch and he's a - sort of a competent person and realizes that their geography is off.
SIMON: But he's with his daughter. There's not much choice, is there?
HUYLER: There's no choice at that point. No. He's made the commitment to take her on this - what he thinks is going to be a vacation and an opportunity to reconnect with her. He's been somewhat distanced from her - can't see her as much as he would like to and realizes, as he's getting older, that he needs to. And so this is a very important moment for him.
SIMON: I gather you found the inspiration for this book while you were on a trip from New Mexico to Monaco.
HUYLER: Yes, right. So right after the pandemic, the restrictions were lifted. I worked throughout the pandemic in the hospital, and my son and I went on a trip where we drove around Italy. We rented a car, we drove around Italy and we descended to Monaco and saw all these absurd future yachts or superyachts in the harbor with crewmen aboard, in some cases, and the contrast between that and the experience of the pandemic was really just profound. I mean, it kind of crystallized so many issues for me. I mean, I'd known them about them before. Nonetheless, this was a kind of a singular moment. I mean, that was the genesis of the novel.
SIMON: Claude, who was Nick's friend, who's gotten him this job, tells his daughter, Natalie, she's a princess and gives her a red dress and tells her that her big responsibility on that island will be to play. That sounds pretty promising, doesn't it?
HUYLER: It does. And I think it was an example of a - sort of an innocent intention on the part of Claude that created this sort of cascade of events that became far larger. And, in many ways, the story is about that. It's a small story, an intimate story I hope that speaks to larger issues that are very present in the world around us now.
SIMON: Such as?
HUYLER: Such as technology, such as the way that hierarchies are reinforced, the sort of cruelty of systems, the way that so many are oppressed in different forms. There's the extravagant forms of oppression, and then there's the intimate, kind of quiet ones where people are afraid for their jobs, are afraid of being outsourced, have to conform to these sort of monolithic systems and are seen as sort of faceless cogs in the machine. And I think this is something that is pervasive in the United States and many other places as well.
SIMON: Yeah. And that brings up the subject of the glasses. The staff never see the people on the island. And they have to wear these glasses. What are they?
HUYLER: The glasses, I think, are sort of metaphoric, but they're also very real. I mean, we're seeing them right now, you know, coming out. They're being advertised. And what the glasses do is they accentuate or change reality and introduce distance. But more specifically, they blur the faces of the employers. You can't even see the faces of those who are in power.
SIMON: We'd like to ask you to read a section where Nick has an observation about the limits of the glasses.
HUYLER: Sure.
(Reading) They were the future nonetheless, and they spoke to the inevitabilities ahead in the years to come where nothing could be believed and nothing could be seen clearly as a result. I suppose, when I thought about it, I understood that history was about to change, that no one understood where the story was going, no one at all, that new powers had been released into the world, that soon truth and fiction would merge into one, that the glasses would creep from the dark into the day and make all distinctions unclear. And though the promise they held was unrealized and their distortions were only crude beginnings, already, their power had been grasped.
SIMON: Are we that far away?
HUYLER: I don't think so. I don't know. I mean, what do you think?
SIMON: I've never had on a pair of those glasses, but I do know increasingly things you say, things you see on the web and not just on the web, you have to double and triple check. They're not believable.
HUYLER: Yeah. I think this is a fundamental sort of questions of what you can believe, what you see online, what's real, what's not. And it creates kind of a collective anxiety and uncertainty that pervades the public sphere.
SIMON: You're an emergency physician at a public hospital in New Mexico. Are there compelling stories that come through the doors every day?
HUYLER: There are enormously compelling stories. And one of the things you see as a physician, or as anybody working in a hospital like this, is you get a sense of what people are actually going through in America. You don't have the luxury of detachment, and it gives you a certain perspective on society. I mean, emergency rooms, in a sense, are kind of like canaries in the coal mine of society.
SIMON: People who run this island, do they run the world, too, or do they create their own world?
HUYLER: Perhaps a mix of both. I mean, one of the intents of the book is to not be clear who actually runs the island. You don't really know. I don't want to give things away too much, but that there's this sense that there are powerful forces and powerful figures and structures that are controlling things, but we don't really have insight into them. We don't really know them. We don't even know the information they're using to make choices, and the fact that the bulk of the population simply is in ignorance.
SIMON: Frank Huyler. His new novel, "The Red Dress." Thank you so much for being with us.
HUYLER: Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on your show. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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