The connected life

Ben Sherwood has the habit of taking the most ordinary circumstances and turning them into extraordinary events. This morning, for instance, the 40-year-old author is at the Farmers Market, in a booth at Du-par’s, eating an omelet and drinking a cup of decaf, but in his head, he’s time traveling, moving back and forth between the present and the furthest reaches of his past.

Although he is here to discuss his second novel, “The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud,” he’s equally compelled by the moment’s synchronicity. “I first started coming to Du-par’s,” Sherwood says, laughing, “when I was 1. My grandparents lived near here, and the Farmers Market was where everybody came. My grandmother used to take us here for blueberry pie. There was a pony ride nearby. So it was blueberry pie, a pony ride and then the roller coaster when I got big enough.”

The world is full of unexpected connections if we know how and where to look. Certainly, that’s the message at the heart of his fiction, which deals primarily with the play of the miraculous in everyday life. In “The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud” (Bantam), he writes about a groundskeeper in a Marblehead, Mass., cemetery who has the uncanny ability to see, and interact with, the dead.

Sherwood’s first novel, “The Man Who Ate the 747,” revolves around a Nebraska farmer who eats a jumbo jet piece by piece to prove himself to the woman he loves. In both books, reality is something of a flexible construction, where the inexplicable not only can happen but often does.

“The hopeful, optimistic side of my personality,” Sherwood explains, “wants to believe that the world works in a certain way, in an unseen way we don’t always understand. Just as it can be magical for a man to eat a plane protected by his great devotion and love for a woman -- so that the physical dangers of eating tons of metal will not hurt him because of his love -- in the new novel, there is a magical world around us that, if we open our eyes to it, will perhaps allow us in a healthy way to hold onto people who are no longer here, until at the right moment we can let them go. I happen to think that through fiction one can find truths that are searing and connecting, even if they require a leap of faith. And that’s what comes out when I sit down to write.”

It’s interesting to hear Sherwood bring up faith and magic, because on the surface, such concepts seem antithetical to who he is. Married, with no children, he spends part of each month in Southern California but lives mainly in Manhattan, where he worked for many years as a television news producer, first at ABC and more recently on the “NBC Nightly News.” He is soft-spoken, even cautious, a self-described skeptic who became a writer almost accidentally after his father’s death in 1993.

“I was 29,” he remembers, “and all my certainties were upended. It led me to start writing and to try and figure out the meaning of things.” For four years, he gave up journalism altogether; even after he returned, it was with the idea of seeking a kind of balance to the hard edge of the news.

“The Man Who Ate the 747,” he says, “emerged while I was at NBC. I was a senior producer working on the [Tom] Brokaw program, but part of my personality did not find expression in the day-to-day covering of news stories -- hurricanes, wars, floods, shootings. So during the impeachment of President Clinton, the war in Kosovo and those intensely real moments, I escaped to write the book.”

‘A little moment’

Still, for all that news alone cannot sustain him, Sherwood loves the rush of journalism; although he left NBC in January 2002 to become a full-time writer, he continues to feel a certain pull. “Sometimes,” he says, “I sit in the living room on a breaking news day and I talk to the television, calling out orders. My wife will wander in and say, ‘You’re all alone, honey. No one can hear you.’

“The thing about fiction,” he adds, “is that the scale of communication is orders of magnitude more personal. It’s one person sitting in one place with one little book turning the pages at his or her own pace. It’s not the megaphone of broadcasting; it’s just the expression of a little moment. And there’s something exciting about having one’s own voice.”

If journalism and fiction speak to different audiences, different impulses, Sherwood sees certain commonalities between them, beginning with the need to report.

“My imagination,” he says simply, “is not good enough to fathom working in a cemetery. My imagination is too limited to perceive the possibilities of what comes next. So I go out and ask questions and bring back authentic details that my imagination can play off in the invented landscape of my work.”

Because one of the characters in “The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud” is a sail designer, Sherwood met with an engineer who taught him about sail making; because that same character aspires to sail around the world, he found a champion sailor to show him the ropes.

“The crowning moment,” he recalls, “was when he invited me to sail in the races off Marblehead last May, and I crewed on his Aerodyne 38. It was a total nightmare because I didn’t know what I was doing. I got off the boat with my shirt ripped, bleeding, but we won by four lengths.”

Perhaps Sherwood’s most eye-opening experience came at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where he worked for a week cutting lawns, digging graves and otherwise caring for the dead. “It was not nearly as gloomy as one might think,” he reflects. “It was actually very life-affirming. You’d think a cemetery is all about death, but in fact, working there is like working in a park. It’s outdoor physical labor in which the coping mechanism is humor and to embrace one’s life and not be overwhelmed by the sadness and grief.”

As for the otherworldly, Sherwood notes, “there are guys who have worked there for 30 years who scoff at the idea of spirits. And there are others who swear they’ve seen things they can’t explain. One guy remembers seeing someone standing next to a grave, then looking down and looking back up again and that person being gone. It was wide open territory, and there was no way anyone could have disappeared so fast.”

Ask Sherwood if he believes this, and he’ll say that as a journalist, he “used to expose charlatans and psychics and those types of shenanigans.” But he’ll also argue that “there’s a world happening at some other level, which is not just about death as an end.”

That’s what motivates “The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud,” with its emphasis on some sort of afterlife, in which love lingers for both the living and the dead.

“I think,” Sherwood explains, “that there’s a place in between, a limbo, where the living who have lost someone and the dead who are moving on can hold onto each other. Many people suffering with loss occupy this murky twilight where they’ve not fully embraced life.”

For the character of Charlie, that place is Waterside Cemetery, where he tends the ghost of his younger brother, Sam, who was killed in a boyhood traffic accident, more carefully than any monument. After 13 years, though, Charlie is as bound by death as the cemetery’s inhabitants and must discover a passage back to the world. For him, the challenge is to reclaim himself while not losing sight of his brother’s spirit, to remain open to Sam’s continued presence in his life.

“Again,” Sherwood insists, “I’m a skeptic. I can’t tell you that the leaf that lands on your car is Grandma. But it gives me comfort to think that perhaps there’s a bird in a tree last night at my mom’s house that is connected to the fact that my dad grew up in that house, lived in that house and may have returned to that house. I know it sounds crazy, but I like to think it’s possible.”

Coincidences

Or, as he writes at the end of the novel: “There’s death and life, you see. We all shine on. You just have to release your hearts, alert your senses and pay attention. A leaf, a star, a song, a laugh. Notice the little things, because somebody is reaching out to you.”

In that sense, Sherwood is suggesting that the most compelling mysteries may be the least imposing, coincidences that are either insignificant or profoundly significant, depending on your point of view. “Is someone actually reaching out to you?” he asks. “Who knows? Does it matter that you know for sure? No. Does it connect you to that person and that place and what’s missing in your life? I hope it does. It certainly does for me.”

To illustrate the point, he gestures at the space around him, as if invoking his own set of ghosts. “It’s like coming to Du-par’s,” he says with a half smile. “It’s like the experience of being back here again. It’s like being with my grandmother, Jenny Sherwood, a.k.a. Nana, who lived in that house where my mother lives, the house that is so important to our family. We came here. This was our place. Some of these connections defy explanation. And it’s probably better that way.”