A Change In Altitude
Anita Shreve
Book notes
About the author
Returning to the United States, she was a writer and editor for a number of magazines in New York. Later, when she began her family, she turned to freelancing, publishing in the New York Times Magazine, New York magazine and dozens of others. In 1989, she published her first novel, Eden Close, and since then has written 13 other novels, among them The Weight of Water and The Pilot’s Wife, both of which were made into films.
She is married to a man she first met when she was 13. She has two children and three stepchildren.
Discussion points
Author's view
I suppose you could say I've been writing A Change in Altitude for 30 years - ever since I climbed Mt. Kenya in the late 1970s. The mountain is 17,000 feet high; I climbed it in sneakers; and we made the trek very shortly after our arrival in Kenya. In other words, I was ill-equipped to deal with the raw cold, the strenuous climb, the altitude, and the dangers of the scree, the bog and, most of all, the glacier. While I was climbing Mt. Kenya, a member of our party nearly died on the glacier, and that split-second event has stayed with me all these years. An event similar - though with vastly different characters and with much worse consequences - forms the central core of the novel. Because of it, a young American marriage is thrown into turmoil. Moral and ethical questions are raised. Lives are forever altered because of a single moment in time.
This last is a theme I have explored before - in The Weight of Water, when a mother's careless moment results in tragedy; in Testimony, when a group of high school seniors does something that will forever change their lives; and in Where or When, in which a chance sighting of a newspaper ad throws two families into chaos. We have all experienced such singular moments and have felt our own paths change course. What interests me as a writer is how a particular character adapts to that moment and the altered life beyond.
While I was in Kenya, I spent a good deal of time with Africans. I worked for an English-language African magazine. I interviewed Africans for articles. I knew them socially and was invited to their houses - even into the slums where I was treated with the greatest courtesy. Race seemed more or less irrelevant in social relations. What seemed to matter most in the politics of Kenya was power and money. Kenya was a class society built on the difference between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. As an expatriate, one could move with ease between the two groups, providing this lucky American with insight as to how the country worked. When I lived there, Jomo Kenyatta was in power, and the country was enjoying its most peaceful years since the advent of colonial times. Shortly after I left, Kenyatta died, and Kenya has never been as stable. Because of tribal strife and a devastating drought, the country now finds itself in dire straits.
The only time I have ever kept a diary was during the three years I lived in Kenya. Oddly enough, however, when I unearthed these diaries, I found them to be of little help. For example, this is my only entry written about the climb up Mt. Kenya: ‘Climbed Mt. Kenya. Made it to the top. It was hard.’ One would be hard-pressed to find a writer of any kind in those truncated sentences. The diary was full of information I had NOT remembered. If someone had asked me, a month prior to finding those diaries, if I had ever played squash, my answer would have been, ‘I think I've seen it being played, but, no, I haven't.’ According to my diaries, I not only played squash but once competed in a club tournament in Nairobi. Likewise, had one asked me if I'd ever met Norman Mailer, I would have answered quickly, ‘No.’ According to the pages of my diaries, I not only met Normal Mailer but had a few choice unprintable words to say about what I thought of him. All of which makes me ask: ‘What really happened in my life?’
Writing A Change in Altitude was a challenge. Though many of the events in the novel were partly based on reality, there is no one true sentence in the book. One can have marvellous or terrifying experiences, but, as a writer, unless the imagination is triggered, nothing will get written. I suppose this is why it took me so long to write the book. I had to achieve enough distance to be able to trigger the imagination to move the novel as far away from reality as I could.
For many years, I thought A Change in Altitude would be the novel that would never get written. I couldn't see how I, an American and 30 years removed from the experiences I had there, could plausibly write about that wonderful country. Then Barack Obama arrived on the American political scene. I became an Obama devotee during the American presidential elections. I not only loved the man for who he was and the hope he could offer all of us, but I also identified because I had known and loved many Luo [Obama’s father was a Luo, one of Kenya’s ethnic groups]. I felt I had the tiniest insight as to where he had come from. When I wrote the first draft of the novel, I mentioned Obama obliquely in the last sentence of the book. As it happened, that sentence was lost in subsequent drafts, but he was definitely the impetus to put pen to paper about Africa, and I thank him.