Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 7, 1993 TAG: 9302070011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
AIMING FOR UNDERSTANDING
STEPHEN Hunter's "Point of Impact" is a thriller with a purpose beyond escapism.It's an entertaining novel of conspiracies, assassination and duplicity, but it's also a meditation on firearms - guns, in the popular parlance; guns and their place in America and in the lives of the people who use them. These matters aren't as simple as many claim.
The book isn't a sermon, but it does give lie to many of the stereotypes and assumptions that fuel arguments about gun control.
Hunter, a big guy with short, graying hair and beard, served in the Army from 1968 to 1970. Since then he's worked in journalism as book editor and film critic for the Baltimore Sun, and in popular fiction, most notably the 1989 hit, "The Day Before Midnight."
Recently, we sat down in a Washington, D.C., restaurant to talk about "Point of Impact" (Bantam Books. $21.95). When Hunter began work on the book, he thought he knew a lot about guns, but, he said, "it was remarkable how much there was to learn. My expertise was an illusion."
The research "took me from the most superficial levels - gun shows and firing ranges - on into the deep, serious gun culture, i.e. reloading for accuracy, that sort of thing. It got me hanging around people who shoot and for whom the firearm is the central icon of their lives.
"There's a sense that the shooting culture is nothing but rednecks with beer bellies and Ruger mini-14s. But this is a very complex world. It's a world with a lot of ambivalence even within it, and there are a lot of very intelligent people who are drawn to firearms. There are a lot of very ugly, violent people who are drawn to firearms, and I wanted to get the whole spectrum.
"I didn't want it done from the snooty liberal point of view where anyone who owns a firearm is axiomatically sick. I wanted to show that it is possible to own a firearm and have an inner life, too.
"I wanted to get at the whole complexity of firearms and what they represent, and how they have different meanings depending on your attitude toward them."
The ambivalence of the shooting culture comes from its changing role in American society. The intellectual outdoorsman once personified in Teddy Roosevelt has fallen from favor. That historical perspective is an important part of Hunter's novel.
"I wanted somehow to connect with a period in history when shooting wasn't suspicious, when it was noble - a period that is forever gone, vanished and will never be achieved again. You look at the NRA publication, The American Rifleman, and there's an obituary column. Every once in a while you'll see that so-and-so died. He was 87 years old. He was a Grand Master Rifleman who shot at Camp Perry and the Palmer Cup and all that, and then it'll say that he went to Yale University and the Sorbonne. That's impossible today.
"One of the things that's gone on in this country is that the intellectual elite culture has nothing to do with the elemental concerns of life. Men who go to Harvard are disconnected in a way that didn't used to be. That period when shooting was a gentlemanly pursuit is forever vanished.
"Whether you agree with it or not, its passing, like the passing of any great tradition, strikes me as poignant, and I wanted to catch that poignancy."
The complexity of the gun culture is harder to define. Hunter compared the act of shooting accurately to cooking or music:
"I had this ignorant idea that gun plus bullet equals proficiency, and it's far more complicated. It turns out to be all about harmonics. You're looking for an exquisite balance between the right kind of powder, the right kind of shell, the right kind of bullet, the right kind of primer, the right kind of rifle. All those things are variables and if you affect one of them, you change the equation.
"You're looking for the lost chord, a harmonic convergence where everything is working for and nothing is working against the rifle. And when I began to see how incredibly intricate and intellectually abstract and fascinating it was, then I began to get it, to understand how men could love guns."
And that, finally, is Hunter's point. "Basically, the book is about how passionate people can feel about guns."
If Hunter doesn't fully share that passion - he believes in some form of gun control - he understands it. "I think I feel about gun culture the way Catholic intellectuals feel about the church in that I see all the contradictions, I know all the fallacies of it. I know the delusions that sustain it. On the other hand, I find it very comforting. I mean I can talk to those guys.
"I tried to write a book that would engage the issues of that culture fairly. It's not a book for zealots on either side. It's a book for the rest of us.
"I think the Handgun Control Inc. crowd will be a little upset with it because it shows that it's possible to own a firearm and not be a piece of scum, and yet I tried to embrace the reality of firearms, which is the terrible violence that people are doing."
Still, ambivalence and complexity aren't the stuff of most bestsellers, and Hunter has no illusions about the book's chances: "I am utterly bewildered as to what the response will be. I don't know if it will engage serious reviewers. I don't know if it will be totally ignored. But, it is what it is.
"It's not something that's been milled to appeal to everybody. It's a book that's seriously set in gun culture and if you can't deal with that, you should read another book. It has sort of the psychotic's integrity, if you will."
If nothing else, "Point of Impact" succeeds in the creation of several complex characters for whom the firearm is that "central icon," and the book might bring a measure of open-mindedness to the gun-control debate. But it isn't likely to change many readers' minds about firearms. Hunter isn't a polemicist. He's an observer, a writer who wants tell a good, timely story and that's what he has done.