Ken Finkleman: Watch him around sharp objectsFred Lum/The Globe and Mail
A surprising thought entered Ken Finkleman's mind once long ago as he stared balefully at a boring dinner companion. "I thought to myself, 'If I picked up this knife and stabbed the person across from me in the heart, for good or for bad it would just open this trap door and I would drop through it and never look at the same world again.' "
A quick check of the utensils on the patio table where Finkleman is telling his story reveals no immediate cause for concern. But as anyone who has ever seen his quirky television shows knows, the man is unpredictable. This particular fantasy proved so compelling to Finkleman, auteur of The Newsroom and Married Life, that he turned it into a book 30 years later.
The result, called Noah's Turn, is a slim but considerably quirky novel that combines all the wit Finkleman honed writing scripts for such films as Airplane II with deep thoughts inspired by a quick reading of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Noah Douglas is an unsympathetic, unemployed television writer with seething resentments who eventually acts one of them out - to the misfortune of a pretentious friend who has committed the sin, in Noah's eyes, of achieving literary success.
Descending amusingly into the lowest echelons of a media world he frankly despises, Noah does to his rival what most typical attendees at a Toronto book launch only dream of doing. A sharp metal object is involved.
Struggling would-be novelists might not want to know how easily literary inspiration came to Finkleman. "I wasn't working and I didn't want to," he says, describing his creative process. "I was having a good time. I was drinking a lot in the evenings, I was reading a lot, I was sleeping on my couch in the afternoons, I was exercising. I was fine."
He began reading Crime and Punishment because "it was just sitting there," Finkleman says, and he put it down halfway through. "It wasn't my cup of tea," he says. But the murderer Raskolnikov seemed strangely familiar to him, so he started to write his own version of the story - minus the redemptive ending his ex-wife advised him to skip in the original.
"I had this character in my head, of an amalgam of certain people I know," he says. "And I just started writing, with no intention of really doing it, and I kept going and kept going. I had nothing else to do."
Impulsively murdering somebody is "one of the few acts you can actually do where you can take complete control over your life," Finkleman notes, munching a sandwich on an outdoor patio in the downtown Toronto neighbourhood where he lives, works and shoots most of his shows, and where he is often seen tooling around on his $8,000 vintage Italian racing bike with its limited-edition polka-dot paint job. "You're able to drop yourself out of this life and into something else altogether."
Unfortunately for Noah, the act only seems to complicate all the conventional entanglements he sought to escape. Getting away with it forces him into a role neither he nor his creator anticipated. "I didn't discover that until I was writing it," Finkleman says. "I said, Wait a second, it's not working, He didn't transform himself. He didn't take himself out of the world. So then I realized the only way he could become this other person was to take responsibility for the crime, to be the killer."
In devising an appropriate fate for Noah, the author considered Camus's L'Étranger as well as the brazen criminality of murderer Gary Gilmore, who famously demanded to be executed. "There is something to that," Finkleman says. "He lived it out to the end as this person who had no apologies. He couldn't be accused of not being the genuine item."
By contrast, his own hero's ultimate goodbye gives Noah's Turn one of its best jokes. The trap door opened, but the irrepressible funnyman popped back out.