"Leading Men" by Christopher Castellani in One Sentence
How to cast a blazing spell from the start and make us feel from beyond the grave
Christopher Castellani’s 2019 novel Leading Men vividly imagines the life and loves of Frank Merlo (1921-1963), partner to one of the 20th century’s foremost American playwrights, Tennessee Williams.
Williams wrote his most successful plays during the years he spent with Merlo and attributed his subsequent failures to Merlo’s death. The alchemy that produced this great work and the often stormy relationship between the two men are what Castellani set out to explore in his fourth novel.
A 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, Castellani is also currently the writer-in-residence at Brandeis University, and on the faculty at YoungArts, Warren Wilson’s MFA program, and regularly at Bread Loaf.
And as one of the earliest advisors and subscribers to Lit in One Sentence, his feedback has been invalubable as I’ve developed my ideas about emotional superstructure in stories.
He was the one who first flagged emotional “superstructure” as a good word to describe what we’re doing here, which is pulling any story’s most powerful alignment of:
whose head we’re in,
what they’re doing, and
why it matters to them
… into a single sentence, to gain insight into how the author created that story’s unique emotional vibes.
I might have kept sliding past this word without realizing it was a good one for much longer if he hadn’t done that, so I’m quite grateful!
Castellani admits that he was initially skeptical that any “one sentence” could describe a story in a meaningful way without being reductive. But once he saw the superstructure sentence for Leading Men, he couldn’t think of a single element of the book that didn’t resonate with it.
We’re planning to do a deeper dive into all this in an author interview next week, which I’m very excited to share with you!
But this week, let’s focus on two aspects of emotional spellcasting that we can learn by unpacking Leading Men’s superstructure:
How to cast a blazing spell right from the start (ie, crafting a powerful opening sentence)
How to make us feel from beyond the grave (ie, how we always read a secondary character’s subplot with the protagonist in mind)
I could, of course, have chosen any craft element in the book, because everything in it is developing a piece of the superstructure.
Leading Men’s Emotional Superstructure
A working class gay man whose love alchemizes the stardom of his playwright partner and actress protégée must determine how to belong among them.
How to Cast a Blazing Spell Right From the Start
Want the New York Times reviewer to fall under the spell of your next novel from the very first sentence? Then let’s look at what Castellani did with the opening sentence of Leading Men, which is:
“Truman was throwing a party in Portofino, and Frank wanted to go.”
Do you see how many notes from the superstructure sentence this sentence is hitting right away?
We know immediately whose head we’re in: Frank’s, the working class gay man mentioned in the superstructure.
We know what Frank wants to do: go to a party, which evokes belonging.
And, as long as we guess correctly that Truman is Truman Capote, we can infer that this party is likely to be filled with the stars of the day, and that Frank is at least “star adjacent” enough to be included.
Yet the phrasing is just destabilizing enough to hint that something might get in the way of Frank’s desire, that it’s not a done deal that he will get to attend this party. We do not open with the sentence “Truman was throwing a party, and Frank had decided to go” or “Frank was planning to go.”
And indeed, the invitation is addressed to Frank’s partner and we sense by the end of the first paragraph that if Tenn had been in a different mood, they might not have gone. (They do go.)
For a story about a working class man whose love catalyzes other people’s stardom and whose struggle is to figure out how to belong among them, this opening sentence is pointing us to so many elements of “true north” right away. It is a microcosm of the superstructure, and it establishes the emotional vibes we’ll continue to explore throughout the novel.
Which makes it a much stronger opening sentence than, say, “It was hot in Rome that summer” or even “Frank wanted to get out of the stuffy apartment” — both of which are true and things that we learn within the first paragraph. These details help ground us in the story early on, but neither would have made as good of an opening sentence as what Castellani did choose, because neither is pointing us directly to the superstructure and emotional vibes of the story as a whole.
Key takeaway for story creators: Cast your story’s spell from the first sentence by using it to evoke as much of your superstructure as possible.
How to Make Us Feel From Beyond the Grave
During most of the time I spent rereading Leading Men to find its superstructure, I thought it would focus on Frank living his final days in the hospital not knowing whether either of the people he most loves and wants to see — his playwright partner and actress protegée — would choose to come to his side or honor his memory once he was gone.
Castellani plants this emotionally powerful question right at the end of chapter one, so we read the rest of the book and watch Frank’s relationships play out wondering how it’s going to go for him, whether his love will be returned when he needs it most or whether he will die abandoned and alone.
But also, half the chapters take place almost fifty years after Frank has died, following his actress protégée in her twilight years as she tries to decide what to do with herself after her astronomer husband also passes away.
There are reasons she doesn’t want to return to her hometown in Sweden, which is perhaps too haunted by the memory of her beloved and long-dead father. She also doesn’t want to stay in the house or city she shared with her dead husband.
Inspiration comes in the form of a young man who reminds her in many ways of Frank, the son of a mutual acquaintance they spent time with the summer when she was 17 and Frank rescued her from her terrible mom and launched her on the path to becoming one of the major film stars of the 20th century.
Thanks to the young man, she becomes involved in putting on a lost play Tennessee Williams wrote for her, in an effort to honor Frank’s memory correctly, in a way Tenn was never quite able to do. And in the process, she also chooses — in her faintly icy grand dame way — to snuggle up to Frank’s vibes when selecting a city in which to live out her final chapter.
As we saw with a story as simple as Little Red Riding Hood, once we’re grounded in the head of a focal character, even when we spend time in the heads of other characters, we’re subconsciously calculating how all of their actions will impact the main protagonist. In the fairy tale, it was just a few lines of following the wolf and the huntsman and subconsciously working out how their choices would affect Little Red.
In superstructure terms, it’s one character’s story above all others. We mirror them the most, feel what they feel the most, and even when we go off and spend time with other characters, we don’t lose that emotional connection. We know how what other characters are doing will make our main character feel.
The effect of this in Leading Men — which is undoubtedly Frank’s story — is completely worthy of the Ouija board scene that appears in the middle of the book, when Anja lets her new friends hold a cannabis-elevated séance and Frank seems to appear to her from beyond the grave.
Again, half the book takes place fifty years after Frank’s death, so in one sense literally nothing is impacting him in any kind of a way. And yet …
Because we’re so thoroughly grounded in Frank’s head first …
Because we feel the same warmth as him in his moments of greatest belonging, and feel the intense gut punch he must have when his hopes of becoming a star in his own right are shattered …
And because we’re wondering the whole time whether either of his beloveds will show up at his deathbed or honor his memory, his contributions …
We know how Anja’s efforts would make Frank feel. We know what being loved back in this way would mean to him. Anja is closing out Frank’s journey from the superstructure, long after he no longer can. We get to feel the transcendent bliss of that on his behalf as we read Leading Men.
The effect is like we’re standing shoulder to shoulder with Frank, watching from the great beyond as Anja’s quest unfolds. Through her sections, we learn that she and Tenn both found stardom somewhat hollow — in Tenn’s case even debilitating — without the love and belonging Frank brought. She seems to be saying to beyond-the-grave Frank: you not only belonged, you made us.
And because we know Frank so well by this point, we can imagine exactly how that would make him feel.
A Question for You
Let’s say it’s ten years after you die and you’re able to peek back from the great beyond on how things are going in the land of the living.
Based on whatever you’re doing this week, what would be especially gratifying for you to see happening?
As always, your comments will only be visible to other paying subscribers of Lit in One Sentence, not the whole internet.
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