How a Monaco Harbor Gave Birth to Frank Huyler's Novel The Red Dress

Frank Huyler traces the genesis of his novel The Red Dress to a single image: a middle-aged officer casually spraying the deck of a superyacht with a hose, in the harbor behind a Monte Carlo casino. That man became his narrator, a professional servant of empty extravagance, and Huyler named him Nick, after Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Bellevue Literary Press published the book.

How did the trip unfold?

In the summer of 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic slowed, Huyler and his teenage son traveled to Italy. Travel restrictions had lifted only days earlier. Rome was almost empty of tourists. "It was glorious," Huyler writes.

The two stood on the Spanish Steps at dusk and dipped their hands in the Trevi Fountain. They walked straight into the Colosseum on a hot, bright day. At the Vatican, nearly alone, Huyler writes that the reasons for the Protestant Reformation became fully clear to him, walking through rooms of marble, silk and silver "extracted from illiterate workers in the fields and fishing boats on the horizon."

They rented a green Fiat 500, drove the Amalfi Coast, Venice, the Dolomites, and Milan, where they drove a Ferrari for fifteen minutes. Near the trip's end they reached Monaco, where the novel was born.

What did Huyler see in Monaco?

In front of a casino by the water, at ten o'clock in the morning, they watched a gray-haired man in his seventies, in a track suit, emerge from a Lamborghini with a young blond woman "so young she could have been his granddaughter." The man tossed his keys to a uniformed valet. Huyler read the pair as an image of carelessness and boredom.

Behind the casino lay the superyachts, most gleaming white with black privacy glass and chrome railings, some "like props from a film." Almost all seemed empty, like houses closed for the season. A handful showed signs of life: crewmen polishing the brightwork, preparing to leave.

"I watched them for a while, and wondered who they were, and what they thought of their work, and this was the genesis of my novel The Red Dress," Huyler writes.

What does the pandemic have to do with it?

Huyler worked as a frontline healthcare worker throughout the pandemic. He describes wearing single-use N95 masks for weeks at a time, stored in brown paper bags until their rubber bands broke. "Never in my life have I felt more disposable, or more like a name on a schedule," he writes.

A physician's assistant he worked with, a veteran of the Iraq War, told him the quiet ER reminded him of patrol in Baghdad, when "the hair on the back of his neck stood at attention."

Huyler also cites a specific institutional case: at the height of the pandemic, with hospital beds in New Mexico in critically short supply, Lovelace Health System, part of a national for-profit corporation, closed an entire wing and laid off dozens of nurses at the direction of executives working from home. The State of New Mexico protested to no avail.

For Huyler, the pandemic proved that "we were not, in fact, in it together." Essential workers in meatpacking plants, hospitals, nursing homes and grocery stores kept working unprotected, while non-essential staff "disappeared into Zoom en masse."

What connects the yachts to the hospital ward?

John Updike, Huyler notes, wrote: "The essence of the superrich is absence. They like to demonstrate they can afford to be elsewhere." But watching the man climb the casino steps, Huyler concluded that everyone in the system, from the rail-polishers to the master-suite occupants, is similarly interchangeable, "serving larger forces that none of them fully understand."

A few weeks after flying home, his name back on the schedule and school about to begin, Huyler started The Red Dress. He calls it the story of "a flawed and solitary father's love for his child" and his small forces of resistance against "the faceless, inhuman, profoundly distorting powers of the coming world, where so little will be known with certainty, and nobody understands where we're going."

The novel now stands as his answer to the question fiction at its best asks: to see clearly, and to lead more examined lives.