Their escapades start off as relatively good clean fun: late nights, bars, bourbon, drugs, pickup trucks, guns, and lots of music. But things change once JAG is introduced to fallenangels—an online network for singles with extreme desires. What starts off as a tongue-in-cheek diversion quickly blossoms into full-blown obsession, and then a kind of spiritual mission. Operating under a series of screen names, JAG becomes convinced that he can offer some brand of sexual redemption to the women of fallenangels.

Soon, JAG has a hard time keeping track of all his online “friends.” The site crashes; he jeopardizes his church job in order to keep fallenangels alive. His overlapping online identities compete for control of his psyche. Cyrus and other flesh-and-blood friends disappear. The reverend turns attention toward political influence. JAG’s hopes for a life with his son look more and more unlikely. In the book’s final chapters, JAG crosses the line into violence and desperation.

This novel is exceedingly good at what it does. Few writers in García’s peerage could pull so many raunchy sex scenes so artfully. The narrator’s eclectic love of music is palpable and endearing. Much of the novel handles both sides of rural America’s cultural divide—reverend included—with balance and empathy. Cyrus—ostensibly a sidekick and minor character—is a beautifully rendered 21^st century Southerner. In fact, I’d argue that one of this novel’s greater triumphs is its refreshing vision of Dixie: finally, a piece of fiction that frees the South from those same tired, gothic tropes—what Barry Hannah called “the canned dream of the South…a lot of porches and banjos.” While it’s true that the Klan still marches through the streets in badbadbad, it must compete with a Gay Pride Parade across town.

badbadbad is not without its problems. The narrator’s brother and son are both characters whose promise doesn’t fully pay off. And though it’s well executed, there’s a lot of on-screen messaging—which, while it may be true to life, tends to grow tedious on the page. Most unfortunately, the exact nature of JAG’s mission on fallenangels is never fully fleshed out; it never seems to be about salvation so much as getting laid.

Still, this book is fast, fun, irreverent, and unlike anything else in the fiction aisle. García’s prose and imagery are well rendered and perfectly matched to his subject. Many of his scenes would turn zany and cartoonish in the hands of a lesser writer; his gift is the ability to describe excess with craft and heart. Totally fearless in its treatment of religion, race, sex, and rural America, badbadbad breathes fresh air into what sometimes feels like a stuffy literary landscape.

Extras

• Read the first three chapters of badbadbad.
• Here’s an interview with Jesús Ángel García at The Nervous Breakdown, where he was a Featured Author in July 2011.
• Below, watch FEAR, Part I of a five-part badbadbad documentary (also edited by García) featuring interviews with his readers from across the U.S. You can also listen to a six-song sampler from the badbadbad soundtrack, or check out the book’s chapter-by-chapter YouTube playlist.

It is a flawed argument. As the narrator makes clear for just under 200 pages, there are also people who talk about themselves in the second person. The character shares a number of qualities with his creator: a last name that rhymes with “jock itch”; a son named Owen; residence in New Orleans. One cannot help but wonder to what extent Yakich is using the second person to talk about himself as well.

That potential juxtaposition is wrenching, since the narrator of A Meaning for Wife is a recent widower, whose wife’s unexpected death hovers over nearly every page of this book, set during the weekend of the narrator’s twentieth high-school reunion (class of ’88). Bringing his toddler back to his parents’ home for the occasion, the narrator faces plenty of demons from his past, including his father’s schizophrenia. But somehow, Yakich infuses this story with humor.

Readers can have strong reactions—not always positive—to the second-person point of view. Most of us can think of a handful of highly successful short stories that rely on this narrative technique; successful novels with second-person narrators, however, seem fewer. Since I’m continuing to experiment with second-person storytelling in my own writing, I wanted to see how Yakich managed to sustain his narrator’s voice for the length of an entire book. I discovered that at least two writerly tools helped him: dialogue, and plenty of narration that comes from but is not necessarily about the narrator.

A brief, intriguing mention in the December 2011/January 2012 issue of Shelf Unbound magazine led me to this novel from Ig Publishing, which also brought us Jacob Paul’s excellent Sarah/Sara. That Yakich’s primary literary reputation is as a poet also drew me as I recently read another debut novel from a poet—Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. It turned out to be one of the most impressive books I read last year. A Meaning for Wife sets a high bar for 2012, too.

Further Links and Resources

• Read an interview with Mark Yakich about A Meaning for Wife, second-person narration, and more.
• Learn more about Ig on the publisher’s website.
• Here are some samples of Yakich’s poetry. His collections include The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, and The Making of Collateral Beauty.
• With Loyola University-New Orleans colleague Christopher Schaberg, Yakich has co-founded Airplane Reading, a site that was started “to treat ‘airplane reading’ seriously.” Yakich and Schaberg have also recently published Checking In/Checking Out, a nonfiction book that reflects their individual experiences with and attitudes toward air travel.

The novel’s protagonist, Benjamín Chaparro, is essentially a bureaucrat in the Argentine judiciary: a deputy clerk and chief administrator of its investigative court in Buenos Aires. The novel opens sometime in the early nineties. Chaparro is about to retire and begin writing a manuscript of his own. Ostensibly it’s about a man named Ricardo Morales, whose young wife was the victim of a horrific rape and murder twenty-five years before.

Sacheri has said that “writing is a special way to read,” and here Chaparro’s writing constitutes a close reading of—even as it’s mixed with the feeling he’s tampering with—the experiences implicating a group of characters. Included in his account are his alcoholic but cunning assistant and best friend Pablo Sandoval; Irene Hornos, a court judge and the woman Chaparro has secretly loved for nearly thirty years; the crime victim, Liliana Colotto, and her widower, Ricardo Morales; and Isidoro Gómez, Liliana’s attacker turned henchman for the Argentine government. Chaparro’s tone is by turns ironic, self-deprecating, questioning, and sincere.

Through both chance and disposition, the crime makes Chaparro a sort of unwilling detective. The Secret’s plot employs the familiar patterns of a mystery or detective novel. Sacheri, who also teaches high school and university-level history and economics, is interested in literature that is preoccupied with ordinary lives but also grapples with socio-political, historical, and philosophical questions. In a recent interview, he articulated a belief that literature’s complexity should emanate from the multiplicity of contacts it allows the reader—with other reading, with his or her own interiority, with that of other people:

At times I’ve seemed to notice that for some, the most laudable form of complexity is opacity… An author who contemplates his navel and a reader condemned to the contemplation of some other person’s navel. I’ll sound unforgivably profane, but that concept doesn’t satisfy me. Not as an author and not as a reader.

The detective/mystery plot serves Sacheri’s position well. I think of Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortázar (Sacheri cites his earlier work as a major influence), and even Alice Munro as other writers who have used the popular form masterfully as a way to engage with rigorous ideas and create rich, complex experiences in the mind of the reader. Sacheri’s novel experiments in this way with tone rather than form. Some scenes have a madcap, schmaltzy quality—as when Chaparro and Sandoval collaborate to trick an uppity judge into signing off on some court documents—reminiscent of the most satisfying TV comedy writing. These moments are entertaining to read, and they also serve to fully render character and illuminate the weaknesses of the court system through humor. In this way, the novel indeed plays with form differently than both traditional detective novels and its film adaptation.

The book’s complex structures are a strength, serving its particular themes. In an author’s note, the mention of “the bloody Argentina of the 1970s, which occasionally appears as the background of the story narrated here” strikes me as a sardonic understatement. Chaparro picks up on a photographic clue that helps identify Isidoro Gómez as a suspect, and his comment that “…I’ve always liked looking at things a little sidelong, focusing on the background instead of the foreground,” points us to a way of looking at the novel as a whole; its historical “background” is equally significant.

In the film adaptation, the period surrounding Argentina’s Cámpora government and its Dirty War indeed functions as a menacing, all-pervasive backdrop. In the novel, John Cullen’s translator’s note provides critical information for readers who come to the book without knowledge of this time period, providing explanations like the following:

[A] time of great turbulence in Argentina culminated in the so-called Guerra Sucia, the Dirty War, which lasted from 1976 to 1983. During these years, Argentina was the chief sponsor of massive and systematic political violence, whose victims included…students, activists, trade unionists, teachers, journalists, and leftists in general. In such an unstable and dangerous environment, even the basically apolitical Chaparro is at risk.

The "grandmothers" protesting the lost generation from the dirty war

This environment transcends setting to become both structural enclosure and subject matter. It has a direct impact on the court system where Chapparo works as well as the crime’s ultimate consequences for Morales, Gómez, and Chapparo himself.

The complex hierarchies of the court judicial system and the labyrinthine vault where cold case files are archived are Borgesian labyrinths where power, guilt, and accountability are distributed and refracted between people and the systems that bind them together. Indeed, Chaparro often struggles with the shady boundary between the implicit and the complicit. He frequently calls attention to the way personal attitudes and actions—often his own—can incriminate individuals. “We’re all cowards, it’s just a question of who frightens us enough,” he reflects after finding a colleague with military connections has secured an order to suspend Liliana Colotto’s murder investigation indefinitely. Chaparro wishes that the judge in charge of the case had held his corrupt colleague accountable: “My stomach turned at the thought of that son of a bitch getting away with such rank malfeasance,” he says, but then admits, “but after all, I was idle and pusillanimous too, in my way…The interview with Batista left a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt somehow implicated in this injustice done to some and the sinister impunity granted to others.” How are individuals implicated when systems are corrupt? What is the mechanism by which those implicated become complicit? Who is responsible for justice and punishment in the absence of a trustworthy state? How does violence at the state level breed violence between individuals?

Because Sacheri was integral to the writing of the film adapation, it’s interesting to consider the two works as companion texts with differing strengths. Sacheri says that his characters became more complex under the gaze of director Juan José Campanella. I agree. One example is the scene in which Chaparro interrogates murder suspect Isidoro Gómez, attempting to extract a confession. In the novel, Sandoval appears at work still drunk after a night of carousing. At first it seems that he threatens to derail Chaparro’s interrogation. He throws both characters off guard when he begins a line of half-joking questioning that ends with Gómez blurting out—in pride and self-defense—that he indeed was responsible for Colotto’s rape and murder. In the novel, this moment is both a repugnant and triumphant one, revealing Sandoval’s brilliance (and Chaparro’s doubt of him) at the same time as it reveals Gómez’s insecurity.

In the film, Irene is the pivotal character in this interrogation—gorgeous, self-possessed, and very pregnant. Until this point, we’re not entirely sure Isidoro Gómez is capable of the crime he’s suspected of committing. His claims of innocence seem convincing. He comes off scared and timid and somewhat bewildered. But Irene surmises correctly that if he’s the right one, hitting him where it hurts will cause a certain effect. She dismisses him as a viable suspect based on his lack of masculinity and strength, speculating aloud in blunt terms why surely he can’t be the one. And this is finally what makes him lose it: he punches her in the face and defiantly screams his confession in the most vile and violent detail.

This use of her character and the issue of her pregnancy resonates on several levels. It creates a parallel with Liliana Colotto, who was two months pregnant at the time of her rape and murder. We rarely ever see this variant on justice: a young pregnant woman ingeniously provoking a man into an indignant declaration of guilt for a violent crime against another young pregnant woman. It’s both Irene’s sexuality and vulnerability in this moment that allow her to wield power—she secures the confession they need to send Gómez to jail—and modulate the accumulation and release of tension in the scene. The film’s somewhat richer development of character (and by extension, plot and parallels between characters) ratchets up the emotional stakes and rings on a deeper psychological register than the novel.

But what’s less visible in the film is one of the book’s great strengths: the trope of the novel within the novel. Chaparro is uncertain about the whole enterprise—why he wants to tell this story, if he should be writing it, and what it’s really about: “…[I]t’s not my story I want to tell,” he writes by way of introduction, “it’s Morales’s story, or Isidoro Gomez’s, which is the same story but seen from the other side, or seen upside down, or something like that.” His uncertainty allows readers to witness his writing as a process, and, as a result, this foregrounds the construction of the story as a whole. The novel alternates between third-person chapters narrated through Chaparro’s consciousness, titled with words and phrases like “Retirement Party,” “Cinema,” and “Coffee;” and Chaparro’s numbered, first-person-narrated manuscript chapters. These chapters are even typeset in different fonts. In “Cinema,” we read that “[Chaparro]’s anxious about how to continue, how to recount what happened to those people. He wonders if that’s the feeling writers have when they tell a story, a certain sense of omnipotence as they play with their characters’ lives.” Later:

Chaparro rereads the opening sentences of his new chapter and hesitates. Is that a good way to start this part of the story? he wonders…Can a single human action—in this case, a monumental drinking binge—be the cause that changes another’s destiny, assuming that such a thing as destiny exists?

The crime that ties Chaparro to Liliana Cotorro, Ricardo Morales, and Isidro Gómez is a bloody and visceral metaphor for Sacheri’s exploration of the relationship between a single human action and its consequences. The Secret of Their Eyes (originally La pregunta de sus ojos, or The Question of Their Eyes) is a supremely accessible novel and a thrilling page-turner whose most nuanced tensions lie in the relationships between its structures and characters and the questions that these pose. Sacheri says that the book is “a reflection on punishment.” Readers are invited to ask, who is responsible? How are we all implicated? And how is the longing for love like the longing for justice?

Further Links and Resources

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In The Art of Fielding, debut novelist and co-founder and editor of N+1 magazine Chad Harbach taps into this ephemeral baseball consciousness through four characters at Westish College, a fictional small liberal arts school on Lake Michigan. There’s the hot baseball prospect at shortstop, Henry Skrimshander; his catcher and mentor, Mike Schwartz; the school president, Guert Affenlight; and Affenlight’s once-estranged daughter Pella, returned to her father’s school after the dissolution of her marriage.

This four-person starting rotation, if you will, offers up infinite pleasures through alternating points of view, all in close third-person. The protagonists possess clear, distinct voices and lovable affects, rendered in prose as pristine as a freshly mowed outfield. Harbach is particularly effective at rendering the quirky particularities of a team’s collective personality, the nicknames (Buddha, Schwartzy, The Skrimmer, Suitcase) and superstitions (no haircuts before game day, the inspirational quote in the pre-game huddle, yoga on the field). The novel’s sense of humor is one of many reasons its appeal extends beyond baseball fans without disappointing die-hards.

On a micro level, the sense of place—a Midwestern college campus on Lake Michigan—feels rich and real. Harbach achieves this verisimilitude using clean, bright descriptions that are always clear and straightforward. The characters’ physicality highlights both setting and theme without weighing down the language, as in this locker room description: “As he twisted his combination lock in its casing, right left right, he could sense a gentle depression, like the hollow of a girl’s neck, each time he reached the right number.”

The same could also be said of the landscape:

Shreds of clouds blew past the setting sun, causing shadows to scurry rodentially over the grass. To his right rose the big stone bowl of the football stadium; to his left stretched Lake Michigan, which this afternoon was colored a deep slate blue that perfectly matched his bathroom floor.

And then, of course, there’s the narrative itself—that of a storied shortstop who comes upon hard times, and of those around him. The archetypes of College Novel and Baseball Novel are as well-worn as the path to first base, but the story isn’t solely restricted to the often clichéd worlds of sports or academia. Harbach introduces complex, intellectually engaged characters, well-versed in Melville and Emerson in particular, Eliot occasionally, Greek mythology often. Far from casual name-dropping, the characters’ ongoing dialogue with these canonical texts makes Moby-Dick et al. an integral part of the narrative itself. A college athletics setting allows for and appreciates the blending of sports and scholarship.

In a climactic example, the characters reenact a famous Emerson rite. At another moment, Affenlight broods on the post-modern “Prufrockian paralysis” of Bill Blass Disease, when a player’s mind keeps him from executing simple tasks on the field. In this way, baseball becomes like a literary trope, and the ghosts of literary greats like locker room legends. Dumb jocks these characters are not, nor geeky English nerds. And the story, as a result, is strengthened by the interplay of sports and words. By switching pitches in this way, between baseball-as-art and thought-as-play, The Art of Fielding elevates and transcends its classic subject matters:

For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

Indeed, the title—which refers to a fictional retired-shortstop’s creed called The Art of Fielding—encapsulates this union of art and baseball. Schwartz, the team’s captain, is particularly aware of the parallels. At one moment, he muses on the idea of coaching as essentially story-telling:

All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense.

The Art of Fielding is a love-story many times over. We watch the President of the school fall for an undergrad he knows he shouldn’t. There’s affection between players, between unlikely lovers, for the game itself, and between father and daughter. But it is the universality of falling in love that deepens the narrative with urgent feeling:

Everything that floated through his life’s width—a sunny day or a sudden cloudburst, an e-mail from an old colleague, a conversation with Pella that didn’t turn into a fight—seemed loaded with such poignance that he found himself on the verge of country-music tears, and could cope with his own ridiculousness only by making fun of himself.

Baseball, like books, in the right hands, becomes an expression of love. But the cost of loving something too much is all too real here. When a routine throw to first seriously injures a beloved teammate, Henry’s faith in his art and in himself is irrevocably shaken. Over the course of the book, all of the characters risk serious consequences for that which they love most: loss of jobs, weight, friends, sanity.  The stakes are high.

Harbach has been compared to (and is blurbed by) Jonathan Franzen. In certain echoes, this makes sense, particularly when expounding on the dangers of freedom:

Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense.

But where Franzen can be cruel to his characters, and more than a touch melodramatic, Harbach’s is a more compassionate narrator; his characters never try your patience the same way or tire your nerves. The comparison between the two authors, outside of a couple coincidental parallels, doesn’t really hold up beyond that.

The fictional motivational volume The Art of Fielding (the book within a book) reads: “It always saddens me to leave the field. Even fielding the final out of the World Series, deep in the truest part of me, felt like death.” After spending five hundred pages with these memorable characters, it was bittersweet to let them go upon finishing the book. The Art of Fielding, like baseball or college, inspires wistful fondness after the action has ended. It’s the kind of book that insists on the local train instead of the express, even though there are six additional stops, because it’s just too good to put down.

As Schwartz observed about the Human Condition, we are all indeed alive with access to beauty. And in reading The Art of Fielding, this profound sentiment is brought home.

Further Links and Resources

In her recent interview with Solomon, Contributor Sara Schaff speaks with the author about “truth” versus “accuracy” in fiction, why the short story is a more demanding form than the novel, and how she stumbled upon the story of a Russian mail-order bride, Rachel Bella Calof, whose story inspired this novel. In response to a question about developing her main character, Solomon replies :

This question is the hardest for me to answer because I was not that conscious of how it happened. I know what I don’t do. It is organic in that I didn’t go through and make decisions about [Minna's] character before I started writing her. She came to be who she was through the writing.

On a story level and on a plot level, I did know where the story was going. I really wanted to have a story-driven, plot-driven book when I launched into the longer form of the novel because I didn’t want to be wondering the whole time what it was about. On a thematic level I’m still learning what it’s about, but on a level of what’s happening, I always knew: this is a story about a mail-order bride who goes to America. It was nice to have that basic piece there.

I didn’t know exactly where it would end, and certainly lots of things changed, but I had a sense that this is this journey story, and these are some of the things that are going to happen. It’s certainly not going to be just stuck in her head the whole time. Minna became who she is because of what the story needed her to be. The story also became shaped around who she was. Especially in revision, where I started realizing wait, no, this isn’t really what would happen here. She really wants this, or she needs that. When I went back, she started driving the story more, whereas, in the beginning, she was becoming herself in relation to the story.

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

In The Little Bride, Anna Solomon’s debut novel, 16-year-old Minna Losk travels from Odessa to America as a Jewish mail-order bride. Her motivation is born in from both fantasy and necessity. The journey represents a move toward a more prosperous life, safe from grueling housework and pogroms, a world in stark contrast to the one she has experienced so far—devoid of family, comfort, or a true childhood. She is disappointed to find that her new home isn’t a grand house in a city but a sod hut in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota. And her new husband, Max, is a poor match for the desolate land he has chosen to farm. Old enough to be her father and rigidly Orthodox, Max is kind but perilously stubborn. In addition to grappling with new depths of loneliness, precarious weather conditions, and finger-numbing work, Minna finds herself the stepmother of two teenage sons, one of whom she grows increasingly attracted to over the course of a year.

Anna Solomon’s short fiction has appeared in One Story, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, and Shenandoah, among others. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. Her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Slate’s “Double X,” and Kveller. Before receiving her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, she was a journalist for National Public Radio’s Living on Earth.

In this conversation with Sara Schaff, Anna Solomon considers the nature of short stories versus novels, the process of writing and researching a first novel that is also historical fiction, and the unexpectedly encompassing nature of publicity and self-promotion.

Interview

Sara Schaff: In a recent interview with Erica Dreifus on her blog, you said you once thought that if you could learn to write short stories well, then you could learn to do anything, even write a novel.

Anna Solomon: It’s weird to say this, but I actually feel like a really masterful short story is harder than a good novel because it’s such a demanding form. It feels much more particular, and if things are not perfect, it’s much more obvious. I mean, I think there are perfect novels, but I think it’s less important that a novel is perfect.

There’s more room to breathe in a novel.

Yeah. I think some novels achieve that feeling of unity that you can get with a story, that sense of singularity where you can see it all in one piece. I often think of two different categories of novels—in one category are books like Housekeeping or So Long, See You Tomorrow. I think of books like that as being perfect in what they are, and I feel that part of that is because they’re on the short side and they’re quiet and kind of domestic books. Private books. And then there are books like the The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Updike’s Rabbit books that I think of as great novels, but I don’t think of them as perfect novels. And part of what’s great about them is that they’re not perfect; they let so much in, they’re much less precious and fussy in a way. But books like Housekeeping and So Long, See You Tomorrow, I’ve read six times, and I feel like they’re these bibles.

How do you feel about your novel now, compared to your stories? Did writing it feel very different?

It did! You know, I’ve talked to friends who also were writing short stories before they began novels, and they said to me, “I felt like writing each chapter of the novel was like writing a short story, and I was just writing short story after short story.” For me the form felt so obviously different—the pacing, the structure, that part felt very natural to me. I don’t know if it’s partly that my short stories have always been on the long side and kind of begging to be expanded; I also wonder to what degree the subject matter is just so different than anything I’d written. I had never written a historical anything, and I had never thought I would, nor do I really read much historical fiction, but this was the story I wound up wanting to tell.

People who’ve read my stories and read the novel will say to me, oh, it’s totally you; it feels like your writing, which is a great comfort to me when I hear that because in some ways they feel so different.

The fine sentences, the well-drawn characters—that all feels like you. But yes, The Little Bride does feel very different. It’s an epic journey whereas your stories are more contained.

It’s funny because my goal while writing this book felt sort of small. It felt sort of like, okay, all I want to do here is try to write a novel. I just have to see if I can do it, you know? I wasn’t trying to be overly ambitious—when I say that it sounds funny now because I took on a part of history, and I’d never done that before, but in the way I was talking before about the small and large books, it felt to me like a small, quiet book. I know there’s all this epic-ness and sweeping history, but it felt like a book that was very close to its characters, and in that way, kind of contained.

You’re following Minna’s story.

Right, it’s very close to her, and it stays close to her. In the new book that I’ve started writing, the thing I know I want to do this time is open that out. There are many more points of view it’s allowed to go into. It feels much bigger and messier and that’s really exciting, too, but I definitely had to do this first.

I’m starting to research material for a historical novel, and it feels so daunting. What was your process in writing historical fiction—did you research first and develop a sense of the place, or did you start writing the story and then fill in gaps from there?

I definitely did them at the same time. And I think it’s totally daunting, too. Now that I’m facing this other novel, I’m still asking, how are you supposed to do this? And how do you do it as a fiction writer? What’s the obligation to history?

I was fortunate that I came across Rachel Bella Calof, this Russian mail-order bride whose story inspired the book. I was at a residency when I read her amazing memoir, and I was in this place where I was working on a book that was going nowhere, and I was in despair. I started reading Calof’s story, and I got to this line in the first section where she’s undergoing her “Look,” [the physical examination one had to have before being approved as a mail-order bride] and she says, “They inspected me like a horse.” It was one of those lines that said so much while saying so little. And the whole first chapter of the book just kind of came into being. And then I was like, “Oh, I need to learn more.”

But even then I was always writing. I didn’t really take much time off to just research. I felt like it was really important for me to just keep moving, and have the research grow out of what the story needed me to know. When I was writing the sections in Odessa and needed certain details, like the names of streets she might have run through, I would put X’s, and later I would go and look up names. There’s this great history of Odessa written by a Brown professor, and I would look through it, look through the maps. It didn’t feel to me like those names were essentials, that they were affecting the story, I guess. I certainly think that they can. Seemingly unimportant details can have a huge impact, obviously. But I tried to use the research as inspiration, as much as information that would hold me to something.

So you don’t get bogged down by trying to make everything accurate before you get the story.

Exactly. Because the characters, the actual story, felt a lot more important to me. I think that’s partly because of how I read. When I do read historical fiction, which is not that often, I tend not to be reading for the “Oh, I want to know what it was like to live during this time.” But a lot of people do read it in that way. So at other points, I would get this anxiety, like, “Oh my gosh, this isn’t accurate enough.” I think the book actually wound up being accurate in most ways, but if people wanted to go through it and pick it apart, either from a farming perspective or an Odessa perspective, they could say this or that isn’t exactly right.

But that could happen with any book. You set a story in contemporary times, in a place you know, and someone will find inaccuracies.

Well, exactly. And that’s one of the interesting things about historical fiction. If you open yourself up, the artifice of writing it all is much more pronounced. Writing contemporary fiction, there could be the illusion that it is “truth” in a way, but there’s no such illusion with historical fiction. Any attempt to recreate the past is going to have plenty of falsehoods. Can we even attempt to understand what someone 120 years ago might have been thinking or feeling? I think we can. Do I claim that it’s accurate? I don’t think I’m as interested in that accuracy as I’m interested in the truth of it, on a human level.

While writing this book, I was ignorant about a lot of things, and I think that was good. There were a lot of things I didn’t think to worry about, and that part of what just let me do it. My sense is that with each book I write, the book will be better, but I will also be more aware of these important questions, and that awareness is going to make the process, not necessarily more difficult, but more fraught. There’s something very freeing about ignorance.

I’ve heard other writers say that the second novel was actually harder. Because of the expectations attached to a second book.

Yes, and now I can understand my process and understand what worked and didn’t work and therefore expect myself to fix all of it, but I might not have all the tools yet.

The novel is both a page-turner and a character-driven story. In literary circles the term “plot-driven” can be pejorative, as if a good plot precludes good writing or good characters. But Minna’s character really drives the forward momentum of The Little Bride. What she does and how she reacts feel very real and organic. How did you write and develop her character and the story?

This question is the hardest for me to answer because I was not that conscious of how it happened. I know what I don’t do. It is organic in that I didn’t go through and make decisions about her character before I started writing her. She came to be who she was through the writing.

On a story level and on a plot level, I did know where the story was going. I really wanted to have a story-driven, plot-driven book when I launched into the longer form of the novel because I didn’t want to be wondering the whole time what it was about. On a thematic level I’m still learning what it’s about, but on a level of what’s happening, I always knew: this is a story about a mail-order bride who goes to America. It was nice to have that basic piece there.

I didn’t know exactly where it would end, and certainly lots of things changed, but I had a sense that this is this journey story, and these are some of the things that are going to happen. It’s certainly not going to be just stuck in her head the whole time. Minna became who she is because of what the story needed her to be. The story also became shaped around who she was. Especially in revision, where I started realizing wait, no, this isn’t really what would happen here. She really wants this, or she needs that. When I went back, she started driving the story more, whereas, in the beginning, she was becoming herself in relation to the story.

Minna, though quite young, is so aware of and unapologetic about her desires. She even describes herself as being selfish.

In one sense she’s unapologetic about her desires and openly selfish, and then in another she’s constantly trying to want something else, or to change her desires: “Maybe I could think about it in this way and then I would want what I have. Maybe I could squint my eyes in this way and the room would be different.” But then her actual desire rears up and she’s never able to actually quash it.

Since she was a young girl, she’s had this innate sense of difference toward others—other kids being more religious and other kids being less self-aware. She’s always felt like an outsider, and her self-awareness grows from that. She’s gotten so used to her position as an outsider that she has less need to fit in and please. Some part of her wants to join that world; she looks at the character Ruth and thinks, “If I could just be a good housewife, and I could want that then that would be satisfying and I could just be normal.” But she’s just not. She’s never satisfied with that. She’s also not really satisfied with being unsatisfied, and you could say that’s a particularly modern feeling. But there are certainly lots of characters who were written in much earlier times about very strong, dissatisfied women. Jane Eyre, for instance. Becky Sharp.

Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country.

You know, I’ve never read that.

People don’t necessarily like the character of Spragg.

Well, people don’t necessarily like Minna either. [laughs]

I was wondering about the “likability” factor. How have readers reacted to Minna?

People either feel that she’s complex and real and they love that she’s not perfect and that she’s not always virtuous or giving. Those people love that she can be all these things. Or they feel, “She is mean and selfish and bad.” I had a friend who leads book clubs, and her book club read it and everyone loved it except one woman who just hated Minna. That’s going to happen.

I certainly want the characters I read to be complex and flawed. It’s important to me, because otherwise I would feel so lacking in my own character if I didn’t get to read other people who were struggling. But some people don’t read for that, and they want a sense of pure escape.

In terms of writing this book, looking back at your short stories, and thinking about the novel you’re writing now, do you see any similarities between your characters? What patterns are you noticing in your own writing?

On a purely external level, [the theme of] coming of age. There are a lot of 16ish-year-old girls – I’m pretty fascinated by that time – I think I always will be. I’m sure that it will change, too, as I get older, but it’s such a ripe moment for characters because there is so much change. That time in my life still feels so vivid, in ways that are not entirely pleasurable. [laughs] The complexity is certainly there.

There are themes that run through a lot of [the work]. One theme would be outsiders versus insiders. Place is also very important in almost all my short stories as well as the book; it becomes its own character. And it’s very important to my writing process.

Sex, too. Not just sex, but there’s a lot of complex sex going on. Part of it is power issues around sex.

And women and young women exploring their sexuality—matter-of-factly, unapologetically. Their exploration often feels like part of their longing for something else.

Yeah, that’s interesting.

In your story “What is Alaska Like?” the narrator’s relationship with Randolph Cunningham boils down to wanting to leave town and her job as a chambermaid. In “The Long Net,” June and her friend encounter a frightening pedophile at a campsite but the story turns on June’s longing for connection with her mom, wanting to be noticed.

It’s funny with “The Long Net” – that was a story where my growing awareness of my themes almost stopped me from writing it altogether. As I was writing I thought, wait, I’m writing “What is Alaska Like?” again. And then I thought, you know what, that’s what writers do. That’s okay. In many ways it felt like a maturing from “What is Alaska Like?” although I still love that story, too.

But those echos can help make a collection work.

Oh, I love that you called it a collection. I hope it will be a collection. It’s cool that you’ve read my stories more recently than I have. It’s such a gift to be read closely and have things be thought about in relationship to each other.

On some level, I write because I want other writers to read what I write and to appreciate it, so it’s been a change getting used to caring about sales. I sold my novel to Riverhead, and it turns out I’ve written a historical novel, and a Jewish novel, and a women’s novel. I’ve done all these things that turn out to be marketable, which of course my agent is thrilled about. The idea that it might actually sell well and catch on in book clubs is awesome. At the same time, I’d like my short stories to be taken seriously, too, despite the fact that stories tend to be tougher on a commercial level.

How do you feel about the self-promotion aspect of being a novelist today?

It was definitely a hard transition this past spring when I decided I had to get myself on Twitter. Well, I didn’t have to, but it’s turned out to be a really good thing. I actually wound up liking it, finding this amazing community of women writers, but also writers of all sorts, and feeling connected through it. I’m not the most natural at social media at all, but I do feel like I’ve been able embrace it.

I’ve also been finding the events totally great. I’m loving readings, I’m loving doing Q & A’s. I’ve been doing a musical and literary performance with my friend, Clare Burson, and that’s been going really well. That part of it I enjoy; it feels really gratifying. Part of me likes to perform, so that’s been great.

The harder fact of self-promotion is how encompassing and full time it is. I remember thinking last year, “When my book comes out, I’m probably going to have to give a good hour or two a week to publicity.” I really thought I would just be able to keep on keeping on with the writing. That [shift] has been hard for me, because I thrive on discipline and routine. It’s the first time in my serious writing life that I’ve taken this kind of break from fiction. I’m writing some essays, which I take seriously, but it’s not the same. And I’m not even doing those in a regular, every-day-sit-down-at-the-same-time fashion. The hardest part of promotion is not the idea of going out there and speaking on behalf of my book, but just the sheer amount of time and distraction. I could see why I would have been a better author fifty years ago, when you just went out, did a few readings, and then went back to your desk.

Further Links & Resources

The most consistent plot-line in this complex, unconventional novel relates to an animal sanctuary, started by accident as an extravagance to please Kitty’s fetishes and insecurities, but which grows both in size and relevance as the novel progresses. It is where Rory’s artistic ideas first take seed and where Kitty finds her calling and heritage. More importantly, it provides sanctuary not just to abandoned circus animals but also to artists just as talented as Kitty and Rory, who have no hope for success beyond the role of “makers” without patronage or media attention. Those employed at the sanctuary are effectively human animals through whom the more privileged artists orchestrate their complex performances.

Rory’s evolution as an artist comes at some risk; he first courts, then shows disrespect to, a mentor whose rich acquaintances disgust Rory.  Yet, later in life, when Rory is a successful artist petitioning the government for a grant, he allows his assistant, Nora, to do most of the work. In Nora’s words:

“[O]n certain levels [Rory] tries to be the best he can… he’s aware of inequity in the art world, he tries to address it in the ways it has occurred to him, but he makes a common error in thinking that since as a gay man he can be considered a member of a group that has been oppressed, he has some sort of exemption from ever being considered oppressive himself.”

Nora’s story forms the crux of the symbiotic relationship between the makers of art and those who represent it.  Seamlessly woven in with her self-doubt is Rory’s almost didactic narrative of the grant application. He expresses his ambivalence about having benefited from as well as being held back by his mother’s fame, but also relies on Nora to complete the pesky grant narrative for him. Rory’s fame shields him from the injustices of art world, but it also keeps him from personally connecting with the people who might help develop his art.

Art patronage is represented in various forms, but the complexity of the artist/patron relationship is especially evident in the character of the misogynist film director, Albert Wickwood, whose resentment for his mother (and all mothers) is emphasized throughout the novel. He is behind Kitty’s rise to success, but, ironically, he is also the director who ends her career. Wickwood’s art is controversial in both method and form.  He wants to draw attention to animal cruelty, but he’s often insensitive to the conflicting messages he conveys.

For example, in a fragment about one of Wickwood’s documentaries, we see that he often fails to observe the realities of his subjects in blatant and disconcerting ways. In this particular narrative, “one of the dolphins breaks away from the group repeatedly in order to linger against the frothing jet of the water intake…” while an oblivious voice-over exclaims: “’They’re a mighty playful bunch, aren’t they?’” Meanwhile, in italics, the stunt-woman observes: “One of the dolphin attempts to insert his penis in the soft tissue at the rear of the turtle’s shell would be prominently visible from the first camera position.”  We then shift back to the official version: “From this new panel, the lone dolphin and the turtle pair is mostly eclipsed….” The dolphin’s playful nature is juxtaposed with a disturbing subtext and significant omissions.

Thus, relationships between artist and art object, mentor and mentee, patron and protégé, are explored in double-edged turns through these characters’ lives. Wickwood is near-sadistic in his direction, effectively treating his actors as animals (“Kitty Dawson responded best to some of the methods trainers used with dogs,” Wickwood confesses during an interview). Similarly, Rory’s indifference to Nora’s struggle suggests that patronage comes with some inevitable oppression.  In Animal Sanctuary, art demands blood sacrifice, and injustice comes dressed in the garb of good intentions. Success is relative, and art, like nature, is both a mother and a killer.  The titular animals in their sanctuary are also unemployed artists, refugees, victims of rape and violence; proud, even elegant, but nonetheless, displaced tigers and lions.

But to reduce the book to these dichotomies would be a disservice. Animal Sanctuary doesn’t raise a political platform. Rather, it resonates with moral questions about the role of art in social change through fragments in various narrative forms: film synopses, a textbook passage on film theory, an interview fawning over the director’s success juxtaposed with another focused on Wickwood’s best actress, Kitty, and whose tone leans toward sexist brow-beating.  Falkner braids her narrative with emails, journal entries, letters, magazine articles, blogs, and even voice recordings. These are interspersed with the most intimate thoughts of the characters, some of whom make dramatic entrances only to disappear, never mentioned again.

Trying to encapsulate the complex animal refugee metaphor brings to mind a quote from Wickwood:

“Now, I don’t really ever enjoy discussing beforehand with anybody else just how it is I intend to pull of one of my stories. It always seems to come down to trying to describe in words how I am going to show something visual by not-showing it: a perverse impossible task of the type gods or devils set before an unlucky soul.”

Wickwood holds that plot “is absurd on paper,” and a work of art ultimately “succeed[s] precisely because the plot eventually steps aside and lets other things be accomplished.” Thus, Falkner, by discarding plot and structure conventions, highlights the ambivalent systems which both nourish and threaten art. The book contains no climax, no resolution, no punchy dialogue, no riveting main scenes. Nor does it contain any real protagonists or antagonists. The characters, like their art forms, are submerged within murky, subconscious waters, and only the lights of the camera reveal their true natures.

Sarah Falkner

Even beyond the novel’s halfway point, the reader may still be uncertain of the story’s protagonists or the animal sanctuary’s role. But the pages keep turning because of Falkner’s incisive prose, her accurate and fluid discussion of the aesthetic values of film, and the moral complexity of her characters. The reader is left, at the end, with the singular effect of a well-executed work of art full of dark undercurrents, sometimes destructive, sometimes spiritually uplifting.  In Animal Sanctuary, Falkner breaks the modes of craft to show us that the idea of control over art is an illusion. The creation of art can be controlled no more than its interpretation, and no more than the change, violent or passive, it may excite among generations of its audience.

Further Links and Resources:

Read a Q&A with Sarah Falkner at the blog, We Who Are About To Die.

Browse through images from the innovative art book project, City of Salt, for which Falkner collaborated with visual artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick.

To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

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Up From the Blue returns to the epicenter of the Harris family’s disaster: Washington, D.C., 1975, when Tillie – an off-kilter eight-year-old – must navigate her mother’s mental illness. Colonel Harris adopts a Greatest Generation silence about his wife’s problems. Tillie’s older brother Phil retreats into sullen dutifulness. Her mother Mara’s absence – physical, psychic – weighs heavily on the household.

Set against a backdrop of deep societal change and unrest, Henderson’s crisp prose mimics Tillie’s nimble mind. That mix of childhood inexperience with an adult knowledge carries the novel into the revisionist territory of memory.

My brother worked so hard to listen and to do what he was told, but while he knew more of what was happening than I did, he was never a part of what was happening. He was so quick to understand and cooperate that he faded into the background.

The inherent conflict between child and adult in the prose parallels Tillie’s reality where order is simply a disguise for disarray and what seems to be true, isn’t.

Henderson centers the brief glimpse of pregnant, adult Tillie on the crisis of her labor, but these pages expose the repercussions of that distant, harrowing year. In this juxtaposition, we behold Tillie’s frightening similarities to Mara, see the paths that could have been and yet aren’t —

A part of me will always be eight years old, living that last year we had Momma with us. And my story of that year always ends with our walk because that’s when there was hope. That’s when we could still choose any ending.

Henderson gives the reader an ending, the defining moment of Tillie’s childhood, that is also her beginning – that great, slow elimination of alternate versions of the self: adulthood.

Extras

• Visit Susan Henderson’s website – LitPark – for more information about Up From the Blue, including author appearances, her blog, interviews and raves, and book club resources.