Grass opens with a seemingly straightforward scene – his eight grown children, gathered at his request around the kitchen table of his home near Lübeck. There’s a tape recorder, and the idea is for his children to talk about their father, who has just turned eighty. But things begin to shift and slide when the narrator, Grass, admits that his children will be using “words he has put into their mouths.” And few pages later, he introduces Maria and her magic camera, which  “takes pictures of things that aren’t there.”

With these conceits, Grass ostensibly records his children’s version of his story over numerous recording sessions, each of which is a different chapter. These take place at different homes of Grass and his children, in assorted parts of Germany, with various permutations of his children present. The chapters are bookended with brief comments from Grass (rather, Grass writing the character Grass). The story is presented in vérité style, without quotation marks or any formal indication of who is saying what. It reads like an unedited oral history transcript.

Grass’ children, several of whom are well past middle age themselves, reminisce about their childhoods, meandering through their father’s post-war years, forming a composite of his life as he achieved literary superstardom in Germany and beyond. As his children recount, their childhoods weren’t particularly tragic or abusive; they were mostly dysfunctional, with lots of longing for their father’s interest and attention. As they grow up, some of the children are unaware of the existence of their half brothers and sisters. At one point, they recall Grass moving back in with his first wife, sharing a home with two of their children and his wife’s Romanian lover; they eventually divide the house like the nearby Berlin Wall. For the most part, Grass is absent, distracted, or otherwise engaged. “He wasn’t a play-father,” says one of his children.

Marie is introduced early on, nonchalantly, as the children pass around family photos at one of their recording sessions. She’s based on a real person – a family friend who was a photographer – and The Box is dedicated to her. As the children meander and reminisce their way through Grass’ post-war years, Marie and her magic camera are omnipresent and omniscient. She sees much of the confusion and turmoil firsthand, but her camera penetrates deeper. It produces prints that see the past, the future, alternate versions of the present, and the deepest wishes of its subjects. Its unique powers, along with Marie’s ubiquity, allow her to see the confusion and turmoil caused by Grass’ mental and physical restlessness.  “My box is like the good lord: It sees all that was, that is, and that will be.”

As the children describe them, Marie’s photographs depict innocent fantasies, latent desires, melancholy wishes, and stark alternate realities. There are shots of Joggi, the dog, expertly navigating the Berlin U-Bahn. There are shots of Grass’ daughter Lara and her friends, naked, walking the Kudamm in Berlin. There are shots of a family trip to Brittany that depict the children as young soldiers wearing steel helmets and gas masks among the ruined, long-abandoned battlements, looking not unlike Grass did during the war.

Marie has a different relationship with Grass, and the prints from her magic camera often supply the raw materials for his writing, especially his work after debut novel and international sensation The Tin Drum (1959). The children remember the Stone Age pictures the camera produced that formed the basis of Grass’ 1977 novel The Flounder. They recall it supplying research for The Meeting at Telgte (1979), set during the 30 Years War.

For Telgte, Grass takes the pictures himself, shooting a concrete parking lot. “Because, he said, in this very spot a good three hundred years ago stood the Brückenhof, which will be the scene of the action.”  The prints depict outbuildings and barns with thatched roofs, portrait photos of historical figures at the real Telgte meeting.  “He wanted the box to help him rewind,” one of Grass’ children says. “Historical snapshots,” says another.

Günter Grass is obsessed with the past and has spent a lifetime attempting to come to terms with it. There’s a German word for this: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which literally translated means “managing the past,” and usually refers specifically to the Holocaust. This fuels his compulsion to write. It’s the desire to understand the role his friends, his family, his fellow citizens – and Grass himself – played in this crime. It’s the desire to make a new German society. This isn’t unique to Grass – many post-Nazi German writers fall into this category – but he is easily the most famous.

The Box was preceded by Peeling the Onion (2006), which offered a linear – though lyrical – account of his childhood, war years, and early literary success. In it, Grass revealed that he was drafted into the Waffen SS and saw limited action in a tank unit at the end of the Second World War. Long a critic of ex-Nazi participation in German politics, and perhaps the leading cultural voice calling for Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the book prompted a firestorm of controversy that tainted Grass’ reputation. Mild critics called him a hypocrite, while others called for the Nobel laureate to return his prize. Grass kept his prize and continued to work.

Peeling the Onion is what one might call a typical memoir. There are times when you think Grass might be spinning a yarn: Was the Joseph he met in a POW camp, the Joseph who Grass said sounded like a “grand inquisitor” and quoted Saint Augustine when he beat him at dice, was this really Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict? Still, in relation to other memoirs, it’s not off the charts. In fact, as a reader, you’re always waiting for Grass to…well, be Grass. But he earns and keeps your trust. Perhaps he chose strategy this because of the book’s dynamite revelations. If you’ve positioned yourself as the moral compass of post-war Germany, and you’re going to disclose that you were part of the Waffen SS, Marie and her magic camera aren’t going to help you. This was one case where Grass wasn’t going to play around with the past.

In The Box, I first thought that Grass was being diabolical, using Marie as an elaborate joke that his children play on him as they reminisce, telling him a tall tale as revenge for him making a career of it. One of the children says: “It’s possible even we, sitting here and talking, are just figments of his imagination – what do you think?” Of course, this is Grass writing in his children’s voice, so this is actually true.

Grass – well, the character of Grass – adds fuel to the fire in one of the chapter bookends,  cryptically stating: “Yes, children, I know: being a father is only an assertion, one that has to be constantly corroborated. That is why, to make you believe me, I must lie.”

But Grass is also a writer who once said, “If I say potato, I mean potato.” It’s hard to take him seriously on this point, given his oeuvre is peppered with talking animals; a child who wills himself to stop growing and possesses the superpower-like ability to use his voice as a weapon; and the aforementioned magic camera.

But permit me to twist the phrase a bit: “If I say talking dog, I mean talking dog.” “If I say self-created little person with super powers, I mean self-created little person with super powers.” “If I say magic camera, I mean magic camera.”

Maybe there’s something to this. Let’s apply it to The Tin Drum, Grass’ first novel. He claimed that the only way he would really convey the story of the rise of Nazism and its wake of destruction was to do it from the point of view as a child; this necessitated one that never aged, had the faculties of an adult, and while a little crazy and unreliable, provided an utterly unique perspective.

Marie’s camera is a device that allows Grass to explore the issues of past, present, and future that have always confounded him. Think of it this way: Grass was largely an absent father, but here he is writing about Marie and her nearly omniscient knowledge of his children. He must know something about his children to write a character who knows nearly all this is to know about them:

But you, Nanette, she managed to capture with her box even when I could not be with you, but in my thoughts was right there, holding your little hand that completely disappeared into mine. Mariechen knew our wishes, after all. That made it possible for me to be near you when you had dropped your house key or your pocket money again. I helped you look; it was a long way between home and school. Cold, I would say, warm, warmer, warmer, hot … And sometimes more turn up than had been lost. The pleasure we both took in found objects.

So, the father knows his children after all. The Box is how Grass sees his children (via Marie and her magic camera, Grass’ creation) and it’s Grass imagining how his kids see him (via Grass writing in their voices). He’s a fair and often critical assessor of his behaviors and their impact. The children try to work out what drives him, and it’s clear early on that they’re aware of his preternatural drive, one that’s more powerful than any other force in his life: the pursuit of truth, the reconciliation of past, present, and future. “That’s just how he is. Always was. I have to work through it, he said.”

In the end, I came to believe just about everything in The Box except for Marie’s magic camera. I suppose I could attempt to corroborate the real biographies of his eight children with those that are recounted here. But those are the details that he had no need to make up. As for the magic camera, it’s incidental as well. The point of The Box, at least to me, is that the octogenarian Grass needs to believe that despite all of the family turmoil he’s caused, that his children understand that he was compelled by a greater power – namely, the quest for truth. By writing in a realistic way (despite the magic camera) how his children could come to this understanding and acceptance about their father, perhaps he’s really giving them a blueprint to follow in real life. Or, at the very least, he’s making his case.

According to The Box, Grass’s children, by and large, turned out fine. Professionally, they are successful. Personally, they seem happy. Their childhoods were, like other childhoods, bittersweet, though certainly more tumultuous than most. The world is richer for Grass’ work, but there was a cost. The Box is tragic in this respect, because for a man obsessed with making sense of the past, he now has to account for his own, and there’s more than a tinge of regret. It’s not an apology to his children – as far as Grass is concerned, there’s nothing to apologize for – but it does offer an explanation:  Sure, I could have been around more, but the time we spent, wasn’t it magical?

Further Links and Resources:

The gradual accumulation of detail and story is Ondaatje’s preferred narrative structure; the effect of the jumps from scene to scene and the uneven length of these snapshots of life during the voyage fragment the story even as glimpses of conversation, of interactions first half-described and later completed, tie it together. One effect of this technique is to reveal the characters as mutable figures—just when you think you know who someone is, they may act in a way that’s surprising. And because The Cat’s Table is narrated in the first person from the boy Michael’s perspective, when characters surprise us they often surprise him, and we feel the inherent unreliability of anyone’s understanding of anyone else.

I didn’t even know to expect a new novel from Ondaatje until the galley was in my hands. The best kind of surprise—unlooked for, and so all the more valuable. And as I prepared to write this review, something about The Cat’s Table tugged at me. I flipped through some of his other books. It seemed like the right time to re-read Anil’s Ghost, given recent events in Sri Lanka. And there it was: Anil, a forensic pathologist, works with the archaeologist Sarath on a ship in the Colombo harbor. Once a luxury liner, it is now overflow office space. The name of the ship is the Oronsay. As Ondaatje’s writing combines and repeats images, themes, and references, it makes sense to discuss The Cat’s Table in the context of his greater body of work.

2.
I have always loved Ondaatje’s writing for his beautiful sentences and his indelible images, but also for his huge imagination. Larger-than-life plots abound in Ondaatje novels, and even if a reader balks at accepting their plausibility, the descriptions of the events are so entrancing, so bizarre and wonderful, that they have a kind of metaphorical truth. For example, the thief Caravaggio’s escape from prison in In the Skin of Lion by painting himself blue and blending into the prison roof:  “They daubed his clothes and then, laying a strip of handkerchief over his eyes, painted his face blue, so he was gone—to the guards who looked up and saw nothing there.” Or the Bedouin rescuing the burned man in the desert in The English Patient, an “archangel” with a yoke of hundreds of glass bottles hanging from his neck rubs a tincture of ground peacock bones into the patient’s skin to help him heal. I think this is what people mean when they describe Ondaatje’s work as “haunting” in blurbs: the images resist evaporation. In The Cat’s Table, a fabulously wealthy passenger is traveling to England hoping to find a cure for rabies, which he got from a mad dog after a priest he had insulted cursed him. Another passenger keeps a collection of plants, many of them poisonous, under lamps in a hidden garden in the bowels of the ship. Perhaps none of Ondaatje’s inventions are really all that outlandish—in a world where giant squid, and the Lascaux caves, and the brutality of tens of thousands of murders in Sri Lanka actually exist, why should anything else seem surreal?

Over the breadth of Ondaatje’s work, there are two aspects of his narrative style that I love. The first is his juxtaposition of the large gesture with the small, everyday one. In The English Patient, the burned patient was once a man hopelessly in love who crashed his plane in the desert. But when the novel opens, his nurse, Hana, is simply feeding him. She “unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.”

In the Skin of a Lion, which may be my favorite of Ondaatje’s novels, follows Patrick Lewis, the future nurse Hana’s father, and his love affairs with two actresses, but the novel is as much about work, the hard, brutal work of the immigrant, as it is about love. Consider this scene when a nun falls off a half-built bridge:

The man in mid-air under the central arch saw the shape fall towards him, in that second knowing his rope would not hold them both. He reached to catch the figure while his other hand grabbed the metal pipe edge above him to lessen the sudden jerk on the rope. The new weight ripped the arm that held the pipe out of its socket and he screamed, so whoever might have heard him up there would have thought the scream was from the falling figure. The halter thulked, jerking his chest up to his throat. The right arm was all agony now—but his hand’s timing had been immaculate, the grace of the habit, and he found himself a moment later holding the figure against him dearly.

Contrast the drama of the nun’s fall with this passage:

Patrick did not speak. The light moved down her arm to the bowl, illuminated her hand which wet the cloth, squeezed it, and moved forward to give it to him. She saw his right hand reach to take it from her. His hand began to wipe her neck. He removed the brown paint, turned her around and slowly wiped the vermilion frown-mark by her mouth, the light close on her face. He rinsed out the cloth again and holding her forehead steady wiped the targets off her eyes, cloth over one finger for precision, the blue left iris wavering at the closeness…so that it was not Alice Gull but something more intimate—an eye muscle having to trust a fingertip to remove that quarter-inch of bright yellow around her sight.

The language, pacing, and tone that describe the nun’s fall and the makeup removal are so similar that they give both events a similar importance—and that’s the point. Critiques of Ondaatje maintain that this drama is all a little much. Although Ondaatje’s writing is somehow never truly sensational, neither is it the quiet revelation of William Trevor, or Alice Munro. As I was working on this essay I found it difficult to re-read Ondaatje’s works one after the other. The level of intensity so rarely drops, and the images ought to be savored, not inhaled, otherwise they subsume and overwhelm each other—taken all at once the work can seem like some kind of faintly lurid carnival show of wonders; read at a slower pace Ondaatje’s inventions and historical re-imaginings seem individually more wonderful.

To find the wonderful aspects, the beauty, in both history and work, is one of Ondaatje’s main undertakings.  In the Skin of a Lion follows characters through pushing logs downriver to a sawmill. When the logs jam the boy Patrick greases himself and dives into the water to places dynamite charges that will free them (“A river exploded behind him, the crows leafing up.”). The immigrant Nicholas Temelcoff swings from girders to build the Prince Edward Bridge in Toronto, (“He knows his position in the air as if he is mercury slipping across a map”), an earlier echo of Kip and Hana swinging in front of the Italian frescoes in that beautiful scene from The English Patient that made it into Anthony Minghella’s film adaption. Later, Patrick works as a leather-dyer: “men leapt waist-deep within the reds and ochres and greens, leapt in embracing the skins of recently slaughtered animals…And the men stepped out in colours up to their necks, pulling wet hides out after them so it appeared they had removed the skin from their own bodies.” In The English Patient, Count Almasy turns again and again to Herodotus, as if that text and its stories are the key to understanding his own life.

The second thing I love is Ondaatje’s willingness to leap, from scene to scene, moment to moment. This includes his jumpy, minimalist conversations. If you don’t know someone well, you may be a little uncomfortable around them, so you speak only briefly. If you know someone well, you don’t have to explain yourself, so you also speak briefly. Ondaatje’s characters often inhabit these two spaces. His leaps in point of view, time, image, and place are, of course, poetic. Ondaatje discusses this tendency in his own work in a new afterword to The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: “One could leap from terror to a close-up of a moth in a bowl, but there had to be some unspoken or hidden link between the two moments—to do with language perhaps or some small spark in a lyric that would lead to conflagration in the prose sequence that followed.”¹

Because of the commercial success of The English Patient, Ondaatje has avoided being labeled an “experimental” writer, yet his earlier books are relentlessly restless in the ways they combine images, their intertextuality, their fragmented narratives and sentences. Two books are especially jumpy and interwoven: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976).

Of Billy, Ondaatje writes, “What if I tried to write a book that allowed all these angles and subjects and emotions, but they all came from one person? As far as I could see, one voice never really spoke only in one way: it contained multitudes.” The structure of these two books is like a camera panning in a circle. It moves around the main characters slowly, looking at them from all those different angles, occasionally darting away to interview a friend or a lover, a talking head in a documentary. We get glimpses of letters, interviews. Sometimes you can believe what the friends and lovers say, and sometimes you can’t. Slaughter is set in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, and follows cornet player Buddy Bolden’s rise and fall. Both books crash over the reader in waves. There is a willingness to loosen the threads of the narrative so much that the fabric is more transparent than opaque. Instead of reading for the resolution of the story, you’re reading for the scene, the moment. The story pauses, but only barely, pulled along by the shifts between those multitudes. And Ondaatje preserves aspects of this structure—its reliance on short scenes and shifts in points of view—in his later work. Both books also display Ondaatje’s interest, at times frightening even to him, in violence.

3.
Billy the Kid is, of course, one of the most violent figures in the early American imagination, and part of Ondaatje’s treatment of Billy is to rewrite the cartoonish figure he has become and to restore the horror of the actual shooting of other people. From there, the violence of the mind and of music, in Coming Through Slaughter, and the violence of love as well. In Ondaatje’s memoir, Running in the Family, he describes the violence of his father’s dipsomania,² and in The English Patient, the violence of love, the intimacy of wounding someone is a counterpoint to or expression of the guilt the characters both feel. In that book, only Kip and Hana escape violence in their relationship; perhaps it is displaced into the dangerous sapper’s work.

Anil’s Ghost, set in the early 1990s in Sri Lanka and published in 2000, is a litany, a report of violence. The civil war in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese-controlled government and the Tamil minority, eventually represented by the Tamil Tigers, ended last year with the government’s massacre of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians. It began in the mid 1980s, and also involved a third group of antigovernment insurgents in the south of the country. The character Anil, a forensic pathologist who was born in Sri Lanka but who left to go to school in England and the US when she was fifteen, returns to the country on a human rights mission. There she becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of a single murder victim, a body she calls “Sailor” who was found in a government-restricted area. All around Anil are people who have survived the war so far physically but perhaps not otherwise. Ondaatje describes:

Street bombs, usually containing nails or ball bearings, could cut open an abdomen fifty yards from the explosion. Shock waves travelled past someone and the suction could rupture the stomach. ‘Something happened to my stomach,’ a woman would say, fearing she had been cut open by bomb metal, while in fact her stomach had flipped over from the force of passing air. Everyone was emotionally shattered by a public bomb. Months later survivors would come into the ward saying they feared they might still die…

Thousands of people were murdered, publicly and privately, over the decades of the Sri Lankan conflict. People disappeared. The book opens with a scene of Anil in similarly afflicted Guatemala, her forensic team shadowed by the families of the missing. “There was always the fear, double-edged that it was their son in the pit, or that it was not their son—which meant there would be further searching…The possibility of their lost son was everywhere.”

To move through Ondaatje’s work is to follow the thread of his interests, his themes, or obsessions, or beliefs. To examine Billy the Kid by imagining his violence is to solve his disappearance, the vanishing of the actual gunslinger in the American imagination, to be replaced by a merely rakish outlaw. Anil’s Ghost, the story of events a Sri Lankan-born writer must at some point contend with, is an extension of the ways Ondaatje’s work circles around violence and death. In The Cat’s Table, there is less violence, although there is the metaphorical violence of travel, and the violence of exile. This is exemplified by a storm which Cassius and Michael want to experience firsthand. They convince their friend Ramadhin to tie them to the deck:

We’d imagined lying there conversing in wonder about the lights of the storm at some great height above us but we were now almost drowning from the water in the air—the rain, and the sea that was leaping over the railings and swirling across the deck. Lightning lit the rain in the air above us, and then it was dark once more. A loose rope was slapping at my throat. There was only noise. We could not tell if we were screaming or only trying to.

Michael remembers this moment vividly years later. As he reaches middle age looks back on his life, he circles around such moments. The novel gives us the boy’s point of view on the scenes, but then some reflection from the older character, making sense of his journey piece by piece. In Divisadero, Ondaatje writes, from the point of view of Anna, one of the characters:

All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in the past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion…For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered piece of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, make up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

In a book on poetic forms, The Making of a Poem, poets Eavan Boland and Mark Strand write, “While the subject of most lyric poems is loss, the formal properties of the villanelle address the idea of loss directly. Its repeated lines, the circularity of its stanzas, become, as the reader listens, a repudiation of forward motion, of temporality and therefore, of dissolution. Each stanza of a villanelle, with its refrains, becomes a series of retrievals.”

Between them, these two quotations seem to explain a great deal of how Ondaatje makes use of his poet’s sensibilities in the service of fiction. They also address the doubling of narrative, the circling back to conversations, images, themes, that runs through his books. In the Skin of a Lion ends with Patrick and Hana driving together into the night. Patrick is searching for Clara. Anil is searching for Sailor. Anna is searching for Lucien Segura. Michael, in The Cat’s Table, is searching the past. And they may help explain the violence in his work. Sometimes it seems as if there is a cruel balance: to find something, you have to give something up in return.

4.
As useful as the above quotations are when thinking about his work, I will admit to at times being annoyed by Ondaatje’s explanations, especially in Divisadero. The intrusions of what seems more like the author’s voice than the character’s into the text remove me from the novel’s setting. For example,

“The skill of writing offers little to a viewer. There is only this five-centimeter relationship between your eyes and the pen. Any skill in diving or dreaming is invisible, whereas the clockmaker visiting Auch removed his dark cotton jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt….”

Divisadero is partly about two writers, Anna and the French writer of an earlier time, Lucien Segura, whom Anna is researching while she lives in his house. But because of the tone of the passage, I can’t separate Anna from Ondaatje himself, and to be reminded of the creator of this complicated narrative in this way is disrupting. The same paragraph, however, contains one of my favorite Ondaatje sentences: “Soon I was almost within the pleasure of his serious demeanor.” And for this, I can forgive him anything else.

Another critique of Ondaatje’s novels might be that they have, more or less, one tone: serious, dramatic, and often-awed. I can’t argue with this, but I would refer such readers to Ondaatje’s slightest but in some ways most kick-ass book, the poem Elimination Dance (La danse éliminatoire), which is a political, hilarious, weird take on a called dance (e.g. Anyone with a red hat on the floor, except here it is “Any dinner guest who has consumed the host’s missing contact lens along with the dessert”). The “Study Questions” at the back of the book include: “Does the author’s fuck-you tone contribute to the theme of the poem as a whole?” and “Compare Elimination Dance with ‘The Rape of the Lock’—with special emphasis on the use of zeugma.”³ Ondaatje’s poetry is generally more humorous than his prose. “Sweet Like a Crow” proceeds:

Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed

through a glass tube

like someone has just trod on a peacock

like wind howling in a coconut

like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire

across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,

a vattacka being fried

a bone shaking hands

a frog singing at Carnegie Hall….

But the poems I love most share the tone of his novels. Maybe this only says something about my own value for sincerity. Or maybe I more easily recognize, in his poetry as well, the same circling back to his central concerns. In “The Hour of Cowdust” Ondaatje describes “the hour we move small / in the last possibilities of light…/ Everything is reducing itself to shape…

The boat turns languid

under the hunched passenger

sails

ready for the moon

fill like a lung

there is no longer

depth of perception

it is now possible

for the outline of two boats

to collide silently

It is this collision, of lives and stories, that keeps me returning to Ondaatje’s books, along with the continual surprise, as a result of these collisions, of moving from one narrative to another. Ondaatje insists on a willingness to admit that our own story (or the story of the original main character) may not be the most interesting one, and that when that story reaches a pausing place, we can continue to find meaning in other people, other characters, whose lives branch off from and continue without us. So Caravaggio becomes, three-quarters of the way through The English Patient, the narrative’s focus. So, in Divisadero we leave the cowboy Coop behind to follow the French writer, Lucien Segura. In The Cat’s Table we leave Michael several times to follow other characters. The last chapters of Anil’s Ghost don’t belong to Anil, but to Ananda, a sculptor who helped her by crafting a possible model of Sailor’s head. He is now reconstructing a statue of the Buddha that was destroyed. His final act is to paint the eyes that will give the statue life, but he must do it backwards, as Ondaatje explains:

Without the eyes there is not just blindness, there is nothing. There is no existence. The artificer brings to life sight and truth and presence…He climbs a ladder in front of the statue…The painter dips a brush into the paint and turns his back to the statue, so it looks as if he is about to be enfolded in the great arms. The paint is wet on the brush. The other man, facing him, holds up the mirror, and the artificer puts the brush over his shoulder and paints in the eyes without looking directly at the face. He uses just the reflection to guide him—so only the mirror receives the direct image of the glance being created. No human eye can meet the Buddha’s during the process of creation….

Is this just more fascinating research, or a metaphor for writing as well? The idea that we could not bear the true power of looking directly at someone else, that we are revealed by the stories that circle around us, as well as by our own, is one of the best lessons of Ondaatje’s work.

5.
The more relaxed pace, the slightly less dramatic stakes, and the continuation of the themes of the collisions of lives, and of disappearance and searching combine to make The Cat’s Table enormously satisfying. It seems, in many ways, the best possible next novel Ondaatje could have written: a little gentler than Anil’s Ghost, a little less difficult than Divisadero. Here are more eccentric, fascinating characters: Miss Lasqueti, who keeps pigeons in the pockets of her specially-sewn coat and who may or may not be involved with Whitehall—she periodically throws dissatisfying crime novels overboard in a fit of rage; Mr. Fonseka, the traveling teacher of literature and history who can as easily recite a song from the Azores as lines from an Irish play; Asuntha, an abandoned child who learns to become an acrobat and then is deafened in a fall, and whose father is a prisoner on the Oronsay; Emily, Michael’s beautiful cousin who is being sent to finishing school in England but who seem determined to make her life her own. Watching all these characters, and reporting on them, is Michael, brave and wild and occasionally very homesick. With two other boys on the ship, Cassius and Ramadhin, Michael explores every part of the Oronsay, small boys being endlessly curious and no one’s first priority.

Here, too, represented in Michael and the boys who explore every inch of the ship, is Ondaatje’s own boundless curiosity. The conversation about what amount of research belongs in a novel, and when an author’s enthusiasm for research can overwhelm the narrative is an important one, but often Ondaatje’s research is so interesting that I don’t care how it relates to the narrative. One of my favorite bits of research, from Divisadero: “Gotraskhalana is a term in Sanskrit poetics for calling a loved one by a wrong name, and means, literally, ‘stumbling on the name.’” The title of his book of selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, informs you that someone somewhere works for his living by peeling cinnamon. Knowing this is enough: I don’t need the story to contain it.

While The Cat’s Table has a more circumscribed roaming space than some of Ondaatje’s other books, it includes issues of class and race, and the painful, thrilling transition from East to West. The ship stops in the exotic ports of Aden and Port Said, and these images stay with the boys. The three-week journey seems etched in many of the passengers’ memories. The liminal space of the ship allows for confidences and friendships that are still vivid years later. Yet after the voyage, in living their own lives the passengers on the ship lose touch with one another. Cassius slips from his friends’ grasp. Ramadhin also has his own secrets from Michael. In the end, they are unknowable.

The Oronsay will become a haunted hulk of a ship in the Colombo harbor, but in The Cat’s Table it is a vital, floating world, and there is a nostalgia here for the loss of childhood, and for that slightly simpler time in which an eleven-year-old boy would be put aboard a ship more or less alone, for a lightly-supervised three week trip.

The book begins with the ship’s disappearance into the night as it leaves Sri Lanka. It ends with Emily, Michael’s cousin and pseudo-guardian, disappearing “into the world” on the dock in England. But on the pier Michael finds his mother, although he hasn’t seen her in four or five years, and “there no longer remained any sure memory of what she looked like.” Her story is outside the bounds of the novel—it will continue, without us. We the readers, along with Michael, had not realized that he had been searching for her for quite some time.

Published in 1982, before more recent discussions of whether fictionalized memoirs were less truthful or not, the book is not labeled a novel or a memoir. I have no idea where it would be shelved in a bookstore today, partly because there are no bookstores left in my Philadelphia neighborhood where I could check (a long-shuttered Borders dominates one corner). In Running, Ondaatje recreates conversations between dead family members. Did the contents of these conversations come from interviews or journals? Ondaatje writes in the acknowledgments, “…if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.”

A zeugma is “a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun.” –Wikipedia

[Click "Back" on your browser to return to the essay]

**Special thanks to Preeta Samarasan for her help with this essay.

Further Links and Resources:

In Marion Ettlinger’s stark black-and-white portrait of Carver, the author sits hunched forward slightly, his hands crossed at the wrists and resting on this knee. He wears a supple leather bomber jacket, a wool scarf, and a broad ring on one of his fingers. Carver looks comfortable, untouched by life’s rough edges, a slight smirk seems to be growing at the edges of his mouth.

Marion Ettlinger's photo of Carver, from http://www.nancykiefer.com/

I remember thinking, “How could this guy know so much about these characters?”

I was sixteen, and still naively believed that the narrator of every first-person story must be the author himself. Right? I mean, I was writing self-absorbed, autobiographical poems and stories every day. Wasn’t everyone else?

But back then I had no idea of the difference between sympathy and empathy. And, most importantly, I had no idea of what the imagination was capable of.

When I discovered the writing of Andre Dubus in my early twenties—beginning first with his final collection, Dancing After Hours (Knopf, 1996), and then quickly devouring his entire catalog—I discovered complex work that both taught me about the literary craft of compression and point of view in short stories, and gave me a deeper understanding of empathy and compassion as a human being.

As I read Dubus’s work, I also sought out all that had been written about him. In the latter, too often I stumbled upon other writers and scholars seeking to make tenuous links between the characters that inhabit Dubus’s tough yet celebratory stories, and Dubus’s actual life. Such reductive readings frustrated me. By then, I’d come to understand the difference between art and life, between the writer and the writing.

For no other apparent reason than the sake of putting fiction into neat boxes, some scholars seem to regularly seek out the explanation of fiction in the autobiography of authors. These scholars cling to ease rather than aspiring to generate objective knowledge and insights. They claim to admire a writer, yet diminish their work by putting forth essays and papers full of feeble examples of how the author’s work is thinly veiled autobiography.

Dubus himself said he steered clear of autobiography in his fiction. “I’ve always fought writing autobiography,” he told Kay Bonetti in a 1984 interview for the American Audio Prose Library series. ”I’ve felt that there was something wrong with it. I guess in my early twenties I started thinking about my choice of subjects and worried then that if I spent too much time writing autobiography I’d lose touch with the world.”

Unsurprisingly, that conversation with Bonetti eventually got around to Dubus’s literary hero, Anton Chekhov. In Dubus’s own words, we discover that what the short story devotee really sought to achieve with his art were stories devoid of himself. Explaining Chekhov’s reaction to an editor’s praise for his piece “A Dreary Story,” Dubus told the interviewer: “What [Chekhov] wrote to his editor about that story is absolutely true, it is full of arguments and philosophical debates, and Chekhov said, ‘but you will not find me in there.’ And that’s what I like.”

Recently, I sought input from several authors about the idea of autobiography in fiction. Many of the authors I spoke with have themselves, in varying degrees, dealt with their own writing being questioned as to its autobiographical elements.

Christopher Tilghman, author of the novels Mason’s Retreat (Random House, 1996) and Roads of the Heart (Random House, 2004), as well as the story collections The Way People Run (Random House, 1999) and In a Father’s Place (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), is unequivocal about his feelings on the matter of fact versus fiction in Dubus’s short stories.

“On the subject of using personal material in fiction,” says Tilghman, “I tend to think of Andre as one of the least autobiographical writers I know.”

In 1987, Tilghman became a founding member of the writers’ group that met nearly weekly in Dubus’s living room until his death in early 1999. The group eventually became known at the “Thursday Nighters,” a term coined by Tilghman. Dubus chronicled some of the group’s particularly difficult growing pains in his essay “Letter to a Writer’s Workshop,” collected in Meditations from a Moveable Chair (Knopf, 1998).

“If there are specific incidents in any of his stories that were drawn from life, his literary and spiritual project simply subsumed them. Whatever residue of personal experience that survives is simply not recognizable as autobiography,” continues Tilghman. “And to the contrary point, Andre seemed to have used fiction as a way to place and observe himself within situations that, thankfully, he never did experience in his waking life.”

It is not voyeurism that readers seek in Dubus’s stories, says Tilghman, but the pointed “horns of ethical dilemmas” that Dubus’s stories thrust readers between. “Many of his characters take action that we might think of as unlikely or distasteful or unlawful, but they do it because they think it is the only thing to do.”

When Tilghman met Dubus back in 1987, he was a young writer struggling to find his voice. Today, he is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Virginia. At UVA, known as the school Thomas Jefferson built, the legend of William Faulkner’s stint as a writer-in-residence in the late 1950s still looms large, as does the legacy of a certain alum: Edgar Allen Poe. Today, the acclaimed novelist and short story writer Ann Beattie serves as the university’s Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing.

Like Tilghman, Beattie was close to Dubus. In the winter of 1987, she joined E.L. Doctorow, Gail Goodwin, John Irving, Stephen King, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Yates for a series of benefit readings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to raise money for Dubus after he was struck by a car and handicapped. A decade later, Beattie joined Dubus for several readings together while he was on tour for what would end up being his final story collection, Dancing After Hours.

For Beattie—whose recently published novella Walks with Men (Scribner, 2010) had many reviewers pondering whether or not the author had raided her own memories of living in New York City in the 1980s in order to write the book—the question of autobiography in an author’s work is much less interesting than many other more intriguing questions.

When Beattie was in college in the late 1960s, the New Criticism model—eschewing the biographical and sociological in favor of close reading and the work itself—was a prevailing wisdom. Then, for a time, she questioned such an approach. “When I became a writer, I found this increasingly….odd,” says Beattie. “Why were we living and working, if not to admit that we were peculiar? Not that I think the key to fiction is ‘Is it autobiography disguised?’ but rather that readers might think there was a ‘key’ to better understanding the work, and that that ‘key’ turned in the lock of ‘writer’s life’.”

“If readers do think this—as opposed to people who speak about literature, who want, justifiably, to move closer to the text, but who may therefore be led into a kind of thinking that involves verifiability—they’ve been misled about what fiction is. Both parties have misunderstood,” asserts Beattie, whose newest collection The New Yorker Stories (Scribner, 2010) collects her forty-eight pieces that appeared between 1974 and 2006 in that bellwether of American short fiction; the book was named to the New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2010 list.

“Fiction mystifies the writers of fiction,” says Beattie, explaining:

They—they, alone—are quite capable of displaying the ‘facts’ of their lives, yet doing this holds almost no fascination for any fiction writer, EVER.

So while fiction writers don’t write blindly, neither do they think that facts should be warped into art. They have taken a huge step away from facts in order to write fiction. In that space—in that gap—true make-believe, true fiction, occurs. It occurs as much for the writer as for the reader. It seems to me that it’s interesting additional information if an incident really did, in point of fact, happen to the writer, but the more interesting question is: So what? Why did that capture the writer’s interest, as opposed to 1,000 other things that really happened?

The author Edie Clark has long been awed by not only the incidents and characters that captured Dubus’s interest and empathy, but by Dubus’s seemingly prophetic vision.

Clark, the author most recently of the essay collection States of Grace: Encounters with Real Yankees (Benjamin Mason Books, 2010), traveled for years from her home in New Hampshire to attend the weekly writer’s workshop at Dubus’s Massachusetts home; Clark’s searing memoir of losing her young husband to cancer, The Place He Made (Villard, 1996), was written and drafted during those workshops.

“What always struck me so deeply about Andre,” says Clark, “was how some of his stories turn out to be his life, rather than the other way around. Like he was prescient.”

Clark served for many years as the fiction editor of Yankee magazine and published many stories and essays by Dubus, as well as work by Donald Hall, Stephen King, John Updike, and Monica Wood, among many others. In particular, Clark remembers an eerie, seemingly prophetic Dubus story that came across her desk.

In 1986, Clark had Dubus’s story “Blessings” in production for the next issue of Yankee. The story, later collected in Dancing After Hours, revolves around an horrific boating accident, a shark attack, and the subsequent aftermath for the survivors. “I recall counting the number of times the word ‘leg’ appears in that story,” says Clark. “Twenty-seven different times. And, of course, while we were putting that story into print, Andre lost his leg and the use of his other. I don’t think he ever put that together as the rest of his life was so dramatically changed but it wasn’t the first time I saw this, that what happened in his stories preceded what happened in his own life.”

Watson and the Shark, by John Singleton Copley

But, of course, Dubus’s stories don’t always fall into this prescient category—a category, it could be said, that exists for an honest writer engaged in writing about their own fears and the what-ifs of life. In Clark’s opinion, Dubus both used kernels of his life as seeds for stories, and he listened closely to the stories of others to inspire his art. For years, Clark kept a long quotation from Dubus’s essay “Marketing” (from Broken Vessels, Godine, 1991) tacked to the wall beside her desk. The quote, the essay’s opening paragraph, reads:

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorrow, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking about the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working: spending evenings with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell or he may be in the middle of one and we hope it is joyful.

“Andre thought deeply about life,” says Clark, “and about what happened to his friends, because he cared but also because he wanted to understand how the world worked.”

In Dubus’s own remarks we find how consistently he looked outward to find the stories he wove, such as in a 1985 interview with Thomas Kennedy for Revue Delta. Dubus was open about the very simple inspiration that led him to write Voices from the Moon (Godine, 1984), a story that is both his longest novella and very likely his masterpiece: Dubus told Kennedy that he came upon the story’s plot while reading the Boston Globe one day.

The nine chapters of the 126-page Voices from the Moon alternate between Richie Stowe, a serious twelve-year-old who plans to become a priest, and the other members of the boy’s family. The story takes place over the course of a single day and is centered on the revelation that Richie’s divorced father plans to marry the ex-wife of Richie’s older brother—the father’s own former daughter-in-law.

“Woman in her 20s who wanted to marry a man in his 40s who was her ex-husband’s father,” said Dubus on the newspaper article. “Against the law in Massachusetts and in some other states. That was the whole thing. I tried to make up the characters who went with them.”

In the end, Clark doesn’t believe that it matters either way whether the kernel of a Dubus story came from his own experience, a friend’s life, or from a newspaper article. “The point is,” she says, “that Andre recognized transformative moments in life, whether in his own or in that of his friends, and turned them into art. He understood what it means to be human.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford is renowned for capturing the transformative moments in life. He is also no stranger to having his fiction confused for his life.

“It’s happened to me a lot,” Ford told me recently, “that novels and characters I’ve written have, by readers, been confused with my life and self. In one way, I suppose, it ought to be flattering. It means the illusion of the book was fairly complete, or at least it seemed ‘true to life.’”

While Ford solidified his reputation as a master of the American short story with his early collection Rock Springs (Atlantic Monthly, 1987), it was his 1986 novel The Sportswriter (Vintage) that thrust his fiction into the American consciousness. The voice of Ford’s narrator Frank Bascombe, an American Everyman set adrift in New Jersey, has resonated with readers both in the States and abroad. Ford has since taken Bascombe through the subsequent novels Independence Day (Knopf, 1995) and Lay of the Land (Knopf, 2006).

Ford, who included Dubus’s story “Killings” when he edited the anthology The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (Granta Publications, 2007), has been charged by some critics with using Bascombe as a mouthpiece of his own views. The author, however, insists that very little, if anything, about Frank is autobiographical.

“I’m always trying,” says Ford, “to give Frank responses to things that I’ve never had—and maybe once I’ve seen them ascribed to him, wouldn’t want.” If he slips and lets a little Ford into Frank, he sees it as a weakness that needs correcting. “I think to myself,” he says, “’Gee whiz, what a failure you are. Is that all you can do, just to give him some point of view, some opinion, some response that you yourself have already had?’”

Ford, who says he came to Dubus’s stories later in his life, notes that even when kernels of fact occasionally find their way into fiction, they are quickly mutated by the very act of storytelling. “Of course, these bits of oneself migrate into pieces of fiction—both advertently and inadvertently,” says Ford:

But they never get there in a pure state. Events are events; people are people. But characters are made entirely of language, and come onto the story’s stage through a process of authorial choice, misadventure, fortuity, editorial acumen, and really a lot of other courses—all of which fundamentally change them from being real people, assuming they were real people to being with—which frankly they mostly weren’t.

In fact, Ford finds the act of attempting to wedge real people into fiction to be harmful to the creative act:

Writing real people into fiction is hazardous, as many writers have pointed out, and I myself know to be true. Real people, whom you might want to install in your story, turn out to be intractable. They tend to stay themselves and be hard-sided, and not the infinitely mutable fascicles of language real characters (versus real people) are. Made-up characters are lambent, they mutate, they surprise, they act out of character, and are therefore to be prized—for this freedom alone.

In the end, Ford believes such reductive readings of fiction do not merely minimize his work or that of his peers, but diminish the human potential of the mind. “The assertion that characters in fictions are just real people put onto the page offends me by selling the imagination short, by reducing all things fictive to the personal, to the known, to the flesh—as if that’s really where reality lies. It’s not. Reality’s dull, dull, dull without the imagination to show it the way outward from itself,” says Ford.

Are biographical readings always wrong? No. Are biographical readings but one limited lens through which to explore fiction? Absolutely.

Writers discover and tell stories for reasons that often remain a mystery to the writer themselves. Dubus himself could only speculate on why many of his characters so often struggle with loneliness, heartache, violence, adultery, rape, murder, and abortion. “I think honest writers write about what bothers them,” he once opined.

“My guess is that surprise is the variable,” speculates Ann Beattie when she considers what it is that captures a writer’s interest and sends them spelunking into the depths of a story:

You can be surprised at the simplest, most ordinary things, like that the houseplant wasn’t done flowering; that it was winter and it snowed; that you boiled water and put something in the pot and, by golly, out came pasta. So: writers are not special creatures, hyper-aware and hyper-sensitive. Rather, they are ordinary or dumb creatures, who—for whatever reason—have decided not much is lost if they are to be vulnerable, and to make something of their surprise when confronting ordinary life. To look at ordinary life in an unusual way—a lingering way—tinges it. If the color and contrast takes, that’s what fiction is. Fiction is like a big, absorptive blotter.

In the end, no one—no scholar, nor his children, family, or friends, not even the author himself—can truly give us impartial insight into Dubus’s fiction. Fiction need only be true to itself.

On February 23, 1999, the day before Dubus died, he gave a brief interview to Greg Garrett. When asked how he wrote dialogue that is “so real,” Dubus insisted that it wasn’t in the least bit real; it was, he said, human speech purified to a poetic rhythm. “We’re not trying to be real,” Dubus told the interviewer, on what he did not know then was the last afternoon of his life. “We’re trying to be better than real. We’re trying to be true.”

During the symposium, I was somewhat disturbed by the constant assumptions by many of the presenting academics that Dubus’s masterful fiction was simply thinly veiled autobiography.

After the symposium, Ed asked me to contribute an essay to the special Dubus tribute edition edition of the Xavier Review published in December 2010. I appreciated Ed’s support in allowing me to contribute an essay that, in some ways, sought to debunk the work of other Dubus scholars. I thank the Xavier Review for first publishing this essay, and supporting its republication here.

The Stakes Are Absolute

Three Questions on Andre Dubus with Todd Field

Todd Field, image via Wikipedia

With the 2001 film “In the Bedroom,” director Todd Field became the first person to bring Andre Dubus’s fiction to life on the screen. Field worked with co-writer Rob Festinger to adapt the screenplay from Dubus’s taut short story “Killings.” After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, the film went on to earn five Academy Award nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay.

On the evening of February 23, 1999, Dubus called Field—who was well underway with “In the Bedroom”—to wish him an early “Happy Birthday.” The next morning, Dubus died of a heart attack. Field was the last person to ever speak with him.

Field and I spoke briefly about his interest in Dubus’s prose, and his work adapting it.

Joshua Bodwell: Of all Dubus’s work, why did you to select “Killings” to adapt into a feature-length film?

Todd Field: The most exciting thing as a reader is to come across someone’s material—a short story or novel—that you can’t stop thinking about—to become haunted by an impression. In 1992 I was a directing fellow at the American Film Institute. The first year we were allowed to make whatever we liked so long as the running time wasn’t in excess of thirty minutes. We weren’t permitted to show our work outside the conservatory, and so there was no fiscal obstacle of having to secure standard literary rights. That year we were required to make three films. The first two were original, but for the third I wanted something to adapt, and someone recommended Andre Dubus. The first book I got my hands on was Collected Stories and it was like discovering a new country where all the relatives you’ve never met live. Two days later I’d camped on three of Andre’s stories— “Killings,” “Delivering,” and “The New Boy.” Of the three, “Killings” was the most powerful in terms of theme and breadth, but for those same reasons it was definitely not a 30-minute film. “Delivering” is the story I ended up adapting, and to this day is the film I’m most fond of in terms of execution and process. But “Killings” kept on nagging at me. In large part because Matt Fowler reminded me so much of my father, a man you would never imagine violating his own nature in such a way. When it came time to make a feature length film there was no question that it would be anything but “Killings.”

Bodwell: One of the major changes you made in adapting “Killings” into In The Bedroom was making Frank Fowler an only child, whereas in the story he had a brother. Can you talk about that decision?

Field: The stakes are absolute for the Fowlers, leaving them just each other, without any other immediate family, to mitigate their grief. This is something I witnessed first hand when, sadly, one of my dearest friends, an only child, was murdered at twenty-one.

Bodwell: Could you talk a bit more about why you feel that your film adaptation of “Delivering” was so artistically satisfying?

Field: “Delivering” is a wonderful character study that explores, over the course of a single day, some of the complicated dynamics of brotherhood. In this case an older, stronger brother trying to sort out how to protect his younger, not particularly athletic, sibling from something he knows will hurt him emotionally. But that same afternoon the older brother too becomes worried about the physical safety of their father. In the end he decides he must inflict physical pain on his younger brother to get his father’s attention, ultimately, at least in his mind, saving them both. The story is really perfect, and Andre, who would sometimes take years working on a story, told me that “Delivering” was really the only time he ever sat down and wrote something in a single sitting. That didn’t surprise me, because it does have a peculiar kind of momentum. We all experienced something similar making it. “Delivering” was photographed and edited very quickly in just four days.

Further Links and Resources

From “The Times Were Never So Bad” from Edward Delaney on Vimeo.

According to NPR, in his apology post on the blog, MacMaster defends himself by claiming he was writing fiction:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

In fact, the headline of the New York Times story on the subject read, “‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ Blogger Admits to Writing Fiction Disguised as Fact.”

This story reminds me of another I saw recently, also involving an elaborate online hoax and extended correspondences with a completely made-up person. In that case, a woman believed she was in an online romance with a firefighter from Colorado—only to discover that the whole thing was an elaborate fiction made up by a Chicago woman:

When the Colorado volunteer firefighter she loved died unexpectedly of liver cancer in 2006, Paula Bonhomme tenderly re-examined his gifts to her: a rubber duck with a firefighter hat, a lock of his hair, a flattened quarter he’d stuck on the train tracks as a kid. [...]

Even though they had never met, Bonhomme left an unhappy marriage in Los Angeles and was set to move to Colorado in 2006 when she learned James was dead. He hadn’t told anyone else of his diagnosis, James’ sister said, and didn’t want a memorial service. “You all have temples within you,” he wrote in a last note, “go there if you want to honor me.”

About seven months later, Bonhomme’s friends uncovered the creepy truth. James, his young son and about 20 other friends and family members Bonhomme had been communicating with for months were characters allegedly created by a woman in Chicago’s west suburbs.

The depth of the alleged deception stunned Bonhomme. Janna St. James, who lives in Batavia, had allegedly used a voice-altering device to pose as Jesse James on the phone, coordinated numerous storylines with her characters that advanced in emails and instant messages, and sent and received mail — including children’s drawings — from all over the world.

The alleged perpetrator, St. James, also takes refuge in the terms of fiction. According to the Chicago Tribune St. James’s defense included

[an] argument that she was creating fiction and therefore wasn’t liable.

“The concepts of falsity and material fact do not apply in the context of fiction,” her attorney had written, “because fiction does not purport to represent reality.”

But do these kind of hoaxes count as “fiction”? One of the key terms of fiction, it seems to me, is the reader knowing that the story is made up. Fiction is a kind of contract a reader must enter willingly: You’re going to tell me something that isn’t true, but that has meaning anyway, and I will accept your story with the knowledge that it isn’t true.

If the reader doesn’t know the story is false, he or she invariably ends up feeling deceived when the truth is revealed—because that’s exactly what happened. If it’s written down—even if you’re writing in character—it might be a fiction, but it’s not fiction. It’s just a lie.

A lean and intimate tale of war and familial devastation just published by Bellevue Literary Press (which in 2010 gave us Tinkers, Paul Harding’s dark-horse Pulitzer winner), The Sojourn tells the tale of one Jozef Vinich, born in a Colorado steel town at the turn of the 20th century and destined to become a mountain sniper for the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. Along the way he partners with various characters as he walks through a physical and spiritual wilderness: his own self-alienating father; his adoptive brother Zlee, who becomes a sniper with him; a ghost of a man, nicknamed Banquo, at a prisoner of war camp; and a pregnant Romani girl named Aishe, whose child he delivers. Despite the remoteness of his journeys—and the lives he takes along the way—he is never alone, but always graced by a connectedness to others that sustains him.

Krivak’s first full-length book, A Long Retreat (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), dealt with his journey toward becoming a Jesuit priest, which he gave up after eight-years to become a husband, father, and writer. In both of these books, he achieves an intimacy that neither sensationalizes, nor asks to be applauded. Instead, that intimacy comes across as part of the author’s bargain with the reader: to show the face of human life in the teeth of its own uncertainties, and in its vacillating poles of meaning. We talked about The Sojourn just as Krivak was launching his book tour.

Interview:

Steven Wingate: Most immigration stories that move from Europe to America involve leaving behind poverty and seeking better fortune. But Jozef Vinich is a native-born American citizen who spends time in Europe and returns. Why did you feel it was important for you to write a tale of that particular migration?

Andrew Krivak: This was the experience of my grandmother, her siblings, and her father. Her mother was killed by a train—the prologue of the novel comes from a true family story—and her baby brother was thrown over the trestle and rescued by boys swimming. Her father and his young family then moved back to Austria-Hungary, where he had land, a house, and could arrange to marry someone who would take care of his children. But it was a miserable life for my grandmother, and when she—at the age of 16—asked her father if she could emigrate to America in 1919, she was amazed to hear him say, “I was wondering when you would ask me. There is nothing I want more than to have you go.” Maybe to fulfill the dream he never could. I don’t know. And she loved to tell the story of how she stood in the immigrants’ line as she was getting off the boat in New York Harbor, but found herself shepherded into the citizens’ line because she had an American passport that the customs officials in Prague gave her all very matter-of-factly, without her even knowing what it was. This lore was passed down to us and it never struck me as odd, until I moved out of rural Pennsylvania, that one should grow up in country other than her own.

Over time, however, a couple of things began to dawn on me and shape the story toward an interest in this particular reversal, as it were. First, the reality that plenty of immigrants in those first few decades of the twentieth century went back, and I suspect it was often for reasons both fated and willed. For my great-grandfather, it was that combination of both, and I’ve always wondered if he might have struggled in his old age with what it was he might have become in America, if he’d been able to break free of circumstance and stay? Secondly, ever since I read Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, I’ve wondered about this idea of coming of age in a land not one’s own. The Israelites had a powerful sense of the sojourn—the time of rest in an alien land—as a time when God taught them. And so, in the end, I wanted to sit down and write a coming of age novel in which the main protagonist “becomes” in a land that shapes him and teaches him, but is nevertheless not his own.

A clear vein of withdrawal, awakening, and return runs through your work—you’ve written a retreat and a sojourn. It’s possible to see Jozef Vinich’s sojourn as a very long silent retreat with lots of killing. In what ways did you embrace this common theme in your writing process, and in what ways did you try to separate yourself from it?

I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it in terms of how I embrace or separate myself from the theme of retreat. I can say, though, that I’m seemingly always interested in the search for the self, how we become ourselves, or how we change and grow from one moment of awareness to another. My memoir took up that theme because it was pretty much all that I was engaged with for the eight years that I lived in Catholic religious life. But The Sojourn takes up that theme by virtue of my having wanted to attempt a coming-of-age narrative, as I said, in a land and at a time that was utterly alien to me, but which shaped those who gave me life.

This past semester I was teaching The English Patient in a seminar at Boston College, and we discussed the theme of retreat in the novel, the way in which each of those characters in that bombed-out Italian villa had come to be there, with what love and loss and brokenness defined them, made them who they were, not what mask or role they’d taken up for the purposes of survival in a war. I don’t think that we as humans consider that often: how crucial rest and retreat—with an embrace of loss inherent in the need to do such a thing—is to our own self-awareness. That ongoing search for who we are and what we ought to do. The father-in-law of a friend of mine was a marine in Vietnam, and he saw this same theme that you’ve pointed out in both A Long Retreat and The Sojourn. In an email exchange he said to me, “Finding yourself is hard. Finding yourself in a war is very hard.” That should have been the epigraph to The Sojourn.

All authors make their own deals with reality and they vary from not only book to book, but from character to character. What bases in reality did Jozef Vinich have as opposed to his adoptive brother Zlee?

Well, I’ve given away some of the answer to this in my answer to your first question. In many ways, a great deal of the story is based in reality. When I first decided that my book after A Long Retreat would be about these grandparents of mine who were Americans with an old-country education, I thought that I’d be writing a second work of nonfiction. When I sat down to talk to my agent about it, however, she was quiet for a long time while I talked myself more and more into an unconvinced corner, until she said, “It sounds to me like you want to write a novel.” And I did; I just needed her to say that. So, then I felt I had permission to create. And what emerged in the character of Jozef Vinich is actually an amalgam of the many characters who populated the stories passed down to me from my parents and grandparents and great aunts and uncles, and all kinds of folks I grew up listening to. And they all seemed to fit, as though longing somehow for that kind of singular identity. So that kind of seamless move from the nonfictive to the fictive was an easy and interesting one for me to make. Or maybe I should say facilitate, because that’s really what seemed to be going on.

Now let me tell you a little bit about Zlee Pes. When my parents were in their seventies, I took them to Slovakia and to the village in which my mother’s parents had grown up—the same village from which my grandfather had marched off to war. I knew the way and had visited before when I was studying Russian and Slovak as a Jesuit, so it was as easy for me as buying a plane ticket. But this trip with my parents was like no other homecoming I had experienced or could even imagine. To see my mother sitting at a kitchen table in Eastern Slovakia sharing a preserved and common history with her first cousins—separated from her by an accident of opportunity and fate—in a language that, too, had been preserved on two separate continents, made me wish that I could somehow preserve all of this myself, and keep returning year after year to that place of family origin.

And yet, I would never be more than a stranger in that land, someone whose parents happened to have parents whose parents left that land for another. Somehow, this notion of the “double” came to me through that. The idea that re-connected distant family can find a closeness as loyal and profound as brotherhood itself. And on that same trip to Slovakia, I took a photograph of a great wooden door in Bratislava, and on the door were the words, Zly pes. “Beware of dog,” but literally, “Bad dog.” My mother and I both admired this door, and I told her that one day I would write a story in which I would place a character named Zlee Pes. So, there you have it. The intricate weave of what and who is real, and what is not.

The sharpshooter is an ideal character to show working his way through a spiritual dilemma. Jozef seeks in the darkness in so many ways, both metaphorical and real. The spiritual aspect of their hunting is palpable in the reading. Were Jozef and Zlee always sharpshooters for you, or did they evolve into the role?

I love that you see the spiritual element involved in the sharpshooter. Not only the searching in the darkness but the fact that to hide is a kind of sojourn itself, and that the man who excels at this has to be an ascetic in the strictest sense, sacrificing all for the ultimate gain. The answer is that they evolved into this role. My grandfather was a gunner, a boy of seventeen put behind a machine gun retrofitted to shoot bi-planes out of the sky. He no doubt surrendered quickly, when the Italians came over the top, in order to survive. But he was raised in the mountains by his shepherd father, and I knew from my research that the Germans—and thus the Austrians as well—recruited the men of the mountains and the forests for sharpshooter training. It makes sense. And truthfully, I didn’t know how to bring together the two pieces of plot that involved the coming of age in a mountain setting, and the First World War. Around what could these two facts cohere? And then it came to me, while I was reading Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. In it, a Lance-Corporal, Kendle, is killed by a German sniper. Sassoon writes, “Kendle was half kneeling against some broken ground; I remember seeing him push his tin hat back from his forehead and then raise himself a few inches to take aim. After firing once, he looked at us with a lively smile; a second later he fell sideways. A blotchy mark showed where the bullet had hit him just above the eyes.”

Of course, I thought. My character will be a sniper. And the two pieces of plot began to fit nicely together, once I started researching the ways in which the Austrians chose and trained sharpshooters for the front. After that, too, once I began developing the inner life of Vinich the man, it was clear to me that his role as a sharpshooter, along with Zlee, rose to the level of a calling, or at least for my purposes in the narrative.

You write very lovingly and beautifully of guns in the novel. Was it an interest you had before the book, or is it one of those cases where writing your way through your subject matter turns you on to something you can learn about?

Both. Growing up in northeastern Pennsylvania in the 1970s, guns were a way of life. We had the first day of deer season off from school not because no students would be there but because none of the teachers would be there. My father hunted and my older brothers hunted, and I began that same kind of initiation, but stopped. My older brothers went off to college, and my father lost interest in hunting. I couldn’t just go and do it all on my own, so I left that aside for other things, like fishing and books. But I’ve fired plenty of weapons in my time (all except big game rifles) and don’t feel at all upset around guns. That said, there’s an entirely other world of firearms that one enters into when delving into the weapons of war, especially the First World War, where many of the men at the front really were bringing their own hunting rifles from home with them. This I knew no amount of NRA safe hunter training in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania could prepare me for, so I started my research from square one.

The best part about it was that I was living in London at the time, and so I would get on the Tube and head out to the Imperial War Museum to do everything – from looking at photos and listening to recordings, to peering down the sights of an actual Manlicher 95. There’s also not much systematic information on the Austro-Hungarian army out there. It was an army that existed almost without equal in its disparity and strangeness, which made it as weak as it was strong. Add to that the inherent secrecy of information on sharpshooters and other early forms of stealth warfare, and the research becomes a very narrow and yet focused field, which yielded some fascinating stuff.

The Sojourn has a tight, yet varied pace. Sometimes it reads like an introspective literary novel, other times like a hard-boiled war novel. What happened within (or between) drafts to help define your pace?

At first it began as a story from the past within a story of the present, and I had Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in mind, where Marlowe tells the story of his search for Kurtz to the men at anchor on the Nellie. I was very conscious of imitating that kind of novel almost exactly. But gradually, the number of people in the room listening began to dwindle, from three, to two, to a single person, and I didn’t know what to do with that other person anymore until I realized that he had no greater status than any reader who might come to the story, sit down, and listen to its conclusion. And so, while that single person didn’t disappear, he ceased to make his presence known, and the novel proceeded with that first person voice and point of view, as intimate as though old Jozef Vinich were telling the story to the reader himself.

As far as pacing goes, I had hoped to make that imitate the natural ways in which anyone telling a story for an extended period of time will vary his or her pace based on memory, what one forgets as well as remembers, emotional import, and an ongoing gauge of how the listener’s holding up. One of Jozef Vinich’s explanations is that he has been blessed or cursed with being able to remember everyone or everything that has shaped him. But that can’t possibly be true, now can it? That, too, is part of the pace. At times introspective, at times moving hard, all the while calibrating the speed, details, and usefulness or uselessness of what to remember and what to forget in the telling of a story. How well that succeeds of fails in the telling, I suppose, is up to that silent reader to decide.

There’s also a circularity to the novel—it ends with Jozef bringing a child to safety, just as he was bought to safety in Pueblo, Colorado as a baby, both infants having tragically lost their mothers. How did this theme come to you?

That physical act of surrendering, the preservation of life in the face of death, is something I’d had in mind for the book since the beginning. I wondered what my great grandmother must have been feeling—believing—in order to throw her baby boy into a river just seconds before she was killed by a train. An entire strand of fate is preserved by that momentary act of will. And so I wanted to see what would become of that character, now that he had been given the opportunity to live and grow and act on his own. And I tried to keep that motif intact throughout the novel, the physical act of surrendering, right up to the point where Jozef finds himself literally delivering the Romani child from death into life. Salvation begets salvation. One of the things I wanted to resist in the novel was some great narrative arc with a big payoff at the end. I wanted, rather, to let the great arcs give way to the small acts. This seems closer to a whole other kind of truth.

Jozef’s retrospective voice from 1972 feels distant from the young man we follow for most of the novel, who knows English but has little chance to speak it. Yet when he’s telling the story in 1972, he’s very erudite. What do you imagine happened to him during this time, and how much of his “unwritten” life story did you envision as you built his voice?

I’ve always suspected that this would be a stumbling block for some readers, Jozef’s voice in the novel, but there are a few pieces to this puzzle offered throughout that I hope are sufficient to give the man’s late-in-life voice the reality of a speaking voice, as though he might sit down with the reader and tell The Sojourn in the space of an evening, from dusk to just after midnight. It’s in the books that his father has cherished and traveled with and from which he has read out loud to Jozef in his boyhood. Thoreau, Grant, Melville, Whitman, and the Bible. Those are explicitly mentioned in the novel, clearly books that the older man has held onto from his boyhood.

And the American-ness of the older Vinich’s voice is meant to suggest that he has, in a kind of loyalty to the unorthodox education that his father gave him, continued to read and explore not only the authors he has mentioned, but others that he no doubt discovered on his own. The linguistic soup within which my grandparents grew up, and in which they were both adept at maneuvering has never failed to impress me, especially when you consider how terrible most Americans are at it. My grandfather spoke five languages as a matter of course by the time he entered the army at the age of seventeen. And then he learned three more in the course of fighting, spending time in a POW camp, and immigrating to America. So, part of not just the voice but the landscape that I wanted to capture was that linguistic complexity, within which very simple people were forced to navigate all their lives.

I understand that your next book is another novel. Why did you decide to stick with fiction instead of alternating back to nonfiction (like many writers do), and how do you see your relationship with both genres unfolding?

The one crucial thing I discovered in writing A Long Retreat, my first book of nonfiction, was the importance of story. You know, the old Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end. Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, conventionally or experimentally, there is no escaping the fact of story. But to answer your question, yes, my next planned book is a novel. The truth is (no pun intended) the next two books that I have envisioned are both stories that will be better served as fiction, and so that’s where I’m going to put my creative energies. The other thing I have to confess is that I am a failed poet, and I still revel in the beauty and complexity that good old mythos allows, and which one is seemingly cautioned away from in nonfiction these days. We all know that the memoir is a construct. I would rather just go ahead and tell one goddamn lie on top of another at the service of good writing and a good story, than cleave to some false sense of an obligation to tell the truth. What does John Berryman say in the sonnets? “Listen, for poets are feigned to lie, and I / For you a liar am a thousand times.”

Further Links & Resources:

Author’s Note

You are about to begin reading my long-awaited second novel, My American Unhappiness. It’s important for me to point out that the term long-awaited has nothing to do, technically, with the quantity, of, well, awaitment, and I only mean to say that a small handful of people, many of whom I know personally and some of whom depend on me for financial support, have been awaiting this book’s arrival for a long time. Also waiting for it: My mother, my in-laws, and a few of the good folks at Bank of America to whom I owe a great deal of money. I also have a fan, a young fan who recently graduated from Livonia Stevenson High School, my alma mater, and she is very excited to read my second book judging from the number of exclamation points in her recent e-mail. To them I say, cheers. Here it is. Thanks for waiting.

I began writing this book about two or three years ago, in a hotel room in Washington D.C., after a hard and wearying day of lobbying for an increase in federal funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities. I was then working as the executive director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the NEH. This was in 2006, in a political environment that made me feel like lobbying for federal humanities funding was about as fruitful as lobbying to make Libya the fifty-first state.

Most of my time on Capitol Hill consisted of meeting with (and occasionally lusting after) twenty-two-year old staffers, dressed, for the first time in their lives, in professional and dapper business wear, all of whom made me feel impossibly drab, chubby, and poorly dressed. I did have a meeting that afternoon with a real live congressman, Wisconsin’s Jim Sensenbrenner, who was, in fact, the last congressman I thought I’d get any face time with at all. At that point in our nation’s history, Sensenbrenner was zealously pursuing an immigration reform bill as punitive and xenophobic as any piece of legislation recently considered in the halls of American government (now playing in Arizona). Mr. Sensenbrenner greeted me and my colleague, a librarian from Waukesha, with real warmth. “You know I don’t support you people,” he said. “But have a seat and I will tell you why.” I simply smiled and did as he said.

His reasoning, I understood, was inane. He had most of his facts wrong. He had, also, no idea, or the desire to have an idea, about the difference between the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. At that time, I happened to be a freshly-minted NEA Literature Fellow, and as much as I wanted to defend these two worthy federal endeavors, I simply nodded, and took notes, and tried my best to politely inform the congressman that a number of NEH and NEA funded initiatives actually took place in his rather wealthy fifth district. When Mapplethorpe came up, as he always did, I cowardly blamed all that on those bad kids in the arts. I was representing the sainted and patriotic humanities.

In short, I listened to the Congressman for Wisconsin’s 5th District spew forth a litany of accusations, misinterpretations, and talk-radio-perpetuated myths and sat on my proverbial hands. Sensenbrenner remained cordial throughout, but he struck me as a sort of slob, unkempt and boorish. I have heard it said that he has never held a job outside of Capitol Hill, and if he had not been born rich I doubt he would have had much of a station in this society. I wish now that I had told him he was wrong. I wish now that I had called him an over-privileged jackass. I wish now that I had asked him if a man born a millionaire can have any idea about how hard an American family must work to make ends meet, let alone a family of migrant workers. Or what it feels like to choose between making the minimum payment on his student loan and the minimum payment on a hospital bill. I had a great deal of things to say, but I said nothing. I wasn’t there for that. I was there to be likable, that horrible word. And so I held my tongue. But a writer’s tongue is never held. It merely goes dormant until the muse joins him.

I returned to my room and ordered two scotches and a steak from room service, purchased a pay-per-view movie (Little Children, with the effervescent Kate Winslet), and, after finishing said movie and composing a half-hearted but lusty poem about Kate Winslet (which inspired a Google Image Search for Kate Winslet), I began to work on this novel: My American Unhappiness.

I wrote twenty-six pages that night and I suppose I owe this unprecedented bit of productivity to Congressman Sensenbrenner. All of the phrases that went unsaid at our meeting seemed to come forth from my fingertips, blackening the white screen in front me.

Given all of these facts, what I really must say, for personal and political and legal reasons, is this: This is a work of fiction. None of the events, characters, or situations chronicled in these pages are real. Seriously: I do not want my words to be used as a chance to disparage the good people in the world of the NEH or any of my former colleagues with the state humanities councils, most of whom are a wise, decent, and extraordinarily hard-working lot. Nor does the fictional Wisconsin Congressman Quince Leatherberry, who runs into a bit of trouble in the pages that follow, represent Representative James Sensenbrenner in any way. I don’t think Mr. Sensenbrenner has been involved in anything unethical. I just hate his ideas. If I hate your ideas, I turn you into a purely fictional literary character and then I beat you up.

Author’s Note (2)

A few months after that trip to Washington D.C., I finished a draft of this novel in a borrowed space, a windowless basement underneath an old townhouse from the 1840s. This was in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, where I had recently moved with my family and where I lived for four years. The house, at least the upper floors of the house, served as a lodging facility for an arts center—Shake Rag Alley—and two of the board members of that center, upon hearing that I, a young father, was having trouble finding a quiet place to write, offered me this place.

One weekend, I went over and vacuumed and dusted and cleaned; I found an old desk and some bookshelves and set them up facing a cinder block wall where a fireplace had once been. The next weekend I went over with my laptop and a desk lamp and tried to write. I was in that cautious phase of a new project, when a writer worries that he or she will wreck the flow of words. Any change in routine seemed precarious. Still, ultimately things worked for me. Something about the claustrophobia of a dank, antique basement seemed well suited to the sort of novel I was trying to write, and I wrote faster than I have ever written before. Within four months, I had finished a 450-page draft of a novel called My American Unhappiness.

My first attempt at a second novel was already finished, languishing in a small, green metal IKEA cabinet that looked as if it was made to house dead manuscripts, a manu-crypt, if you will. That novel failed for all the reasons second novels tend to fail, including an overwhelming desire to please the critics who liked my first novel as well as a delusional belief in the majesty of my talent. It was an ambitious novel, an attempt to merge Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude into a seamless tale of generational strife and mysticism set in southwestern Wisconsin. Everybody would like me. Easy enough, yes? Nonetheless, I had to put that novel aside. All five hundred pages of it, put down in one of those acts of artistic euthanasia that feel more like murder than mercy.

My American Unhappiness, however, was and still is a more playful novel, a dark comedy with numerous references to popular culture and American politics. A great deal of the material came from my own personal life, and thus the novel was easy to write, particularly because the main character, Zeke, was sort of an amalgamation of all of my worst tendencies and tactics. Zeke is so weird and intellectually obscure and lonely that he has increasing trouble functioning in contemporary society. He is so politically disillusioned that he becomes part of the carelessness he detests. Zeke is the guy I feared I could become if I had no wife or kids or writing to hold my life together.

After that feverish five-month writing binge, I tinkered with My American Unhappiness for a while. Zeke, however, was not the problem that I confronted as an artist. The problematic character was a minor one, a creation named Mack Fences, who is based on my dear friend, Mark Gates. Those of you in the world of publishing may recognize the name, as Mark was, for many years, a well-respected, talented, and diligent sales representative for the prestigious publishing house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was also named Sales Representative of the Year in 2006 by Publisher’s Weekly magazine. He is now dead.

Mack Fences was initially a minor character, a sort of fop designed to provide a bit of levity from what was an initially dark and stormy little novel. Mack Fences chain-smoked, he drank too much, and he was intellectually fierce and witty but also a wee bit of a coward. I remember one scene in particular that I thought stood out: Mack, confronted by a rabid and renegade Homeland Security Agent, quickly buckles under the weight of federal inquiry and begins naming the names of his friends involved in “un-American activities that were cynicizing [sic] the nation.” I was quite pleased with his role in the novel, and I do admit that I secretly imagined Mark, and many of his good friends in the industry, chuckling aloud at a few of the inside jokes that peppered the manuscript.

Somewhere around the time I turned in the second draft of this novel to the woman who was once my editor and whom I thought would be my editor for a long time—this was in December of 2007—Mark Gates was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, which had spread to the brain.

I had long considered Mark Gates to be my best friend, although I am pretty sure there are a lot of other people who also felt the same, and so I am one of many. When Mark was healthy and energetic, he and I used to talk on the phone nearly every afternoon, usually at the end of the workday, and this small ritual was always one of the highlights of the day. Mark would air a number of grievances about political figures and sing a number of praises about Madison’s service sector employees (he has always been an outrageous tipper and loved anybody who, like him, offered up sales and service with a smile). I would report to him how many words I’d accomplished that day and he would make a good show of the admiration bit: “Wow. I don’t know how you do it.” In a world where fiction writing is seen largely to be an unproductive waste of time, devoid of the ever important TRUTH and about as economically viable as selling rotten plums, Mark’s encouragement was one of the things that kept me going. I have always been an approval-seeker (hence my skill in lobbying and fundraising) and thus, Mark’s approval became a significant part of my writing life.

I had trouble returning to the manuscript after Mark’s diagnosis. I went to a rather maudlin Christmas party at Mark’s house around this time (one I almost skipped, so freaked out I was by his illness, but my wife made me go).

I was one of the few people in the room who knew of his diagnosis, so I spent a good deal of my time making small talk in the kitchen and then hiding in Mark’s office and sobbing.

For instance, Les, a good-hearted and kind music-loving neighbor of Mark’s, said, “Hey, Dean, do you have the Van Morrison album St. Dominic’s Preview?”

And I would burst into tears.

A few weeks after Christmas, there was Mark, resting in a thin blue gown at the University of Wisconsin Hospital, his head shaved and a large train track scar going along his head. I would sit with him, and his longtime partner, Stevie, and I would have absolutely nothing to say. I would either tear up and sit there, quietly weeping, or I would nod and listen and bite my lip as Stevie described the upcoming medical battery that Mark would soon have to go through. I’m sure I was a real shot in the arm. Sometimes I would bring my daughter Lydia with me. She was three at the time and was a considerable mood-lightener, despite the fact that she was a bit terrified of the hospital. I sometimes think now, in hindsight, I let her see too much of Mark’s suffering. I don’t know. Novelists make bad parents in that they often forget that suffering makes no sense to those un-obsessed with narrative.

Lydia called Mark’s IV stand his “coat rack,” and she liked to stare at the scar on his head. Often, she would draw pictures for Mark and Stevie—her godparents—and then she and I would drive back to Mineral Point, usually in the snow. It was a horrendous winter. The snow fell in record amounts, and the fifty-mile journey back to our house could often take two hours or more.

Home again, in the evenings, I would go down to my basement office in the evenings where Mack Fences, the character was still healthy and happy, a smiling postmodern Willy Loman, peddling his books with a shoeshine and a smile.

It felt odd to have the real Mark Gates sick and suffering in a hospital bed while the fake Mark Gates was going about his business. So I gave Mack Fences cancer. And then I decided that I would have him beat the cancer. I was going to use my novel to save Mark Gate’s life.

Clarification

It certainly is bad form, I suppose, to add so many introductory notes to a fiction text. Get on with it! Go! Tell your story!

I hear you.

After all, when I teach fiction writing workshops, I almost always invoke John Gardener’s dictum of the “fictive dream” and urge the writer to remain invisible in his/her own work. I am no fan of postmodern fanciness, or the sorts of “superfluous pyrotechnics” I demand my students avoid. There is narcissism in the self-reflexive act of authorial intrusion and I have spent most of my adult life pretending that I am not a narcissist. I feign interest in the lives of others. I send thank you notes. Why drop the rouse now?

But I do want to continue on this note for a moment longer: One of the problems of introducing one or two real people into a fictional world is that everybody else wants to come into the narrative too. Soon enough, the doors get thrown open. Everybody you know becomes fair game.

I tend to allow everybody into the narrative if I can find a place for them—former teachers, like Charles Baxter and Nicholas Delbanco, are alluded to in My American Unhappiness, and various nods are given to neighbors, professional acquaintances, and a motley assortment of women on whom I have had a series of marginally unhealthy crushes on over the years. I am prone to crushes, mad crushes, and if I do not write about the crushes they stay with me. They cause trouble. If I write about them, they almost immediately go away. This strategy has helped me stay married for fourteen years.

In a dark time, fiction begins to appear rather fruitless. A common condition after 9/11, of course, was that everything a novelist put down on the page seemed trivial in the wake of tragedy and violence on an epic scale. I remember writing a long letter to a dear friend and mentor after 9/11 saying, “Why bother?” It was a letter written about many things and by many people that autumn. I had to leave this manuscript for a few months when my best friend got cancer.

When I came back to it, my editor (who I thought would be my editor for a long time) said, with real empathy and sorrow in her voice, that I, in deference to the art of the novel, had to try to avoid sentimentality or syrupy sweetness when discussing the character of Mack Fences post–Mark Gate’s cancer diagnosis.

So I tried to do that in this novel. And I have failed in some places.

I’m aware of that. Consider this your apology.

Disclaimer

Since my daughter was born in May of 2005, there have been twenty fatal bear attacks in North America. When you consider the fact that every weekend, large numbers of largely unskilled Americans enter wilderness areas on foot, bicycle, kayak, and canoe in an orgy of panicked recreation, that’s a pretty good statistic. And when you consider that a large number of those fatal bear attacks occur in Canada and Alaska, well, then, hikers in the continental United States don’t have a huge burden of worry to carry around in their backpacks, do they?

Still, twenty people have been fatally mauled by bears.

Before I became a father, I’m not sure I would have given the statistics on fatal bear attacks much thought. I certainly wouldn’t have Googled the phrase “fatal bear attacks North America” at one in the morning the night before we were to leave on a family vacation to northern Minnesota.

But that’s what I did in August of 2008. I woke up that morning and walked down to my office—I was directing a small rural arts center at the time—and typed up my letter of resignation. I’d had a large blow-up with the board of directors the night before and this was an impulse decision. I quit, I said. Boy, did that feel good for like six minutes. And then I went home and started to pack for our vacation. Soon, thanks to the wonders of Wikipedia, and, perhaps, my refusal to go on prescription anti-anxiety medication, there was a searing pain in my chest and blurry vision blotting out the words on the screen. “WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF PANIC ATTACKS,” it should have read. “WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?”

~

Although I do not live in Alaska, or Montana, or any place like that, I think about bears once or twice a day. I think about the many places I might stumble upon a bear, and I also imagine unlikely encounters with bears—in parking lots or in my backyard or sitting at the diner. I have a friend who once encountered a bear—no joke—in a restroom at a national park.

Bear lovers, I’ve heard the facts: You may as well stop now. I know that bears are very rare in southern Wisconsin or central Iowa, the places I now hang my hat. And I know that the bears that would be in the Midwest are black bears, and I know that black bears are shy and fear trouble. True, I have never seen a bear in the wild. But for a long time I was convinced—in fact, I am still sort of convinced—that my end would come at the hands—at the frantic and slashing claws—of a bear.

This odd but deep belief turns most outdoor activities—hiking, camping, canoeing, taking out the trash—into a chapter of Profiles in Courage for me.

Googling anything at three in the morning, when you are unable to sleep and when there is nothing but darkness outside your office windows, is a bad idea. In fact, if you ever quit your day job with two small children at home and no Plan B, I would suggest you unplug the Internet for a few days. Avoid, at least, typing your fears into search engines: global warming, water shortage, spontaneous combustion, mild genital pain. No good can come of letting your anxious, wide-awake fingers type such phrases into a search engine. The results that come back are both horrifying and staggering.

In reality, twenty fatal bear attacks are not all that many. I have pretty good odds of dying in other, less dramatic ways in this life. But late that night, when I was supposed to be working on novel revisions, finishing them up so I wouldn’t be tempted to work during the family vacation we were about to embark on to Northern Minnesota, I googled the phrase “bear attacks northern Minnesota.”

I stayed up all night, reading stories of survival and stories of great sorrow. I read many contradictory pieces of advice on what to do in case of a bear attack. Dawn came. Amanda and the kids woke up. We’d already put a deposit down on the cabin, and my wife really, really needed a vacation, and the Ford Focus station wagon was packed up, the Thule car topper was loaded and strapped down. There was no doubt about it. I was heading into bear country. And I was bringing my wife and my two young children with me.

In the end, we survived. We did not see any bears. We even ate blueberries at the edge of a waterfall and saw no bears, though as we ate those berries at the waterfall, it occurred to me that, were I to die, dying while eating wild blueberries with your family, overlooking a waterfall in northern Minnesota, is not a bad way to go. The tooth and claw tearing your flesh and piercing your organs may not be all that ideal, but the waterfalls in that part of Minnesota are quite beautiful and the light is a certain kind of crisp white in the mid-afternoons, and my God, the berries are delicious and I love my wife and kids.

I tell you all of this because when I wrote my first novel, I was not a parent. This novel, my second, was attempted with children. It is a tale told by a chronically anxious, worried man whose best friend was dying.

While I don’t expect critics to bear that in mind, I would appreciate it if you, dear reader, might.

DEDICATION: This book is in memory of Mark Gates

Mark Gates was very excited to read this manuscript. He didn’t get to do that. He lived long enough, I think, to have read at least a draft of it, and it’s possible that he might have found the time and energy between bouts of chemo to at least digest all of the parts that referred to him, but I didn’t have the guts to do it. How do you show something as trivial as your own fictive musings to a dying friend?

Ultimately, I didn’t give the character of Mack Fences cancer. I took all of that out, cut countless scenes from hospital rooms and hospice care out of the novel, and made Mack Fences into the sort of character that represented the Mark Gates I wanted the world to remember.

This profession even fucks up grief. That’s what Philip Roth’s alter ego, Zuckerman, says on his way to his brother’s funeral in the novel The Counterlife, and I found that to be true. My writing career was so inextricably linked to my friendship with Mark Gates that it became harder and harder to write this novel when Mark Gates was dying, which would have been true, I think, even if the novel did not contain a character based on him. I realized that Mark had become the one person I wrote to in my head as I composed My American Unhappiness, that proverbial ideal reader (Updike’s boy in a library east of Kansas), and now he was gone.

Mark Gates introduced me to my first editor and to countless booksellers, sales reps, and publishing professionals. He was my one-man public relations and sales force, and the hardcover sales of my first novel, I’d say, are nearly all linked to his personal connections and spirit.

When I first met Mark, I was working as a bookseller, and at almost every event I went to in the publishing world, I found that if I invoked Mark’s name I could make a new friend.

“Do you know Mark Gates?” I’d ask, and always, the answer would be a delighted “I love Mark Gates!” Not “Sure, I know him.” Or “That guy from FSG/Holt?” Nope. It would always be a delighted “I love Mark Gates!”

That word love was always invoked, and although I used to tell Mark I considered it overkill (Mark and I never paid each other a compliment without a generous dose of backhanded irony), it is the only way to say it. We loved Mark Gates and we loved him because he was a man who did everything with love.

Mark loved simple pleasures—a cocktail and a good book, a perfectly prepared pork roast, talking on the phone to an old friend, an evening gathering to share stories, jokes, and gossip. He often spoke in expansive and superlative terms, even at the end of his life. He was fun to entertain because of this quality and he was everybody’s favorite dinner party guest.

I cooked for him one final time in late August of 2009, the day before I left Wisconsin for Iowa. We no longer made much of a fuss over our dinners together anymore, though once upon a time it was an occasion to wax poetic over bacon-wrapped brussel sprouts and bandaged cheddar. Mark and I could out-eat, out-talk, and out-drink everybody we knew, except for each other. Our feasts often could be described as epic.

Our last dinner together was decidedly non-epic, however. Mark had lost much of his appetite by then and he sat at the table sipping Vendage, his cheap white wine of choice, and listening to my daughter Lydia tell him about her new home in Ames, Iowa, where we were moving because I had a secured a day job again, my days as a full-time writer as numbered as a bingo card.

I defrosted some hot dogs and heated them on a charcoal grill. I warmed up a can of Bush’s baked beans and added a dash of pepper, some ketchup, and mustard. I garnished Mark’s plate with chips. He ate two hot dogs that night, and although he was exhausted and worried and uncertain he looked at me and said, “These are the best hot dogs I have ever had in my life. This is the best dinner I’ve had all summer.”

He said these things in a way that made us believe him, even if he was just being his usual gracious and grateful self. Maybe the hot dogs tasted that good to him that day. I like to think that they did. I don’t know. But I do know that his tendency to use terms like best and greatest and favorite was not an affectation: Mark Gates was at his core a truly happy man, he loved people, and he loved most everything. Every day seemed better than the last day. I’m not saying he was always cheerful or unflustered, but deep down Mark was the most content human being I have ever met.

It’s painful to know I’ll never again be at a party and overhear Mark telling some poor, unsuspecting first-time guest on the proverbial Mark Gates Show that Stevie, his partner of nearly three decades, had spent all of his “poor dead father’s money.” It’s painful to know that I’ll never feel Mark’s hand on my elbow at a crowded publishing event and hear his trademark voice deadpan, plenty loud for overhearing, “Dean, can I ask you something? When did you first realize how much you hated me?”

Most people in the small world that is publishing have our Mark moments, our phrases, and our gestures that we will never forget. His scratchy, sudden laughter. His old-school suspenders. His itchy eye, which he tended to rub with his middle finger whenever anybody teased him. When the best people go, they leave us with so much material.

The last time I saw Mark, he was incredibly weak, small, too tired even to smile. I sat at the edge of his bed and I tried to tell him all of these things, how much he had meant to me and how he taught me about what was important. I met Mark when I was just twenty-two, figuring out what was important in the world and what wasn’t, and his influence on me was profound.

“Because of you,” I sobbed, a torrent of emotion emerged. “I know that nobody important really cares what you’ve done or how much you make or what sort of house you have or what kind of car you drive. I know that friends matter more than fame. I know that…”

I broke down into more tears.

Mark slowly lifted his head and raised his hand toward me.

“I was wrong,” he wheezed. “That stuff is the most important stuff. That’s how everybody gets to JUDGE you.”

I started to laugh, held onto his hand.

“Forget everything I taught you,” he said.

I went downstairs, sobbing and laughing all the way down the stairs and out the door to my car.

When I went out on my first book tour five years ago, Mark was a nervous wreck. He had jumped through innumerable hoops to help me get published, to help me get a warm reception from booksellers across the Midwest. It was a terribly giddy moment for us, as if some dastardly plan had miraculously come to fruition.

“Don’t screw this up,” Mark told me when I called him from the Madison airport before departure. “This will reflect poorly on me if it goes badly. And on poor, poor Amanda. I just worry about her after, you know, you sully your reputation all over the country.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, feeling the butterflies calm down in my gut.

Talking to Mark always reassured and settled me; his fixation on comical alternate realities always made the more immediate reality less daunting. It’s why I called him four or five times a day. It’s also, I suppose, why I wrote My American Unhappiness, creating a character that preferred the impulsive to the well-considered and the delusional to the certain. I can see now why I needed to spend much of the past five years with a wholly fictional alter ego: it allowed me to exist in a comical alternate reality, where tragedy and unhappiness were intellectual diversions, not real life, not the brass tacks sitting, points up, on my chair.

“And whatever you do,” Mark said to me back then, “Don’t read more than fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes?” I said. “That’s all?”

“Yes,” he said. “You always have to leave them wanting more.”

Author’s Note [3]

With those words in mind, the author decides to cut the twenty-one manuscript pages of front matter from his novel. The novel comes out tomorrow. Mark Gates never got to read it. And because of that the book will always feel, to the author, to be something short of complete.

Mark Gates with Lydia Bakopoulos, 2006

Further Links and Resources:

• Learn more about Dean Bakopoulos at his author website
• Read Dean’s essay on teaching writing, “How Reading Junot Diaz Can Help America Prosper,” in the Wall Street Journal
• Watch the videos for My American Unhappiness—here’s one as a taste:
• Find a copy of My American Unhappiness at an indie bookstore near you

Erika’s debut collection, Quiet Americans, is largely inspired by the histories and experiences of her paternal grandparents, German Jews who escaped Nazi persecution and immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s.

Andrew Furman (author of Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma) had this to say about the book:

In searing, pitch-perfect prose, Erika Dreifus evokes in Quiet Americans the heart-wrenching intersections between domesticity and war. Drenched in the blood-soaked history of the Holocaust—yet attentive to those quietest moments between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children—these stories gather unexpected force sentence by sentence, page by page. On several occasions during my reading, I needed to remind myself to breathe.

I read Erika’s Practicing Writer newsletter and blog faithfully for several years before launching Fiction Writers Review, so Erika—as a writer about writing and a fairy godmother of writing resources—was an inspiration to me long before we met. I still remember the thrill I felt when she mentioned FWR on her site for the first time; not long after, I convinced her to write a review for us. Reading the galley of her deeply moving collection and re-reading it in published form, I was again awed by Erika, this time by her brilliance as a fiction writer herself.

This interview took place over coffee during AWP 2011, a day after attending the exciting panel she organized and moderated, “Beyond Bagels and Lox: Jewish-American Fiction in the 21st Century,” and just hours after FWR’s own panel on criticism in the 21st century, “The Good Review.”

Interview

ANNE STAMESHKIN: First, let me say again how impressed…no, that’s too cold…how struck I was by Quiet Americans. And I enjoyed your panel on Jewish fiction yesterday. I only wish there’d been ample time to argue with a particular woman in the audience, the one who announced [to your panel of Jewish fiction writers] that she didn’t like to read Jewish fiction because she wants to know “what really happened,” not something “made up.” In your case, some of the stories are even more than half-true, based on your family’s experiences across three generations. So tell me—and that naysaying woman!—why you chose to relate these stories as fiction. Did you ever consider writing them as essays instead, or have you written essays about your legacy or your own experience as a third-generation American Jew?

ERIKA DREIFUS: I have written a couple of essays, but I never thought about writing a personal or family memoir about these stories, though they are, as you know, based on and inspired by my family. I have written nonfiction pieces about my handling of this legacy. I did an article for the Boston Globe when I got a German passport, and I described the process of getting it and why I had gotten it and decided to become a German citizen—a dual U.S.-German citizen. A lot of the bare-bones history behind these stories is in that essay.

And I’ve written an essay, a conference paper, called “Ever After? History, Healing, and ‘Holocaust Fiction’ in the Third Generation.” (For those who want to read it, I should mention that it includes a lot of British spellings: it was for a conference in London, and the publisher was in Germany.) Writing that essay helped me process and figure out more how my writing—my fiction that I’d been writing—connected to the history. The fiction allowed me certain freedoms—ways to focus on what I’d consider to be more “dramatic” moments, and really push to the corners the less dramatic things.

My story “For Services Rendered”—about a Jewish doctor who was given leave to emigrate from Germany because he had treated the daughter of a high-level Nazi—the complexity of that idea had fascinated me; the bit of truth was that when my grandmother came here, she became a nanny for a family, an affluent Jewish American family whose daughter was the patient of this pediatrician, a German refugee who had been told by his Nazi employer back in Germany, “You should get out of here.” And my father, as I was writing, he said, “you know, you could look this guy up; I still have his name, and you could do a nonfiction piece…” but I said, no, that’s not what I want to do. I wanted to explore it a different way. I almost didn’t want to know what the guy’s real name was—and I didn’t use his real name.

Oh, and I think the woman in the panel, the one who doesn’t like Jewish fiction…I’m pretty sure she has a nonfiction book coming out.

Ha! That’s one way to get publicity… But you do hear people saying “Feh, novels, stories. I want to read what’s true” across the board, about all kinds of fiction. It was interesting to hear it attached specifically to Jewish fiction…that desire to know what “really happened,” about the Holocaust. Yet no amount of sheer “what” can really ever tell us why or how this happened. Do you think there’s a way of getting at even more truth through fiction…when you can give a whole story, or as much as you choose to? Fewer and fewer people remain to tell their stories—and the prospect of reconstructing “true” narratives becomes ever more elusive. But I’d argue that a collection like yours refutes the notion that a book of fiction can’t portray what really happened, at least in a larger sense.

I agree, and I think a good example of this is in my story “Homecomings” [about a Jewish immigrant couple making their first trip back to Germany]. My grandparents did go back to Europe for the first time in 1972; they did stay with French cousins, because they—my grandmother—did not want to sleep in Germany.

In “Homecomings,” the characters were there during the Munich Olympics and the massacre. Were your grandparents?

They were not. And that’s the fiction! But at some point it occurred to me that they must have been there right before. And the reason I know they weren’t there during the Olympics is that in early September of ’72, they were in charge of me—my mom was away visiting a friend and the friend’s brand-new baby in the hospital, and my dad was at work, and I fell and broke my tooth, and it turned purplish-black and chipped, and my grandparents were very upset with each other—you know, somebody wasn’t watching her! I was three. So I knew they were not away in September. But my grandmother told me that they went back that year, and she just sat outside her old building and cried. She just cried. She couldn’t even get out of the car and was not interested in going into the apartment, which actually my father and I did in 1990.

We went back, and I think that’s another thing that helped the story. I had been to Mannheim, and I had seen the apartment and the street and the office, and the descriptions of the city itself…all the things that are mentioned in “Homecomings” are based on these real places and what I saw.

The flower shop in Mannheim / photo credit: The Dreifus Family

We knew there was this flower shop where she and her father used to go, and we found it, and there’s a picture of me in front of the office building where my great-grandfather once had his business. And my grandmother was still alive then in 1990, and when we got the pictures developed and she saw them…I should say that she wasn’t a crying sort of person. She was tough; there were few things that could make her cry. But she was just hit, with everything, when she saw a picture of me in the courtyard of their apartment building.

Ifflenstrasse, the street 'off the city's main ring' where Erika's grandmother lived / photo used with permission of The Dreifus Family

There’s that blurring of generations in moments like that. Yesterday during the panel, Margot Singer talked about her cousin’s realization, while visiting the Czech Republic, that this is where I would have grown up if things had been different. There is a line in one of your stories, after German Jews have relocated to the U.S. “Doesn’t everyone want to go home?” asks the husband. And his wife is just silent.

That idea of “home” and having lost one is powerful…in 1989, my grandparents went back again. My parents had given them a trip for their 75th birthdays. Again they didn’t sleep in Germany, but they did go into Mannheim. I think they went to go change money in a bank and some man was trying to tell my grandmother that she should move back to Mannheim, that she should come “home.” And she told us, “I really let him have it!” (Laughs.) She said, “I told him, ‘America’s my home!’”

Not a quiet American!

That’s the funny thing. No one who knew her would call her quiet…but my grandfather, he was. Though I don’t know how much of that was the language. I don’t think he ever felt comfortable in English. The way a conversation went with them on the phone, is that I’d have to remind her that I wanted to talk to him, too. And she would give him instructions: Grandpa, talk!

Speaking of the title, I love it, and it feels so fitting for the collection. In every story, even the ones that don’t take place in America, silence plays a powerful role. In your story “Matrilineal Descent,” for instance, Emma stays quiet while her heart breaks slowly over time—with drastic consequences, as this “quiet” still allows for vengeance. What did you want Quiet Americans to mean, or to suggest to readers? And were you referencing the Graham Greene book—the singular American to your plural?

It’s clear that I was influenced by Greene’s title to some degree—hey, it’s a great one—but I’ve actually worried about how to respond to questions about it. There isn’t an intended direct connection between that novel and my collection. My book isn’t an homage to or a criticism of his.

In most story collections, as you know, there is usually a story that shares its title with the collection…but the funny thing is that the title story wasn’t part of the initial book! The collection has gone through so many different iterations.

Tell me more about the book’s genesis. How did it take shape?

Three of the stories in Quiet Americans started out as pieces I wrote during my MFA program. I wrote a whole collection for my thesis, and the working title then was The Unchosen, because I had a story called “The Unchosen,” which has never been published, although I’ve submitted it everywhere. Alas, it lived up to its name: it was never chosen! (Laughs) Then I had a very long story called “Reparation,” so then that was the title for a long time. And then I decided that even though that story came close at a couple of places, there were various issues about it—one being of course how long it was—that made people not want to take it. But once I removed it from the book, I had to come up with yet another title.

You know that some of the story titles in the book are in other languages. “Lebensraum”…you know a lot of people—even really educated people—don’t know what that is. And “Mishpocha” is sort of limited to the Jewish reading community, so even though I felt that Lebensraum really was a good title for the whole collection—I could see it working well—I didn’t want to use it because I didn’t want to alienate people right away.

However, you did keep this title—and “Mishpocha”—for the stories themselves. Why?

I have a PhD in European history, but my potential readers are not necessarily in this specific field. And you can get through college and definitely high school without doing much European history these days! A whole book with an unfamiliar title might be off-putting. But I wanted to keep “Lebensraum” as the title of the story because I believe most short-story readers are curious and brave enough to read something under an unfamiliar word and then maybe even look it up.

So, getting back to the issue of the title…then I returned to the stories that were left, and “For Services Rendered” doesn’t really do it for the whole book, and “Homecomings” was, I felt, a little bland, and then I realized I could take a piece from a longer story I wasn’t going to able to use, the one that “Quiet Americans” used to be part of, and it really worked. As soon as I thought of this, I knew it was right. But it was a long time coming.

And that title can mean a lot of different things…are you quiet from fear? Are you assimilated when you’re quiet? There’s powerful gratitude felt by the American tourist in “Quiet Americans” when the British war vet speaks up to the insensitive Berlin tour guide.

I was surprised by how much I liked that this story was written in the second person. As many of FWR’s writer-readers know, that can be hard to pull off. Why did you make this choice for this particular story?

First, I love that you like the choice. A lot of editors who saw the story said, “Great story, but I just have a personal distaste for the second person.” I hope that the piece earns this through quiet…the writer is asking the reader to speak.

I agree. Reading it, the story feels confrontational in the best way. It feels like “you” are the one in this uncomfortable, even hostile, situation. And what would “you” do? it asks. Would “you” be able to speak up? It’s a different “you” of course—but it reminds me of the character-narrator addressed in a popular Lorrie Moore story, “How to Become a Writer…”

I love what Moore does with the second person in other Self-Help stories, too. “How to Be the Other Woman,” for one.

Agreed. I see a kinship between her second-person characters and yours…that implied sense of universal experience as well as an individual one.

I’m glad that came across! Lorrie Moore is one of my favorites.

After reading the three more directly linked stories in Quiet Americans, the trilogy beginning with “Matrilineal Descent,” I have to ask: did you ever consider shaping your book into a novel-in-stories, focusing on these recurring characters (who represent three generations of the same family, spanning twentieth-century Germany to present-day New York City)?

Yes and no. I have other stories, some from my MFA thesis, but they’re a little repetitive in terms of theme. So initially I did have ideas about putting more stories about this family (or versions of them) together in a book, but it just didn’t really work. It felt a little artificial…stretched. Maybe it was because I did not plan. If I had really set out to write the linked stories, then I could have done it. But on the other hand, I’ve tweaked them quite a bit…they’re not the same stories as the ones I originally wrote. For the book, I even changed some of the names to make the stories more cohesive…in “Homecomings,” I did this. It wasn’t always as obvious that the refugee couple in “Homecomings” was the same as the one in “Lebensraum.” Although in my mind, they were both inspired by my grandparents, I had initially named them differently and was originally imagining two different families…but then I realized they were in fact the same couple…and I went back and changed some details in one of the stories to fit this. It felt more right this way than it had been when I was trying to treat them differently.

One sort of interesting thing that I came to realize as I was shaping the collection is that, in a way, the “Quiet American” story could also be considered, even though the names aren’t used, to be a continuation of “Homecomings.” Because the details are really the same…the grandparents from Germany, the mention of Stuttgart for the consulate, and there are two grandchildren mentioned. So readers could decide that this is another story of that family, but you don’t have to decide that.

In these crazy publishing times, why write a collection, period, instead of a novel?

Actually, I did write a novel. When I went to the MFA program, it had just gotten agented, and I’d done a lot of revisions for the agent, and she was sending it out—so I didn’t want to workshop it. I didn’t want more feedback at that point; of course it was one thing to get notes from editors at houses, but quite another to bring it back into a workshop. So I started writing these stories, and they kept coming. And one really good thing about my program was that it demanded a lot of production. We had to present 8-25 pages twice during the residency week and then four times during the semester.

That’s a lot!

It is, and some people submitted multiple revisions of the same story or novel chapter during a semester, but I never did that. I mean, I did workshop “Lebensraum” and “Homecomings” in revisions during two different semesters with two different groups of people, and I may have submitted early iterations of “For Services Rendered” twice during the final semester, which was an especially trying one, but I wrote over twenty stories during my MFA years.

Why did you choose to do that instead of workshopping revisions?

There was a huge advantage to me of just getting all that material down and then going back and revising later. And this is why I wasn’t really focused on that novel. It was never published, and it remains the novel in the drawer, the proverbial first novel. To the question “Why short stories?” the practical answer is that this is what I worked on during those years. And of course I love reading short fiction, too.

What were you reading when you worked on this collection, and who are some other Jewish writers, or artists in other mediums, who inspire you? Who would you recommend to other people who are interested in reading and writing Jewish fiction?

I would recommend everyone who was on the panel, and everyone we recommended during it… [EDITOR'S NOTE: Scroll down for a grand reading list!] Some short story collections that have really spoken to me include Margot Singer’s The Pale of Settlement, and one on the after-history of the Holocaust is the wonderful novella-and-stories Awake in the Dark, by Shira Nayman. (One of the stories from it, “The House on Kronenstrasse,” appeared in the Atlantic’s Fiction Issue in 2005, and I interviewed her for JBooks. Both Nayman’s and Singer’s were books I felt a kinship with, ones I wished I’d written! Obviously with Singer’s there are stories about Israel that I never could have written, but I just admired it so much and felt so connected to it.

Have you spent much time in Israel?

Not enough. I went for the second time last year, in October. And I first went there in 1988. There’s not much I would redo in terms of my life, but one thing I wish I would have done when I was younger would be to have applied for a fellowship and to have spent more time there—a year or more, maybe—and to have become fluent in Hebrew. But I graduated from college the year of the first Gulf War; I remember my college roommate’s sister was in Israel in January of 1991, and it was a really scary time for American families to send their kids there. It would have probably been amazing to go when I was younger. But maybe I’ll get the opportunity for a longer stay somewhere in the future. I hope so. I do feel very attached to Israel.

And how much time have you spent in Germany?

Not a whole lot. The country I really know best outside of the United States is France. And I began this love affair with France and all things French when I was in middle school and started studying French, French literature and history…but the first time I went to Germany was 1990, during my semester in France. And it was right after the wall came down.

It was an exciting time. I brought back pieces of the wall. East Berlin—what had been East Berlin—was in bad shape. The pictures that I have from that trip…well, let’s just say the city has been completely reborn in the last twenty years.

Then I went back again a few months later with my dad. He was on business, and we went in the summer to Mannheim. Then my dad, my sister, my mom, and I went in 1993, and then I went again, to Stuttgart, in 2004.

During one of those trips, did you have an experience like the tourist in “Quiet Americans”? Or was this something you imagined (or feared) might happen?

I don’t know if you experience this, too, but when I write fiction that is at least partly autobiographical, I sometimes have trouble remembering what I’ve made up and what’s the real memory. And I definitely feel that way about this story… The idea of the RAF soldier…that didn’t happen on my bus. I got that idea from a conversation with someone else who had a similar experience. Some aspects of that story are definitely true. The reason I went on the bus tour is that I do have a terrible sense of direction, and I’ve made a habit since my first trip to Paris: get on the bus and figure out where everything is. But I can’t say with 100% certainty that I had what was my narrator’s impression: that this guide was very much focused on how everything in Stuttgart was destroyed or rebuilt and didn’t talk about much else.

When I read the story, I find myself questioning that memory. Did it really happen, or was it just my feeling?

And I’ve had this doubt emerge about a number of stories I’ve written. So to get back to that earlier question, this is another reason I’m so glad it’s fiction! Because if it were a memoir…I’m one of the people who believes that a memoir should be as true as the author can possibly make it. I don’t want to have an A Million Little Pieces moment. So even for fiction, I want to be very careful to say that I don’t remember exactly what happened.

As a Jewish American, did you grow up feeling more like part of a community, or like an outsider?

Growing up in Brooklyn, almost everyone we knew was Jewish. There were some Italians and Italian-Americans, Roman Catholics, but then we moved to the suburbs and we were the only Jews on our block, and I was the only Jew in my fourth-grade class, and it was a culture shock. And in the larger middle school and high school, and then in college, I got used to being around Jews again, and then at the MFA program, I found myself the rare Jew again. In France, as a high schooler, I lived with a family in the Alps, and one of the daughters asked me the first day I was there, “So, you’re Catholic?” I said, “No.” “Well then you’re Protestant.” And I told her I was Jewish. She said, “Really? I’ve never met a Jewish person before.” I slept in her room, and there was a cross over the bed. There was this back and forth, growing up, between belonging and being an outsider.

And I come up against this idea, from within the literary community, that being Jewish is “not so special,” that everyone’s met Jews and knows about Jews.

In cities like New York, it’s likely most people will run into someone Jewish at some point, but it’s amazing how segregated many communities…even urban ones…remain. Growing up in the burbs of a small city in Pennsylvania, I was asked more than once—and not maliciously!—if I had horns.

Yes! People say that everyone’s assimilated, and yesterday one of the panelists mentioned that he doesn’t want to read any more about so-called “obliterationist anxiety,” and my chest tightened. There are little things. I remember moving to New Jersey and there was a dance class that many of my classmates took, but it was at a country club that didn’t admit Jews. And I didn’t even want to dance in that class—I was so clumsy, it would have been a horrible thing!—but just knowing that something like that exists, when you’re 9 years old, and knowing my grandparents’ background, and watching the Holocaust miniseries on television (it had just aired the year before), which I probably shouldn’t have watched at that age, but I did….

What role do you think Israel, or the idea of a Jewish state, plays in this concept of “obliterationist anxiety”?

For me, personally, it’s all significant and everything is tied together. But it’s a complicated subject, Israel, especially in the context of the constant public discourse about it.

This brings up something very important to me and my writing more generally. In my history education, I was graced over many years to work with Stanley Hoffmann, technically a political scientist, but really a multiply-gifted individual who is really interested in moral issues and how complicated they are. I was his TA for his class on France between 1936-1944, and in that class and elsewhere, he really helped me not see things in black and white, how hard it is to make moral choices and, as he has said, that “it takes a lot of courage to be a hero.”

In “Mishpocha,” for instance, what happens on that street…that happened to me when I was walking in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And of course people in my parents’ generation read the story and say, “Well, of course you didn’t say anything. Who knows what might have happened to you?” But people in my generation—our generation, and those a little younger—those people can get upset when they read this, that I didn’t say something. When the incident came up in a workshop, there was quite a discussion. Now, I can be brave in some contexts: I’ll speak up in a class or curriculum committee and say, “Hey, this should really be on the syllabus!” But in other settings, like in that situation on the street, I’m not brave at all.

I wouldn’t know how to write about that moment in nonfiction. It was so searing to have it happen, but being able to bring it into a fictional piece felt…important, and I hope that it helps scaffold that story and gives more insight into the diversity of the Jewish American experience: this man was raised as a certain kind of Jew, and his wife as another. We live in such a multicultural society—but various online message boards will be teeming with rages about people “appropriating” other cultures. We all live together, and how limiting does it become to only write about people who are just like you? Unfortunately my “Reparation” story—the longer one I mentioned before—didn’t work for a number of reasons, but in it, I was trying to get at some of the issues between African Americans and Jews. Perhaps it was worrisome to editors that as a Jewish author, I was writing African American characters…but we’re not living in a Jewish ghetto. We do interact. So it feels unnatural to only have my Jewish characters interact with other Jews.

It’s obviously a complex question. Of course we want to get things right, and there’s often a fine line between appropriating and inhabiting…but writing just “what we know” or what we are is awfully limiting. After an Edward P. Jones reading I attended, someone asked him what his thoughts on writing other genders, races, etc., were. In his novel, The Known World, which I love, he wrote white women as convincingly as he did African American men, and he claimed to feel pretty confident doing so. But he admitted to feeling suspicious of white authors who try to write black characters—and really of any majority trying to write from the POV of any minority. I can understand his perspective on this (again, you’ve got to get it right!), but I wonder how, or if, we can get to a place where readers and editors can look at an author photo and not put up a wall if the author has a different gender or background from the characters.

Or a different life experience. I’ve been in workshops in which some participants—who were mothers themselves—knew I don’t have a child, and occasionally someone would just put up a wall, as you said, at certain things in my stories, saying, “No, that’s just not how it is when you have children,” or “She wouldn’t feel that way three weeks after having a baby,” or “She wouldn’t fit into her clothes yet.”—but these things vary so much from mother to mother, from person to person. The idea that I had overstepped by even trying to imagine motherhood…that you’re only allowed to write about certain things because you’ve lived them…to me, it contravenes the idea of fiction.

I find that if a character comes across as not believable, not real within a story’s world, that’s when I go to the author photo and think something generically judgmental…you know, “Come on, really, male writer? You think women are like this?”

I know what you mean. But then you get writers like Jacob Paul. I was so impressed with Sarah/Sara, the character and the book.

He wrote the character of Sarah/Sara beautifully—her voice, everything. I forgot the author was a man for huge spans of time.

His book gets into many interesting topics that I’m invested in, that I want to write about: 9/11, and Israel. It was a pleasure to review.

You’ve been writing book reviews for a while now—for as long as you’ve been writing fiction…

And teaching them, too!

I didn’t know that. Where did you teach writing reviews, and what was the context? I just learned today that Penn State’s MFA program offers a course on reviewing.

Overall, I’m surprised that more writing programs don’t offer courses in writing reviews. When I was freelancing and teaching, I taught a course online in writing book reviews. And through the Lesley MFA program, which has an extra interdisciplinary or independent study component, I ran a book review class for several semesters until I took a job at CUNY.

As discussed at the [AWP] Good Review panel, it can be hard—or at least problematic—to write reviews that are overly critical when you’re a writer yourself. And some people make the argument that writers shouldn’t be critics, that we have too much personal stake in the market/community, or some kind of ulterior motive. But there are huge pluses, too, right, to donning both hats? Let’s spin this toward the positive… What do you think are some advantages of being both a writer and a reviewer of books?

Charles Baxter made the excellent point that if you do workshopping and critiquing correctly, that’s actually a lot like reviewing. And ideally, being able to write a good critique about someone else’s work helps you learn about the craft yourself. And that’s sort of how I feel about reviewing, especially the reviews I do for FWR, which focus at least in part on craft elements, and which are written largely for an audience of fiction writers, and which review the work as fiction. The issues that come up in writing about Jacob Paul’s book—the use of point of view, a man writing a woman’s voice, and how a novelist or short-story writer can write successfully about these huge events (suicide bombings, 9/11)—it really does help clarify the way I think about these issues and how to frame them, craft-wise, in my own work.

Of course the review should first and foremost say something about another person’s work: the act of writing about it, of reviewing, helps focus your thinking about it. But doing so can only help your own work.

And is there an advantage to the community aspect of being a writer-reviewer? Do you like the idea of authors reviewing each others’ work out there. Do you like the idea of being reviewed by a fellow fiction writer, or would you prefer to be reviewed by a critic who identifies first and foremost as a critic?

One of the things I’ve really loved so far about my book being released is seeing how reviewers respond to the book; I’m thrilled that they get it. Some of them have been fiction writers, and they really seem to understand what I’m doing. Whether that’s because they’re just innately really smart [laughs], or because they’ve really thought about what goes into writing fiction because they do it themselves, I don’t know, but it’s good to have writers review other writers.

But it’s also hard…in another review-focused panel yesterday, they talked about negative reviews. I try not to write many negative reviews…I’ve written some, but not many. Recently I did write—for the Jewish Journal—a fairly negative review of a work of fiction in translation, an Israeli author’s book. I criticized both the translation and the story itself. Disclaimer: I can’t read Hebrew beyond street signs, but I could tell the translation was clumsy because it just wasn’t working in English. And I was troubled by the overall jumpiness and shifts in points of view: the two narrative strands weren’t integrated very well.

I wrote a pretty mixed review on an anthology of Jewish fiction called Promised Lands. It was scary to say negative things about it because some of the authors in there were quite acclaimed, and many of the stories in it were quite good, wonderful even…but some were not. Mostly I had concerns and questions about the way the larger book was put together, and I voiced these. These pointed to larger questions about how literary anthologies are put together, and I tried to broaden it to that discussion.

But mostly I try to review books of fiction that I can recommend to readers, books I admire and want others to admire and enjoy, too. And if we can talk about fiction as fiction, too, that’s wonderful. I feel so grateful to have lucked into this community at FWR. It’s like being part of an “ideal cohort.” I’m excited to continue working with the site—especially on our annual celebration of Short Story Month.

We love that you’re part of the FWR family. Thanks for taking the time to talk about your collection!

Further Links and Recommendations

Read “For Services Rendered,” a story from Quiet Americans discussed in this interview, via Book Buzzr:

Erika Dreifus loves to recommend books to readers interested in 21st-century Jewish fiction. The following list is drawn from a handout she created for her AWP panel’s attendees; you can find the original–which breaks these books down into thematic categories and includes related recommendations–on Erika’s website, which also links to a bevy of blogs and publications featuring Jewish lit.

• Albert, Elisa. How This Night Is Different (2006).
• Amend, Allison. Stations West (2010).
• Brown, Danit. Ask for a Convertible: Stories (2008).
• Brown, Rosellen. Half a Heart (2000).
• Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007).
• Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated (2002).
• Furman, Andrew. Alligators May Be Present (2005).
• Goodman, Allegra. Kaaterskill Falls (1999).
• Hamburger, Aaron. Faith for Beginners (2005).
• Haworth, Kevin. The Discontinuity of Small Things (2005).
• Haworth, Kevin. “The Scribe” (2009).
• Horn, Dara. All Other Nights (2009).
• Kadish, Rachel. From a Sealed Room (1998).
• Leegant, Joan. Wherever You Go (2010).
• Litman, Ellen. The Last Chicken in America (2007).
• Lowenthal, Michael. Charity Girl (2005).
• Mirvis, Tova. The Ladies’ Auxiliary (1999).
• Obejas, Achy. Days of Awe (2001).
• Orringer, Julie. The Invisible Bridge (2010).
• Paul, Jacob. Sarah/Sara (2010).
• Reyn, Irina. What Happened to Anna K. (2008).
• Rosenbaum, Thane. The Golems of Gotham (2002).
• Setton, Ruth Knafo. The Road to Fez (2001).
• Shteyngart, Gary. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2001).
• Singer, Margot. The Pale of Settlement (2008).
• Sofer, Dalia. The Septembers of Shiraz (2007).
• Solomon, Anna. The Little Bride (2011).
• Stern, Steve. The Wedding Jester (1999).
• Vapnyar, Lara. Broccoli & Other Tales of Food and Love (2008).
• Weber, Katharine. Triangle (2006).

Have you noticed that more and more often, writer bios emphasize everything about the author’s life but writing? Authors list their credentials from the odd jobs they’ve worked: door-to-door knife salesman, pig farmer, department store perfume-sprayer—okay, I made those up, but pick up virtually any book by an up-and-coming author and you’ll see that they’re not far afield.

Writer Edan Lepucki discusses this phenomenon in an insightful essay on The Millions:

Or is my annoyance at the non-standard bio about something else? With the authors who have held a dozen, motley jobs, I worry that book writing is just a hobby for them, a one-off thing, another occupation in a long line of them. God damn the dilettantes multi-talented! Or is it because such a bio suggests that writing, and the devotion to that pursuit, isn’t worthy enough for its own three-line biography? Maybe it’s that tired idea that writers are lame, sheltered wimps who haven’t really lived. “Please!” these bios call out. “I’m more than just a writer! I am worthy of your admiration and respect!”

I’m sure this is all stemming from my own insecurities. Part of me is embarrassed by the fact that I’ve pursued writing since I was a kid, that I did not have a long and colorful life before I put pen to paper. I’m probably just envious. I can’t blame the writers whose bios spotlight a different kind of life, a different part of life. As I said, it’s all branding, in the end. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

For some writers, I think Lepucki is exactly right: such bios might be an attempt to pre-empt the perennial criticism that the author hasn’t lived a real life or worked a real job.

But perhaps there’s something more. I wonder if some authors use their author bios as a way to assert their bona fides, especially when the author’s biography and the character’s life overlap. Are you writing a novel about a time-traveling ninja? Be sure to mention your history degree and your sixteen years of studying karate. Working on a story about a traveling circus? Tell the audience that you can juggle seven balls at once, or that you used to perform as a clown at children’s birthday parties.

There’s nothing wrong per se with this kind of author bio—as Lepucki points out, it’s just another form of author branding. And there’s nothing wrong with drawing on your life experience, either; after all, don’t all fiction writers do that? However, bios-as-credentials suggest that a writer is somehow more qualified to write the story than another writer. It implies that only a writer who knows about gang life (for example) can truly write about gangs, or that only a writer who climbs mountains could write about a Mt. Everest expedition. Or—taking this a step further—only an Indian writer can (or should) write about an Indian character, or only a woman can (or should) write women characters. But shouldn’t fiction writers be able to imagine their way into experiences they’ve never had?

When you read an author bio like those Lepucki highlights, does it change your perception of the book—especially for fiction?

And speaking of that laptop—I spent a lot of time on it during this funk. It’s amazing how much web-surfing can look and even feel like writing—fingers on the keyboard! typing!—if one’s denial is deep enough. It was during one of these Internet binges that I made my way to the book section of the New York Times, where a debut novelist named Deanna Fei was being reviewed. Her name rang a bell. I typed it into Facebook, only to discover that we had a couple of friends in common—we’d gone to the same college, graduating a few years apart. I checked out Deanna’s author page, which led me to her blog. The first entry I read revisited some quotes on writing—from Sylvia Plath, D.H. Lawrence, and others—that Deanna had compiled in college, when her dream was to “be a writer.” She reflected:

Some of these statements don’t seem quite as profound to me now as they might have back then, and if I redid this exercise today, I’d probably revise the list substantially. But every one of them still speaks to me, very clearly, in at least one way: They’re about writing. Not about “being a writer,” but about writing. And—it’s not always easy to remember—writing is what it’s all about. Nothing else.

I’d been told this before, but I needed to hear it again just then. It helped. I went out and bought Deanna’s novel, A Thread of Sky, and was reminded further of all the wonderful things you can do with words if you let yourself get them down on paper, and give yourself time to rework them and test them against your meaning. There is a moment in A Thread of Sky—the story of six women, family members, who take a package tour of China—in which one of the characters finally confronts her grief over her dead husband, by way of a very mundane act. I’ll resist saying anything more about it; I don’t want to rob other readers of the experience of having their breath taken away by the deep sadness and utter simplicity of the moment. The same passage that knocked the wind out of me also knocked some sense into me. This is what writing is about, I remember thinking: illuminating emotional truths, exploring interesting questions about people and the world—above all, forging a connection with your reader. This is the work that makes those anxieties about “being a writer,” however inevitable, seem beside the point. Nobody ever moved anybody by being a writer. Only by putting words on the page that ring true.

Originally from Queens, New York, Deanna attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and received a Fulbright grant to research A Thread of Sky in China. In the Huffington Post, The Millions, and other venues, she’s written with insight and humor on the writing life, literature, identity, family, and reality TV. She shared her thoughts with me on these and other subjects over email in February.

INTERVIEW

Kate Levin: This may be a strange place to begin, but I was overjoyed to learn recently that you sometimes dive into celebrity gossip sites while warming up to write. As someone with a bad UsWeekly.com habit (the need to know what Lindsay Lohan’s up to always seems to strike just as I’m sitting down to work), I wanted to ask if you’d share some of your favorite pre-writing gossip sites?

Deanna Fei: I don’t think any of these sites need my endorsement, but my usual stops are HuffPost, TMZ, and E!. I like a mix of narrative, eye candy, and plain tawdriness.

You noted in an earlier interview that celebrity gossip sites are rich in stories. You make a similar observation in a piece for the Huffington Post, “Why Every Writer Should Watch Jersey Shore.” Thanks to blogs and Facebook and the million reality shows on TV, it seems like a story-hungry mind has more windows than ever into the lives of other people. It seems, too, that all of these narratives, all this information, could really impinge on the mental quiet needed to write. How do you cultivate the concentration it takes to work on a novel?

It’s true that I honestly believe my gossip habit serves as a little warm-up for writing, a way to step out of my own life and into the lives of others. But you’re right: writing doesn’t happen without that final phase, the whiting-out of everything but the one story before you. And sometimes that takes a lot of tricks. I have two laptops—one that’s so old that it crashes if I do more than word processing and maybe looking up a few references on Wikipedia, and one that I use for everything else. When it’s time to write, I put my other laptop in another room and close the door. I turn my phone to silent mode and put on noise-canceling headphones. And I don’t let anyone interrupt me. Maybe it seems self-indulgent, but writing is creating a whole universe for your characters and your readers, and you have to protect the process.

The idea for A Thread of Sky grew out of a package tour of mainland China that you took with your own sisters, mom, aunt, and grandmother. In your acknowledgments, you write: “…while this book was, in part, inspired by them, it is not about them; it does not depict their histories or their personalities. I offer them my apologies for potential misunderstandings, and my lifelong admiration.” Did it complicate things that the story was rooted in a recognizably real family experience? Or did it feel like the work of creating any fictional characters?

Fei reads at B&N in Park Slope, April 2010 / credit: from author's website

There was a part of me that deeply regretted the fact that my story had a recognizably autobiographical basis, because I couldn’t help worrying about the assumptions readers might make about my family and the ways that my family might feel exposed. In terms of my writing process, the main complication was always making sure that nothing remained in the novel simply because it had happened in real life—one of the worst justifications to write anything.

But in general, I think that whatever the inspiration for fictional characters, the challenge of making them spring to life is much the same. And the truth is that people will assume autobiographical elements in your writing no matter what, especially with a first novel. You can’t let that stop you. You simply have to write what moves you.

You went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and worked on A Thread of Sky while you were there. I imagine it’s very different to put up portions of an embryonic novel for critique than complete short story drafts. What was it like trying to draft a novel while simultaneously receiving feedback from other writers?

For me, one of the hardest parts of writing my first novel was getting up the nerve to start. So that novel workshop was most crucial in making the stakes seem manageable. I could tell myself I was simply drafting sixty pages so that I could get into this class with Elizabeth McCracken, as opposed to starting my first novel.

In terms of the actual workshops, it’s true that my novel was too embryonic back then for the feedback to be very useful in itself, especially when we were so accustomed to thinking of plot and structure and language on the granular scale of the short story. But the encouragement and sense of fellowship were invaluable. So was simply witnessing how the process was terrifying and bewildering for everyone, whether it was their first novel or their third.

Since I left the workshop, I’ve mostly reverted to working in isolation for long periods of time, and recognizing when I need to turn to my trusted readers and editors. But those two years at Iowa were such an intense, immersive experience that hardly a day goes by when I don’t hear some of those voices: Frank Conroy’s exhortations to inspect every sentence for “meaning, sense, and clarity”; Ethan Canin’s edict that you write to explore, not explain; Elizabeth McCracken’s passion for research; and on and on.

This is from your thoughtful and funny essay in The Millions, “A Different Species: A Chinese American Writer in China,” about moving to China on a Fulbright to work on your novel:

One of the things I found so interesting about your essay is that I tend to think of research-for-writing as a way to feel at home in a subject or setting, to “get it”—but it seems like the alienation that you felt in China was really productive for your work. I was wondering if you could talk about that a bit.

The Great Wall / credit: from the author's website

You raise a really interesting question. To me, it’s both: you need to feel at home with your subject, but you also want to let it retain a sense of mystery, a smidgen of unknowability. I think it’s crucial to immerse yourself in the world of your characters through research, imagination, and/or literally moving to the place where their story takes place, as I did. But a writer is most crucially an observer, someone who stands just a little bit apart. You never want to feel too comfortable; you need a little distance to see clearly.

More broadly, the feeling that you have to “get it” completely can be deadening in fiction—and, I think, can even verge on hubris. In the same way that a traveler eventually has to look past that urge to fully digest a foreign country, a writer has to embrace the fact that your subject will always remain just slightly beyond your grasp, in the same way that your characters will never behave exactly how you anticipated and your novel will never be exactly what you set out to write. To me, that’s proof that you’re really writing, when the story is a living thing.

Now, to dig into the novel itself: the point of view rotates by chapter among the six women in the book—three sisters, born and raised in NYC; their mother and aunt, who emigrated from Taiwan to the US as students; and their grandmother, a former Chinese revolutionary now living in LA. The setting shifts, too, as we travel along the “must-sees” offered up by the package tour. How did you know which of your characters’ eyes to lend the reader at any given spot along the tour?

It’s a funny thing: I just knew. I always had a sense of which character had the most at stake in each setting, and that dictated the choice of narrator. Sometimes it was obvious—for example, that the grandmother would narrate the historical capital of Nanjing because the city would evoke her memories of life under the Japanese occupation, as a nationalist activist, as a permanent exile. And sometimes it was more abstract—for instance, that the romantic gardens of Suzhou would force Nora to face the fact of her heartbreak. But there always seemed to be an organic and fundamental relationship between the point of view and the setting.

Suzhou Lingering Garden

All of your characters are given equal voice in the novel, but Irene is the only one who has to play the role of both mother and daughter on the tour, and the story begins and ends with her. Do you see her as the heart of the book?

Yes, though I didn’t fully realize that until I was well into the revision. My original intention was to give equal weight to all six women, but I came to see that Irene’s emotional journey was, in many ways, the heart of all of their journeys. She is the center of this family, in bridging the generations between her mother and her daughters and in providing the impetus for this reunion. While the other characters are, each for her own reasons, deeply ambivalent about embarking on this tour, Irene desperately wants to reconnect with her family and her ancestral home. Her hopes, her sense of deep disillusionment, and her eventual coming to terms helped form the overall arc of the novel.

These six women are all faced with very different (often secret) dilemmas, which is part of what gives this tour its crackle of tension. One thing they all seem to be wrestling with, though, is the complicated and ever-changing nature of home—whether it’s an ancestral home, a physical home, or even a person’s own body. Did “home” become a concern for all of your characters because it was a larger concern of the novel, or did it work the opposite way?

The latter—it was a theme that emerged from the characters, which is how I think themes should almost always originate. Otherwise you run the risk of stilting your story for the sake of an idea. It’s funny: the one line that seems to most explicitly contain the heart of the novel—”Jia—family, house, home. In Chinese, it was all one word”—is one that I wrote on my final pass-through of the manuscript.

Your younger characters, Nora, Kay, and Sophie, are especially aware of other people’s ideas of who they’re supposed to be as Asian American women. Their range of responses to stereotyping—variously ignoring it, making fun of it, confronting it through political activism, defining themselves against it, telling someone to fuck off, not telling someone to fuck off—seems to echo a theme of A Thread of Sky about resisting oversimplification and generalization in favor of complexity, multiple ways of being. I was also thinking about this in light of “I Called Amy Tan A Dirty Word—And Then She Friended Me,” your piece about coming up against other people’ assumptions about what your book is. Could you say a little about the struggle for your book to have its own identity, to be read on its own terms?

Amy Tan, photo by David Sifry

There were times I struggled with how my novel seemed to be instantly categorized in ways that didn’t ring true to me. Of course, that’s just part of how books get packaged and digested—you know, “If you liked this, try that!”—and there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. But for writers of color, it can be particularly disheartening for the work to be categorized sociologically, which takes something away from our individuality and our art. In my case, I got a lot of Amy Tan comparisons, some of which were complimentary and some of which were dismissive. And in terms of the novel being set in China, there were times that I felt like I’d wandered into a preexisting shouting match between “pro-China” and “anti-China” camps. But there’s only so much that a writer can control. I find that anytime I hear from people who’ve actually read the novel, they always seem to have a highly individual sense of my story and my characters on their own terms, and that’s more important to me than anything else.

Now, to shift topics just a bit—to sex scenes. There are a couple of them in the novel, but I’m thinking mostly of the very climactic (sorry) scene in which one of your characters loses her virginity. Do you have any advice for those of us who have trouble writing sex scenes?

Ah, I love that you ask! I think sex scenes are some of the hardest to write—and they can also be the most essential. They should never be obligatory or gratuitous, of course—but too often, writers just let the moment pass in a line break. That seems like such a wasted opportunity to me. A good sex scene is a good action scene, a high point of tension and conflict, a moment when your characters are (in more ways than one) laid bare. As the writer, just try not to lose your nerve. It’s your duty to see your characters through the moment.

In addition to writing, you teach. What drew you to teaching—and specifically, to the kind of work that you do, teaching in public schools in NYC?

Public education has always been my passion, along with writing. I can’t help wondering why more of us writers—along with journalists, musicians, dancers, artists—don’t seem to connect the problems in our schools with the problem we’re always lamenting: the shrinking audience for our art. When we continue to fail so many of our students, where can we expect the next generation of audiences to come from?

On a more personal level, I find teaching nourishes me as a person and as a writer. I rely on my students to challenge my thinking, and very often, I’m inspired by their toughness and their wisdom. I find schools, and adolescent groups in particular, to be such fascinating microcosms of society. Writing requires a lot of isolation and contemplation, and teaching gets me away from my computer and out of my head; it keeps me from slipping into solipsism. You have to write what moves you, but you also have to write stories that matter.

You do other community-oriented, NYC-focused work in the form of your writing for Open City. Could you tell us about that project?

Open City is an interdisciplinary neighborhood blog and community project coordinated by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. I’m one of five writers documenting the rapidly changing neighborhoods of Manhattan’s Chinatown, Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, and Flushing, Queens, through essays, photos, interviews, oral histories, poetry, and anything else that inspires us. I was born and raised in Flushing, where my parents still live, and it’s been fascinating to revisit the neighborhood through this new lens.

Click here to learn more about AAWW and the 2011 Asian American Short Story Contest

As we wrap up, is there anything you know now about novel-writing that you wish you’d known when you were working on A Thread of Sky?

There are so many things I wish I’d known. When I was writing my early drafts of A Thread of Sky, I spent way too much time polishing pages and pages that will never see the light of day. I like to think that it was all part of the process, but part of me knows that a lot of it was a waste of time. More importantly, it led me to get too attached to various lines and scenes; it distracted me from the bigger picture. Writing a novel requires momentum. Especially when you’re transitioning from writing short stories, you might feel like you’re sacrificing beauty and precision—but you have to trust that can come later. Also, the force of a novel depends on huge stakes, overarching questions, a sense of expansion—and I think that, in this way, the craft is more akin to film than short stories. I’ve actually gained some of my most treasured lessons about plot and structure from books on screenwriting.

Finally, I know that you’re a fan of Jersey Shore. Any thoughts about Snooki’s forthcoming novel? Should writers of Serious Literary Fiction roll their eyes and grumble about her giant advance, or is it better to take a more generous, big-tent philosophy?

I have to confess, I didn’t know anything about Snooki’s book deal until now. In my world, writing is art, but books are commodities, and these realities have to coexist. None of us can help grumbling every now and then, but the only thing we can control is our own work. And maybe Snooki’s earnings will enable her publisher to discover an unknown writer or two.

Or maybe Snooki has a great story to tell. You never know.

Further Links and Resources

The hardcover edition

Each week we’ll give away several free copies of a featured novel or story collection as part of our Book-of-the-Week program. All you have to do to be eligible for our weekly drawing is to be a fan of our Facebook page. No catch, no gimmicks. And once you’re a fan, you’ll be automatically entered in each subsequent drawing.

Last week we featured Dakota, Or What’s a Heaven For, by Brenda K. Marshall, and we’re pleased to announce the winners: Amy Marcott, Heather Kirn Lanier, and Travis and Regina Mossotti. Congratulations! Each will receive a copy of the book, signed by the author.

This week we’re featuring Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, by Ethan Gilsdorf. In her review of the book for FWR, contributor Sophie Powell writes:

Ethan Gilsdorf, a former Dungeons and Dragons addict and seasoned pop-culture and travel journalist, chronicles his international odyssey through the worlds of Harry Potter bands, medieval reenactment societies, World of Warcraft guilds and massive fantasy conventions, to name only a few. In the process he learns to come to terms with his own attachment to the imaginary that has persisted into his forties. As a dedicated fairytale and myth fanatic myself, my curiosity was piqued by the title of the book which is at once a memoir, an insider’s guide to the world of gaming, and a quest that takes him all around the world to find answers not only to his own life, but to the larger question of why tens of millions of people turn away from reality and fully embrace fantastical other-existences.

If you’d like to be eligible for this week’s drawing (and all future ones), please visit our Facebook Page and “like” us. As we did last week, we’ll be giving away three, signed copies of this title. To everyone who’s already a fan, thanks for supporting this project. What we want to do is not only find ways to expand our readership, but also to put books we love in the hands of readers.

So please help us spread the word!