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The story opens as Amina attempts to settle into George’s house. Before coming to the US she slept in a bed with her mother every night. Her father slept on a separate cot in the same room. The scenes that focus on Amina staring out the windows of the suburban house in winter are intercut with her memories of Bangladesh, and the contrast highlights the hush of her loneliness, and the strangeness of her new life.

When Amina returns to Desh to escort her parents through the post-9/11 visa circus, she recognizes in her relatives’ questions about America her own previous fantasies of that life. When she disagrees with George, he often ducks the argument by sighing, “cultural differences…” as an excuse, and it would be easy to read that gap of understanding as the novel’s chief concern. In fact, it is a novel about imagination: how it can fail us, or mislead us, color our self image.

The fantasy of America looms large around the globe: a land of opportunity, a fresh start, a bully, an enigma, a screen for projected desires. It is striking that Amina, the devoted daughter and dutiful wife, who nurtured her American dreams for years, has many difficulties with empathy. For her, imagination ends at other people’s inner lives. Freudenberger makes her so sympathetic that we don’t recognize Amina’s blindness until late in the novel, when she embarrasses a family friend, Nasir. Some disconnects do arise from cultural misunderstandings, but these resolve quickly—Amina is smart. In many ways this is less a novel about learning to become an American than learning to become an adult.

Amina’s parents prepared their only child for achievement, and when the family falls on hard times in Bangladesh, she willingly assumes the savior’s mantle. She worries about convincing George to help bring her parents to America, about her part-time jobs, and about money. She endures sex, George’s family, and George, but although she takes on these adult responsibilities, in many ways her thinking remains childish. She never really second-guesses her decision to leave Bangladesh. She finds it difficult to question the life she has chosen. George and Nasir and Amina’s parents all have secrets, and somehow in her resentment over these secrets, Amina forgets that she has her own. Freudenberger writes,

As a girl she’d often imagined a sort of magic that could give her a glimpse of the person she would one day marry. The likelihood that he existed somewhere made this fantasy even more irresistible, and she could spend hours daydreaming about it in the opulent apartments of her students, waiting for them to arrive at the solutions to simple problems. How thrilled she would’ve been if she’d been able to see George then: a man already, hardworking and reliable, decent looking if not overly handsome, sitting at a computer in an American office. The desire to be sixteen again was suddenly so powerful that a sound escaped her, something between a gasp and a groan.

Culture does not define this scene; such youthful longings are universal. It’s familiar to daisy pluckers the world over—loves me, loves me not. Both family circumstance and her image of America-as-promised-land hobble Amina’s desires—a fact so painful it elicits that gasp. It’s better to be sixteen, dreaming of being twenty-five, than the other way around. Marriage ties Amina to George, but not exactly as she expects, and she imagines herself, as so many people do, into the life she thinks she ought to have, which isn’t necessarily the life she wants.

Amina’s trouble with imagination extends to George’s cousin, Kim. The black sheep of the family, Kim is Amina’s opposite: the not-dutiful daughter. Kim married (briefly) an Indian man and spent time in India, so she expects to click with Amina, since Bangladesh is India’s neighbor. Their interactions reveal unflattering truths—that even well-traveled Americans can assume homogeneity across huge swaths of the globe. Dhaka and Bombay are, of course, miles apart geographically and culturally. But Kim also embodies an American optimism and empathy, traits Amina overlooks.

If this novel has a flaw, it’s in the flatness of many of the secondary characters. I was annoyed by the portrayal of George early on until I realized that he is two-dimensional to the reader because he is still two–dimensional to Amina. He represents her idea of an American husband, not a person. Still, he doesn’t grow much on the page as the novel advances, and Freudenberger relies too much on Amina as an unreliable narrator. When she honestly can’t see a facet of a character’s personality that’s one thing, but withheld information frequently appears with this as an excuse.

Freudenberger’s writing is often described as “witty” or “sly” and though parts of the novel display humor, in contrast to Lucky Girls this book is incredibly earnest. While the first half feels measured, slow even, the building wave of problems and misunderstandings that befall Amina’s family at the end of the novel kept me turning the pages impatiently, and finally brought me to tears. The Newlyweds delivers both a cautionary tale about the failure of imagination, and a monument to its power. It argues that in a country built by immigrants, and fueled by dreams, only the difficult work of understanding each other can save us.

Further Links and Resources

If you have read Mrs. Dalloway (and what self-respecting fiction writer or fiction lover hasn’t?), you will likely recognize some similarities between An Unexpected Guest and Virginia Woolf’s famous novel even without the benefit of the jacket copy’s reminder. In fact, Korkeakivi’s novel could just as easily have been titled Mrs. Moorhouse (or perhaps Madame Moorhouse). Like Clarissa Dalloway, Clare Moorhouse spends the single day in which the novel unspools preparing for and hosting a dinner party. She’s quite fond of flowers, too.

Madame Moorhouse is the American-born wife of a high-ranking British diplomat based in Paris. We learn quickly that her husband desires a plum appointment to Dublin, and that this prize may well be in reach—if the evening’s dinner party proceeds smoothly. But her Irish ancestry notwithstanding (Madame Moorhouse was née Clare Siobhan Fennelly), our protagonist has reasons to worry about a transfer to Dublin. Those reasons—and a ghostly presence from her past—haunt her as she goes about her day in Paris.

An Unexpected Guest transpires in a rarefied world, and that may distance some readers. If scenes that unfold in gourmet supermarkets and museum gardens don’t appeal to you, this book might not either. I’m a Francophile, so the frequent inclusion of French dialogue pleases me. But, as I learned back as an MFA student, there are those who believe that “people who use ‘foreign’ words in their fiction are just showing off.” Again, if that’s your disposition, you might choose to steer clear of this book.

Which would be too bad, because you’d miss a satisfying reading experience and the chance to consider anew the ways in which earlier literature can influence new writerly generations. And, of course, you’d be missing an inexpensive, luggage- and logistics-free trip to Paris.

Extras

• Preview (and, if you like, purchase) Korkeakivi’s “Folding Paper,” an Atlantic Fiction for Kindle offering.
• If you haven’t (gasp) read Mrs. Dalloway, Project Gutenberg will make things right.
• If you’ll be in Paris anytime soon—or if you simply wish to imagine what your literary life might be like there—you’ll find Laurel Zuckerman’s Paris Writers News posts and updates most valuable.

In her recent review of Arcadia, Founding Editor Anne Stameshkin writes:

In Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia, the community of this same name is a utopia within our actual world—a flock of hippies, vegans, pacifists, and dreamers settling in upstate New York in the late 1960s. The Arcadians live off the land, eschewing commercialism, capitalism, and even pets (keeping them is considered slavery). [...] Groff’s prose is lush and lovely throughout, as idealistic as her Arcadians’ vision.

We’re giving away a copy of Arcadia next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

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

Further Reading

• Read the rest of Stameshkin’s review.
• Stephen King’s 2008 interview with Groff for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

The Cove’s story starts forty years earlier, near the end of World War I, during the last summer a brother and sister live on a cursed family farm. Three characters share the novel’s close-third narration, but the bulk belongs to Laurel Shelton, a woman with a large purple birthmark on her shoulder. Her father bought the farm cheap, unaware of local superstition; “There were stories of hunters who’d come into the cove and never been seen again, a place where ghosts and fetches wandered.” The Sheltons enter folklore when the father collapses in a field and the mother dies of a poisoned limb that “turned the color of Laurel’s stained skin.” Marked by the cove “as its own” in the eyes of neighbors, Laurel becomes an exile and a burden to her brother, whose war wound buys him community acceptance. Then, Laurel discovers a mute flutist hiding deep inside the cove. An accident draws him out of the woods and into her home, where they fall in love through gesture and music.

Admittedly, the plot reads like a doomed romance novel with a dark twist. That said, the author layers the story with historical details that help it transcend that fate. Central to the novel is a German internment camp located just west of Mars Hill. Here, the government interned the crew and orchestra (the origins of the flutist) of the Vaterland—a German luxury liner seized and renamed Leviathan. The ambiguity and paranoia of wartime patriotism drive the violence of the novel’s subplot (see: a skull in a well). Yet, Rash lets real horror creep into his reader’s imagination like the dark water that will drown the valley. That ominous cliff just breaking the surface like the tip of an iceberg, so that  “people would have no inkling it was once immense enough to shadow a whole cove.”

Extra

• Profile of Ron Rash’s roots in Appalachian culture on the Western Carolina website. Rash reflects on his grandfather – who couldn’t read or write – and the gift of storytelling he passed to his young grandson.

In Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion, 2012), the community of this same name is a utopia within our actual world—a flock of hippies, vegans, pacifists, and dreamers settling in upstate New York in the late 1960s. The Arcadians live off the land, eschewing commercialism, capitalism, and even pets (keeping them is considered slavery). But to keep the outside world at bay, members must corrupt their own systems. Among themselves, they exchange no money, but they must sell crops, music, and drugs to feed their growing population; their mission is equality for all, but established members occupy a mansion while new arrivals squat in muddy tents; all are supposedly welcome, but as the circle widens, fewer members are interested in the community’s original vision. Such hypocrisies (and law enforcement’s growing interest in its pot plots) increasingly threaten Arcadia’s survival.

We watch the rise, fall, and memory of Arcadia through the sensitive eyes of Bit Stone, one of the commune’s first children. His story divides the novel into four sets of episodic snapshots: childhood, teenage years, young fatherhood, middle age. When he tastes his first forbidden candy bar from “outside,” young Bit cringes at its sweetness—what, we wonder, will this child make of the rest of our world?

Groff’s prose is lush and lovely throughout, as idealistic as her Arcadians’ vision. The close, close, close-third person, as rendered here in the present tense, casts Bit’s childhood in a sensual fog. While all of his imaginings and perceptions are gorgeously written, some scenes almost yearn for more breathing room—distance, perspective—between narrator and character. But this is a small and only occasional complaint. More often, Groff uses this too-close angle to great (and conscious) effect, and near the book’s end, Bit admires the opposite quality in his daughter: “Already, she watches life from a good distance.”

One of Arcadia’s richest scenes unfolds during Bit’s teen years: late at night, he joins other teens in the Dormitory while the smaller children sleep; they strew moss and acorns about, sprinkle glitter on the kidlets’ pillows, and wedge a dozen butterfly wings beneath the windows…a prank: the fairies were here! The fairies were crushed?! The teens, who anticipated delight in disillusioning, are left deeply unsettled:

Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.

Even decades after Arcadia’s demise, Bit observes his community’s life-long influence—the “dull, small pain”; the gift of seeing the world differently—on the people who grew up within it. The adult Bit, living in Manhattan, teaching photography, has a less exotic life than his younger self, but he is interesting to read about because of the distance he has achieved, the things and people he has lost. As narrator-observer, he gains strength in perspective, in watching, recording, and remembering through his photographs.

In a surprise turn, the book’s final section reveals a dystopic future—extreme climate change, a bird flu pandemic—alarmingly set in 2018. As in, just a few years from now. Groff permits no comfortable distance between the reader’s world and this future; again, she takes us too close for comfort, and now the effect is nothing short of powerful. We have to wonder: If more people had lived like Arcadians, would things be better? And are Arcadia’s former inhabitants better suited, or less so, to carve out a future in a world of diminishing resources?

Near the novel’s end, Bit and his daughter, Grete, encounter Glory, an Amish woman who once watched the Arcadian experiment from her own would-be-utopic community. Glory views the world as either/or:

Freedom or community. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.

Why can’t you have both? says Grete, frowning. I think you could have both.

You want both, Glory says, you are destined to fail.

Yet Groff’s characters—and arguably, her readers—survive precisely by needing both, by striving to get the balance right. It’s why we’re drawn to books about ideal societies and their opposite, why we vote, why we have children, why we love other human beings. Arcadia may tell the story of a failed social experiment, but it’s about so much more—the seeds of what remains, of what succeeds: the fruits and consequences and necessary questions of living consciously.

Further Links and Resources

• Courtesy of NPR, read an excerpt from Arcadia.
• Here is Stephen King’s interview with Lauren Groff.
• In this podcast, Groff reads Alice Munro’s story “Axis” and discusses it with Deborah Treisman.
• Indulge in what Anne argues is one of the best short stories ever written, Groff’s “L. Debard and Aliette,” in the Atlantic Monthly. It also appears in Groff’s collection, Delicate, Edible Birds.

That’s the whole point, really, of the book, following as it does the last twenty minutes of Vada’s life—as he finishes mowing the lawn, eats cookie dough for lunch, and suffocates under the weight of his friend Wyatt’s stuffed trophy bear. It’s a joke wrapped in a pun inside a pratfall, the gags and absurdities layering and corkscrewing until you don’t know which way is up.

But Griffith’s novel is more than a series of jokes or comic set pieces. The narrator both claims that Vada is telling the story—he attributes specific words to Vada, claims Vada lied in the previous chapter, etc.—and refers consistently to Vada in the third person, which together make the novel seem less about a (mostly!) pathetic character dying and more about the pieces of each of us which come across as pitiful, unsuccessful, unrealized, incomplete. Vada describes himself as “a hard case, only not in the unreformable-criminal way…but for crimes of excessive interiority and fear.” It’s Social Anxiety Disorder as a metaphysical state, and Griffith deftly connects this human moment to the acts of writing and reading and also, more universally, to our relationship with mortality. Griffith’s fearless narrative gearshifting and his funny, nuanced portrait of grief give the book a degree of subtlety which makes Vada’s story moving and satisfying in ways that less ambitious comic novels can’t hope to achieve.

Extras

• Steve Almond recently interviewed Griffith for the Nervous Breakdown, and here’s another interview from Cincinnati’s City Beat.
• On the NEA’s website, read an excerpt from Bibliophilia, one of Griffith’s previous novels.
  ]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-trophy-by-michael-griffith/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/save-that-blood-an-interview-with-jim-shepard http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/save-that-blood-an-interview-with-jim-shepard#comments Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:00:25 +0000 Shawn Andrew Mitchell http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=33691 You Think That's Bad, could also be a creative mantra. Here the veteran writer discusses his research process, the apocalyptic state of the world, the (possible) irrelevancy of literature to the apocalypse, his epic mustache—and other matters of importance.]]>

  Jim Shepard, Credit: Michael Lionstar

  A secret affair on board a zeppelin. Three brothers involved in the Chernobyl incident. A Nazi expedition in search of the Yeti. It’s a rule: any discussion of Jim Shepard’s work must eventually turn toward the range of ground covered. In hyper-condensed story after hyper-condensed story, he pushes through new subject matter that could easily have taken a whole novel to explore, and when you’ve read enough of his stories, you start to wonder if there are boundaries to his empathy. They must be somewhere, because we’ve all got them, but they certainly don’t seem to involve gender, class, nationality, sexual orientation, time, or space. Maybe it’s the human-animal divide? No, he wrote from the point of view of the swamp monster. Maybe it’s the fourth dimension? I can’t remember anything about string theory in his oeuvre. But, then, he’s still going.

  Those familiar with Shepard’s past work will recognize this trend in his latest collection, You Think That’s Bad (Knopf, 2011), which could almost be read as an exercise in oneupsmanship—he invokes the voice of a “Black World” ops man embroiled in a touchy conversation with his wife and friend, an engineer made helpless in the face of a crumbling marriage and the rising sea level in the Netherlands, and even a servant of Gilles de Rais, the Breton knight and fellow of Joan of Arc accused of the serial killing of children. His narrators are thrown up against even more dire circumstances than previouisly, and while Shepard continues to take the careful time to feel for their predicaments, he also continues to spare them no sorrow (in a good kind of way).

  Like a lot of my fellow MFA students and friends, I came across Jim Shepard’s work only a few years ago. I’d stumbled across a copy of Love and Hydrogen (Vintage, 2004) in the Staff Recommends section at McNally Jackson booksellers in Soho, and was immediately grabbed by the title story regarding two gay men aboard a zeppelin. But Shepard has been at this long before those National Book Award Finalist and Story Prize winner stickers were slapped on the cover of Like You’d Understand Anyway (Knopf, 2008). He’s the author of six novels and four story collections, and the editor of several anthologies. His fiction has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, The New Yorker, and everywhere else, and he was a columnist on film for The Believer. His stories have appeared four times in the Best American Short Stories and once in the Pushcart series. Additionally, he teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA program at Williams College and is a husband, a father, and the caretaker of two beagles.

  Despite all that he was kind enough to take time to talk with me, a fan-boy and MFA candidate. Via e-mail and phone we got a chance to discuss his early career, his process, where he might take his narrators next, and how he feels his mustache measures up to Tobias Woolf’s.

  ---

  Interview

  Shawn Andrew Mitchell: In your essay, “An Appreciation of John Hawkes,” up over at The Rumpus, you discussed your mentorship under Hawkes during your time as an MFA candidate at Brown University. Had you done much writing before this? If it existed, what was Jim Shepard juvenilia like?

  Jim Shepard: By that point I’d written my whole life, as short as it was. I’d always written, for myself, and occasionally for the nuns at Our Lady of Peace School, when I’d finished all of my English in-class assignments early. I wrote mostly about war and monsters. I remember Sister Justine being bemused at one story of mine entitled “Save That Blood!” I think it involved G.I.’s fighting werewolves. As you can see, I haven’t come very far in terms of subjects.

  What sort of things did you read at that time?

  Nobody in my family went to college, so I only read what books my parents had in the house, which were almost entirely nonfiction. What that meant was that because nobody had taught them about literature or encouraged them to read literature, they thought “Well, of course you want to read because you want to be an intelligent human being, but if you’re going to read you want to learn stuff, and the way you learn stuff is you read nonfiction.” So I grew up reading all about volcanoes and dinosaurs in little science or history books for kids. Every so often I read a sort of summarized version of Viking myths or Greek Myths. I didn’t really know about the world of children’s books until I got to college and people would say “I love Where the Wild Things Are,” and I would say “What’s that?”

  Do you still go back and read about mythology?

  Not really, no. I’ve read Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino and stuff like that, but I don’t do that kind of folkloric wandering very often. I wouldn’t pick it up as a kind of curiosity. Normally there are so many other things I’ve got to get to that I don’t think, “You know, I don’t know any South Seas myths, I think I’ll read some of those.”

  If the internet is to be trusted, you graduated from Brown in 1980 and your first book, the novel Flights, came out in 1983. What were you up to during those three years, creatively and professionally? I ask partially because I’m about to exit my MFA program, and there seems to be a yawning void ahead.

  I got a job right out of Brown, at the last minute, teaching at the University of Michigan. I was finishing the final year of my MFA and facing the void you describe when Michigan asked Brown for the names of two or three students they might invite to apply to teach. I agreed to the interview because it meant a free trip to New York; I never really imagined they’d offer me the job. Then when Michigan did, I accepted, since I had no other prospects. The hubris of what I was doing never really hit me until I arrived in Ann Arbor. I spent the next three years working eighteen hours a day to keep up with what I had agreed to teach. (As in, “Hey: I’m lecturing on Lolita on Thursday. Oh, shit.”) During the summers, I tried to prepare for the upcoming fall semesters, and worked on Flights.

  

  Flights was followed by three more novels: Paper Doll [1987], Lights out in the Reptile House [1990], and Kiss of the Wolf [1994]. Then, in 1996, Knopf published your first collection, Batting Against Castro. Were you working on short stories concurrently with the novels, or did you break from those entirely until you began work on Batting?

  I wrote stories as an undergraduate and a graduate student, so a number of stories that are in Batting Against Castro are quite old. Some of them are older than my first novel. There’s a story in there called “Eustace,” which was the first story I published. There’s also a story called “Messiah,” which was probably the first decent story I wrote after a whole lot of bad stories. So Batting Against Castro, unlike a lot of the other story collections, really took about fifteen or twenty years to come together. It’s probably my weakest story collection if I had to judge, mostly because I think I’ve gotten better as a story writer. But whereas You Think That’s Bad took two and a half years, Batting probably took twenty. Mostly because I was writing novels along the way.

  Along with the teaching load.

  Along with the teaching and having children and bothering the dog and stuff like that.

  Do you find it hard to switch between working on short stories and working on a novel? I’m having to work on stories for workshop right now, but I’m focusing on a novel for my thesis. It’s a tough balancing act.

  No, I think what the stories were doing was allowing me to write when I didn’t have a novel idea or when the novel idea that I had didn’t seem to be working. So I didn’t really feel like I was switching. I felt like I was saying, “Well, since you don’t have a novel, why don’t you try to do something?” Or I might have come across an idea that I thought was cool but I knew wouldn’t be a novel. So it didn’t feel much like switching. It felt like trying to keep myself working in some capacity.

  What sort of ideas do you feel could shape into a novel and which ones do you know are going to be short storyish?

  It’s hard to say, really. Certainly some of the longer stories I’ve written lately have had a huge amount of narrative that could have been developed and a huge amount of research that went into them. A lot of my writer friends have said, “You’re crazy for not making this a 500 page novel.” So it’s not exactly inherent in the narrative itself. It has a lot more to do with how long I want to maintain the obsessive intensity of staring into that world. I think as I’ve gotten darker in terms of subject matter, the desire to stay in that world has diminished as well. If you’re writing about the servant of a mass murderer, the energy involved in trying to stay empathetic is such that five months is probably enough and three years might be too much.
  
  Why do you think your subject matter has gotten darker as you’ve gone along?

  I don’t know, but I think in general my sense of the world is becoming more apocalyptic. The despairing or angry sense you have that things are going down the toilet, which I suppose is a characteristic of getting old and crotchety, is a little bit exaggerated by a situation whereby you can almost confirm that sense just by empirical standards or even just by watching the news. It was always the case when I was growing up that people would say “America’s not what it used to be; the world’s going to hell.” It seemed back then that it was pretty easy to claim that was a controversial position. Now I don’t think it is. I guess I have a sense of powerlessness in the face of that. Very few people are in any position to stop it, but writing literature is a particularly good way to feel like you have no impact on the culture.

  Was there a time when you felt that fiction could influence the culture in a positive way?

  I recently visited Notre Dame. And some faculty there told me that on the day that Martin Luther King was shot in 1968, all of the major news services were frantically calling South Bend because apparently Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, and Wright Morris were all there for the literary conference, and the national media urgently needed some American fiction writers’ responses to what had happened. The assumption was—as it still is in Europe—that  literary fiction writers, having engaged with some care the social issues of the day, had something to contribute to the national conversation. Try to imagine something like that today.

  That’s uplifting to think about… Maybe we should switch topics to something jollier like “craft.” How about research? At what point in the process does your research begin to coalesce into fiction? Does the research continue into the drafting time, or do you get it done beforehand?

  I do a lot of reading of weird shit just because I like to, and some of that never coalesces into anything.  At some point, though, sometimes various human dilemmas I’ve come across in my reading start to haunt me—resonate with some of my own emotional history—and at that point I might start researching more pointedly. Research continues all the way through the writing process, and even the final revisions.

  Speaking of, McSweeney’s sent you to the Netherlands for a few weeks to do research for “The Netherlands Lives with Water,” one of the short stories included in You Think That’s Bad. How did your process differ for that story vs. stories where your research typically involves more reading than travel?

  It didn’t, really. Being in the Netherlands led me to other sources of information – taught me about other sources of information – the same way books would have. Maybe I developed a more visceral sense of Rotterdam from being there for as long as I was; I don’t know.
  

  Have you done a lot of traveling in your life otherwise?

  I never traveled at all until after I got my first decent-paying job, at the aforementioned University of Michigan. Since then I’ve gone to Europe a lot, and around the US. And the Caribbean. That’s about it.

  Do those trips spur an interest in writing stories set there at all? Or does that still come mostly via your off-the-wall reading?

  With some stories a trip is certainly a help. It would help if you’re writing a story about an executioner in Paris if you had actually been in Paris and wandered the streets. But for the most part these are research and imagination-based stories. I’ve written about Tibet and never been to Tibet. I’ve written about Australia and never been in Australia. I’ve written about Japan and never been in Japan. I don’t feel the impulse to have to be there. There have been times when I thought I should make the trip but the cost and rigmarole were such that I thought “You’re better off writing than going through all that energy.”

  Have you ever tried your hand at more straightforward nonfiction or journalism instead of stories?

  I’ve done essay writing on politics and film. I haven’t been that interested in journalism because I think other people can do it as well as I can if not better, and nobody’s offering. Nobody’s saying “Jim, do you want go study this or study that?” I also don’t know if there’s that many outlets for it. If I said, “Gee, would you pay me to go on site at Fukushima and report on the reactor breakdown?”, I think most nonfiction or journalism outlets would go, “Well, you’re a fiction writer, what do we get out of that?” So then it becomes a question of if I want to do all of that on spec or put in all of that money up front and write this piece and hope somebody somewhere runs it. And I’m not sure there’s too many things, facing limitations like that, where I think, “If I don’t do it, no one will.” I also understand why, if I were a newspaper or magazine editor, I might say, “I’d rather have a physicist who can write travel to Fukushima rather than send a fiction writer to chat with physicists.”

  It seems that a large majority of your stories are in first person. Has it always been that way? What draws you to that point of view more than others?

  My first three novels were in the close third person, which seemed to me much more flexible. Lately, though, I’ve been attracted to the perversity of highlighting the chutzpah involved in some of my choices of narrators. Maybe it raises the stakes for me.

  Related to that, it’s often struck me while reading your stories that what might be even harder than crafting a story around so much factual research is getting the human tone right for that time and place. Do you think about this while you work? How much do you change your tone and style for each story?

  I think about that a lot, because that’s really what’s on the page. In a lot of ways, if I’m writing a story about Tsuburaya, the Japanese special effects wizard, it’s really more important that I get his voice right than if I get the Japanese details right, at least at first. And the two are not very separable. So I’m much more interested in trying to nail that down, especially now that I’m doing more first person stories than third person stories. Although that story is in third person, there’s still a quality where you want to provide the illusion of a very different sensibility, but a sensibility that is still apprehensible to the American reader. So that’s really a matter of very careful moderation of tone. Tone is partly based on concrete details, but also on how that voice presents information.

  So a lot of energy goes into that at a very early stage. Do I have what seems to me persuasively strange in the way I want it to be strange? Do these sound like Poles even though I’ve not spent a lot of time around Polish people? Do these sound like Japanese people even though I’ve not spent a lot of time around Japanese people?
  

  It seems like it could become a question of nature vs. nurture, as in how much is specific to a culture and how much you can just assume is a kind of cultural universal in regards to “human nature.”

  Right. There’s a slight of hand there because literature is supposed to be universal, but you also believe that you’re learning very specific cultural eccentricities. So you can relate to Tsuburaya because he’s a human being too, but you also feel sometimes reading him “God, that’s so Japanese,” and you’re not even sure what you mean by that in some ways. What you mean is a combination of insight and stereotype and any number of other things.

  But stereotype is just a kind of brutish way of gathering together empirical data and insights about a particular group. So you say Italians tend to be warmer than Germans or Germans tend to be more organized than Italians, and of course those are generalities and stereotypes, but the Italians and Germans would also be the first ones to tell you, “Yeah, that’s sort of true.” So you’re trying in some way to interrogate the stereotypes and explode the stereotypes even as you make use of them.

  There’s a subtle difference between stereotype and archetype, maybe?

  Yeah, that’s a part of it. Archetype I try to avoid because it has so much of a Jungian grandiosity to it. I think of archetype not so much as German as The King or The Son or something like that.

  What is it about the chutzpah-filled and somewhat self-deceiving character that attracts you?

  I like the tension that comes when somebody who is quite self-conscious and quite smart still doesn’t seem to get it about himself or herself. I like the way that highlights and muddles those issues of responsibility and agency. I think a story where someone simply doesn’t know any better and so he does something wrong is a much simpler story, because that seems to suggest that if you just gave them the right information, that would solve the problem. I don’t think a lot of human behavior that’s very interesting operates that way. I think there’s a lot of examples where the person knows what he or she should be doing, tries to do it, and fails, and that’s very interesting.
  
  You’ve talked in other interviews about how writers need to broaden their empathetic range, aka how deeply they can feel about how broad a swath of the world’s people. Do you have any advice as to how we might go about this? What do you encourage writers to do to develop it?

  The usual: read more, and read more widely. Observe more carefully. What’s that great Walker Evans line? “Die knowing something. You’re not here long.”

  You’ve also lectured that the writer should provide operating instructions for the reader to be able to navigate the story. What kind of instructions?

  Each story creates its own special set of expectations, I think, and I’m always grateful when a design that I thought I’d begun to discern is confirmed, gracefully, by the story itself. What we don’t need is to be told stuff we already know, or have intuited.

  What sort of things do you find your students telling the reader over and over again? What do they often leave out that seems essential?

  It really depends on the model they’re trying to build. But when you’re trying different things, you want to reassure the reader that the weird thing they’ve started to notice, you meant that to be there. There are all sorts of way to reassure the reader of that kind of thing, but I’ll give you an example. You might have a person wander onto stage and start saying stereotypical things about Chinese people, and the reader reading that goes, “Is that the story’s agenda?” But as soon as a secondary character says, “You realize you sound like an idiot, right?”, the reader has a great sigh of relief and says, “Oh, OK, this story knows that it’s doing that.” That’s a really simple way that operating instructions might work. You basically say, “I know you thought it sounded weird, but in fact, I know that too,” and the reader suddenly feels a lot more confident in the design as you go along.

  It’s that moment in Ulysses where you go, “Oh, this isn’t a guy who doesn’t understand punctuation. This is being done for a reason and paying off, and there’s a consistency to it.”

  Another element of your teaching is that the writer should control the “rate of revelation” in the story, or how fast how many things are revealed as the story progresses. For the sake of facts and numbers, what’s the ideal rate of revelation in terms of revelations per page (r.p.p.)? How much character, conflict, background, and factual data can the reader digest at a time?

  Ha! How do you measure such a thing? I suppose I’d say that everything in a short story should be accomplishing multiple tasks at once, in terms of informing the reader, and that everything should be continually enlarging, as opposed to confirming, our understanding.

  Going back to the weird shit you read, what have you gotten into recently?

  To give you a sense of how weird my shit can get, lately I’ve been reading about 17th and 18th century farming in America. If you want to talk about a subject where people think, “Why on Earth would you do that?” That’s the kind of weird stuff that I’ll just get into and start nosing around and not even be sure why. I don’t know how long it lasts. I do know that the good news is that if I do it for awhile and think, “Alright, I’ve done enough of that,” I don’t beat myself up over it and go, “What was the point?” Because I do think it’s interesting while I’m doing it and it’s in some way enlarging my concept of the world.

  Are you working on another novel now, or do you plan to continue blowing up the short story form? What are we going to see next?

  I have only the most tentative plans for a novel at this point, so I’d expect more stories. Bad news for anyone who depends on me in economic terms.

  You’ve been at this now for quite some time. What have you noticed in those who keep at it versus those who don’t?

  Quite some time? Jeez. Now I’m depressed. If it’s not too circular in terms of reasoning, I think I’d suggest that the main thing those who’ve kept at it have going for them has not been talent but the willingness or the determination to persevere. Not only in the face of rejection from the outside world, but also in the face of their own disappointments with themselves.

  Maybe we should end this on a lighter note than our deep, deep disappointment in ourselves. My friend wanted me to ask you about your mustache, specifically how you feel yours measures up to Tobias Woolf’s.

  Oh, man: it’s not even close. Toby’s  mustache is epic. He could star in a western series for HBO. I look like the skeevy guy with the unmarked van.

  

  A Western-style mustache that belongs to neither Shepard nor Wolff.

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  Further Links and Resources:

• Read Shepard’s 2009 essay “An Appreciation of John Hawkes” over at The Rumpus.
• You can also read Stephen Elliott and The Rumpus Book Club’s 2011 interview with Shepard, in which they discuss, among other things, empathetic reach and the empathetic imagination.
• A short clip of Amy Hempel raving about Jim Shepard.
• A trailer from Electric Literature for “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” with animation by Jonathan Ashley and music by Nick DeWitt:
• Shepard reading from “Boystown”:
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/save-that-blood-an-interview-with-jim-shepard/feed 3 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/carry-the-one-by-carol-anshaw http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/carry-the-one-by-carol-anshaw#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:00:55 +0000 Jennifer Taylor http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=33922 Carry the One, a “compelling psychological examination of lives altered by a tragic accident.”]]> How do you remember the 80s? Depending on your age (and I’m not asking), it might have been a rite of passage filled with brooding music and unfortunate clothing choices. Or maybe it was a time of perceived invincibility fueled by drug experimentation, as it is for the characters in Carol Anshaw’s latest, Carry the One (Simon & Schuster). The novel provides a compelling psychological examination of lives altered by a tragic accident.

The story begins in 1983, at an unpretentious Wisconsin farmhouse wedding. Carmen Kenney, the pregnant bride, waits impatiently for her guests to leave, sobered by the disconcerting realization she doesn’t really know her husband, Matt. She wearily says goodbye to a car filled with passengers: her sister Alice; her new sister-in-law Maude; Tom, an acquaintance; her brother Nick and his girlfriend, Olivia, the driver.

Carmen asks Olivia if she’s all right to drive. Olivia, who has spent the day ingesting various drugs says yes. And maybe she means it. In the backseat, Alice pays more attention to Maude’s advances than to Olivia’s capabilities as a driver. So Alice doesn’t notice what’s happened and sees the child only when their eyes briefly meet as the girl flies over the car’s hood.

She looked to be about nine or ten, although she had the adult features of kids from rougher places. She was quite beautiful, with a mop of hair bleached white by half a summer, green eyes staring at absolutely nothing.

The death of the child, Casey Redman, and what it means to those left behind forms the foundation of Anshaw’s perceptive novel.  The protagonists struggle with personal dilemmas, both of their own making and driven by their environment as they grapple with guilt and residual damage. Anshaw shows the reader occasional glimpses before the accident, but the majority of the novel focuses on its aftermath: this trauma proves to be the defining moment of their lives.

While Alice and Maude’s relationship flickers on and off—testing the sustainability of romance borne of tragedy—Alice seeks to add another element to Casey’s short life. Through art, she creates tangible proof that Casey existed in a series of paintings about the child. Alice’s struggle with the accident feels at times enviable and brave, and at others like a painful loop she cannot escape.

Alice was beginning to see the terms of these paintings. She would wait for them to arrive and then paint them, like the clicking of a shutter, making snapshots out of oil and canvas. This was the central point of her art now, to record the girl’s unlived life.



In this regard, Alice submerges her own life in that liminal moment when Casey’s ended.

Before the accident, Nick had thought he would only casually date Olivia, yet the tragedy forges a defining link. They mark time together, united in a painful shared past. Carmen hides her remorse, but wonders if the child’s death cast a pall over her entire marriage, “played out under a long stretch of shadow it couldn’t outrun.” Even her son, Gabriel, born after Casey’s death, reminds the reader that fate denied the Redmans the pleasure of watching their daughter grow up.

The novel also casts the siblings as children, living in the pall of parental dysfunction. Even in adulthood, Alice, Carmen, and Nick must remain united against their parents—Horace the bully and Loretta the accomplice. Anshaw adroitly explores the relationship between the Kenneys’ familial background and who they become in the wake of trauma. Their ingrained roles, likely formed before they reached Casey’s age, remain a strong force in the novel, even though the moment that defines them—the accident—occurs during adulthood. Among the three siblings, one craves parental affection, one shuns it, and one has created a hell so complete that Mom and Dad don’t factor into the equation.

Anshaw dips into the minds of Alice, Carmen, and Nick as they attempt to make sense of what happened and comprehend their roles. In a novel so concerned with the internal fault lines of guilt and grief, this omniscience feels perfect. The relatively long expanse of time covered by Carry the One gives Anshaw space to fully explore her characters’ lives and their complex adaptations to enduring pain. The story unfolds over twenty-five years, including societal touchstones from the tenth anniversary of John Lennon’s death to the horrors of 9/11. The world carries on, even if the Kenneys remain shackled to the past.

Throughout the book, Alice and Carmen keep a wary watch over Nick, who lapses into the shadowy world of addiction. His penance of choice might be different from theirs, but he pays all the same. The sisters continue to reach out to their brother as he medicates his demons with an unwavering dedication. Scenes where Alice and Carmen try to pull Nick out of himself will resonate for anyone with an addict in the family.

Carol Anshaw’s Carry the One renders lives forever altered in the aftermath of one fateful day. The past declares itself, but the Kenney siblings prove time and again that a single event may be refracted in ways as diverse and unaccountable as the individuals it touches. Against the changing landscape of time and memory, they may falter under the weight of Casey Redman, but carry on they must.



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Further Links and Resources


• At Simon & Schuster’s author page, watch a video interview with Carol Anshaw and read an excerpt from Carry the One.
• Follow Anshaw on Twitter: @carolanshaw
• This NPR story about dog books features Anshaw’s Lucky in the Corner. Learn more about her other previous novels, Seven Moves and Aquamarine, on her website.
• The author is also a painter; here are samples of Anshaw’s artwork, together with information about her Vita Sackville-West project.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/carry-the-one-by-carol-anshaw/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/contents-may-have-shifted-by-pam-houston http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/contents-may-have-shifted-by-pam-houston#comments Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:00:29 +0000 Michael Byers http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=33747 Contents May Have Shifted is made up of journal entries that recount the main character Pam's travels, troubles, and search for meaning. In Michael Byers's review, he wishes the novel were braver, and argues that the literary novel must take itself seriously, while considering why we hold genre fiction to a different standard.]]> Pam Houston’s new novel, Contents May Have Shifted (W.W. Norton, 2012), appears to be closely autobiographical, in parts. Its 320 pages consist of 144 journal entries written by someone named Pam. The book’s Pam appears to be a writer, or a teacher of writing, or both. Pam namedrops some fancy writer friends, mostly poets. Pam travels, opines about her love life and the love lives of others, laments her crappy childhood, considers the injustices of the non-white and non-rich world, and writes about animals. While in the company of her female friends, Pam is liable to say or think things like “on the subject of men she is totally fucked.” She tends to describe people of color as “gentle” or “pleasant” or “dancing—joyful—to the beat” or “singing a little song” or as having “kind eyes.” Sometimes someone nearby says a bad word like “faggot” or “niggerhead,” but the person who says this word can be counted on to have a secret heart of gold beneath his gruff horse-breaking exterior.

The 144 journal entries aren’t in any discernible chronological order, meaning there’s not much narrative to be found. In Pam’s world, bears, small planes, fishing, hunting, and Alaska are prominently featured, although not in such a way as to add up to a sustained story involving any of these things. Likewise, people appear without introduction and disappear without warning, and not in a good way. A fair number of entries are also devoted to Pam’s dreams, or to Pam’s experiences in therapy, acupuncture, Bhutan, etc. There are wise things said by wise people. There are beauties in nature. There are the horrors of history, sanitized as though for the Book Club Audience (in a former Turkish brothel, Pam experiences “rooms so thick with ghosts of women in captivity you can feel their hair on your arm, their jasmine-scented breath on your face”). The reader is peppered with such pronouncements as “I know faith springs out of doubt like topsoil, and one thing I am is here right now.”

I admit I have very little patience with this kind of thing. And I’m not the ideal reader for this book. Pam and her pals, all proponents of “spirituality,” or whatever, aren’t living the same life I am, which is the life involving facts and science, and the worst of spirituality’s practitioners—which seems to me to be most of them—are only interesting in the degree to which they are unable to recognize how tedious their chakra-talk is.

But even beyond my impatience with the subject matter and the characters’ careless habits of mind, this book is uncourageous and predictable. The problems of the characters are uninspired—Why doesn’t Rick love me more than he loves Sofree? Why were my parents such monsters? —and similarly little surprises the reader in the course of the narrative development.

As might be said of any failed book, this one had the chance to be interesting, frightening, challenging, beautiful. For instance, what if Pam suggested, somewhere, once, that she’s got a lousy love life because she’s mostly not very lovable? What if the book had taken on, treated, considered, addressed, the sad, evident mediocrity of her privileged personhood—a mediocrity all of us similarly privileged people might reasonably claim? What if she considered the notion that her parents were crappy to her because they didn’t like her much, and for some interestingly convincing reasons? That Rick, when leaving her, had his reasons too? Such a book, written by someone who dared to assess the sluggish economy of herself with some objectivity, would be scary as hell, because that would be a clear-eyed, forthright book written by someone who knew her way around the imperfect world of herself—someone who had taken a good look at what it means to be a fucked-up, unexcellent person and come back with a real report on behalf of the rest of us fucked-up, unexcellent people.

It is fair, in the face of this kind of thing, to consider what we ask of a literary novel. It depends who’s doing the asking, of course. Contents May Have Shifted is barely fiction at all, barely pretends to be, as far as I can see, and often seems to be a first-person account whose audience is meant to be the author and the author alone. Or, maybe fans of Pam Houston’s other books. But every successful novel is in its way an experimental one, in that it must derive its unique form from its unique content. This is why they take so long to write, even the short ones. And the long list of similarly hermetic autobiographical fictions—ranging the gamut from J.M. Coetzee’s Youth trilogy to Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home­—suggests Houston’s tactic can work, in the right hands.

The only thing I ask, really, is that a literary novel take its own existence seriously—its own people, events, and concerns. Things must not only be told with a clear eye, but those things must also be important for the author to tell—because we, the reader, could not in a thousand years imagine them ourselves if the author were not around to do it for us. This test of elementary unimaginability is a handy way to distinguish genre, or non-literary, novels from literary ones. Lord Peter Wimsey, for example, is always perfectly imaginable. Indeed, we know he will remain the same man no matter how many people are poisoned around him. Mysterious death shapes the plot, but we will not be surprised except in unsurprising and smallishly clever and pleasing ways, as Lord Peter’s character, and indeed his whole world, continue ticking over like a well-kept Rolls, unaffected. This is why we love mysteries, as P.D. James has noted, and plainly it’s the case that if I insist on asking a genre novel to deliver the complex and unique pleasures of literature, I’m just a boneheaded killjoy.

So maybe it’s better to consider Contents May Have Shifted as a genre piece. Not sure what the genre might be called—it’s the one featuring a late-middle aged spiritually-minded unmarried childless woman who safely but with wise and fond sorrow considers her life’s path with the aid of acupuncturists, psychic masseurs, hot tubs, Buddhists, etc. It’s not a terrible book, I guess: it’s just thuddingly dull. Everything’s familiar, and safe, and predictable. Pam’s scary flights always land just fine. There’s always a nice dog around. The spirit world beckons.

There are a handful of highlights. There is a good mudslide in journal entry #30. There is a pet psychic who reads the mind of a pet fish, and who is good for a laugh. ”Your fish really likes being pretty,” the psychic reports. There’s some good writing about sled dogs. Most of the time, though, we’re just given the chance to read Pam’s journal while she thinks about her travels and her troubles, with the idea being that we are being given a portrait of a grief-stricken woman coming to terms with the betrayals she has experienced at the hands of the men in her life. But the lack of narrative drive and absence of complexity in these characters combine to deliver the impression that this narrator has not so much been felled by grief as she has bumped into it inadvertently while boarding a plane.



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Further Links and Resources

• In the Iowa Review, read an excerpt from Contents May Have Shifted.
• On Flickr, check out the images that helped inspire the novel.
• Listen to an interview with Houston on KPOV radio. In another recent interview at Fictionaut, the author offers writing advice, including tips for getting unstuck.

  

  • The author’s website offers a section from Houston’s novel Sight Hound and the story “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had,” from her collection Waltzing the Cat.
  • Preview Houston’s bestselling collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, and her book on real-life adventures, A Little More about Me, at the publisher’s site.
  • For a very different take on writing and spirituality here on Fiction Writers Review, read Aaron Cance’s interview with Melanie Rae Thon.
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