Jonathan Lethem is one of a very small number of contemporary writers who can be considered household names, even in houses not inhabited by novelists. And for good reason. Lethem has written eight novels, three collections of stories, two books of essays, and has contributed to dozens of edited anthologies, journals and magazines, garnering as many awards along the way. But you knew that already, from your household.

In March, 2011, Lethem was the Zell Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Michigan, and I had the opportunity to interview him over breakfast one morning. Now here’s the rub: Jonathan Lethem has talked about everything. A quick Google search will reveal his patient and thoughtful responses to such varied interview questions as “…is relativism your philosophical stance?” and “Do you find incessant rain, like that which at the moment has us hiding and scurrying, defeating or oddly comforting?”

Despairing of finding an incisive question about his work that he has not already addressed somewhere online, I decided instead to follow up on tidbits he’d mentioned during his visit to our program, especially those I found of particular interest to us MFA-types. And also, as a displaced Brooklynite, I indulged in some banter about my favorite city in the world with the writer who captures it like no one else can. (Read on to find out how New York is akin to a “giant Ponzi scheme.”) Lethem is, after all, New York’s most notable exile.

Interview

Roohi Choudhry: I wanted to start by talking about your “Promiscuous Stories” project and the related Harper’s essay that seems to be at the core of the upcoming collection of essays you’ve mentioned, The Ecstasy of Influence.

Jonathan Lethem: Yes, although it’s maybe deceptive. That essay is at the center of this new book, it gives it its title. And the spirit of that essay from the perspective of the writer who collaged it together—this sort of magpie approach to culture—pervades the whole book. But the subject of what you might say “copy-left” gestures, including my own copy-left gesture of creating that “Promiscuous Materials” project, really doesn’t come up, except in one very brief section about the writing of that essay itself.

The “Promiscuous Materials” are funny. I keep wanting to point out to people that, along with the many things I’ve done that are not original—that’s another one of them! Writers give things away all the time. A painter or playwright friend might take inspiration or directly adapt something that their writer friend does and say, “Do you mind?” And the writer says, “No.” I didn’t invent giving things away. All I did was point to it; I put a name on the gesture and bragged about it a lot and created the website.

On the whole, my experience with having written that essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” and having made those gestures—I ended up for a little while being one of these copy-left advocates who goes around talking about this all the time. It was interesting for a little while and then I felt that the people who were convinced got it. I admire people who can devote themselves to advocacy—it’s a teaching role, to reorganize people’s thinking or open up people’s access to information again and again along the same few lines. I do it in teaching, but there I do it about the aesthetics of fiction. Making stories. That I could talk about forever. The fact that I believe that copyright laws are dumb, is something I find I’m not actually interested in talking about forever.

The thing that interested me about this project is also about the aesthetics of fiction, though. I’m interested in how it connects with what we were talking about earlier this week: the idea of a kind of pre-professionalism becoming more rampant with MFA culture. We’re in an MFA program, but we’re also aware of the limitations and problems with that. And so, even though this collaborative impulse is not an original thing, even if it’s been done for all time, I wonder if some of that is now changing because of this pre-professionalism, becoming professionals [as writers] earlier, as we all in this community compete with each other for the same goals.

This, I would say, points to something that is much wider than the sphere of writing, per se, or even the arts. And that is the business paradigm, the capitalist vocabulary where everything is a zero-sum, competitive, Darwinian struggle for bottom-line success. It’s this disease in our culture in every way. It affects the way people think about things like the education of little children, or their own participation in the social arena, or even in family life. The business model pervades everything. When I was growing up, it wasn’t obligatory that every news story, every situation be followed by the “marketplace” equivalent—“Okay, now what will this mean for the stock market?” The fact that the New Yorker has a page of market analysis trivia every week. Or a writer like Malcom Gladwell, who basically writes about how social and aesthetic and interpersonal experience can be quantified and commodified. His specialty is showing you the business paradigm underlying all sorts of apparently non-commodifiable situations.

[Malcolm Gladwell, on spaghetti sauce]

The dominant nonfiction writer at the New Yorker when I was a kid was John McPhee, who wrote about rocks.

This ideology—and it is an ideology—is really, really potent. It overwrites all other ways of looking at experience. And it has to be assiduously battled, rolled back, from areas that are precious to you, in order that you can even see them clearly and dwell in them in good faith. So when you talk about pre-professionalism in MFA programs, or competition, I don’t think, “Oh gosh, MFA programs are so corrupt.” I think, “How tragic to hear of another description, which is basically the same larger description of things being looked at only through that lens.” It’s the only language that the culture validates for evaluating things. It’s as though anything else would be like magical thinking. Ideals like the commons, that’s not esoteric or religious or magical. That’s another framework being squeezed out by the ideals of privatization and commodity.

But to look at the truth of an arts culture—it’s the realm of participation in a commons, where only some gestures can be successfully commoditized. And even then in a very scattershot and unsystematic way. The irony of talking about pre-professionalism, of course, is that it’s so peculiar to even talk about the life of a very successful writer, critically or commercial, as though they were a professional: credentialized, with a systematic approach to their success that really mimics the professions. Because it’s not a professional realm. It’s a kooky, eccentric, individual realm of different kinds of stances and attitudes and results utterly inconsistent even within the experience of a single writer. Let alone something you can take: “Oh, I’ll model how that writer is doing it and do it precisely that way.”

There’s this Writer’s Digest world where you’re supposed to professionalize and learn how to stuff the envelopes just the right way and make sure you always have seven stories out in the mail at any given time. It’s very poignant and not evil in any way. It’s quite charming and human: the urge to find some kind of industrious beaver-ish approach to becoming a published writer or managing your career once you’ve broken in with some articles. But that Protestant work ethic aspect of it is very silly in a lot of ways, too.

I like that you mention the Protestant work ethic. It feels particularly relevant because the MFA is such an American phenomenon to begin with. There are a few programs elsewhere now, but the idea is still so uniquely American, in some ways.

I’m a funny case in that I’m a grotesque workaholic. I do have my kind of practical side. I approach my own work with a constant attitude of demystification: this is a set of tasks, let’s just do this and break it down. So, in one sense, I happen to reflect an apparent devotion to the idea of writing as industry. But in my belief system, as opposed to my behavior, I think it’s a misunderstanding that what I’m doing, or what any of us are doing, is worth doing because it’s productive or redemptive or will be remunerative or edifying for others. It’s an area of deliciously useless—it’s a cultural realm. It’s a conversation. It’s a game and it’s joyous and it’s diverting and can be unexpectedly rich. It’s bottomless for me; I’ve fallen into it as if plummeting through a bottomless chasm of fascination and experience.

It’s taught me everything I know – caring about books, writing them, talking about them, has become a life. But I’m not working in an assembly line manufacturing cars, nor am I a doctor curing cancer. Which is not to devalue what I do but to say, it simply has some different aspects. Art-making, cultural participation exist outside of the realm of the utilitarian world, and have to be looked at differently and talked about differently.

I think that’s a really useful way to frame it, especially for those of us at a program.

And also, writers as apprentices, and afterward as well, have to remember this aspect of play, mischief, freedom, that detaches from the idea of responsibility or usefulness. If, at some point the results [are like] “last night a DJ saved my life;” if at some point, I talked someone back from a ledge, or made someone treat another human being more sensitively. I’m not renouncing a potential received-use value in my work, although it would be a difficult kind to predict or quantify. But to work as though the reason it’s okay to spend your time locked in a room alone making up stories about imaginary people is because you’re helping humanity—you’re going to make crappy, crappy art and probably be miserable, too. Because the suspicion that you couldn’t have picked a less direct way to help humanity will be creeping up over you and making you feel guilty all the time. That remorse will destroy your confidence. You have to disenchant that nonsense. The problem is that, in a culture that is so Protestant-work-ethic, people have a great deal of trouble accepting that they’ve chosen a path of less contribution than putting their shoulder to raising the barn.

In some ways, it’s an immigrant work ethic, belonging to the new world. Because–you’re forming a new society, what are you doing for this new society? That pressure seems constant.

I think that’s true. Absolutely. It’s the American story, and it’s a very interesting one, very entrancing, which is why everyone reflects it. Not only naïve people; everyone feels this. It’s intense. Even I, growing up inside a hippie, bohemian, outsider perspective; my parents were also engaged with the Protestant work ethic in their different ways. Even if they sometimes seemed to be engaged by flying in the teeth of it. They were both, in different ways, dropouts in the mainstream. It was still a narrative that was hugely a part of their lives.

So, this goes together with busting up the present corporate, business paradigm, which is an even newer and more pernicious thing.

But underneath, it is this older story that provides its foundation. And that’s this utilitarian conceit: that art is okay to do because it can be somehow framed as a very productive or helpful human activity.

Because it’s enriching!

Yes, and people have misunderstood me in the past, and thought I was making a cry for a decadent perspective—very rarified and elitist art-for-art’s sake—that somehow seems an insult to the democratization of art, or an insult to the people who feel they have received use-value [from art]. I believe in the received use-value of art all the time. It’s saved my life a hundred times over. But not because the person who made it was thinking: “I’ve got to save that young man’s life!” That’s not how that happens.

And that can cause really un-complex decisions in making one’s art.

Or unnecessarily complex ones. Pretentious ones. Both. All sorts of bad art can come out of that.

What you say about art saving your life speaks to my next question. Because we were talking about the idea of subcultures earlier this week. I don’t want to cannibalize your lecture [“What I Learned at the Science Fiction Convention”] tomorrow too much. So less about conventions. But in that general context, I wanted to talk about the idea of finding subcultures as a refuge from alienation, and relating that to writing. Something you said in another interview made me think about this. You said that, most of the time, in your books, “language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone.”  Which made me think of Essrog [the Tourette’s-afflicted protagonist of Motherless Brooklyn] and how he’s always touching people, kissing people, reaching constantly for something to fill that void. His language overflow seems to make up for an alienation, something missing. And I wonder how language and writing, and characters, have provided a mode of contact for you, in terms of finding, touching a subculture or community?

Ironically, you couldn’t know this, but you are cannibalizing my lecture, because that’s where I end up in that sequence I’ll read. For tomorrow night, I’ve put together some different parts of the essay book into one confessional essay about this yearning to connect that underlies the writing act. You just completely paraphrased a big chunk of it, in a way.

In that case, we can move on!

No, no, it’s great to talk about. There’s a peculiarity of the writer both feeling special or different from other people in some inchoate way, not always in a grandiose way, maybe feeling very inferior or alienated, but—apart. And, choosing then to deepen this situation, in a way, by the life procedure of writing, which is very isolating. To go away and to do this. We’re fundamentally social creatures, we’re born into families, we’re in a social context instantly. We’re not solitary selves to begin with. And that continues, we’re mostly creatures that understand ourselves in our tribes and in our families and in environments of others. It’s a pretty big strain on that experience to go away from the tribe as often as you need to, to begin to write and continue to write. It’s really uncomfortable.

In some ways, the MFA has become our tribe.

Sure, it’s another version of that. So again, you’re anticipating me because then the fact is, what do you do when you go off to this place? You think about the people you’ve taken yourself apart from and you make up stories about imaginary versions of people. You’re participating in a secret tribalism. And the world of books is a strange kind of surrogate social reality. I experienced it that way: as an enormous engine of loneliness-destruction, these lives that were speaking to me through the voices of novels and stories. The authors and the characters were this incredible reality of a social conversation that I was entranced by. That simultaneously took me out of daily life—my immediate physical opportunities of social connection—and replaced it with this vast, historical, exalted, strange, other conversation. But it was and it wasn’t simultaneously a replacement for what was being sacrificed.

And my own writing becomes another door back into the world. I wanted to speak back to those books. I wanted to have commerce with them. That was my strongest impulse: not to impress myself or others or to save lives, but to join the company, in a sense, of these voices. And just be among them. Gain a voice in a realm where a child struggles to acquire speech, and then the writer struggles to be audible to the world of books that he adores. It’s like your parents—a vast library of parents and you want to be heard by them. So I’ve always seen it in a social context.

But I’ve also always seen it as: this is my special chance, as a kid born into subcultures, very specifically. The fact that I had more than one made me really see, early on, the power and the function, and understand my attraction to them, and also my diffidence about them. Because I was simultaneously but never completely: a hippie, a Jew, a Quaker, an artist, and a New Yorker. And I was a weird kind of New Yorker, because Brooklyn is a subcultural identity in relation to the mainstream of New York City—to Manhattan.

And then there’s the Star Wars watched-twenty-one-times subculture.

Oh, that’s the subculture of one—fool. But actually, it’s quite relevant because, when I bumped into the fact that there was a science fiction subculture which I was completely unaware of, it was really like Columbus bumping into Puerto Rico. I was nineteen when I first gathered that there were people who organized themselves socially according to reading those books. I was just reading the books. I read a lot of science fiction, but I didn’t know there was a behavior.

Was that at college?

Yeah. I’d gone to one comic book convention as a teenager. So I’d glimpsed that there was a fan culture around comic books. But it was actually when I was 21 or 22 that I went to a science fiction convention. The fact is that I found it absurd and totally delightful at the same time because I found so many people interested in things I was interested in, and so persistently thought they were interested in the wrong ways. But good enough. Nobody’s subcultures are perfect.

And it was only many, many years later that I [understood] so much of my attraction to it, and so much of my distressing way of behaving in that situation to myself and others. I wasn’t being mean or drinking a lot—I mean I was always talking about how we should dissolve the subculture. Which isn’t actually what subcultures want to do! I thought that was the goal. I was like: “I want to make science fiction more normal.” And they were all actually horrified by that.

But it had to do with my own attraction and responsiveness to subcultures in general which was: to want to show them how they’re really just part of the human tribe. Or have their ideals disseminate. You know, the way the hippies were supposed to change everything and hadn’t managed to. I had found my new hippies! So I have a very strange fascination with and incompetent use of subcultures. I’m very drawn to them, and I’m very perplexed by the tribal reinforcements that they impose. The resistance to transmissions in or out from the outside world.

Interesting. As writers, we feel alienated and isolated, so are drawn to subcultures. But then we want them to be more like what we were running away from in the first place.

Yeah I think these conflicts are built in. I think it has a lot to do with American identity, which is this giant incoherent idea or set of ideals that can’t be resolved in a unified way. It can only be resolved sub-culturally. That’s why I include New York as one of the subcultures that I’ve experienced. People are understandably very fixated on New York’s arrogance and myopia. And these things are true. But also, growing up inside that world, I know how vulnerable and naïve and fearful of “elsewhere” you can be as a New Yorker. That it is a self-reinforcing sub-cultural identity of a certain sense. You know, that famous New Yorker cover image of Manhattan, where you see Tenth Avenue and Eleventh Avenue and Twelfth Avenue, and then the Hudson River, and then the vast plain with a few specks of light on it. One very familiar interpretation of that, and the dominant one, is that this shows the solipsism and narcissism of New York. But it also describes a helplessness and naïvete: “what IS out there?” It’s terror. New Yorkers can’t drive and they have to be proud of that, because there’s no other option but to act as though it’s a wonderful thing. But that’s helplessness and dysfunction.

So this is another version of sub-cultural brandishing your difference and even your weakness as your badge, your emblem. And I think a lot of American life resolves into certain versions of subculture. The people I know in rural Maine will say to me, “Not only have I never been to New York but I would never wish to go.” It’s just an inconceivable world. Well, Mainers don’t go to conventions where they wear nametags that say “I’m from Maine and my name is such-and-such.” But they are also participants in a sub-cultural identity as Mainer—specifically, this flinty, caustic, sea-salty, coastal Maine identity is a subculture. It may not have as many love beads as being a hippie, and it wouldn’t be very willing to see itself in the framework I’m proposing as analogous to MFA programs. But it’s another kind of sub-cultural choice that’s been made.

There are only subcultures, in a way, is what I’m saying, and then an idea of a whole or outside. Even “mainstream” literary authority—let’s just say, to be able to isolate more or less what we mean—the people who are routinely asked to write reviews for the New York Times Book Review and therefore, and let’s please understand that it is therefore, guaranteed that their own books will be reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, among whom I will now number myself. As hegemonic and oppressive as the assumptions that go with that, the degree to which that subculture has the privilege and utilizes the privilege of pretending there are no other literary cultures besides itself, it’s also still a subculture, where social reinforcements and tribal ritual prevail. And where a limited number of people are executing maneuvers amongst one another as though it is a whole world, but it’s not.

But then, the “weakness worn as a badge” idea is a less relevant sub-cultural idea there. Or maybe then, it’s a weakness as compared to Wall Street, or something.

Well, this is a very interesting question. What you then have is a ritual hand-wringing over the death of the novel, or the death of publishing. Which is a kind of a bogus victim-identity to substitute for or to basically blur the power assumptions of their privilege—or our privilege. Which is why I think those narratives are such fetishes. You know, that the novel has always just suddenly died, and publishing has always just suddenly extinguished itself. Because then you can mourn your loss of power, status, value, relevance, and that becomes your version of stigma or crisis. It’s crisis as identity politics. If you’re not, let’s say, Black or Asian or Transgendered, you can be a hurt, deposed king. I mean, that’s why I hate all the movies about the poor little royalty, because it’s this fetish.

Poor little royalty?

The King’s Speech. Our culture’s willingness to play certain games about exalting privilege and power by always finding ways to fill it with sympathy. It’s like the novel is equivalent to British royalty. Or, like we all have to clap our hands to keep Tinkerbell alive, because it would be so sad to see the mighty fall. And I just think, if the only good thing about the novel any more is that we remember how great it was, and we would be sorry and feel bad for it if it didn’t still feel great, then let it die. Let Tinkerbell die. That’s not why I cherish it.

So, I wanted to track back a bit to the idea of New York as a subculture. I find interesting this idea of “different New Yorks,” the many subcultures within it. There’s that E.B. White passage about the three kinds of New Yorkers—the native, the commuter, and the settler. I think it was up in the subway for a while. I’m curious about how you see yourself and your work fitting into that kind of system; the different ways those identities maybe interact in your work.

I don’t have a lot of useful observations about how the culture of New York works as a whole because I have experienced it in such a miniaturist’s perspective, and so subjectively, and it’s been so different for me at different times in my life. I found myself writing about the idea, the projections of Manhattan, in Chronic City. But it still doesn’t equate to an E.B White-style diagnosis of the functions of that great city over time. It was more, for me, like trying to freeze a single impression basically of Manhattan in 2004, on the edge of the re-election of George Bush, and with the trauma of 9/11 settling very uneasily into the background, as the financial engine of the city revived. Of course, we now know that it was only reviving to crash precipitously.

In fact, my freeze-frame image of 2004 in retrospect becomes an image of a city in a delusory lull between the two traumas of 9/11 and the coming financial collapse. And that was enough: to try to think about: what I felt and saw in the life of Manhattan and some Manhattanites, and the city’s idea of itself. Or its avoidance of an idea of itself. Its will to be amnesiac, its will to erase reality in favor of a dream of privilege and glamour and decadence. That was enough to try to contend with. That was easily a 700-page novel. To try to think about very much more than that little freeze-frame is too much for me. I don’t have the capacity. That’s what I’ll say about my writing about Brooklyn, the most serious attempt obviously being The Fortress of Solitude: that I basically just took one grainy photograph of a certain block in Brooklyn on a certain summer day in 1973, and blew it up and blew it up, and looked harder and harder at it to try and fathom what I felt. And what it meant and what its implications were and how it got that way. And what about it could be sustained, and what about it was unsustainable. But it doesn’t mean that I understood Brooklyn historically. Even Brooklyn is much too big, much too conflicted, much too various.

Right, and I ask that question, even though it’s sort of unanswerable, because I’m coming from a completely settler perspective to New York, such a different New York from your books, which is partly why I was initially drawn to your work.

Well, the paradox of New York is captured in an interesting way in this conversation. Because, of course, there’s the yearning for a notion of authenticity and provenance. And I end up walking around with that credential, having accidentally printed out that credential, as having “street-cred” in some way; deep, inside knowledge. But my parents were arrivers in Brooklyn. Contrary to the widely-disseminated lie, I wasn’t even born in Brooklyn. I was born in Manhattan, then lived in Kansas City for a while. The fact is, New York is defined in many ways by the newer arrivals. The “natives” are often bystanders as New York is being enacted or reenacted or redefined by very new immigrants. Whether at the level of the desperate and hungry immigrant looking for a foothold in the new world. Or the “Euro-trash,” the privileged occupants from afar who come to make this fantasy place their fantasy place. And also, in the middle between those two extremes, the arriving artist class. The ultimate New Yorker is someone like Dawn Powell or Andy Warhol or Truman Capote. Who comes from the provinces, seizes this place, makes it their own, defines it. Because they recognize themselves in it, and could never imagine living anywhere else.

I’m the inversion of that. I grew up there, and I often can’t imagine living in New York. I run away from it compulsively. I don’t think that I’m as true a New Yorker in a funny sense as Andy Warhol, or my wife, who came there from St. Louis and fell in love with it and felt that this is the only place where the world was the way she’d grown up hoping it might be. That’s New York. It belongs to the arrivers. We sort-of natives, we children of New York, are more often its perplexed bystanders.

That’s essentially what E.B. White is saying in the passage. It’s interesting, and I suppose it’s what I want to believe, but aesthetically it seems definitely to belong to you.

Oh, I’m very much of the place, and I think about it all the time. But it belongs to whomever seizes it at the instant. It’s a place that’s not about provenance. It’s about the present and the future. This is probably something of an oversimplification and historians could pick it apart, but I feel that if you want to look at real historical meaning, New York is the first secular city. It’s the first city built by enterprise and ideas and deal-making, as opposed to by some national or religious or authoritarian settlement. The defining moment in the founding of New York City as a place was the Dutch letting the Jews get in. And they didn’t do that because they liked the Jews. They did that because New York wasn’t sacred to them and the Jews were going to make useful deals. They were going to amp up the commerce.

That decision is characteristic of New York. It’s replenished by avaricious, opportunistic growth-models. So now—here I am ending up with business language, which is just what I said [at the start] we had to overthrow; that we have to defeat business language. But New York, for better and worse—and I think for both—is a business place. And also, an illusion place. A fantasy-of-business place. It’s the center of Wall Street and of Madison Avenue. The literal core of the idea of the dream factory, of selling the sizzle not the steak. It’s virtual reality before virtual reality. It’s a place of projections. But not the projections of religious authority, or the power of kings, or the purity of nations. It’s a place of: “Come here if you can make the projection bigger. We’ll let you in, you weird people.” Because the deal is going to get bigger. It’s a Ponzi scheme, you know: “Keep ‘em coming in, we need more punters, we need more buyers, we need more sellers.”

New York is a huge Ponzi scheme?

Yeah.

That’s great. What are you working on now?

I’m writing about Queens, that’s my novel in the background. Soon as I finish the neatening-up work on this big, crazy essay book, I’m going to get back to it. I’ve got 150 pages, I’m just underway, of a book that’s another New York book. I guess, in some ways, if I was going to make a very crass blurb for it, I’d say it’s like a girl’s Fortress of Solitude. It’s my mother’s world in Queens and Greenwich Village in the fifties and sixties. But then, it will stumble forward all the way to the present.

There are a lot of historical moments in the book. And some are the first time I’ve ever written something that tries to convey a mimetic authority, the classic naturalist authority over time periods I didn’t live through myself. That’s different for me. I had to do a lot of research to write about the seventies in The Fortress of Solitude, but I was researching stuff that my own senses had apprehended. I was just fleshing it out, confirming stuff, intuitions, reminding myself of what I already knew, really.

Can you talk about your process of doing that historical research?

You know, it’s weird. I was joking [earlier in the interview] about how silly it is to accuse of any writer of professionalism. I end up buying a lot of books that I don’t read. My research is often talismanic. I just surround myself with the possibility of knowing things, and then I guess about them instead. So I spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on very difficult-to-find books about the political and social dichotomy of New York City and the outer boroughs specifically. Communists in Queens and labor unions in Canarsie. And then, they’re way too boring to read.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who does that.

What I often find—I guess this is a very Ecstasy of Influence thing to say—is that the best way into the mind of another American era for me, to really just make myself believe that I could feel and think like a character at the time, is to read a lot of novels from that time. Tremendous number of contemporary novels. Sometimes the same couple over and over again.

What are you reading for this project?

Well, I’m reading Norman Mailer. He’s very important to this book. I’m reading memoirs by radicals from that era, the waning days of New York communism. So, Vivan Gornick. I found an assortment of mostly out-of-print novels that capture some part of that milieu. Not famous books. And not always the kind of books that you think are unjustly out of print. You can understand why they’re not in print.

Are you someone who likes those processes to be simultaneous? The creating and the research?

Yes, because it’s too anxious and pedantic-feeling to just sit and read books and hold off the writing. You don’t know what you need to know anyway until you’re working. Somebody said: build the car out of the parts you have. Start going at it. You might have to stop and grab another part at some point, but start driving the car. Start driving the car.

Spend more time with Jonathan Lethem:

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:

Elena Mauli Shapiro, Cr: Hans Mauli

They say that good books eventually find their way into readers’ hands, and because of a fevered novel built around a box of unclaimed personal relics, I’m inclined to agree. A few years ago, while I was a preliminary judge for a fiction competition that will (for purposes of confidentiality) remain nameless, I encountered a riveting manuscript full of old pictures. It focused on an American scholar named Trevor Stratton who comes into possession of the abovementioned box of relics, and finds himself drawn into the life of a long-dead Parisian woman named Louise Brunet—specifically, into a brief stretch of 1928 when she has a short but delicious affair with a man in her apartment building. Trevor serves as the linchpin of the narrative as he explores the contents of the box, getting pulled ever deeper into Louise’s world (and into his own affair with the keeper of the box, a secretary named Josianne), until his life and Louis Brunet’s life become, for a few fevered moments, virtually indistinguishable.

Though I enthusiastically passed this manuscript on to the final judges, it didn’t win the prize; and since the competition was anonymous, I had no way to track down its author (it would have been tacky to try). I just kept an eye out for it, hoping that it would find its way into print, until this February, when I saw an eerily familiar book reviewed in the New York Times. Its title (new since I first read it) turned out to be 13, rue Thérèse (Reagan Arthur, 2011) and its author turned out to be Elena Mauli Shapiro, whose mother found the unclaimed box in a neighboring Paris apartment upon Louise Brunet’s death in 1983.

As a lifelong aficionado of second-hand objects, I couldn’t help but love this novel. It proves that (a) yes, good books do find their way into readers’ hands, and (b) all once-beloved objects in the world are alive in a way that only art can let us understand.

Interview

Steven Wingate: Your book jacket and promotional materials note how you came into possession of the Louise Brunet reliquary. But how did you come to weave a story around it? How long did you carry this book around in your imagination before you started to write, and what obstacles/encouragements fell in your way?

Elena Mauli Shapiro: When I handled the objects growing up, I always wondered what the story behind them was. The fact that I could never know made them all the more compelling; the objects could serve as projection screen for me. Because there was no story, I could choose any story I wanted. I knew for most of my life that I wanted to write a book out of that box, but I didn’t know what form it would take. I only knew that I wanted to be a good enough writer to do justice to these artifacts, or at least not to totally fail them. I wrote many stories before I started this book. Thousands of pages of crap! For practice. I could see myself getting better at the craft but I don’t know that I could have decided on my own, consciously, when I was “good enough.” It was my unconscious that made the decision: I started dreaming about the objects in the box. The first thing I saw was a narrative moving backwards from a picture of a melancholy elder gent taken in 1943 to an undated picture of that same gent taken in his youth. The pictures themselves were part of the story, and that’s when I knew that visual renderings of the objects were going to be in the book. That’s when I knew, “uh oh, better strap in, because now’s the time to get in the box!”

In your writing process, did you “shuffle” these relics a lot as you moved from draft to draft, or did you lay out a stable framework that you stuck with all the way through? Or did some change and others not change?

It was eerily organic the way that came together. There are six main sections in the book and every section begins with a letter Trevor writes where he lists the artifacts that he is studying, that are forthcoming in that section. It just came out that way. I didn’t open the box and look through the artifacts wondering what would go in there next. Instead the story categorically demanded specific objects in the form of Trevor’s list. Then I would scan them. There was a little bit of shuffling around, order-wise, at first. But the momentum of the story was such that by the last section, in which Trevor has completely let go of the boundary between himself and his text, there wasn’t even a list. The story just had me get up and fetch it things when it needed them. I didn’t realize this was all that weird until the publisher wanted to add an extra to the enhanced e-book edition, a few scans of objects that weren’t used in the story. I realized then that they thought I had scanned everything in the box, and then curated the images. I was embarrassed to tell them that I didn’t really have any extra scans, that I had scanned only what the story asked me for. So then we had to take some scans specifically for the e-book extra.

French Soldiers WWI, Credit: Flickr - drakegoodman

Some relics get repeated—the WWI picture, for instance. Were they your favorites before you started to write, or did you find that your characters pulled you toward them? And at what point did the relics not “in the documentation,” such as the music written as a love token by Louise’s piano student, enter into your process?

In any story, repetition of certain motifs accrues meaning. It was the same with the story the visuals told. The ones that got repeated were the ones that my husband made some truly striking comments about. After I’d written about that WWI picture, my husband said, “hey look, the guys in the light uniforms are French, and the guys in the dark uniforms are British.” It blew my mind because despite my careful observation of the photo, I had not realized this before, and yet after he said it, it was so glaringly obvious. Then after I wrote about the bullets, he offhandedly pointed out in his casual physicist way, “oh those are supersonic.” “WHAT? How do you know that?!” “Oh because the ends are pointy.” “So wait, so, that means, the bullet is inside you before you hear the gunshot?” “Yep.” “Fuck! Harris! Why did you tell me that? I am never sleeping again!” And then obviously, I absolutely had to put that in the book.

Credit: Flickr-Arslan

The relics “not in the documentation” made their way in when the story asked me to put in the overheated love letter Louise writes for the boy in the staircase. That was an episode I lifted from one of my practice stories, which I wrote when I was twenty. At that time I had actually handwritten the love letter, which I still had. I wondered how I could morally put that in, since it was not part of the Louise Brunet reliquary but part of mine, and then I laughed at myself: I was having compunctions about forging documentation for a piece of fiction. How fabulous! That’s when I decided that as Trevor was losing sight of the boundary between himself and the story he was telling, he would start to increasingly insert objects “not in the documentation.”

The aesthetic space of 13, rue Thérèse is inhabited by two big shadows: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which any novel about an adulterous Frenchwoman must reckon with, and A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which arguably started a trend of books about research and romance that has lasted over two decades. How did you deal with these precedents, and did that change over the course of writing the novel?

Flaubert is in the book in a big way, explicitly referenced and even quoted. But not Madame Bovary itself—I thought that was not necessary, since the parallels, as you point out, are already so strong. He had a passionate, somewhat unhinged approach to his writing that I really relate to, that I tried to capture with the feral way Trevor tells the story. The book also owes a lot to Possession, but I didn’t really realize that until after. I was in academia at the time I wrote it, so it seemed perfectly natural to me to have research turn into channeling, into a giant romantic allegory about storytelling. Then when I emerged from the fever, I wondered, “hey, where have I seen this before? Oh yeah! Thank you, Ms. Byatt.”

The most intriguing thing to me about 13, rue Thérèse is the layering of voices within it and the fact that your narrator can’t be pinned down. Trevor narrates some of the story through his letters, but in other places it could be read as Louise herself, as Josianne, as an “altered” Trevor, or even as an omniscient narrator who can see through time. At one point the narrator says “this is the year of our story,” which makes that voice very conspiratorial with the reader without identifying it. Were these voices layered on top of each other from draft to draft, or did they all show up at the beginning of your process and duke it out for the right to speak?

At first I wrote snatches of text in the third person, the point of view being either close to Louise or uncannily omniscient, like the Voice of History. Also the text often addressed me directly. It was a bit crazy-making, which was why I decided to create Trevor—as a secondary containment device. He would tell this story, and he would lose his marbles a bit doing it, so that I didn’t have to. I made him on January 12th, 2006, and he started speaking quite naturally in a letter that was dated January 12, addressed to Dear Sir. When I saw that, I said, “what? Who the hell is this Sir?” Trevor laughed at me, said maybe I would find out if I stopped halting the proceedings every time I didn’t know what was going on and just went ahead and wrote the damn thing. So I did; it was quite a ride. I let him possess and be possessed; I let the narrative frame breach the story; I let the boundaries blur between collective and individual experience. I wrote the prologue “On the Record,” after I’d written the whole book to situate the readers a little bit, so that they weren’t dropped into the novel quite as unceremoniously as I was.

You have no actual relationship with the dead Louise Brunet, but you have handled her possessions—a fact that you share with the Trevor Stratton character. How did this commonality come into play as you rendered Trevor? And what about Josianne, the departmental secretary who serves as the gatekeeper to the mystery of the reliquary? At what point did she enter your writing process, and how did working with her character compare to working with Trevor and Louise?

Image Credit: Flickr-Twistiti

While I was writing, Trevor was my imp. He was throwing stuff around in my brain, being horribly disruptive and also quite a hoot. He was also, obviously, my double, since he handled the objects as I handled the objects. When I took a scan of a pair of lace gloves somewhere in the middle of the story, I noticed that I’d left fingerprints on the glass scanning bed that were perfectly rendered in the image. I thought, “damn,” and tried to wipe up the fingerprints and take another image but instead I just made ugly smudges. Then I decided I rather liked the fingerprints, these implied ghostly hands that happened to be on an image of a pair of gloves, which implied another pair of ghostly hands. Then I laughed when I realized—of course, these are part of the story: these are Trevor’s fingerprints. So I made a note in the text where Trevor refers to his own fingerprints—but these fingerprints cannot be seen in the finished book of course, because the image as printed is too small. Which makes the whole thing doubly delightful: the fingerprints of the author that are there but cannot be seen, posing as the erased fingerprints of a narrator who flickers in and out of his own text. So you see it was all very impish, and I wanted to capture that in the story too; I wanted to have a character who would be Trevor for Trevor. So then I made Josianne for him and for me too. We were all a bunch of total goofballs together.

Image Credit: Flickr-drewleavy

What happened with you and the book—both aesthetically and professionally—in those years between when I read the manuscript for the contest and when it got bought, and what was your journey during that time?

I finished the manuscript in late summer of 2008, and wondered what to do with it. I only [submitted the novel to one] contest—mostly I queried agents. When I was a finalist for the contest, I was completely and utterly surprised! I had sent the manuscript in with the assumption that I was tossing it into the maw of oblivion (which is really the only way to stay sane when submitting stuff). I actually landed an agent right around the same time I was told I was a finalist sometime in February 2009—it was weird how those two things happened at once! Then when I got my agent, we did a little tinkering around with the book before she sent it to editors. The book was purchased by Reagan Arthur in June, so the interim between submission and sale was actually pretty short. The interim between sale and publication is, however, NOT short! It is not unusual for that process to take over a year, sometimes nearly two.

The sub-header of your blog at elenamaulishapiro.com reads “Sophomore Novel Angst.” Can you tell us something about your current project (In the Red) How does it resemble 13, rue Thérèse, and how is the angst treating you now that your first one is out to the public and being read?

Image Credit: Flickr-Ahef

In the Red is about Irina Greene, a former Romanian orphan who grew up in the US from the age of four. She has no memory of her native land or language—she says, “English is when the memories begin.” Then one day she becomes embroiled in a passionate relationship with a Romanian immigrant named Andrei Vadrescu. Andrei is very charismatic, and he is bad, bad, bad. The book is about exile, about being drawn to things that should better be left alone. It has the same obsession 13, rue Thérèse does with history, with memory and forgetting. It’s very heavy and Eastern European, with an emphasis on the collective unconscious and fairy tales. It will be less elaborately metafictional than 13, rue Thérèse, more allegorical.

How is the angst treating me now? This is the part where I totally bum out unpublished writers: the angst never goes away. When you’re out there doing your thing alone in the dark, you’re all angsty that it’s not good enough, and you’re quite convinced that nobody is going to read it. This conviction is sad, but at the same time it gives you this incredible freedom: “wheeeeee! Nobody’s going to read it so I can write whatever the hell I want!” Then by some miracle you get published, and people do read your stuff—and then you sit at your keyboard thinking, “oh fuck, someone is actually going to read this shit now!” and it is totally terrifying in the most crippling way, because, of course, you’re still all angsty that it’s not good enough. It’s never good enough. Yipes. Good luck with that.

Further Links and Resources

Image credit: Flicker - Todd Mecklem

Mary Roach is my favorite nonfiction writer—partly because she’s wickedly funny, and partly because we share the same fascinated appreciation for the absurd. I’ve been a huge fan since her first book, Stiff, which is about the various uses of human cadavers. In it and all her other books (Spook, about science and the afterlife; Bonk, about science and sex; and Packing For Mars, about manned space exploration), Roach unearths details that are just too crazy to make up—such as the fact that a dead pope is struck on the forehead with a special hammer to be sure he’s really dead, or that not long ago in Thailand there was a rash of disgruntled wives cutting off their husbands’ penises. And that’s barely scratching the surface. Seriously, if you’ve never read a Mary Roach book, go treat yourself to one right now.

In a recent interview with Robert Birnbaum on The Morning News, Roach discusses research and her discomfort with making things up:

MR: I love archives: the dustier, the better. Also now because of the internet, I still want to find things that are surprising. I am so disappointed when I find out something is already on the internet. So I am going further and further and further into archives to try to find things that people don’t know about—everything is on the internet.

RB: No, I’m not sure that’s true. I’m impressed with Erik Larson, who refuses to use the internet and does his research in libraries.

MR: I once went to a talk he gave on how he does what he does. Somebody said, “How can you describe the corner store in London in 1847? How do you know what was upstairs?” Assuming he was making it up. He said the Sanborn Insurance company went out and documented every street in London: Here’s the year, here’s the address and here’s what it looked like, and here’s who was upstairs, here’s what was down the street. So he had this resource to recreate the street scene. Amazing—and that was just in one example. He probably has 15 resources like that.

RB: Readers presume that it is made-up.

MR: I think the reader is just baffled—I was until I heard that. I know he doesn’t make things up I but I never understood how he or any writer—I remember I wrote Stiff, my first book, and I wanted to talk about that guy who put cadavers on a crucifix in his office in Paris—Pierre Barbet—and I wanted to set the scene. He published a book, A Doctor at Calvary—there was a typo and they changed it to Cavalry [laughs]. I wanted to set the scene and all I knew of him was his book and I couldn’t find information about him. I wanted him walking along carrying a briefcase of some kind. a leather portfolio, and I thought, I don’t know if he had a leather portfolio. I was very uncomfortable with it.

RB: Were there catalogs at that time?

MR: But I didn’t know which one he had. So in just two sentences I felt [like] a scammer, making it up.

Even though I’m a fiction writer and make things up—in fact, even though I am a fiction writer because I like to make things up—I understand Roach’s discomfort. When I write nonfiction, I have a hard time hewing to the facts, yet when I write fiction, there are certain things I like to get right: dates of real-life events, prices, geographical locations—things a knowledgeable reader might know. For the fiction writer, these real-world details are the stage setting of your story: get them right, and the made-up parts are more convincing; get them wrong, and your reader will immediately question everything else you say.

This is where I’m immensely grateful to be living in the Internet Era. While writing my novel, I’ve spent far too much time on Wikipedia, of course: where else can I find out whether Post-It Notes had been invented yet (1980, so no), or that the “rabbit” pregnancy test was more likely to be done on frogs, or when that car buzzer that tells you haven’t buckled your seat belt became prevalent? (And I’m not alone: nonfiction writer Peter Gill described his love for the site in The Guardian.)

And I have a folder of bookmarks to help me find other bits of real-world information, like:

• How Much Is It, which tells you how much a dollar (or a pound, or a yen, or a yuan) was worth at any given point in history. So if my character wants to spend $50.00 on a pair of books in 1977, I know that’s over $175.00 in today’s dollars, and that was an extravagant purchase.
• How Far Is It, which tells you the distance between any two points in the world
• The Baby Name Voyager, which shows you the popularity of a particular name over time, as well as where it’s most popular geographically—so you can avoid having a character named Jennifer before the 1930s, for example, when the name was practically non-existent
• The Social Security Administration’s name index, which gives you the most popular names in any given year
• The U.S. Naval Observatory website, which gives the phase of the moon and the times of sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset on any day in history

Okay, those are my secret research sites. Now it’s your turn: what details do you like to get right in your fiction? Where do you go—on the internet or in real life—to research those bits of info?

In Eleonora Cohen, Lukas has created a winsome companion – a prodigy, no less – to guide the reader through teeming Stamboul. A flock of hoopoes and a pair of Tartar midwives mysteriously appear to attend Eleonora’s birth, an affair that leaves the young girl motherless. Soon her aunt Ruxandra appears and assumes a detached version of maternal duties, at which point one begins to realize that the

Hoopoe. Image Credit: Flickr

girl has special powers – intellectual, if not otherwise. At eight years old, Eleonora stows away in the hold of the ship. Her father Yakob, a Jewish carpet dealer, is aboard that ship, sailing from their home in Constanta on the Black Sea coast to Stamboul to sell some carpets. All this creates the set-up and expectation of adventure and heroic encounters, but Lukas places at least as much weight on the particular time, place and households of his principal characters as he does on swashbuckling or grand deeds. A large part of the delight of The Oracle of Stamboul comes from the way Lukas meticulously describes first Constanta and then Samboul.

It’s rare to read a debut novel so steeped in a sense of the past. Lukas excels in the rich details of the marketplace or the lordly house. When Eleonora and her father arrive in Stamboul, they stay at the lavish home of Yakob’s old friend and business partner Moncef Bey. The Bey, as he is called, takes Eleonora on a shopping excursion for a bewitching new wardrobe. The dressmaker’s shop, like all else in the story, posseses a heightened sensuality. Even spoken language rises. When the Bey croons, “A young lady without a beautiful dress is like a swan without feathers,” the reader along with Eleonora feels a quickening. Just listen to how Lukas describes the change in seasons:

Summer slipped into Stamboul under the cover of a midday shower. It took up residence near the foundations of the Galata Bridge and drifted through the city like a stray dog. Ducking in and out of alleyways, the new season made itself felt in the tenacity of fruit flies buzzing around a pyramid of figs, in the increasingly confident tone of the muezzin, and the growing petulance of shopkeepers in the produce market. Summer could be found in the sticky smell of cherry sherbet, in roast squab, and in rotting loquats.

Image Credit: Flickr

This lush prose carries into the second strand of the story, that of Sultan Abdulhamid II. A looming political disaster for the Ottoman Empire provides much of the story’s tension, but even domestic details provide a glimpse of that world of 1885. Take the description of how the Sultan, driven by state concerns and distracting hunger, breaks Ramadan:

He was on the verge of eating the bread with sardines when he discovered, at the very back of the larder, a box of baklava. Glistening with syrup, the pastries were dusted with bright green ground pistachios. His mother had a penchant for sweets. It would be no surprise if she had hidden the box specifically for consumption during Ramadan.

See how Lukas reveals the mother’s character even as he describes a small act by the son? The beautiful language gives the novel not just a fit setting for Eleonora and the Sultan’s intersecting stories, but links the book to older forms of the novel – the Victorian Novel, particularly.

The Oracle of Stamboul feels rooted in 19^th Century literature. From characterization, to the time spent setting the scene at the beginning of a chapter, to the concern with a noble class different from our current notion of the merely “rich,” the book echoes its contemporaries – its 19^th Century contemporaries. Many books are mentioned – Tristam Shandy, The Hourglass, Sultan Abdulhamid even enjoys Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which he calls “an English mystery novel.” Eleonora’s fastidiousness recalls a young Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch – which would have been published the decade before Lukas’ story transpires. The effect is elegant, transporting:

The sky was a bottomless silky black, sprinkled with stars like spilled sugar and quiet but for a few lonely stray cats prowling the waterfront. A loose association of ships slipped through the straits and the moon was pregnant with reflected glow.

One can almost hear Ms. Eliot describing the nighttime heavens in those terms. All the above to describe insomnia! Even the domestic feels sweeping, somehow grand and at an exalted remove, like a dreamy fairy tale.

Unusual diction heightens the effect. There are those ever-present hoopoes to begin with, Eleonora walks “past pashas and janissaries gliding silent as snakes through water”; the horses pulling the palace carriage have “skin gleaming with the dull radiance of meerschaum.” Perhaps this merely reveals my own linguistic shortcomings, but I have trouble remembering the last contemporary book I read that used words of the janissaire, meerschaum, or hoopoe variety. They feel very much of a time and place, one distant from our own. This formality lends the book a patina of history, at least hinting at an author steeped in writers like Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and Hermann Broch.

Reading plays a thematic, as well as historical, role in Eleonora’s story. Before leaving Constanta, she becomes obsessed with The Hourglass, a six-volume novel that begins with Lieutenant Brashov, a garrison and cobblestones. Pre-voyage, Eleonora must endure Ruxandra’s rationing of her reading – her aunt worrying that it is unseemly for so young a girl to tear through books at the pace Eleonora would wish. Yet, her niece already thinks of herself in literary terms, “Closing her eyes, she listened to the faint cooing of her flock and drifted off to thoughts of Robinson Crusoe, stranded alone on his desert island of despair. If she couldn’t finish her lessons, if she couldn’t finish the book, he would be stranded there in her mind forever.” In a brief hunt for the title, it seems The Hourglass is likely a creation of Lukas’ imagination – or has fallen even further out of the realm of popular literature. But the lengthy novel brings Eleonora and the Sultan together in an interesting way later in the story – reading is one of the joys they share. Once in Stamboul, much of the story’s action occurs in the Bey’s ornate library:

A dark, wood-paneled space decorated with antique globes and navigational instruments, the library was lined from floor to ceiling with books: philological treatises, geographies, encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, poems, novels, and more than a few religious tracts, all bound in red, blue, green and brown morocco leather. Monsieur Karom served pistachio baklava and tulip-shaped glasses of black tea while the Bey set up a game of backgammon for Yakob and himself. Adorned with a sunburst of tiny cedar rhombuses, the Bey’s backgammon board was a masterwork of craftsmanship and elegance.

One of the girl’s new allowances in Stamboul is unlimited reading time and material, “What a joy it was to read in freedom, to fall into a book without the fear of Ruxandra peering over her shoulder.” This celebration of reading reminds you, the reader, of the pleasure of losing oneself in another world – an opportunity The Oracle of Stamboul provides.

Image Credit: Flickr

This novel is also an unabashed celebration of birds. From the faithful flock of hoopoes that follow Eleonora from the day of her birth onward, to feathered metaphors throughout, Lukas fills the pages with the rustle of wings. Abdulhamid II takes an annual birding excursion to Lake Manyas (in the western part of modern Turkey).

Over the course of the trip, the Sultan saw more than fifty species of bird: white frosted geese, golden orioles, night herons, glossy ibises, a mass of spoonbills, and three pairs of bright orange-billed Dalmatian pelicans.

Even incidental mentions of birds congregate together. As Eleonora looks out her window at the Bey’s house: “On the other side of the glass, an unseasonably harsh wind blew off the water, lashing tree branches and tossing sea birds into somersaults.” The political turmoil of the Ottomans, Russians and Hapsburgs that hovers over the intimate details of the principal characters even finds an avian simile: “Meanwhile, France and Britain sat perched at the edge of the carnage, biding their time like crows on fence posts.” Besides providing continuity to the language, the presence of all these winged creatures lends a certain timelessness to the tale, even as it moves through very particular layers of the past.

Istanbul, Image Credit: Flickr

Eleonora may play the role of heroine in this novel, but the true focal point of the book is Stamboul. Lukas succeeds in capturing a mood and a place, and all the attendant sensory experiences that allow a reader to truly disappear into a story. The elevated language – glorification such that even humble states feel gilded – achieves a part of this alchemy. But part of it must certainly land at the feet of his memorable characters – the fact that the adventure doesn’t end with a swashbuckling flourish seems somehow beside the point. Eleonora, Yakob, Moncef Bey, Sultan Abdulhamid – even the onerous Ruxandra – provide such good company, that even at the final page one feels as though another chapter of their story is just beginning. It seems fitting to end with Eleonora’s own sense of the magic of Stamboul, early in the novel, before other turns of fortune redirect her course. Here she contemplates her and Yakob’s looming departure from the city:

She knew all along that they would, at some point, have to leave the Bey and Stamboul and the routine she had so quickly become accustomed to, but knowing one has to leave is much different than being faced with an impending departure. At some point, everyone must leave this world, but who is ready to go?

Wise beyond her years indeed.

Further Links and Resources

Lukas, Cr. Jeffrey Cross

From author's website

Like so many other people, I was caught up in the enthusiasm for Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring when it came out in 2000. I loved the way the novel captured the stark world of 17th-century Delft and the chaos of Vermeer’s household, and brought to life the beautiful girl in the painting. I admired the restraint of the novel, too, how sexual tension builds between Vermeer and Griet and they don’t act on it – though the scene where he pierces Griet’s ear has stayed with me for years.

When I moved to The Netherlands for a couple of years, one of my first goals was to visit the Mauritshuis, or Royal Picture Gallery, where Vermeer’s wonderful painting lives. I walked past years of Dutch Masters, of meticulously painted cows, still lifes of dead hares with fruit, and paintings of cloudy, flat landscapes before finding her. It was like seeing a friend’s picture on the wall, so fully had Chevalier drawn her characters and filled out a world in her book.

I went on to enjoy Chevalier’s subsequent novels: Falling Angels, Lady and the Unicorn, Burning Bright and, most recently, the fascinating Remarkable Creatures (Dutton/Penguin). Reading Remarkable Creatures reminded me that there’s something timeless about a beach; hunting for fossils must be one of the few things we do the same way now as Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot did it 150 years ago. Trust Tracy Chevalier to bring their world alive for us.

In June 2009, I interviewed Tracy Chevalier in her home. Sitting with Chevalier in her homey, book-filled Victorian townhouse in North London, I found her very alive to the world at large, attuned to the subtleties and human drama of the past, and able to draw them fully in the present.

Felicity Librie: When did you decide that you wanted to be a writer?

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Tracy Chevalier: You know, that’s a difficult question. You would think it’d be easy, but it isn’t. I guess I really only thought of myself as a writer once I had a book published, and even then I felt a little bit like a fraud. I don’t know, like, somebody’s going to find me out. But I talked about being a writer when I was a kid because I loved books so much and I was one of those readaholics. I wasn’t sporty, I was fat, I lay on my bed all day and read, and I think I wanted to be involved in the world of books somehow, and so I used to say I wanted to be a writer or I wanted to be a librarian because that was my source of books at that time: a library. I knew nothing at that time about publishing so I just thought it was one or the other.

When I was a teenager I did some writing, but I also started editing a literary magazine at school. So then I discovered there was this thing called an editor, and publishing, and I thought, well actually, I want to be that, because I had that typical teenage girl’s loss of confidence, and I didn’t think that I would be a very good writer, but I could work on other people’s stuff. And so when I went to Oberlin I majored in English, and I did go into publishing for several years. But in the back of my mind was this little itch, like, maybe I’ll write a short story. I didn’t have an idea to write a novel—it was always going to be small—and I remember sending a postcard, after I graduated from college, to one of my professors, saying, “I have an idea for a short story. I’m going to write it.” I don’t know why I said that to him. Maybe it was because he was a writer himself and by sending it to him, I was forcing myself to say, got to do it now, you’ve told [poet] David [Young] you’re going to. And I worked full time, and slowly started putting together stories on the side. But where that came from, I don’t know—that desire to do that. Even then I didn’t call myself a writer. It was only as they started to accumulate over the years that I went very gradually in that direction.

Girl With a Pearl Earring was a critical and popular success, selling 4 million copies worldwide, and going on to be adapted for screen and stage. This must all have been incredibly exciting, but how did it affect you as a writer?

It was pretty scary. On the one hand it was wonderful to have that validation, and to know that I had a readership. That something I had created in a little room in my mind, and in a physical little room, could go out there and really touch people—it was just astonishing. I also underestimated how popular Vermeer is. So that was a surprise, and I couldn’t have done it without him! But it made it hard to write the next novel. When you have a success, your subsequent books are always compared to that. I had critics and readers say, “This isn’t like Girl With a Pearl Earring; why not?” Or, “This is too much like Girl With a Pearl Earring, she’s retreading old territory.” I try hard not to listen to all that but I was very aware, when I wrote Falling Angels, the book after Girl With a Pearl Earring, that I didn’t want to write Woman with a Pearl Necklace—that would be the sequel! (Laughs.) I had to get away from that, so I wrote something really different, set in Edwardian England, with twelve different voices. It’s more of a big genre painting than a focused Vermeer. Some things about it worked and some didn’t. I try not to compare, even though everybody else does.

It’s interesting that you mention the twelve viewpoints, because Girl With a Pearl Earring is the only one of your novels that has a single point of view. All the others use more than one voice. How do you decide about that?

Sometimes it’s obvious right away, and other times it only works later. Originally I wrote Falling Angels in third person, but with little sections in the first-person voices of three main children. I found, as I was writing it, that the third-person sections were boring to write—although there is boredom in all writing, so I wasn’t overly worried about that. But then I would get to the first-person sections, which I called voice sections, and say, “Oh, it’s a voice section today, thank God, this’ll be fun.” Of course alarm bells should have gone off. When I reread the first draft I cried at the end. It was boring, dead weight, terrible. Then I looked it over and thought, there’s nothing wrong with the story except the way it’s told. Maybe I should take a cue from my pleasure in writing the first-person sections. Maybe it should all be in first person, a cacophony of voices. I took the draft, and it was like taking a vase and setting it down so hard it shatters, then putting the pieces back together in a different way. I rewrote the whole thing in first person with all these different voices. I had the idea when, just as I was finishing the first draft in third person, I read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, which uses five different voices beautifully. It’s a wonderful book, using multiple voices very successfully, and I thought, “Oh, that’s an interesting technique, I wonder if I should take the kids’ voices I’ve already written and have the three of them tell it.” It just felt right.

I knew, when I came up with the idea for Girl With a Pearl Earring, that I didn’t want it to be about Vermeer, I wanted it to be about her. She would have a voice and a story, which she hadn’t ever had. Plenty has been written about Vermeer, but not about his models. It seemed perfectly clear that it should be from her point of view.

Image Credit: Flickr

My latest book, Remarkable Creatures, is particularly about a woman named Mary Anning, the fossil hunter, but I knew I wanted there to be a different perspective. Mary was not educated, she didn’t travel, and I felt like we as twenty-first-century readers need a broader view. Also, in religious terms, there were people who saw fossils as a challenge to their ideas about religion, and I wanted to be able to present both sides: people who felt, God created fossils and it didn’t affect their religious beliefs; and those whom fossils did challenge. So I wanted two sides of the argument, and I found out that Mary had this friend who was a middle-class woman twenty years her senior, named Elizabeth Philpot. It made perfect sense to have the two of them tell the story and get a more complete picture. So it comes organically out of the story, but you don’t always know right away. Sometimes it takes a lot of fiddling around, or rewriting a whole draft from a different point of view.

You’ve written about real characters before, such as Johannes Vermeer and William Blake, but they were tangential characters in those novels. Mary Anning is very much center stage in Remarkable Creatures. Was it a constraint to write about a real person, about whom quite a lot is known?

Mary Anning, prior to 1842

It was both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that you don’t have to make it up, which is great, because my imagination is limited! I had the skeleton structure of her life, where she was at more or less any given period; she didn’t move around much, and lived in Lyme Regis all her life. There were highlights of her life, so the peaks are of the story are built in, and that’s great. The disadvantage is that those peaks don’t always happen the way we as readers would like them to. I had to fudge the chronology a little bit, more in this book than in other books.

Vermeer and Blake are both central to the concept of their books, but they’re not the main players, and it’s much easier to make up stuff around them without it actually affecting their chronology. Whereas with Mary Anning, between two important things that happened there’d be a three year gap. And I’d go, “Oh, three years? This is outrageous!” The thing is, back then people had very different lives from us. She used to go out on the beach every day, and the same things would happen year after year. Our lives are much more varied than that, and we’re used to reading about people with more varied lives.

Day after day isn’t great for narrative. So in the first draft I kept all the dates, then I put it all together and thought, oh, this drags a bit—who needs to know that this happened and then there were three or four years before that happened? And I thought: why don’t I just take off the dates? It was an incredible liberation. All my other books have dates that separate the sections, and it’s very clear when things take place. This time I’ve stripped them all out, and it was a great relief. There are three dates that are mentioned, one on which an auction takes place, one when she finds an ichthyosaur, and one when she finds a plesiosaur. I think those are the only specific dates in the book. Everything else is kind of a mishmash. Readers don’t mind it at all—no one’s said to me, “I don’t get this, you know that three years have gone by there?” Once you look at it in a different way and allow yourself that leeway, it makes it a lot easier.

Do you always start with research?

More or less. I read about the period when I’m setting it, and I go to see the places, check out where the scenes are going to be. So for The Virgin Blue, my first novel, I had the idea and did a bit of research, and then I went down to southern France and found a town for Ella, the contemporary character, to live in. I actually rented a car at Toulouse airport and then drove with a map and went into all these small towns. About the third or fourth one I visited, I drove into it and I thought, yeah, okay, she’s going to live here. And that’s a lot of time, you know, but it all starts with researching, taking notes. I start to write without having completed the research, because once you start writing, it opens up a lot of other questions that you need to do research on, and so I feel like my research process is never complete. In fact from each novel I’ve worked on I still have books on my bookshelf that I ought to have read! (Laughs.)

How do you use your research, which might be quite dry and academic, and bring it to life the way you do? What’s the mechanism for taking facts and using them to recreate the past in a way that’s vibrant?

I put the story first, and the characters. The history always has to be secondary. I don’t want to be a teacher, I want to be a storyteller, and I want to prop up what I write with something that’s going to give it validity. That’s where the history comes in. I wasn’t a history major; I wasn’t that interested in history until I was in my thirties, and even now, I’m only interested in history when I’m writing a book. I’m interested in that era and I want to read everything about it, find out about it, sort through all the junk to find the little glittering things that are going to work. That sorting gives me the confidence to set something during a particular period. It makes me know, when a character walks into the house, what the dimensions of the rooms are, what she’s wearing, what she’ll do when she comes in—does she take off a hat and gloves, what kind of shoes does she have, what’s she going to eat? When I’m writing books I tend to see history not as about who’s prime minister or president at the time, but more about what people’s everyday lives were like, and how they differed from ours.

You’ve talked before about how you like to get your hands dirty when you’re researching a novel. You took painting classes when you were writing Girl with a Pearl Earring and you went to a tapestry studio for The Lady and the Unicorn. Apart from looking on the beach for fossils, what did you do for Remarkable Creatures?

Image Credit: Flickr

That’s pretty much what I did! Mary and Elizabeth were very interested in fossils, that was their obsession, and so I had to spend a long time on the beach, looking. It requires a lot of patience, a way of being that doesn’t happen just going out once. I had to go a lot. I’ve got a lot better at finding things than I was at the beginning, because of all the time I put in. And there’s a whole gallery in the Natural History museum of London which is full of the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs that Mary Anning found. I spent a lot of time looking at them. Other than that, Elizabeth Philpot collected a lot of fossil fish, and when she died her nephew gave her collection to the Natural History Museum in Oxford. They have her stuff in all these big trays in back rooms, and I spent a very happy day pulling them out and looking. Some of the labels are in her hand, they’re original, and it was so amazing to hold these things, to hold what she found, prepared and cleaned, and studied, and wrote the labels for. And there’s the label, still there. I always love the hands-on, not just doing but also feeling. It’s like a talisman to touch something that my characters have touched. William Blake had a notebook that he used to write his poems in. They have it at the British Library, and when I was researching Burning Bright, I managed to talk them into letting me look at it, and hold it, and turn pages. It was so amazing.

Your last two novels have featured towns in Dorset (on the English south coast), where you spend a lot of your time—Piddletrenthide in Burning Bright, and Lyme Regis in Remarkable Creatures. How much does your knowledge of those modern settings underpin your creation of the historical settings?

Hugely. I could have chosen to have the made-up family in Burning Bright come from anywhere. I wouldn’t have used Piddletrenthide if I didn’t know it, but I wanted them to be from the countryside, and move to London, where they end up living next to William Blake. And the one bit of English countryside I know best is Dorset. We bought a cottage down there right at the time when I started researching Burning Bright. So I thought, maybe I’ll set it nearby, since I know the area, and then I started getting interested in Piddletrenthide’s history.

Lyme Regis is still very much as it was in Mary Anning’s day—obviously not all the houses and the buildings, though there is a feel about it that’s slightly timeless, and the beaches are definitely the same. When you’re out there you can go fossil hunting and still find the things that she found. That hasn’t changed at all—there are still the landslides and high tides that she would have wrestled with. The structure of the town hasn’t changed because the geography won’t let it. It can’t really spread out that much. It’s down in a valley with quite steep hills around it, and there’s only so much building out you can do. It still has a very small feel to it.

Remarkable Creatures hangs on the unusual friendship between Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot. What appealed to you about portraying a close friendship between two women?

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I think the best books are about a relationship that changes over time. Somebody described the novel once as normal-change-new normal. People’s lives are measured by their relationships with other people. Maybe because I’m not particularly romantic, I don’t write in general about romantic relationships, although Vermeer’s relationship with Griet was certainly romantic. I’m more interested in the day-to-day relationships that we have. With Mary and Elizabeth it was just so unusual, because Mary was a working-class woman and Elizabeth was a middle-class woman, and that’s a huge difference, then and now too—you know we sort of say everything’s wide open, but honestly are there many people who cross paths? Do we have any working class friends? Not really. So that’s still there, though it’s less rigid, less codified in society now than it was.

Then it was very strict. And also, Elizabeth was 20 years older than Mary, which was unusual. But they were good friends. Lyme Regis was isolated enough that you could get away with unconventional behavior. Also, these women did not marry. They did not have the romantic relationships I would have written about. There’s a bit of it but very little. They had each other and that had to suffice—it more than sufficed, I think. They got on very well, bonded by this love of fossils. I guess I’m interested in more than the romantic template we’ve grown up with. Jane Austen wrote about romantic relationships—also about family relationships and sisters—but really in the end, Elizabeth Bennett ends up with Mr. Darcy and that’s the thing that matters. I thought, that’s all very well in a novel, but in real life that’s not always how it happens. And I wanted to know, what happens to the women who don’t get married? This is what happens to them: they have the sort of friendships that sustain them.

Having lived outside the United States for 25 years, you know how it feels to be out of your natural habitat. This theme appears often in your work. Griet moves into Vermeer’s household, Jem and his family leave Dorset for London, Elizabeth is forced to move to Lyme Regis, where she has little social standing. Do you think you’re drawn to writing about outsiders because of your own life experience?

Yes. There’s drama in having to move. It’s that idea of normal-change-new normal, and the change is often a physical one. There’s such a lot of movement in society; a lot of people don’t stay in their home towns any more. There’s an appealing universality to that. It certainly doesn’t hurt that I’m the other. Although I feel much more comfortable in England than I did at the beginning, I’m still aware of being an outsider. I think that gives me an edge, and I’m happy with it.

You have said, Write about what you’re interested in, rather than what you know. What other advice would you give writers?

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Try to make a consistent time when you write every week, rather than just writing when you’re inspired. If I wrote only when I was inspired I’d never finish anything. Finish, finish, finish—you can never judge whether something works until you’ve got the whole thing. Give it to other people to read. You’ve got to find a writers’ group or a class—something that’s going to give you deadlines and a built-in audience. Be open to change: just because it’s typed on your lovely computer it doesn’t mean it’s any good. You have to accept that you don’t know whether something works until you’ve had somebody read it. Find someone whose advice and judgment you trust, and go with that.

What are you working on now?

For the first time I’m setting a novel in the U.S. It’s about an English Quaker woman who emigrates to Ohio in the 1840s and ends up working on the Underground Railroad, helping fugitive slaves escape to Canada. It’s a book about being an outsider, about silence, about freedom – all those big issues. It’s set in a fictional Quaker community just outside of Oberlin, Ohio, where I went to college.

From author website

As someone who primarily enjoys stories where lots of stuff blows up and people swing, shoot, or chuck things at each other, I am fascinated by those writers I admire whose work does exactly none of that, and whose narratives wouldn’t be caught dead with a gun, a knife, or a lit stick of dynamite. Michael Byers is such a writer. In his 1999 short story collection, The Coast of Good Intentions, and his two novels, 2003’s Long for This World and the recently released Percival’s Planet, Byers eschews literal detonations for the precise and studied understanding of the ways the human interior contorts, twists, and ignites upon its own contradictions. Reminiscent of such lightweights as James and Welty, Byers’ work shines with studied and infuried illuminations of the imperfect spirit; he can map out this process of inner grappling with a lovely, intense, and disciplined artistry.

Percival Lowell Observatory, via Flickr

Percival’s Planet, which Holt published this past August to critical acclaim, tells the story of the people involved – in ways direct and indirect, but never tangential – in the 1930 discovery of Pluto. He gives us the powder keg frustration of aging WASPS, the desire and turmoil of the frustrated scientist, and the slow burn of a woman slouching towards darkness, as they collect in the arid beauty of the Arizona desert, looking to that celestial body, way out there at the edge of the solar system, that acts as a through line to bring them all into collision.

Michael Shilling: Percival’s Planet seems to be primarily about the search for that which is just out of reach. Each character – from Felix DuPrie trying to salvage his sense of worth to Mary Hempstead trying to get a foothold on reality to Clyde Tombaugh hoping to discover Planet X – is going for an idea/state of being that may be false/against their gut feeling. When you were writing the book, how deliberately did this common thematic thread evolve?

Michael Byers: It’s a nice observation. Like any set of thematic concerns that show up in a finished novel, some were obvious to me from the start and others only slowly made themselves known. It’s hard, and I think probably against a writer’s best interests, to know exactly how all the pieces go together too soon. I suppose I can say that you begin to get a sense of a gathering coherence to certain storylines, and a sense that one part of the book is usefully amplifying or undercutting another part. When I’m down in the guts of a book I work sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-to-paragraph, scene-to-scene, and I worry about pacing, timing, narrative interest, that sort of thing, and then suddenly there’ll be a chiming sound from some unfamiliar area of my brain that will suggest that A is going to fit neatly, or interestingly, into slot B. Which I then take note of, I think, and go on doing what I was doing. If you can understand the book you’re writing as you’re writing it, I think, it’s not big or interesting enough.

On that last point, when you say, “not big or interesting enough,” do you mean that comprehension of what one is doing while drafting makes for a predestined, i.e. non-organic story with a pre-conceived outcome? Have you had times where you were writing a story and really wanted to make some political/social statement or convey some moral, and found that the characters were getting in the way of doing that? Seems that is when the best stories happen. I guess what I’m asking is, for Percival, at what point did the world you were creating just take over?

Clyde Tombaugh, Lowell Obsrv.

I think too much knowledge beforehand can make for fairly flat storytelling. I think that’s pretty well agreed. I’ve written both ways, both to a strict plan and without a plan at all, and I think it’s true that no matter how much you plot and plan you end up with surprises along the way, and that those surprises are often generative. I guess I mean, that if you know everything about the book you’re writing at the moment, you’re not writing the most interesting book possible — because your conscious mind isn’t the only author of the book. While writing Percival’s Planet the most difficult part wasn’t scene-setting or character-building but giving characters as much freedom as possible within what was, after all, a predestined story.

Which of the characters changed the most on you as you wrote the book? Did you resent that character for ruining the careful/painstakingly perfect plan for had for them?

Characters do change on me, although in this book the changes ended up being dictated by the storylines they had become involved in. I had a number of different endings for Hollis Hempstead, for example, all of which were dramatically exaggerated and spectacular, but none of which made sense given the other stories Hollis found himself among. So I had to scale his conclusion back considerably. Also, since part of the process of writing this book was excising a very great deal of middle, which is where characters tend to get hazy and uncertain on me, I was able to fasten on their more certain ends more definitely.

What do you mean by “a very great deal of middle”? Were there story lines in the book that you wanted to pursue, but couldn’t get a proper handle on?

I think I had a handle on most of it by the end, but including the middles made for a story that was broad without being particularly deep or affecting, I think. And too long. There’s another version of this book that exists mostly in my head, and which is about twice the length of this book. I think it’s probably just as good, maybe better, but I’d still be working on it now, and I got to a point where I felt done enough with this book to let it go as it is.

What are your thoughts on writing about insanity? How did you approach creating Mary Hempstead’s character?

Image Credit: Flickr

I think, as with writing about anything else you haven’t experienced directly, it’s important to experiment a little, to feel around in the dark until you find some voice or set of images that strikes you as fitting. I actually don’t think writing about insanity is that much different, or even that much more difficult, than imagining your way into the life of a person of a different age or disposition. An honest, imaginative inhabitation is still the best means to find your way into a mind, even one whose rules are radically different from your own. We imagine our way into differently ordered minds all the time. There can be a kind of harried, associative logic in the hallucinatory state, and if you find a suitable grammar for that state, for that logic, it’s possible to follow it to some unlikely ends. Mary’s character, including her elaborate hallucinations, came to me piece by piece, and a great deal of what I wrote didn’t land in the final book — including a good deal of material concerning her time in the asylums in which she finds herself. I wanted her to be variously assaulted — by the workings of her own mind, first, but also by a world in which she’s an object of desire. The slightly tricky parts involved knitting the outer world, as it attached to her character and the plot, to her inner world as she experienced it — so, for example, it seemed useful to have her be especially sensitive to being stared at: she felt she looked a certain way, and she feared that everybody was seeing her true, deformed nature.

Who do you think writes well about mental illness?

Most writers have written about mental illness up in some fashion, as it turns out, although of course only recently has the subject been recognized as such. I mean, Emma Bovary is pretty diagnosable, if you wanted to do that for some reason, but it’s interesting to note how intimate and how unjudgmental Flaubert’s inhabitation of Emma is. Jane Smiley (at least, and maybe she among others) calls Madame Bovary the “first case study,” minute and faithful in its description of how a human being works, certainly, but becoming great literature largely to the extent that Flaubert resists proposing a reason for Emma’s behavior. I suppose the potential pitfall in writing about a character losing her mind is a temptation to be less than perfectly particular, or less than fully human even as a character’s mind convinces her that her reality is the one true one. If your character can’t imagine that she’s mad, then she’s close to lost as a character, I suppose — which is why, once Mary goes off the deep end late in my novel, I don’t have any further chapters from her point of view.

But what about writers, such as Joyce Carol Oates in Zombie, Charlotte Perkins Gilman in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and about half of Poe’s oeuvre, who construct an interior logic to their characters who are totally nuts? I feel like that’s an often useful way to approach the character who is “a long time gone,” bridging the gap between the world of the character and the reader. Under what contexts do you think that can work? And please do not use this as an occasion to hate on Poe, because you will break my Tell Tale Heart.

Right, and we might also include a book like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which sweetly deceives the reader into experiencing a false world as though it is a real one – because, of course, for the narrator of that peculiarly moving novel, the false world is the only world to be had. Maybe the difference can be described in this way, that when a broken or spectacularly unreliable narrator has dominion over an entire work, a certain self-reinforcing logic begins to accumulate – each misangled thought making a secure landing spot for the misangled thought to follow – whereas in a work with several points of view, you could argue that they all live beneath the imaginary or at least inscrutable dominion of the Narrator, Writ Large, who exerts a kind of regulating influence on all the voices under Its Oversight. On the other hand, maybe it is more a musical statement: that one weirdly dissonant voice among others who are more traditionally melodic would make for a strange symphony.

Who else have you read that combines historical events with storytelling in a compelling way?

Hm, I have a few favorites. There’s an argument to be made that every novel is a historical novel (even novels set in the future). A nice example that doesn’t get a ton of attention is The World as I Found It, a 1987 novel by Bruce Duffy. He’s not a name you hear much. It’s a long novel, taking place over about thirty-five years, describing the lives of Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Moore, and Bertrand Russell. It does what I want a historical novel to do: fearlessly take over the lives of real men and women, give at least a sense of the times, and move convincingly between the intimate and the epic. I experience it differently now than I did twenty years ago: I still admire its characterizations and carefully produced set pieces, which are often quite masterly. But these days I more admire Duffy’s bravado – the nutty glory of sitting down to write such an outsizedly ambitious thing. He pulls it off, mostly, and where he doesn’t I love the fact that he tried. The perfectly made object, of course, is usually a less than interesting one. As V.S. Pritchett says, “the modern novel has reached such a pitch of competence and shapeliness that we are shocked at the disorderliness of the masterpieces….the carelessness, the lethargy, the enormous bad taste of genius, its liability to accident, its slovenly and majestic conceit that anything will do.” Trying to reconcile this sort of beautiful disregard with the writer’s usual anxious urges to polish and perfect is a lifelong project for most of us, I imagine.

If there was one element of the book you could have expanded more, which would it have been, and why?

More than anything else I’ve written and published, I have a pretty substantial body of finished but unincluded material – chapters that didn’t make it into the final version of Percival’s Planet. The material is fairly broadly distributed over the cast of characters. Because I worked on this book for so long, there are substantial ghosts hovering over it – the ghosts of previous versions, deep histories, family backgrounds, and so on. I’ve published a couple of these alternate chapters, and I’ve put some of this material on the book’s website. I suppose if I had to choose one thing, I’d have included more of Mary and Edward’s story, which has a long and deep written history (but which is brief in the book itself). I do think having such a cushy pile of unincluded matter allowed me to make decisions about these characters more easily than I might have otherwise – whether that logic is always obvious to the reader is another question.

Which books inspired you while writing Percival, and why? That is, were they formal models from which you took inspiration, or were they tonally what you were going for, etc.

You have the two categories of books-to-read-while-writing down exactly. Some books you read because they do what you want to do and you’re trying to figure out how they do it. And others seem to live in the sort of art-space that you want yours to live in – they inhabit, in whatever fashion, the territory that you find yourself interested in exploring.

The books that bolstered me most during the usual periods of writerly doldrums weren’t novels about astronomy, or historical-novels-told-from-multiple-points-of-view, but books that I loved because they demonstrated why books were necessary — works like William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf, Alice Munro’s Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage, Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Louis Begley’s About Schmidt, and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (among many others). Although I think I first turned to these books hunting for some echo of prose that would be clarifying or otherwise helpful, they were more useful, I believe, in retrospect, as books that implicitly demonstrated that a book about human beings and their normal daily behavior was not only worth writing but the only thing worth writing.

Although I imagine it doesn’t seem like it, I’m always struggling to write less plot. I am anxious to keep the reader pinned in some way, fearing for the weakness of my powers, and my first instinct is to go for the dramatic stroke. But it’s not, frankly, my strength, and when I get plotty I can get sort of stupid and pat – at least that’s how it often seems to me. I experiment, obsessively, with what might happen, turning over card after card until I find something of interest. Eventually I remember that plot most usefully arises out of character. That’s what really hooks us, in the end – why people do what they do – and the books that last the longest and that I go back to are those that present us with a mind actively considering the way that mind encounters the world. So: Munro, Maxwell, Yates, and so on.

When writing fiction, of which sense (of the five senses) are you most acutely aware? Does it change depending on the project? How about with Percival?

Image Credit: Flickr

Maybe sound – as in, the sound of dialog, of course, but also the sound of a person’s interior voice as they’re telling their story, narrating the shape of their mind. Sound will tell me how long a sentence should be, what turns a paragraph needs to take (or can reasonably take, given its speed), how self-excoriating or self-pitying a character might be at a certain point. This isn’t a sensory experience of the imagined world but a sensory experience at the desk.

Do you often take to work in which the tone of the writing mirrors the personalities of the characters? Or do you enjoy an artful disjoint between tone and character? For example, one problem I have always had with crime fiction is the manner in which love scenes get stifled by the hard meter of the form, or in The Year of Magical Thinking; people I know who didn’t like it complained that Didion was too cold in her tone, and made her seem not the least bit mournful or engaged with her emotions (I totally disagree).

It’s an interesting question — I think what bores me, or fails to interest me, I guess, about certain work is when it limits a character’s access to his or her own interior for reasons that don’t seem very worthwhile. Since prose fiction is uniquely able to render interior states, I think it’s the easy way out to write characters whose interiors are conveniently blank to them. It’s the sign, often — although not always — of a writer who isn’t really that interested in people, just in writing something sort of slick or weird.

Some reviews of the book have said that you have too many expository sections on scientific concepts. What do you think of that criticism, and the use of factual exposition in fiction? For example, Moby Dick’s very long sections on whaling; some think this is an integral part of Melville’s genius, while others pass out before they can get to the next chapter.

Please continue to refer to my novel in the context of canonical books of world literature; that would be very pleasing! Well, math, science – too much of it – I have to say those reactions have surprised me. I actually think those are fairly lazy readers who say that. I think the book is really, in fact, a little thin in those fields, especially for a novel whose main characters are almost exclusively involved in some scientific endeavor or other. I suppose a lot of people, and literary types especially, freak out when they get offered scientific material generally, almost as though they’re offended that such material should show up in the middle of a story. (Think of how many people sort of gleefully admit, Oh, I’m terrible at math! as though it were some proof of their human excellence.) In the book I do try to attach all the science to narrative, and I think I succeed, so rather than being asides they’re a critical part of what people are doing and why. But even Moby Dick’s scientific excursions aren’t that lengthy (although they do get fatiguing after about chapter 100), and certainly nothing compared to, say, the essays on history and the Great Man Theory, for example, which you find in something like War and Peace.

I guess it’s a question of story vs. exposition, and each person has their preferences/limits. I like when I get the sense of exposition shaped to mirror the way a character thinks or is a mirror of the character’s perception. Somehow Moby Dick accomplishes this objective (though it still bores me). But it seems that this is a pre- vs. post-modern battle between the idea of what objectivity is in fiction, that is, DOES objectivity exist in fiction/existence, or is the shaping/presenting of information inherently have a dose of the subjective because a person/subject is relating that information. Like, if you asked all the characters in Percival who are astronomers to give the same information, it would mirror who they were somewhat, and weigh different elements of that information differently. Or not?

This relates to a discussion of “setting,” too, especially to that dumb old line, “The setting acts like another character!” Well, it doesn’t, ever, although somewhere along the line somebody thought that was a clever thing to say, and it ends up being repeated a lot. What people really mean is, “The setting is being experienced by a particular character or narrative voice and so matters and isn’t just scenery.” Information is a kind of setting.

What are you working on now, and how has the experience of writing Percival influenced this new project?

Image Credit: Flickr

I am, as usual, working on a few things at once. I won’t be teaching again until September, so I have more desk time than I usually do — so I can both crank out pages and explore side avenues that intrigue me. I used to worry I’d run out of things to write about. The more I write, the more I realize that’ll never happen. At the moment I can imagine about a dozen books that should exist somewhere but don’t, for some reason. It’s incredible that any book should still need to be written, after so many centuries of people going about this business! As to writing now, after finishing Percival’s Planet — having completed a long, demanding book is a pleasure, sure. I’m happy it’s over. I’m proud of it, in parts. Naturally it’s the things I’m dissatisfied with about that novel that stick with me: all its inadequacies, clumsinesses, overstatements, underfillings, overelaborations, etc. At the same time, once a book is in print, it largely unfastens from my writerly self. The finished thing becomes very quickly alien to me. Techniques, habits, small technical accomplishments, all can be carried forward into the next project, but very little feeling for the form, content, or purpose of the work itself remains with me. The current work is the only work I really care about, because — since it’s neither finished nor public – it can still, in some imaginary world, be perfected.

First, the personal effect on the author herself: in The Economist’s Intelligent Life, Mantel describes her experience winning the Man Booker Prize.

Some nine months on, I can report that the Man Booker has done me nothing but good. Because I am in the middle of a project—my next book is the sequel to the prize-winner—it has not destabilised me, just delayed me. The delay is worthwhile, because the prize has helped me find publishers in 30 countries. It has made my sales soar and hugely boosted my royalties. In doing these things it has cut me free. For the next few years at least, I can write what I like, just as I could before I was ever in print. I wrote for 12 years before I published anything, and in those years I felt a recklessness, a hungry desire, a gnawing expectation, that I lost when I became a jobbing professional who would tap you out a quick 800 words, to a deadline, on almost anything you liked. It is hard to make a good income from fiction alone, but now perhaps I can do it. I haven’t lived in a glamorous whirl since I won the prize. I could have taken up any number of invitations to festivals abroad, but only if I ditched the commitments at home that were already in my diary. I am, anyway, a bit world-weary and more than a bit ill, and intensely interested in the next thing I will write. Even when you are taking your bow, lapping up applause, you do know this brute fact: that you are only as good as your next sentence.

And then there’s the effect on the world at large. The Intelligent Life blog comments on the “Wolf Hall Effect”:

As well as capturing an enormous public with a seemingly insatiable appetite for Tudor history (“Booker prize is won by Henry VIII”, ran one headline), “Wolf Hall” has changed the image of historical fiction, making it, according to Paul Lay, editor of History Today, “finally respectable”. [...]

Not everyone welcomes this change in the weather. Antony Beevor, the historian and bestselling author of “Stalingrad”, says he cannot comment specifically on “Wolf Hall”, because he has not read it and has no desire to. But he deplores what he calls “histo-tainment” and “faction-creep”, and considers “completely corrupting” the tendency of a Wikipedia age to shape the truth to its own ends, and to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. He has no problem with the roman à clef—he admires Justin Cartwright’s “The Song Before it is Sung”, which explores the friendship between Adam von Trott and Isaiah Berlin, under fictional names—but a novel which uses the names of real historical figures is, he believes, dangerous. “And the better the novel, the more dangerous it is,” he says, “because readers are more likely to think it’s true. It’s like looking at a very skilfully restored ancient vase: you just can’t tell what’s original any more.”

Is there such a thing as the “Wolf Hall Effect”—for better or for worse? With half of the shortlisted novels based in history, however loosely, we’ll have to wait and see what effect the 2010 winner will have.

Soli has created an epic war novel, with an ambitious scope that spans years, characters, and countries. Her book belongs in the upper eschelon of the Vietnam canon. Here, Vietnam is more than a war. We see urbanites and expats in Saigon, farmers and fishermen in small villages, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, journalists with a range of motives, as well as protesters and grieving parents in the States.

With a strong woman behind the lens and under fire, Soli bridges the gap between the soldiers in the field and the observers around the dining room table. The book is at once a tremendous document of a historical era and a timeless story of love and aspiration. The Lotus Eaters isn’t just about how we fight wars; it’s about how we live with them, how we watch them, and how we turn them into history.

From the author’s website: Tatjana Soli is a novelist and short story writer. Born in Salzburg, Austria, she attended Stanford University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Her stories have appeared in The Sun, StoryQuarterly, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Third Coast, Carolina Quarterly, and North Dakota Quarterly among other publications. Her work has been twice listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize, the Dana Award, finalist for the Bellwether Prize, and received scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives with her husband in Orange County, California, and teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.

Interview:

At the risk of sounding obvious: Why Vietnam? What is it about that war that captured your imagination?

My mother worked as an interpreter for NATO in Italy in the late sixties. From there, we moved to Fort Ord in Monterey, CA. As a young girl, living on a military base, I was surrounded by this frightening thing that was happening. My friends’ fathers would be shipped off, and there would be tears. Sometimes a car would pull up to a house, and I remember the dread on all the faces around me. A few days later the family would disappear. So the war in its mysteriousness haunted me from an early age, and when I grew up, I read every account I could, trying to come to some conclusion about what happened.

Why do you think that episode in our history continues to fascinate us and demand reinterpretation?

Marine Crossfire by Eddie Adams

Well, there are still plenty of novels being written about WWII. But Vietnam is unique in that it made people distrust their own government, totally reject the establishment. People became cynical and disillusioned by the lies they were fed about the necessity of the war, about the sacrifices being made, but there was also this great power in knowing the truth, in agitating for change. The access photojournalists had in that war was one of the reasons the truth came out. That freedom, by the way, no longer exists. I see many parallels to the situation today in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is an apathy on the part of the public compared to the 60’s and 70’s.

As far as reinterpretation, the seminal works about Vietnam for me are Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, and Michael Herr’s Dispatches. All focus on the disconnect between the official line our government gave us and the reality those on the ground faced. Those writers moved past the obvious “war is hell” theme. For me, the reinterpretation came with introducing the particularities of place into the war. War doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it occurs in someone’s birthplace, it destroys their home, their family.

I’m really glad you mentioned the “lies about the necessity of war.” One of the things that I find most interesting about The Lotus Eaters is Helen’s agency—the fact that she chooses to go and to stay and to go again. So much of our mythology of Vietnam (and other wars) is wrapped up in the draft—young Americans who have no choice. In your novel, many of the characters are opportunists who choose go there to advance their careers. In fact, the only characters that truly have no choice in the matter are the Vietnamese. Were you trying to show that a sort of adventure/glory-seeking is a part of war? That there is always a choice, on somebody’s part?

War photographer James Natchwey

Journalists are a special case, and one of the reasons that writing the book fascinated me. They go of their own volition; they put their life on the line on a daily basis. And the reasons are as complex and varied as the individuals. The biggest reason I came across, again and again, both in Vietnam and in more recent conflicts, is this desire to be there to record history in the making. The adventure/glory of getting the image, the story, that comes to define an event. It’s almost become a truism that without the recording of an event, it disappears. Margaret Moth said that in her opinion it was the best job in the world. But there is a price to be paid: the danger physically, the burnout mentally. You have to make that part of your choice. And if you go back knowing the risks, is that addiction to danger, or acknowledging that the risk is worth the greater good of knowledge? I’m immensely grateful to the men and women who take these risks, who bring us back these stories that perhaps wouldn’t get told otherwise.

Could you talk about your research process for this novel? It feels incredibly well-informed. Was there a historical Helen Adams? Were any other characters based on real people?

In retrospect, I would say that ignorance is bliss. Not only did I have to figure out how to write my first novel, but then I had to write about a time and culture that required extensive research, and then because this is well-known territory, I had to be accurate for people who had actually experienced the war, but still make it my own.

Dickey Chapelle

I spent almost a year gathering facts, tidbits, ideas, pictures, music. I filled notebooks and notebooks, wrote a first draft that was fairly dry. And then I kind of let it all go, allowed myself to remember the research that stuck with me, forget the rest, so that it became more organic to the story. I went back to telling a story, creating characters, and that changed much of the plot, did away with lots of hard-won research. Painful, but necessary. Research has to be in service of the story, and not vice-versa.

Catherine Leroy

There were a handful of female photojournalists in Vietnam. The ones that particularly intrigued me were Dickey Chapelle and Catherine Leroy. But I took my character farther in terms of being consumed by the war, consumed by the country, the complexities of combat photojournalism. There was a real Vietnamese spy, Pham Xuan An, who worked undercover for Time magazine that I used for part of the story of Linh. But these “facts” are peripheral to the main thrust of the story.

I have received many letters from people who served in Vietnam, both in civilian capacity and military, who said that the book brought the time back to them. I’m incredibly proud of those letters. But I’ve also received letters from people who had fathers, uncles, husbands, etc. who served, and they said that the book helped them understand what those loved ones went through.

Did you travel to Vietnam (and/or Cambodia) in the course of writing this book?

I traveled in Asia briefly with my husband years before I thought of writing the book. Once I was deep into the research, I planned a trip to Vietnam that had to be cancelled due to a family emergency. But then a strange thing happened once I had the first draft down—I had this particular place so strong in my head, it was literally feeding the story. I was afraid that if I went to Vietnam that the difference between what was in my imagination and what I found in contemporary Vietnam would break the dream of the story for me. Going back to your research question, I found the right detail set off a chain of events; that was its value rather than strictly providing verisimilitude for the book. I liken it to the movie Apocalypse Now. That is a fever dream of Vietnam, Coppola’s dream of Vietnam. You aren’t going to find that place on a tour. The Saigon of the book is one made from my characters: Helen, Linh, and Darrow. I’m happy beyond belief when I have people tell me that they were there, and the book brings the time back to them, but the setting is foremost an organic thing intertwined with the characters. I’m planning on finally taking the trip this winter. I think it will be an amazing experience.

This must’ve been a very daunting project to undertake. Did you find it intimidating to write about a subject that (a) had been tackled by so many literary heavyweights, and that (b) many of your readers might have experienced firsthand?

I did find it intimidating. But I really believe that if the story is important to you as a writer, you will find a way to make it your own. I don’t think you can cynically choose a subject because it is topical and hope to pull it off. It has to come from inside, be a passion. Actually, I had the opposite problem with Vietnam. Both agents and editors told me it was a small, niche market, dominated exclusively by military books for a male audience. But that was precisely the reason I thought there was room for a bigger, more inclusive story, that I could tell.

I think readers who actually were there firsthand accept the book because of whatever story truth I was able to convey, which is different than fact truth. Although I tried to be faithful to the general facts, this is not a non-fiction book. The primary focus here is on the effect of the war on characters, who are entirely fictional.

Speaking of characters, I was hoping we could talk a little about Linh—who I found to be remarkable. I guess what fascinates me is how much he defies any sort of easy categorization—in terms of his role, his allegiances, etc. What was the origin of this character? What can he tell us about the Vietnam War and other, subsequent conflicts?

Little Saigon via heatkernel

Linh was really central to why I wanted to write the book. It seemed obvious that in a war that dragged on for over a decade, there would be much contact between the cultures, especially off-duty in Saigon, and yet I found very few accounts of a Vietnamese point-of-view. Linh by no means stands for every Vietnamese, in fact his situation is so complex he ends up a very isolated character, and yet he is the heart of the book. Before and during the novel, I had written a lot of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants in California, and he was the natural starting point for that story. In the early drafts, it was simply about his trying to survive the war, but in the way of a novelist complicating the lives of her characters, one day Mr. Bao showed up. People, including his own, assign Linh roles that have nothing to do with who he is inside. Historically, there was a famous Vietnamese spy, Pham Xuan An, who worked as a reporter for Time, and who the Americans were shocked to learn was a spy after the war was over, but Linh’s situation is both less sensational and more complicated than that one.

The one common thread in most accounts of vets returning to Vietnam is how accepting the Vietnamese people are. There is very little hostility over the war. And the vets often find healing by exchanging stories with their military counterparts, realizing that under all the slurs, the stereotyping, these people are essentially the same as they are. What was amazing about the access that journalists had in Vietnam is how it did at least show us to some extent the civilian toll. From what I’ve been able to read from various journalists in today’s wars, that freedom no longer exists in the same way. I worry that we are not getting the equivalent of Linh’s story in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Could you tell me about the title of The Lotus Eaters? That’s from Homer, is it not?

The title does come from The Odyssey:

Those who ate the honeyed fruit of the plant lost any wish to come back and bring us news. All they now wanted was to stay where they were with the Lotus-eaters, to browse on the lotus, and to forget all thoughts of return.

17th c. etching Lotus Eaters

For me it was a metaphor for what the war does to all the characters. They literally lose themselves inside of it. You go to war with all these plans and goals, and you end up not caring about any of it. Just like the soldiers, many of the journalists could not imagine going back to “normal” life. It’s much more complicated than a simple addiction to danger, an addiction to the adrenaline of war. For Helen in particular, it’s a stripping away of naïveté, of innocence. How can you go home when you’ve become a different person? When you no longer fit?

To take things in a bit of a craft direction, I wanted to go back to what you said earlier about the emphasis on character as opposed to fact. What would you say is the novel’s role, in a world where narrative nonfiction—and unreliable journalism—are so prevalent? Do you have any advice for writers who struggle to incorporate history (or current events) into their work?

books via austinevans

I don’t mean to mislead — I absolutely think that the burden is on the writer to be as historically correct as possible. But that is just the baseline, the beginning, if you will. Then storytelling goes on top of that, and the storytelling has to be just as compelling and character-driven as a fiction that didn’t require research. No one wants to read your research—they are looking for story. That’s why they are reading a novel, to be immersed in time and place and character. The temptation as a writer is to include these inert sections of facts simply because you’ve gathered them. Just guessing, I’d say I used less than five percent of the material that I had available to me. Inefficient, yes, but also necessary for my process. You don’t know what you are looking for until you find it.

Speaking of research, your descriptions of photography are very well-informed and convincing. Was this another area of research for you? Have you worked as a photojournalist or photographer?

via Dan Newton

I did do research on basic photography, and, especially, tried to convey the hardships these photographers worked under. Film got destroyed all the time – whether under the conditions out in the field, or back in the less than optimal darkrooms. Often film was sent out on planes to avoid censorship. Sometimes it wouldn’t make it through. So the medium almost became a metaphor itself. And what is really fascinating is that this is all historical research now. With digital photography, a picture can be sent around the world in seconds. An amazing change. Although apparently the desert conditions of Iraq and Afghanistan wreak havoc with computer equipment.

You mentioned that you wrote several short stories about Vietnam before writing The Lotus Eaters. Do you feel a sense of closure on this subject? Will you write about Vietnam again?

That’s funny that you ask that because until recently I would have answered that I had finished with the war. But a new non-fiction book came out that I had missed, and I started reading it and immediately I plunged back into that time. It felt like home.

I wrote many stories about the Vietnamese immigrants as I gathered my research for the war. I had so many ideas that the original book started splitting in two different directions, which my editor wisely convinced me to delete. But I still have those hundred pages in my files. I would love to develop that story some day. Right now I’m finishing up my second novel set in contemporary California, but at some point in the future I’ll definitely go back to Vietnam.

Can you tell me a bit about the new novel?

Well, I had bitten off so much with the first book, so intense in research in so many different areas, that I wanted a completely different challenge as a writer this time. I’m superstitious about saying too much, but it is set on an isolated citrus ranch in Southern California. Although it is an entirely different kind of book, I think some of the same themes are there: issues of race, dislocation, healing. It’s providing the right kind of stretch for me as a writer in terms of content and craft. I’m very engaged with the story, which I kind of doubted after the obsession of writing the first book. The great gift of writing a second novel is that even when things feel hopeless, you know you’ve gotten through it one time before.

Do you have any advice for aspiring fiction writers and novelists?

Hemingway at work via LIFE

Well, I’m not the most practical writer so I’m not sure how useful my advice is. But I think most writers are idealistic, otherwise why be in such a problematic business? I really wrote the book I wanted to write, regardless of its marketability. It was a hard sell, but I was lucky to have a great team at St. Martin’s who really advocated for the book. So I’d say risk it, write what’s in your heart. Write with the big picture in mind. I’m proud that this was my first book AND my first published book. The realities of the marketplace, of the publishing world, are so complicated that there is no controlling that part of the equation. But you the writer can write the best book you are capable of. That’s the only thing in your control.

I definitely understand the temptation to chase trends, to write something with an eye to an audience, but ultimately, I don’t think that it will fulfill you over a whole career. A short story writer who I interviewed for an article on the writer career track works as a doctor, and his belief is that you’ve got to have a career that financially sustains you other than writing. If you give up that dream, you are free to write what you want and not worry about your bank account. He also makes the point that having a life away from the computer is a good thing. By necessity, most of us have that, but I think rather than resent these intrusions into our writing time, which I know I did, look at that time as making you the kind of person who has something to say when you get to the keyboard.

Further Resources:

• Tatjana Soli will appear at the Carmel Public Library on Saturday September 7, and as part of “Between the Pages” at Town Hall in Seattle on September 16. For full details of those events and 7 more appearances on the West Coast visit her website.
• Read Soli’s essay for Three Guys One Book, titled “Loneliness, Love and Hemingway,” about the influence of The Sun Also Rises on her as a reader and writer.
• Listen to Soli discuss The Lotus Eaters and some of the history behind it, including archival footage of the Vietnam War, in this video:

Margaret Lazarus Dean: photo credit Joe Vaughn

Margaret Lazarus Dean’s The Time It Takes to Fall takes place in the early 80’s in Cape Canaveral, a space town, during a time when NASA and shuttle launches were still a part of the American story of success.  The main character of the novel, Dolores Gray, is an exceptionally bright student who is determined to be an astronaut when she grows up.  Dolores’s father works as a technician for NASA, and he takes Dolores to every shuttle launch, the details of which Dolores then meticulously records in her space journal, her scrapbook of all things NASA.

Dolores has also recently found herself befriended by Eric Biersdoffer, the son of NASA’s Director of Launch Safety, the smartest, but also most unpopular boy in school.   Dolores’ struggle between her desire for popularity and her secret love of math and science make life difficult for her.  However, her life becomes even more trying when her father’s job at NASA is threatened along with her parent’s marriage.  Then, when the Challenger explosion occurs on the morning of January 28, 1986, a launch that had been highly anticipated as it was the first launch ever to include a teacher in its crew, her world turns completely upside down. And Dolores not only makes it her goal to figure out what went wrong on the launch, but also hopes that by doing so she can both save her father’s job and bring her family back together again.  Seeking out difficult answers to difficult questions becomes part of the process of growing up for Dolores, whose loss of innocence mirrors America’s loss of faith in space travel.

Since meeting Margaret ten years ago at the University of Michigan, where she received her MFA in 2001 and subsequently taught writing before accepting her current position at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, I have been impressed by how much she has lived inside this project.  From her intense knowledge of NASA trivia to her set of NASA drinking glasses to her astronaut kitchen magnets, she has immersed herself in this world.  She even enrolled willingly in a physics class for the summer so that she could do the space math needed in this novel.  But this book goes beyond the NASA facts to make a universe full of memorable places and characters that deeply move me, and I wanted to hear more about what went into creating characters against the backdrop of such a tragic historical event.

Interview:

I’ll start off with the most obvious questions. Why NASA?  Why the Challenger?  And why NASA and the Challenger now?

Challenger Explosion: January 28, 1986

I’ll take the second question first: the idea of writing about Challenger was the impetus for the book from the beginning. I remember seeing that disaster and thinking, this is the worst thing that has ever happened—and it was, for people in my generation, the worst thing we had ever witnessed. This was a disaster that affected children more than it did adults, because we (children) were sold on the excitement of having a schoolteacher on board. Within a few weeks, adults seemed to have adopted the attitude that this was very sad, but it was the price of progress, yet children were still walking around with this look of betrayal in their eyes. We had been told that spaceflight was so safe they could send up a schoolteacher, and then they blew it up, with the schoolteacher on it, while we were watching live. We did not bounce back as quickly.

I’d been interested in NASA and spaceflight since I was a little kid, largely due to the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. My father took my brother and me there on visitation weekends starting when I was seven, so I’ve been there approximately one million times. Visiting this museum a lot as a kid was really a great education—I have a lot of images and impressions in my head, knowledge acquired in a disorganized way, which I think is good for fiction. I can close my eyes and picture the lunar modules that put the astronauts down on the moon, or the spacesuits, or the little packets of food they ate. Of course, all this was before the shuttle program got going, so in a weird way I was more familiar with Apollo-era spaceflight, which took place before I was born, than I was with the space shuttle era, which didn’t start until I was nine.

But I think it was useful to see and believe in spaceflight in this way, through artifacts rather than through books or learning it at school. The idea that these were things designed by people, that it was people who went to space, is crucial to the way I think about NASA, and is strangely missing from the way a lot of people think about spaceflight. I don’t think you can believe in a lunar hoax conspiracy theory, for instance, if you are really aware of the huge number of people who worked on each of these missions.The idea that they weren’t actually doing what they were purported to have been doing, that they would all keep this dark secret, is ludicrous. You can only believe that if you picture NASA as this faceless, inhuman entity. And I think that human quality is crucial to the way I portrayed NASA in the book—the rockets were assembled by people, and one of those people was Dolores’s father.

Why NASA and Challenger now? I didn’t intend it to be particularly timely; early in my attempts to write something good, I seized on this material and my own memories of what happened, and the more I learned about the disaster the more convinced I was that I wanted to write about it.  I did experience some doubt in September 2001, when a disaster of completely different proportions occurred. I wondered whether readers might ever again be stirred to care about a disaster that had killed only seven people—all of them people who had accepted the risk of this inherently dangerous undertaking. As a tragedy, it pales in comparison to 3000 normal people dying in office buildings and on planes. But I came to believe that writing about a smaller disaster was still worthwhile, because it’s still true that Challenger was the worst thing that had ever happened for kids in our generation, and as such it still bears looking at. I’m also interested in the way that disasters all have certain things in common, the way that literature about disasters has certain common themes, even if the disasters are deeply different, which is why I obsessively read fiction and nonfiction about 9/11, about Katrina, about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, about Columbine.

There is a definite awareness that this is a novel about space, even in the imagery as the opening prologue offers us a birds-eye view of the Florida landscape and by the epilogue that view is so complicated: then we’re clearly looking down through the eyes of the astronauts.  I love this theme of “watching from above” throughout, though it’s eerie to think about.

Thanks, that’s a cool way of reading it. I didn’t think consciously to start with this helicopter shot of central Florida and then moving back up into the sky again at the end, but I guess that has a nice symmetry, accidentally.

Challenger Crew: photo from NASA website

I did assume, for most of the time I was working on the book, that I wouldn’t ever enter the astronauts’ point of view, because that seemed fraught with ethical issues. They are real people, and they are dead and so can’t speak up for themselves if they don’t like what I’ve written. But the more I learned about the disaster, the more I learned about the seven people on the Challenger crew, the more I came to genuinely like them, and that made me more comfortable entering into a scene with them. Plus, the more I learned about what they experienced that day, especially in those minutes after the explosion, the more I thought that scene needed to be part of the book.

I find myself so visually enticed by so many of the elements in the novel, from the mother’s hair to launch-side bleachers to the schoolyard.  I feel like you direct my eye so specifically.  I know fiction should “show” but your way of showing is so vivid and precise—as if images could attach us to a past or place for good.  Did you intend to be so visual?  For example, there’s that scene in the book which I recall as vividly as if I had been there.  The mom is in the backyard refinishing the table because they are having important dinner guests, and she’s quite a sight.  Here a quote from the passage:

. . .her forehead tight, [she] squinted meanly at the table, moving her lips now and then.  She wore yellow rubber gloves up to the elbows and a set of pink pajamas.  Our father had shrunk them in the wash and the sleeves came to just past her elbows, the bottoms strained over her hips.  The top with its lace edging was now streaked with red wood stain in a way that seemed obscene.  Her hair escaped from her ponytail in frizzy black drifts that hung in her eyes and swayed to the rhythm of her work.

That’s a nice thing to say about it, thanks. I didn’t consciously think about the style as being especially visual—I think I wrote this way partly because my own memories of being a child are intensely visual. I remember staring at things until they sort of defamiliarized and took on outsized level of detail, especially in stressful or traumatic situations. So it just made sense to me for Dolores to see things that way too. I also like the way visual descriptions can take on so much emotional and thematic weight without feeling overly weighty.

Recent Shuttle Launch: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

I’m always telling my students to take advantage of the things that literature can do that other art forms, especially film, cannot, and this is one of them: we can inflect descriptions, whereas movies can only show physical objects more or less as they are. I can describe a pack of cigarettes or a space shuttle as my character would see it, as distinct from the way anyone else in the world would see it. And not only that, I can describe it as she would see it on this particular day, at this particular moment in her life. (Incidentally, this is why Lolita can never be made into a film successfully—because Humbert’s descriptions of Lolita are so inflected through his pedophilia and his love for her. You can’t point a camera at a 13-year-old girl and have that produce the same effect as his descriptions, because the camera can never see her the way that he does. That can only be constructed through language.)

How did that impulse toward imagery relate to the Challenger explosion, which was truly a visual icon?  Or how did it feel to write about such an iconic image?

Yeah, I think most people remember the Challenger disaster as a visual image, and for people in our generation, who were kids at the time, it’s sort of burned into our brains. In terms of using it in the book, I think it was actually more difficult to write about an image that everyone already knows so well. I sort of imagined that readers would be anticipating that image as the story approached that point, but also not wanting to be bored by reading a description of something they’re already very familiar with. At the same time, some readers, like my youngest siblings, were not around for that and don’t have that image filed away, so I couldn’t depend on that to be in the reader’s mind either. I think the key I discovered to making it work was the inflection thing I was talking about earlier—to write about that moment in a way that would feel specific to that character’s experience, not just anyone’s.

Early Cover Design

As a side note, an early proposal for the book’s cover included the image of the explosion, and I’m glad that we didn’t wind up going with that. I think that smoke signature should kind of lurk in the imagination rather than sitting on the cover of the book.

The final cover I felt reflected the novel perfectly with the child-like stars.  It reminded me of one of the pages of Dolores’ space notebook.  Did you enjoy writing from a child’s perspective?  What choices did you have to make in choosing that kind of unreliable narrator?

I did enjoy writing from the point of view of a child, because children are so perceptive but are also often overlooked, which makes them great narrators. I wanted Dolores to be unreliable in certain ways, but not in others, which is not as tricky as it might sound. She’s always right on about math, science, and the details of spaceflight, but doesn’t always understand the emotional dynamics around her, especially her parents’. I hope readers will understand that intuitively.

Some readers have been put off by Dolores, by her honesty and imperfections (for instance, that she doesn’t always behave honorably). I think people are used to children being portrayed as very good and innocent, a purer version of adults, and that’s just not the case. I like Dolores and I think she’s a good kid, but her being a child doesn’t mean she isn’t sometimes selfish or mean.

I assigned your novel as part of my first-year writing class and my students really connected to it.  In honor of them I thought I would ask the question that they often asked, the question I used to hate because it seemed too unliterary, but that I learned to love because it showed how connected they felt to the individuals: “Why did the characters do this thing and not the other thing?”  (This was often followed with “They should have or shouldn’t have done that.”) Did you ever imagine different endings for Dolores?

I think it’s an interesting question, because it goes deep to the heart of the craft of fiction. What are the things that we can decide for our characters, and what are the things we have to wait to hear about from them? I think when I write I make a few key decisions about characters early on, and then I feel pretty helpless after that. I started this book with the idea that it would revolve around the Challenger disaster, and that children were more affected by it than adults. So Dolores is thirteen. Then I found a couple of ways to make her more affected by it than most kids would be—her father is laid off from his job at NASA as a result of the disaster, there is some suspicion that he might have been at fault in some way, and her own dream of becoming an astronaut is crushed. Having set these things in motion for her (and having made similar key decisions about other characters) I couldn’t then move her and the other people around like chess pieces. I had to follow them and find out what happened rather than making it up. Which was sometimes very frustrating.

I often hear writers use these expressions about their characters, like “He up and ran off and got into this crazy mischief!” as if our characters are naughty children. And that sometimes sounds kind of cheesy and contrived to me, but I think what I’m saying here is the same thing—once you set them in motion, you’re sort of running after them taking notes, rather than making their decisions for them.

I don’t know what kind of “should have” comments you hear—the one I hear most often is that Dolores shouldn’t have had sex with Josh [an older boy, in a scene that depicts an encounter that is technically statutory rape]. And that makes me try to untangle the way we use “should have”—because I agree that she “shouldn’t have” in the sense that it wasn’t a wise decision, but I insist that she would have, and did, and that it’s to the benefit of the story that she did.

That was definitely one of the “shouldn’t haves.”  What else do you want readers to consider about these characters that you lived with for so long?  Do you want us to forgive them or understand more subtle motives that underlie what we see on the surface?

I like questions about the characters because I came to really like these people, and I sort of miss them, so it’s fun to get to talk about them because it’s like I get to visit with them a bit. I really like the questions like “What ever happened to __?” even though they make no sense. A lot of people ask me if Dolores ever became an astronaut, what happened with Eric Biersdorfer, stuff like that. The questions can’t be answered, but I like the way the questions imply that readers have come to believe in these people beyond what they see on the page, because I do too.

Florida: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

Of all the characters, I think I’m still most interested in Deborah, Dolores’s mother, because she changed the most for me over the years I worked on the book. I had the idea early on that she would be involved in these machinations, only half understood by Dolores, to try to get Frank’s job back, and that made her sort of a cartoonishly conniving figure. I went through a process with Dolores similar to the one many writers do when writing creative non-fiction— the first versions were somewhat exaggerated to show Dolores’s perception of her, but as I got further into the book, I kept wondering, why does this woman seem so one-dimensional? And the answer was: Oh yeah, it’s that I’m not considering any sort of life or even consciousness for her outside of her function in the plot. I had to force myself to take a closer look at her and think about her motivations—why would she behave the way she does? What are the things that make her real, rather than being just a figure in Dolores’s life? What was her childhood like, what does she think about when her husband is at work and her kids are at school? Now that I’m a mother, I’m more aware of the way that mothers often get treated as large appliances, both in literature and in life, and that makes me glad I decided to take some extra time with Deborah to figure her out a bit more.

It’s funny to think of mothers as large appliances!  You did a great job making Deborah very real. Even when she is absent in the novel she seems real.  Do people ever wonder if this novel is autobiographical?

When the book first came out, I reacted pretty snottily to the question, “How much of the book is autobiographical?” (Although that is apparently a lot of people’s favorite question for an author.) I dismissed that as the least interesting way to read fiction—trying to match it up with some “truth”—and I also felt (and still do) that it’s more rudely intrusive than askers seem to realize. These people were essentially asking me, “Did your mother ever cheat on your father to try to help him get his job back? Did you have sex with an adult as a 13-year-old to try to establish your own identity?” To which the answers are: no, and also: wow, none of your business.

But I’ve been forced to be a little less snotty about this recently, because there is one person who I stole from real life for the book, whom I hadn’t seen for more than twenty years, and that person subsequently became my Facebook friend. And when he was like, What have you been up to? Looks like you wrote a book! Maybe I’ll check it out!, I panicked. And I thought: It turns out I’m a huge hypocrite. I won’t tell the whole story here, because I’m working on an essay about it, but it’s interesting to reflect on the way I always just rejected that autobiography question without having to admit that the characters I create, by necessity, are based on what I know of people, and that is based, by necessity, on the people I have known.

Florida: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

One of the things that draws me in again and again to this novel is that it’s a period piece of a period for which I have some fondness: the 80s. The period details aren’t overly blatant or gimmicky at all, but I love when I am reminded that this is America in the 80s. I could even feel in the novel how the characters, and even the houses, cling to the 70s in their sad way while trying to be up-to-date.  Even though this is a disaster novel did you enjoy writing about all that cool 80s stuff like the pop music and the shoes?

I did enjoy that—it’s been weird seeing the 80s come back into fashion again, in a way that I really don’t connect to my own experience of being alive then. It bothers me (and fascinates me) that we’ve chosen to see this era as one huge joke about neon stretch pants and synth pop. I’m not sure why it is that for some eras the music and fashion and cultural obsessions that survive are the most innovative and profound, but for the eighties we’ve chosen to remember it as cheesy and emptily self-important. But I don’t think it’s possible that people are smarter or dumber in certain historical eras (I say this over the objections of those who came of age in the sixties and have enshrined the superiority of that era in what I believe to be a very self-congratulatory way). There must be some sort of national shame about the things that were going on in the eighties for us to be so mocking of that time.

But, yeah, in the book I would often work on chapters for long periods of time without thinking specifically about the era, and then looking at it again I’d feel like I should eighties it up a little bit. But that’s a delicate thing to do—you can’t just hand your character a Rubik’s cube and put white sunglasses on her and call it a day. I had to really try to separate the stereotyped ideas that have developed since then from my actual memories of what people wore and how they talked. At the same time, some clichés are clichés because they are true, and I wanted to be honest about those things as well. Like, I do remember wearing black leggings with a huge T-shirt and boots and thinking the combination was quite fetching.

After the book came out, I was asked to make a playlist of music related to the book and write about it for a music site called Largehearted Boy, which was actually a great opportunity for me to reflect on the music of that time and opine about it a little bit. Some of the songs I wrote about there are songs everyone knows because they’re on the 80s compilations, but some of them aren’t, and it was nice to reflect on mix of music that Dolores might have listened to. It also gave me a chance to try to articulate my love for Prince, which can never truly be articulated.

I know you did a lot of research to get Florida right, but how important was it to get these artifacts right?

Florida: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

Super important. I always sort of imagined a Florida native reading the book and saying, “She’s clearly not from here.” And this was the standard I tried to hold myself to, though it’s sort of an impossible one—to satisfy someone who lived where my characters lived and worked where they worked, for it to feel completely real to them. Place is very important to me, and I felt like a trespasser in many ways writing this book—I kept imagining if someone who grew up in Florida tried to set a book in Minnesota, how I would react to that, and the answer was: probably not kindly. If I could have moved this story to Minnesota, I would have, but unfortunately for me, Cape Canaveral cannot be moved.

So I did a lot of research, and I visited the area twice (and got to see a space shuttle launch), but ultimately, I relied a lot on imagination, and I wish the word “imagination” did not have such childish and unserious associations, because it’s hard work and it should be taken seriously.

Kennedy Space Center: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

I have heard from a number of readers who grew up in that area, including one reader who grew up there in a NASA family, still lives there, and now has a job working on the space shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center himself—so he’s sort of like my nightmare of a reader. He politely pointed out a couple of inaccuracies, but he’s generally a fan of the book and has invited me to visit for an insider tour. So I kind of passed the test.

The idea of “getting it right” seems to be a theme throughout the novel.  And it seems to be deeper than your average need to be respected or fit in as the novel also brings in math, something that can be “gotten right” in a definite way.  What does it mean for these characters to get it right?

I think most of the characters in the book are pretty committed to “getting it right” in the ways that count to them—except for Delia, whom I love for that reason. The dad of course is also interested in “getting things right” at his job and at home: I think he’s meticulous about his work, and never forgets that people will be riding on the rockets he’s working on. He also really tries to be a good father, and I think he is. But he doesn’t have a sense of trying to “get it right” for his own gain, of trying to reach for something beyond what he currently has. Maybe this is another way of saying that Dolores and her mother are ambitious and he is not, and now that we’re talking about it I think this is one of the things some readers find off-putting about Dolores and especially the mother—that they are ambitious and it shows. They try to make things happen for themselves rather than just waiting politely. It’s interesting, because this is a quality I think Americans tend to value and admire a lot, but it can also easily tip in the wrong direction and then we really punish that person for it.

Talk about getting it right—the mall! The characters say that though “they didn’t talk about it” the mall changed the way they live.  You nailed that mall.  The way we didn’t talk about it, but it was so huge.  Even the way there were the strip malls and then there was the mall.  We analyzed the passage about the mall to death in class because I love it so much.  It seems to mirror the novel’s progress.  Please talk about the mall.

The Mall: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

The mall is one of those things that generally gets treated like a joke, a joke about adolescence or a joke about the eighties or both, but it’s an interesting experiment in fiction to try taking things seriously that we are supposed to be flip and mean about. What are we trying to hide by being so flip? What’s in there that makes us uncomfortable that we turn mean?

My own experiences of visiting malls when they first started to appear in the eighties was not at all like Dolores’s—I lived in a suburb of a big city at that time, so we had a lot more options than the Grays did for shopping, eating, and generally getting out of the house, including smaller, seventies-style malls. But I imagine that in small towns like the one where Dolores lived, the introduction of the big mall would really transform their lives, how they spent time as a family, what they ate for dinner. I also remember really acutely the dire importance of having the right clothes at Dolores’s age (twelve and thirteen). Adults are surprisingly condescending about adolescents’ interest in clothes—but that interest is not nearly as much about materialism or status as adults seem to think.  I think it’s more about having the power to construct your own appearance, to look on the outside like the person you want to become. Anyway, the mall is where clothes happen, so I wanted to reflect the importance of that for Dolores too.

I had a note in my notebook for a long time to return to the same mall years later, in the nineties or early 00s, when it’s grubby and dated and maybe even a little dangerous. But there was never a cause to jump that far forward in time.

Speaking of jumping forward, what about your future work?  Does your next novel take on any other disaster themes?

Why yes, it does! The novel I’m working on now takes place in the late nineties and early 00s, and it has to do with the year 2000 disaster, which many people prepared for but never happened, and 9/11, which no one was prepared for and did happen. I’m interested in the contrast between those two and how they have shaped our thinking about disaster in our era.

Kennedy Space Center: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

For Further Reading:

If you’re interested in good fiction that deals with disaster, Margaret recommends the following: Haruki Murakami’s novel After the Quake (earthquake in Kobe, Japan); Lorrie Moore’s novel A Gate at the Stairs and Martin Amis’s story “The Last Days of Mohammed Atta” (terrorist attacks of 2001); Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto (Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Lima, Peru), and Katharine Weber’s novel Triangle (Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire).

For more on The Time It Takes to Fall, here is a 2007 review from Blookslut. You can also visit the author’s homepage for more links to reviews. Or follow the author on The Time It Takes to Blog.

Also be sure to read Margaret’s wonderful interview with famed blogger Mimi Smartypants, which FWR published last August. Here is as excerpt from the introduction to their conversation:

Readers are constantly being reminded that the act of reading is dying out, with “reading” being defined as “reading books published in the traditional manner.” And one of the forces cited as driving us away from the endangered Book, of course, is the Internet. But I always wonder: what does it mean that time spent on the Internet is largely time spent—well—reading? Like many writers, I do a lot of my reading on the Internet as well as in published books, and one of my favorite writers right now is a Chicago woman we know only as Mimi Smartypants. She has been writing an online diary since 1999, and in over 1000 posts she has detailed her everyday life, sharing with the world (anonymously) anecdotes about public transportation, meditations on the workings of her own psyche, and accounts of the joys and frustrations of raising her daughter, Nora, now a kindergartner.