When I read Peter Neofotis’s Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Eleven Stories, I was back in my grandfather’s kitchen. The yarn-like stories that make up this debut collection recount the life of an imagined town in northern Virginia. Unlike a traditional collection, Neofotis chooses an oral storytelling method to structure these stories, utilizing the conceit that the narrator is not just the vehicle through which we are relayed the narrative but an actual character himself, one who sits down beside us to spool out poignant stories, juicy pieces of gossip, and far-fetched legends from his small town.

Neofotis during a performance / photo from the author's website

The process of the book’s creation also sets it apart from traditional collections. One night in March 2006, Peter Neofotis recited one of his short stories from memory at Greenwich Village’s Cornelia Street Café. Afterward, café management asked him to create a one-man show. The stories he developed for that production are the very ones that have been gathered here in Concord, Virginia. And they live on not only in this collection, but also in the fact that he performs this show at various venues around the country, most recently at the Theater of the American South in Wilson, North Carolina. It also continues to be regularly featured at New York City’s Dixon Place Theater, where he still performs from memory.

Performed is an important verb here. On his website, Neofotis is pictured on stage with an old fashioned typewriter in his lap, wearing a beige suit that brings to mind costumes from The Great Gatsby. And when one reads the stories in Concord, Virginia, one cannot help imagining how the stories must sound out loud, told in character, the narrator made tangible. The tone and voice behind many of the stories is one of a storyteller rather than a writer.

For example, in “The Heiress,” the story of the town’s favored daughter, Betty Joe, who is the unfortunate progeny of a cruel and unfeeling tyrant of a father, the narrator describes her first time competing at a horse show as follows:  “Well, you wouldn’t have thought that girl was an underdog when she showed up for the first event. Betty Joe had her long dirty-blond hair pulled back in a tight French braid and had polished every buckle and stirrup so well, light two-stepped off them.” Perhaps it is the use of colloquial language, or the closeness generated by the way the narrator refers to Betty Joe as “that girl,” but it is clear we are not receiving the story from a distant writer at a computer. Rather, it comes from a friend, someone who has watched Betty Joe grow up, a citizen of the town who has taken us in to tell us a story.

Enhancing that storyteller’s style is the content of the stories. They have much in common with traditional rural, Southern fiction, calling to mind classics from Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, but because of the storyteller mode, there is a tendency towards hyperbole. What makes a yarn a yarn rather than just a good story? A smile playing at the lips of the teller? Exaggeration? Perhaps a don’t-blame-me-I’m-just-telling-you-what-I-heard attitude? Yes. These are all present in Neofotis’s style. Yet despite containing outrageous content, many of these tales take a realist approach: the opening story, “The Vultures,” tells the story of a hunter who accidentally kills his wife on a hunting trip, swears off guns, and then comes home one day to find his yard inexplicably full of vultures; in “The Heiress,” Betty Joe’s no-good father attempts to cheat her out of her inheritance, so she decides to kill him, and with the help of some of the townspeople, gets the case closed as accidental death. None of these tales exceed the bounds of reality; they are firmly set in the real world, one confined by space and time, however exaggerated they seem.

Other stories, however, dwell in memory and mystery. “The Stone Carver,” for instance, is a haunting story of the town artist, Jethro O’Pitcans, who fell down a mine shaft as a child and hit his head, rendering him unconscious and lost for two days. After, he swears he saw the Virgin Mary. In the present narrative of this story, black snakes have infested the town, and deep in the mineshaft where he works, Jethro uncovers a fossilized pterosaur, wings spread so as to look like a crucified figure. Neofotis balances the fantastical elements of this story with running commentary from Rachel, the town journalist, who attempts to set the whole affair down as fact. When Jethro asks her to come into the mineshaft with him, the narration stays close, explaining in beautiful imagistic prose the things Jethro knows and sees. Neofotis writes:

The Virgin Mary appeared, with serpents in her hair. She embraced him. He felt her mane slithering against his lips, earlobes, and jaw. And he knew that at the Place of the Skull, she had wanted to answer her son’s question. She also wished that she could have jumped, flown up to the cross, and ripped out the nails in his arms and feet. Then, with her son on her back, she could have soared away from Jerusalem, God, time, and written culture—to where no salmon-pink stone building society existed. Jesus did not have to be a revolutionary, just as Jethro did not have to be considered a fool. He could just have been her son, she his ma, and they could have lived by the sea in the giant fern, cycad, or coniferous trees. A landscape without grass, seeds, or fruits—just green.

While Jethro is in the throes of his vision, Rachel snaps pictures of him and the statue. Rachel is the one who drags him out of the shaft after he gives up, after he gives himself over to the place where he almost died once before, and where he seems bound to die again.

Jethro’s visions and religious babbling, his prayers, his surrender—“Without a psalm, I no longer live,” he says—make the character seem insane, or, at least for that moment, insensible. When read with a storyteller’s style, however, Jethro holds rhetorical power. He has the attention of the audience, and he’s not merely a madman but one of the townspeople. He has narrative authority. The oral storytelling style utilizes that authority, that rhetorical power, to play out what might otherwise be a crazy man’s magical story of religious visions. Though we get this story not from a live performance but from the page, we understand that the theatrical element is firmly in place. The rise and fall of his voice, the panic, the despair, the surrender, all play out in real time. Jethro is fantastical, Rachel is objective. Magic and realism are merely a matter of perspective.

Neofotis Performing / photos from The Cornelia Street Cafe

As with most things, in this book’s strength also lies its weakness. The very tone and voice that create the storyteller effect in the book can also, at times, be problematic. Specifically, the lack of continuity that is created by the stylistic decision to opt for a disembodied, “true” narrator for some stories, while choosing an anonymous-yet-present narrator who belongs to and speaks for the town in others. For instance, until I reached the fourth story in the collection, I was under the impression that the narrator was a separate omniscient presence, uncharacterized and uninvolved with the story—merely the vessel. However, when I reached “The Heiress,” the narrator became characterized, and considerably more intimate with the characters and the story at hand. Several others in this collection operate in the same vein of narration, most notably “The Flag Bearer” and “The Abandoned Church.” Most of the rest of the stories, meanwhile, maintain that separate narrative presence that the book began with, leaving the reader to decipher when they are in the hands of a town citizen or an uncharacterized, true narrator.

When we imagine the stories as being performed, the narration can be easily adapted to the performer, much like roles being bestowed upon actors in a play. Even when the narrator is a citizen of the town, we can see the person right in front of us, in costume, and we know they belong, they have authority, and we forgive any inconsistencies that take place. For instance, at the end of “The Heiress,” when Betty Joe shoots her father, the narrator (who we have heretofore taken as a citizen of the town—“our town,” as he/she puts it—but someone who is not present at the scene of the crime, and thereby has a limited perspective) describes the moment with omniscience:

[Betty Joe] took careful aim and fired—hitting her father in the top part of his backbone, right below the neck. The minié ball crashed through the upper regions of his heart, causing him to stumble into the bramble of a wineberry bush. The bullet burst out of his sternum just at the place where the rusty juniper trees begin, and at just that moment, Mrs. MacJenkins and the rest of the Concord Bridge Club sat smiling over their fresh iced tea.

When read with a performance in mind, the irregularity of a shifting point of view can be forgiven. The folksy tone of the story and the sympathy the reader has for Betty Joe may make a reader shrug and let the error go. After all, we know by virtue of the book’s creation process that the story was originally performed by the author in costume. The delight of the performance and the singular nature of the book’s creation trumps these minor contradictions. However, in the face of more uncomfortable material, such as the use of racist language, these errors in point of view affect more than just the suspension of disbelief.

Because these stories are set before and during the Civil Rights Movement, it would be dishonest as an author and naïve as a reader to pretend that characters in a rural northern Virginia town would completely abstain from racial slurs. Characters in the stories are bound to, and do, exhibit racist and homophobic sentiments. When these sentiments occur in dialogue, that is one thing—we can attribute them to that character and put it down to his/her particular characterization. But when they are channeled through the retrospective narrator, who is our present-day guide through these tales, the storyteller’s style complicates our ability to distinguish between the author and the narrator. Or, more specifically, the point of view issues created by this technique make it unclear at certain moments how the author wants us to see and judge the narrator.

“The Flag Bearer,” for instance, is the story of the town’s loyalty to a woman, Violet Graves, whose son died of brain tumors that he acquired after his tour in Vietnam. The present action of the story is an annual barbecue on July 4th at Violet’s house, and leads up to the traditional moment when she burns an American flag while the whole town salutes her.

The story opens with an explanation of the setting—where and when, what people are eating, etc. The narrator uses the second person plural pronoun “we”: “And out in that yard, we eat kale, black-eyed peas, and whatever else old Violet Graves has cooked up. In jovial fashion, we ask each other how the summer is going.” The narrator, then, is part of this scene, a visitor at Violet’s house, familiar enough with Violet to call her “old Violet Graves.”

When the narrator switches gears into backstory, he/she continues with the collective pronoun usage: “Since the only savings of many folks in Concord were chests full of Confederate currency (which we are still hoping will be recognized someday!) Eli and Mildred were able to buy up most everything around here.” In the next paragraph, the narrator explains the story of how Eli and Mildred raised a black servant’s baby, Violet, who would grow up to be the same Violet Graves of the present action, educating her and training her to help with Eli’s business. The town’s reaction is explained thusly: “Despite our initial apprehension about a learned charcoal, Violet proved not only to be sharp mentally but also smooth socially” [emphasis mine].

Now, my guess is that Neofotis has no intention of asking us to laugh along with this sort of racist remark. Nor does he probably want us to merely ‘tut-tut’ at the narrow-mindedness of a previous generation, only to let them off the hook because of age. The appropriate response here is shame and outrage—both that this type of thinking ever occurred, and that it still persists in parts of the country. Yet without the clear-cut boundaries established by point of view, it’s difficult to understand how the author has positioned the narrator. And, in turn, how we should trust him.

Frederick Reiken / Photo from Emerson College faculty page

In his article “The Author-Narrator-Character Merge: Why Many First-time Novelists Wind up with Flat, Uninteresting Protagonists,” Reiken points to several reasons why this merge can occur. But the one that seems most apt with regards to this situation he calls the “so-called ‘fallacy of imitative form’ or imitative fallacy,” which happens because of “an unintentional, unconscious merging of narrator and character.” He continues, saying:

Because there is never any distance between narrator and character, there is no apparatus for translating and contextualizing the character’s thoughts, visions, and actions (if there are any). As a result of this lack of separation, a boring character begets a boring narrative, and hence a boring story. Likewise, a disoriented character begets a disoriented story…One very common and often uncomfortable workshop situation pertaining to the imitative fallacy is that in which a sexist character begets a sexist story, and in which the author is held, and rightly so, accountable for the sexism. In contrast, a successful ANC separation would make possible the objective presentation of a sexist character, with no sense that the author is complicit, or is asking us for our complicity in, the sexism. This is true, for instance, of the book Lolita, in which the soundness of ANC separation becomes particularly apparent when unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert reaches the point at which he fails to understand that he has lost the sympathy of his reader. Like Holden [Caufield], Humbert is quite clear on the logic of his own story, but we as readers—as a result of author Vladimir Nabokov’s objectivity—come to understand Humbert as the well-mannered pedophile and monster that he is. The book itself, as structured in author Nabokov’s mind as well as on the page, never asks us for our approval or empathic participation in the pedophilia, which is why the novel never once devolves into pornography.

Neofotis’s stories are voice-based. The storytelling style depends on colloquialism, accent, affectations of rural Southern dialect and lifestyle—describing a building’s location as “yonder,” making sure to mention foods and flowers. It would be understandable, then, that Neofotis sought authenticity in the voice of his narrators, even to the point of extremes such as allowing the narrators to use racist language—not just in dialogue, but in the “telling” Itself. In “The Flag Bearer,” the narrator has no name, no face, and does not directly effect the present action of the story. This narrator is a vessel for information, exhibiting both omniscience and distance, and does a good job of establishing setting, voice, and characterization. The racist rhetoric of the narrator, then, is problematic rather than constructive because an author-narrator-character merge has occurred, leaving the reader feeling unsettled by the language, effectively kicking us out of the fictional dream.

It has been a long-standing debate—especially among Southern writers—about how to handle racist characters. Should the author omit racist moments from a story, even though a racist character is present, out of consideration for readers? What about in stories that take place prior to the Civil Rights Movement? Don’t we risk perpetuating these stereotypes if we continue to dwell on and record them? I think the answer to these questions is no. Each new generation encounters racism in a unique way, and those stories should be set down, illuminating the human condition at any given time. An author needn’t shy away from the difficult theme of racism, but he/she should proceed with caution, as well as an understanding of his or her responsibility as an artist.

But setting aside the argument about what “duty” we have as writers, perhaps consider the issue simply in terms of expending a reader’s intellectual energy. No matter if an author is tackling racism, sexism, homophobia, or any number of topics, there is always the need to create a consistent narrative structure. Without it, the reader spends all her time negotiating the boundaries between author and narrator and characters, expending an unnecessary amount of energy trying to sort out who is who, rather than losing herself to the dream of fiction.

As a way of thinking more clearly about this dilemma, Reiken offers the following model as a way to effectively visualize the separation and interplay of this complex relationship:

In this model, the author-narrator-character relationship may be envisioned as a wave-state simultaneity or superposition—to borrow the language of quantum theory—in which author, narrator, and character are at once both separate and simultaneous, since, literally speaking, they all derive from a single human mind. In this model the ANC separation still occurs, however, because the author constantly modulates between the three domains—alternately immersing himself in the consciousness of the character, then pulling back to the expository commentary of the narrator, while all the while shaping the narrative from the objective perspective of the author. In this sense, the ANC might be thought of metaphorically as a spectrum, at once both wave and particle, and an effective manipulation means having the ability to envision the separation between these domains while at the same time understanding that they are always consubstantial. As author you must understand that, on one hand, you are your narrator(s) and character(s), while on the other that crafting effective narratives requires structuring these domains hierarchically within your imagination, so that at any moment you are able to collapse the wave-state simultaneity and crash down momentarily into one of the discrete domains. The diagram might look something like this:

That is to say, the separation between author, character, and narrator must be distinct and consistent. We must always know where we stand in relation to the narrator, especially if that narrator is an unreliable one. Our position as reader or audience member must be outside the story, where the author resides, able to assess the narrator and the story’s character(s) from a distance. Because when that boundary blurs, we risk losing the objectivity necessary to gauge what’s humorous from what’s in poor taste, and to judge what’s harmful from what’s benign.

On stage most of this wouldn’t be an issue. An actor is, by definition, not the author—even when he is, as in this case. He is playing a role, as his costume makes clear, and that role is a fiction. But translated from the stage to the page, we lose those markers. We lose those temporal boundaries. We lose that structural artifice. The stories are being related to us in the present, via a storyteller, and so we must assume that the narrative voice is retrospective, with the full benefit of historical hindsight in place. Each form has its costs and benefits, and I believe that in an attempt to fully “inhabit” the voices of his characters in the medium of fiction in the same way that he does so on stage, the psychic distance between author, narrator, and character occasionally becomes so thin that it detracts from the true art of these tales rather than adds to them. From a craft perspective, those stories that let in a bit more light between those categories were the most successful ones for me.

In a final note on the structure and approach of this book, I want to line up Concord, Virginia with its canonical neighbors, particularly highlighting the storyteller’s style, the oral quality of the narration, and how that helps or hinders the stories. This book could be aligned with other collections of connected stories—Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, perhaps, or Clifford Garstang’s In an Uncharted Country. However, the work I think it is truly in conversation with is not a novel or collection of stories, but rather Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Thornton Wilder, 1948. From the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, via Wikimedia Commons

Thornton Wilder said, “The theatre is supremely fitted to say:  ‘Behold! These things are.’ Yet most dramatists employ it to say:  ‘This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.’” Similarly, listening to my grandfather spin yarns was never intended to teach me a lesson. There was no moral, and the things I took away—a healthy appetite for gossip and storytelling, as well as a whole catalog of swear words—were left up to me. Likewise, Peter Neofotis’s stories align with Our Town in that they are the stories of people, but even more so of a town that is changing. Neofotis is not using his book as a pulpit from which to say that the Vietnam War was senseless, or homophobic intolerance is despicable, or religion practiced without love is hardly religion at all. As a reader, I might glean these things on my own. But at the base level of the stories, I am shown how things are, not what I should learn from them. This is to his credit. So despite the occasional misstep, Neofotis has done a wonderful thing with this collection: he has captured what it is to be human in a particular place at a particular time.

Still, the greatest strength of Concord, Virginia might be the way in which these stories function collectively to tell us something about ourselves, in the here and now, despite how focused they seem on the past. The final story, “The Ancients,” recounts a government plan to build a dam in the river valley, kicking the town’s oldest citizens out of their homes. Neofotis poetically draws the line between these people and the river that binds them:  “For a human, time means a progression from conception to birth to maturity to cricketness to dust. A waterway, on the other hand, may meander as it grows older, but it does not weaken if the climate stays.” Indeed, “The Ancients” ends with the town’s elderly giving “that wild river one last dive,” jumping in as the water rises. It is this sense of the temporary, fleeting nature of life in Concord—the way times change, and people grow, and perish, living large to the last—that provides a contemporary reader with both a feeling of recognition and solidarity. For we understand through the collection as a whole that each individual, in however limited or short-lived a fashion, plays an integral part in the broader fabric of the community, and that every place—even these communities that seem to exist out of time—will continue to shift and evolve like a river between its banks.

So I finish the book with the sense of a fulfilled promise, happy to have accepted the invitation delivered like an appeal to the muses in the prologue:  “Be it God or Gossip—the chorus sings of a particular community, in a certain valley. It is we, the voices of Concord, Virginia—replenished by a mountain river—inviting you, friend, to swim in our abiding story.”

East Concord, Virginia / Image from Peter Neofotis's website

Further Links and Resources:

• For more information about Peter Neofotis, including the origins of Concord, Virginia, reviews of his work, and tour information for his one-man show, please see the author’s website.
• To hear some of Neofotis’s own thoughts on his process and the experience of performing his work, here is a Q&A with the author that Kevin Kittredge conducted for the Roanoke Times in 2009.
• Neofotis also discusses how his writing and his performances have been shaped by James Hurst’s “The Scarlet Ibis” in this brief piece for Beatrice.
• You can also read a 2004 interview with Frederick Reiken that Eric Wasserman conducted for Poets & Writers magazine. In it, Reiken discusses his father’s opposition to his decision to pursue a life as a writer.
• Finally, here is a clip of Neofotis performing his story “The Heiress” at Theater at Lime Kiln in Lexington, Virginia:

Congratulations to this year’s winners of The Collection Giveaway Project! Earlier today we held four separate drawings to determine the recipients of our free story collections, and here are the results:

1. Shannon for Laura van den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
2. Pete for Joshua Furst’s collection Short People
3. Barrett Shipp for Skip Horack’s collection The Southern Cross
4. Melanie Yarbrough for Robin Black’s collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Thanks also to Erika Dreifus of The Practicing Writer (who first suggested the giveaway), the editors of The Replacement Blog, and Lucy Blue at Before There Were Children for joining this project. You can find the winners of their contests on their sites.

Most of all, thanks to everyone who participated in our May is Short Story Month celebration. We received more than fifty wonderful recommendations from our readers for favorite collections or collections they’re looking forward to reading, and the selections ranged from classic must-reads to debut fiction. Here they are, in no particular order, just in case you’re short on a list of good books to read…I mean, it is the start of summer.

1. The World is the Home of Love and Death, by Harold Brodkey
2. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, by Ernest Hemingway
3. The Age of Grief, by Jane Smiley
4. Separate Kingdoms, by Valerie Laken
5. Airships, by Barry Hannah
6. Finding a Girl in America, by Andre Dubus
7. Jenny and the Jaws of Life, by Jincy Willett
8. Girl with the Flammable Skirt, by Aimee Bender
9. The Point, by Charles D’Ambrosio
10. Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
11. If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home, by John Jodzio
12. A Few Short Notes On Tropical Butterflies, by John Murray
13. Do the Windows Open? by Julie Hecht
14. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver
15. Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
16. Girl Goddess #9, by Francesca Lia Block
17. Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout
18. The Holiday Season, by Michael Knight
19. The Palace Thief, by Ethan Canin
20. Girl Trouble, by Holly Goddard Jones
21. Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, by Lydia Peelle
22. The Secret Goldfish, by David Means
23. Where the Dog Star Never Glows, by Tara L. Masih
24. Boys and Girls Like You and Me, by Aryn Kyle
25. Call It What You Want, by Keith Lee Morris
26. Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, by Shirley Hazzard
27. Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga
28. Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri
29. The Boat, by Nam Le
30. Where the Money Went, by Kevin Canty
31. The Red Convertible, by Louise Erdrich
32. The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
33. Something Is Out There, by Richard Bausch
34. At the Jim Bridger, by Ron Carlson
35. The Pacific and Other Stories, by Mark Helprin
36. The Tiger in the Grass, by Harriet Doerr
37. Out of the Woods, by Chris Offutt
38. Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann
39. The Murphy Stories, by Mark Costello
40. The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, by Philip K. Dick
41. Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, by Justin Taylor
42. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, by ZZ Packer
43. How to Breathe Underwater, by Julie Orringer
44. Through the Safety Net, by Charles Baxter
45. Drown, by Junot Diaz
46. The Dead Fish Museum, by Charles D’Ambrosio
47. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower
48. The Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley
49. The Secret Lives of People in Love, by Simon Van Booy
50. How to Escape a Leper Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique
51. Do Not Deny Me, by Jean Thompson

Bob Dylan turned sixty-nine today. And regardless of how you feel about the man’s music, or how you feel about the different incarnations of his work—pre/post electric, pre/post born again, pre/post Victoria’s Secret—you’ve got to give him credit for knowing how to put together an album, which is a lot different than just writing a great song.

My favorite is his 1976 album Desire. Maybe it’s the story writer in me, but the narrative quality of “Hurricane” and “Isis” and “Oh, Sister” just knock me out. More importantly, there’s a unity to the songs—in tone, in subject, in approach—that gives the entire album a sense of wholeness and progression.

I felt this same way after reading Laura van den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us. The stories feel “of a family,” for lack of a better phrase. Not because most involve elusive creatures and foreign locales, or because exploring and discovery are central themes in all, but because collectively the stories seem to be working toward answering the same question: How can things disappear from our lives so quickly? Whether a husband, a father, one’s health, or happiness, the world these characters inhabit has the potential to change in an instant. And there is little left to do other than sort through, sort out, and move on.

Now, dealing with the aftermath of dead parents, deserting lovers, and finished marriages is not particularly new territory to cover in a story collection. But what I found most unique in van den Berg’s work was another type of disappearance: the failure of our lives to materialize as we’d envisioned them. For some of the characters here have held a particular future for themselves so fixed in their minds for so long that when that vision fails to materialize—or takes shape in a different way than imagined—the loss is as tangible as the death of a family member.

For example, in the opening story, “Wherever We Must Be,” a young man discovers that he is dying of lung cancer. The narrator says of her friend, “it wasn’t until the hospital that he began to overcome the shock, to look ahead and weigh all that did and did not await him.” Yet instead of going to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon, he decides not to, which the narrator decides is out of fear—“of having the experience fall short, of realizing too late that he should have made a different choice. For him, it was better to not know what the Grand Canyon looked like, to retain the splendor of his dreams.”

Laura van den Berg: photo from the author's website

Similarly, there is a great urgency for these characters to live a life that is meaningful and unique. As if each experience were being ticked off a celestial check list by some divine hand keeping score. Near the end of this first story, the narrator says of time, “I’ve grown to hate that word. I think of it often, how much is wasted, how freeing it would be if we weren’t always counting.” Yet these characters always are. And van den Berg’s stories do an exquisite job of catching that straining feeling—that fear that every step matters, that every missed opportunity holds the potential to irrevocably change your life, that there is a track or path for each of us and that if we’re not paying attention the future we envision for ourselves will disappear.

Yet at the same time there’s a feeling in these stories that much of life is out of our hands. In one of my favorite stories of the collection, “Inverness,” a young botanist travels to Scotland in the hope of locating a rare and endangered flower after her fiancée-to-be has unexpectedly left her. She says of her relationship:

I wondered how long he’d been planning his exit, how long other people had known about the turn my life was going to take, while I carried on, oblivious to the way things were shifting beneath me like the tectonic plates before a quake.

Poof! Our lives change. Sometimes it happens by fate, sometimes by chance, sometimes by accident, and sometimes because we expect so much from our expectations. In a beautiful moment that could summarize much of what these stories are trying to explore, the narrator of “Inverness” writes a letter to her former lover, Peter. She writes:

Today it rained. Today I found a twinflower. It was, like so many other things, not at all what I had hoped. But it is a flower and only a flower and how could I have grown to expect so much from it? Perhaps this is the origin of disappointment. When we give something more power than it could ever possibly possess.

How is it that you are already leading a different life?

I cannot say that I wish you well. Maybe one day I will.

Yet despite the way the future changes (or never occurs), these are not simply stories about young women dashed by reality who then harden themselves to the world. And despite the exquisite sadness a reader sometimes feels watching them grapple with fate and chance and their own misguided expectations, we leave this book walking away with a feeling of completeness. This comes from having been immersed in the project of an author who, like a cartographer, has set out to map a particular type of experience, to answer particular questions. Like Larry Brown’s Big, Bad, Love and Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater, like The Pugilest at Rest by Thom Jones and Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, this collection succeeds not only because of the strength of each individual story, but also because of the way that each story adds to the collective whole. Just like a good album.

To win a free copy of the book, comment on this post!

In your comment, tell FWR about a story collection you love (or one you’re looking forward to reading): on May 31, we’ll do a drawing of commenter names, and one lucky winner will receive a copy of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us. To be eligible, your comment must include the name and author of a story collection. Feel free, if time permits, to tell us more about the book. We look forward to hearing from you!

Learn more about how to participate in Short Story Month 2010: The Collection Giveaway Project.

We all had one. It’s one of those universals of human experience, more constant than love or rage or betrayal or grace. I’m talking about a childhood. Still, it’s impressively difficult to capture on the page, pitch the right tone, allow the perfect amount of insight and innocence, or describe the overblown drama of what it feels like to be a kid. From the opening story of his collection, Short People, Joshua Furst nails it. That first story, “The Age of Exploration,” follows the ramblings of Jason and Billy, best friends, both age six. Most of us can remember things that happened when we were six. But Furst reminds you what it’s like to be six – what it feels like to discover the world:

Billy knows about the past and the present, but Jason has learned something new. It’s a secret. Jason knows that the world gets bigger, but it gets smaller, too. He knows there are things he does not want to know. He knows his dad was an engineer once, and now he’s unemployed. He’s going to be an inventor after summer is over and move the family away to a new city, Jason knows that too, but he can’t tell anyone. Jason knows about the future, now. You can be one thing and another and then another and another and on and on, but the things you become sometimes wash the things you once were away. Jason knows what he wants to be when he grows up: he wants to be friends with Billy.

Each of the ten stories in Short People puts you right there, from the longing of a shy girl to be as brave and brash as Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, to the mercilessness of teenage boys at a Boy Scout Jamboree. Furst’s story “Red Lobster,” which won the Nelson Algren Award, gives a hilarious and horrible glimpse of a father gone so utterly off the rails that an outing to Red Lobster becomes a life-and-death experience for his children. Just flipping through it again, I might be ready for a re-reading. Sign me up for whatever Joshua Furst writes next.

To win a free copy of the book, comment on this post!

In your comment, tell FWR about a story collection you love (or one you’re looking forward to reading): on May 31, we’ll do a drawing of commenter names, and one lucky winner will receive a copy of Short People. To be eligible, your comment must include the name and author of a story collection. Feel free, if time permits, to tell us more about the book. We look forward to hearing from you!

Learn more about how to participate in Short Story Month 2010: The Collection Giveaway Project.

I am often skeptical of reviews by people who know the author: sometimes they’re a bit too chummy, like Sarah Palin praising Glenn Beck. (Ew. Just—ew.) So let me start off by saying that I do know Skip Horack, but only slightly. We met at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in 2009, and though we chatted a few times, this is the moment that stands out in my mind. It was a very hot August day, and I was trudging back to the dining hall in search of a cold drink when Skip and his roommate (the poet Matthew Dickman) hailed me. They’d dragged a couple of Adirondack chairs out into the middle of the lawn, and when I came over, they graciously offered me a seat and a beer from the ice-filled garbage can that sat between them. When my roommate passed by, we called her over too. Soon there was a small crowd of us lounging in the grass. Someone brought out a stereo. Someone else started an impromptu game of baseball, and we watched while Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash crooned in the background. It had nothing to do with writing, but it was one of my favorite moments of the conference.

I hadn’t read any of Skip’s work before the conference, but I made a note to myself to pick up his collection, The Southern Cross, as soon as I got home. Set in the Gulf Coast in 2005—the year of Hurricane Katrina—the collection is timely and relevant in the way the very best fiction is. Unlike the characters in the book, we know what’s coming their way, so a short exchange like this, from “The Journeyman,” fills the stories in the first half of the book with eerie foreboding:

“I come by to warn you.”

“Yeah?” Clayton slid the socket onto the drain plug, grunting as he gave the wrench a hard twist. “About what?”

“God and Jesus are up to something.”

“That so?”

“Reverend Gray says they gonna punish this city soon enough.”

A car alarm started up just a few blocks over, and Clayton grinned to himself. “Yeah,” he said. “I imagine they will.”

The collection has no fear about facing the horrifying details of the storm. Take this passage, from “The Redfish,” the story in which the hurricane arrives:

Gray light filled the trailer and Luther sat up and put on his boots. Water was flowing beneath him; he could hear it. He walked across the living room and opened the door. “Fuck,” he said.

The Pearl had overflowed its banks and flooded the woods surrounding the trailers. Pines blew like wheat in the wind; the clearing was a white-capped sea. The water lapped at the front steps, and Luther realized it was still rising. He watched as a gust of wind sent a wave surging through the pine forest. Water slapped against the top step of the trailer and soaked his feet. He saw that Shonda’s Dodge had been swept off in the night. [...]

The wind picked up even more and started snapping pines. A heavy branch crashed nearby and Luther flinched. Betty tried to close the door herself but he stopped her. “No,” he said. “You gonna make a tomb out of this trailer.”

Betty pinched him on his arm but retreated to the sofa. The water was past their ankles, and she kicked off her wet slippers. “All my things are getting ruined,” she said.

Luther admitted that they were. “Still,” he said. “Ain’t nothing in here can’t be replaced except me and you.”

Betty took up the family Bible resting on her warped coffee table. “That’s not true at all,” she said. “Not one damn bit.”

But I’ve probably given you the impression that The Southern Cross is a Book About Katrina, and that’s wrong. Most of the stories make only passing reference to the storm and its aftermath, if they mention it at all. The storm, of course, affects the characters’ lives profoundly—because this book is so firmly rooted in the world of the Gulf Coast. The real story here is not the storm but the lives and worries and fears of the people who inhabit this world. John L’Heureux aptly described the stories as “explor[ing] the geography of a place and a time and a people—and they explore it unforgettably”; Pia Z. Ehrhardt noted that “[e]ach of these deeply felt stories is an offbeat song of the new South”; Eric Puchner praised Horack for “unbuckl[ing] the Bible Belt to show us an America we tend to ignore.”

Now, I don’t believe in writing as tourism, or reading fiction to “learn” about a different place or culture. So while you will, indeed, get a vivid portrait of the world Horack so deftly evokes, learning about the South is not the reason—or at least, not the main reason—to read this book. This is: you’ll be amazed by Horack’s generosity and vision as a writer. As Antonya Nelson, who chose the book as the winner of the Bakeless Prize, noted, “Every one of these stories serves up a unique world peopled by individuals who could, each of them, star in his or her own series. They are all epic-worthy.”

It’s impossible to read the collection and not be impressed by that writerly eye, that depth of understanding even in a story just a few pages long. You can literally open The Southern Cross to any page and find a knockout moment. Take the opening lines of “Borderlands”:

His setter found her in a cold canebrake, half-buried in the loam, her mouth sealed with duct tape. Wes saw that it was her, Sara Champagne.

You could stop right there and wallow in the sad perfectness of that name—Sara Champagne—but then you’d miss the second half of the one-two punch that follows:

Three fingers had been cut from her right hand, two from her left. She was naked to the waist, and a thin red tear ran from the base of her throat and then down across her belly.

This is the kind of collection you enjoy as a reader and then read again and again as a writer, trying to figure out how he did it.

In your comment, tell FWR about a story collection you love (or one you’re looking forward to reading): on May 31, we’ll do a drawing of commenter names, and one lucky winner will receive a copy of The Southern Cross. To be eligible, your comment must include the name and author of a story collection. Feel free, if time permits, to tell us more about the book. We look forward to hearing from you!

And stay tuned for two more story collection giveaways from FWR’s bloggers on May 20 and 24th.

If you write for another blog or lit site and would like to join the Short Story Month Giveaway Project, learn more here.

Do you want to read the book yet?
Because I’m trying to make you want to read it.

Kevin Wilson, who also helps run the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, has put together a strong and surprising collection of wonderfully odd stories. We encounter an old woman who works as a substitute grandmother for children whose real grandmothers have died, or gone senile, or have had a falling out with the real parents. We follow a young man who, in addition to working in a Scrabble factory—trolling all day through hills of letters to find those he has been assigned—also might have a genetic predisposition to spontaneous human combustion. There is a second-person story, and another in the form of a handbook or lexicon. Clearly, Wilson is interested in the formal possibilities of the short story. But unlike many authors with similar interests, Wilson never abandons the very human and tender hearts of his stories or their characters.

For example, in “The Choir Director Affair (The Baby’s Teeth),” [also anthologized in New Stories from the South 2005] we don’t just hear about the baby with the shockingly large and well-formed teeth; Wilson goes to great lengths to show us the baby’s mannerisms, the general and specific gestures that make it impossible for those who encounter it (including us) not to love it, at least a little bit. We feel the heft of the baby’s small but solid form, the competing clean and sour smells of its body. This is not just a metaphor, Wilson insists, and his intelligence and voice go a long way to making us agree.

Kevin Wilson

In addition to startling story concepts and pleasurably alarming imagery, Wilson also makes the collection work as a whole. Two-thirds of the way into the book, we arrive at perhaps Wilson’s best story. By this time, readers might think we have the author’s number—a little bit of Saunders, with some Bender/Millhauserian weirdness thrown in. Then Wilson hits us with “Go, Fight, Win,” something more in line with Flannery O’Connor and Allan Gurganus. There is always a danger when writing weird, ambitious, surreal-ish short stories in getting stuck in that rut where everything has to be audacious or silly, conceptually. One can imagine another, less full Wilson collection that never would have left this land of Barthelmeian wonder and humor. And that might have been great, too.

But what strikes me as a writer after reading all those more conceptual pieces is how fully realized the domestic “Go, Fight, Win” is. It’s a coming-of-age story about an adolescent girl interacting with her younger neighbor, a boy with some hard to define mental or emotional problems. There are grace notes throughout—pitch-perfect scenes regarding first kisses, investigating the dubious authority that teenagers exert over one another, documenting moments of honest obsession and unexpected kindness.

After “Go, Fight, Win,” Wilson gives us “The Museum of Whatnot,” which encapsulates, in its imagery and concept, the argument for this author’s modes of perception and narrative, like Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be a Writer” from Self-Help or Etgar Keret’s “A Thought in the Shape of a Story” from The Nimrod Flipout. In Wilson’s story, the main character is left to tend a seemingly random collection of bric-a-bracs, to guide visitors through a collection she does not quite understand, that has accumulated randomly and without specific purpose. And in this place, people move, think, feel. They search for meaning, for love. Their lives matter to them, and they matter to us, despite the strange surroundings and odd ornamentation. It is a beautiful story, quiet and subtle and lovely, and it is also a smart story in a really, really smart collection.

So are you going to read this book or what?

Extras: For Further Reading

- Read some of Wilson’s stories online:

• “The Museum of Whatnot” in Fifty-Two Stories (also appears in Tunneling…)
• “The Dead Sister Handbook: “A Guide for Sensitive Boys” in DIAGRAM
• “Hammer” in Waccamaw
• “My Hand, Dead Tissue Severed at the Wrist” in Hobart
• “The Neck’s What Keeps Heart and Head Together” in Blackbird

(For more stories and a full list of print publications, see this page on the author’s website.)

- Wilson’s collection was recently nominated for a 2010 Shirley Jackson Award. Other nominees in the single-author story collection category are: Everland and Other Stories (Paul Witcover), Fugue State (Brian Evenson), Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (Robert Shearman), There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya), and Zoo (Otsuichi). A review of Petrushevskaya’s collected stories (translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers) is forthcoming this summer on FWR.

- Here are two great interviews with Wilson: In Redivider (by James Scott); and in The Collagist (by Matt Bell). While you’re reading The Collagist, check out Wilson’s story “Excerpt from the Big Book of Forgotten Lunatics,” which appeared in the journal’s first issue.

- It’s Short Story Month! Support short stories—and independent bookstores by ordering a copy of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth from Powell’s.

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/tunneling-to-the-center-of-the-earth-by-kevin-wilson/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/notes-on-paying-attention-an-interview-with-adam-haslett http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/notes-on-paying-attention-an-interview-with-adam-haslett#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 15:46:21 +0000 Kate Levin http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=8224 You Are Not a Stranger Here, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. His first novel, Union Atlantic, which focuses in part on unregulated trading, unethical banking, and the prospect of a massive economic collapse, was published this spring by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Kate Levin talks with the author about fiction meeting reality, the psychology of power, the responsibility of writers to capture the social and political context of an era, and exposing ourselves in our characters. ]]>

Adam Haslett: photo credit Beowulf Sheehan

Between September of 2008 and February of 2010, our financial system experienced a meltdown that had been set in motion by years of deregulation and corporate delinquency. The strange thing? Unregulated trading, unethical banking, the prospect of a massive economic collapse—all grace the pages of Adam Haslett’s debut novel Union Atlantic, which, as the crisis was unfolding, was being edited, designed, bound, and shipped to bookstores by Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday, which now had a novel of eerie prescience to deliver to the world.

Though perhaps “eerie” is the wrong word. After all, when you talk to Haslett, you learn that he is a political news junkie, someone deeply interested in and attuned to the economic and social forces that shape our lives—someone who links to “Talking Points Memo” on his website. He’s also fascinated by what he calls “the psychology of power,” and speaks of his time at Yale Law School (which he attended after the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and before writing the novel) as an immersion in the language of power. Knowing all this, Union Atlantic starts to seem less an uncanny foretelling and more the reflection of a writer who’s simply been paying attention.

The glimpse into market forces is just one dimension of Haslett’s novel, the heart of which is the conflict between Doug Fanning—a young, ambitious senior manager at Union Atlantic bank—and Charlotte Graves, a retired history teacher on whose family’s Massachusetts land Doug has built an ostentatious mansion. Charlotte believes her two dogs have begun talking to her—one in the voice of Cotton Mather, the other channeling Malcolm X—and admirers of Haslett’s celebrated 2002 short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, will recognize the empathy with which Haslett draws this solitary character, whose mind sometimes utterly distorts reality and sometimes grants her extraordinarily sharp perceptions of it. Rounding out the central characters are Nate Fuller, a high school student who becomes infatuated with Doug while being tutored by Charlotte, and Henry Graves, Charlotte’s brother, the president of the New York Federal Reserve.

You Are Not a Stranger Here was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and has been translated into fifteen languages. The winner of the PEN/Malamud award in 2006, Haslett has published fiction and essays in such places as The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope All-Story, The Barcelona Review, Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Stories, and National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. We sat down to talk when he visited the University of Michigan as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series.

Interview:

Kate Levin: I’m excited to talk about your new novel, but first, take us back to the beginning of your writing life. What were your earliest stories like?

Adam Haslett: I started writing short stories when I was in college. The first short story I ever wrote was about a mother, in a house, on her own, getting progressively drunker as the day went on, while her husband was at the office. It was called “1952,” and the story ends with the woman going to visit her neighbor—because she’s just sort of alone—and the neighbor is an old lady, and the woman finds her dead. So, you know, it was a bright start. [Laughter.]

I think fundamentally I started out, and remain, a Romantic in the capital “R” sense of the word. There are emotional states that I have experienced, or that I intuit, or that I have imaginatively experienced, and I want to communicate those experiences. And often, particularly in my first book, those are states of extremis.

I’ve always begun with people alone. My characters always begin with themselves, and so first it’s the relationship of the characters to themselves—that constant unending narration we have in our heads—and then they move into the world. And I want to track how they continue to relate to themselves once they encounter the world.

Before getting your MFA, you’d spent a year as a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Did you arrive at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, then, with a bunch of stories and a clear idea of what you wanted to work on there?



Provincetown, at the Fine Arts Work Center

No. Other than to keep writing, no. I spent most of my time at Provincetown writing one story, “War’s End,” which is in the book. At Provincetown I had the privilege of a year, full-time, no distractions, no domestic stuff, no classes, no job, nothing, so that’s when I became what I think of as sort of a professional writer, you know—every day, I wrote.

So you went from writing alone in your room in Provincetown to being a student at Iowa. Was that the first time you’d had lots of readers’ eyes on your work, and what was the experience like for you?

Well, I took one writing class in college, which functioned in a workshop style, so I wasn’t entirely new to it, but certainly it was more intense. I think if anything I was leery. I should back up and say that I went in with very low expectations—I went expecting nothing except time to write, and if I were to get anything from a workshop, or a teacher, then that would be gravy. That was my own understanding of what I was doing. So in that sense, I think it was easier to have a good experience, because it turns out I was there with some good people and had some good teachers.

One last MFA-related question before we leave that world: I noticed that your new novel’s main character, banker Doug Fanning, has a young secretary who’s described as feeling powerless because she has “an advanced degree in short fiction.” I hadn’t realized until then that she was supposed to be a former MFA student! Was that a little bit of gentle derision on your part, or a wink and a nod to those of us MFA-ers who might be reading?

[Laughter.] It was sort of a wink and a nod. It’s also from Doug’s point of view—and Doug thinks of himself, because of the control he has at the bank, as what he calls “an artist of the consequential world,” not the “observer of effete emotion” that Sabrina Svetz wants to be. So that’s Doug making a distinction between art and the world, which is certainly more pejoratively drawn than I would draw it.

Your story collection, You Are Not A Stranger Here, was published in 2002. You’ve said in an earlier interview that you begin a short story by hearing a voice or catching hold of a certain sentence rhythm. Do you summon a voice or a rhythm when you’re sitting down at your desk? In other words, do you write your way into a certain voice? Or do you hear it first and then try to nail it down with words?

It’s more the former. The reason you have to spend so long at your desk is because you need to be there when it happens. It’s nice to think that you’d walk down the street and something would come to you whole cloth, but it doesn’t happen much. It has to do with a certain calming of the mind, quieting the voices of distraction. I meditate every morning before I work, and that’s a process of getting rid of a lot of the things that block out those quieter, subtler voices in your own mind. So, I don’t know if I can say that I can summon those voices, but maybe I can hear them better. It’s sort of a negative skill, the skill of concentration. It’s the skill—increasingly difficult, it seems to me—of blocking out a manic culture, in order to be able to listen to something that, when you first hear it, is a wisp of a nothing of an echo. And if it’s ever going to have life, you have to pay attention to it, take it seriously, let it be more important than other things that are way more produced and slick and loud.

To dive into the collection itself, the two opening stories, “Notes to My Biographer” and “The Good Doctor,” seem to have an interesting inversion to them. In the first, the narrator, an aging inventor in the middle of a manic episode, rails against “the mental health establishment” and appears to be off his meds. The second story is told from the point of view of a psychiatrist who tries to engage a reclusive patient in talk therapy, only to find that the woman just wants to take her meds. Now, I could be reading far too deeply into it, but did you put these stories side by side to show us the two sides of that “mental health establishment,” patient and practitioner?

No, the only factors that went into the sequencing of the stories were that there were certain stories I wanted to keep away from each other, so that dictated where they would go. I was aware, also, that half were set in England and half in America, so I was doing a little bit of variation of that.

Ah, so much for my theory. So, while the subject of mental illness isn’t the only thing that unifies the collection—there’s also the solitude of the characters, for one—it’s certainly present in a number of the stories. When did that theme make itself apparent to you? Or did you just think of yourself as writing isolated stories, with some outside readers then pointing out, hey, you could cohere your collection around this theme?

Well, it was certainly something that came from outside. First of all, I didn’t think of myself as writing a collection, until I signed a contract for it. So, definitely, I thought of them as individual stories about individual characters—and they’d been written over four years. I didn’t really think of them as having shared themes in particular, so it did take readers, critics… “mental illness” was sort of the headline of the New York Times review, so it traveled under that banner.

Interesting—how did you feel about that “banner” being placed over the book?

Well, that’s complicated… there’s a lot of things to be said. On the one hand, there’s the real biological fact of mental illness, but I also think that phrase is a kind of conceptual suitcase that people can keep closed. And once you open it, you find out that it’s a label for a variety of human experiences that many of us have the edges of, and these lines aren’t so easy to draw. So the phrase itself rarely appears in the collection. I’ve said before that if I’d set the same characters a hundred years earlier, they would have simply been considered eccentrics. That I’m writing about people whose experience is, in this day and age, seen through the lens of psychiatry, says as much about the culture as it does about those people.

In between writing your collection and your novel, you went to law school at Yale. Was that based at all on a desire to have an occupational footing in the “consequential world,” as your character Doug thinks of it?

Yeah, sure. There’s something fascinating and appealing and alluring to me about the psychology of power, and particularly the psychology of anonymous power. And so going to law school was in a sense like learning a language. Law is the language of power in this country, probably more than in any other country in the world. So that was interesting, but I think the exercise of it—the work—is just too boring. Do you know what I mean? So I don’t know that I could ever sustain the interest to try to be a powerful person. I don’t think that’s what I’m interested in, power of that particular kind. But it’s allowed me to be a fly on the wall in a lot of places where I otherwise wouldn’t have been.

Did you write fiction while you were there?

Well, the way it worked was I went from Iowa to there, and then I signed the contract for the book [You Are Not A Stranger Here] in the spring of my first year, and then I took the next year off to finish the book. And then I went back to finish law school, and the book came out the last year I was there. When I was actually attending classes in law school, I would say I did more editing than actual drafting, but that was just a question of time.

I’m curious about how you taught yourself to write a novel. Did you read a bunch of novels and kind of try to learn by diffusion, or did you just let yourself write your way into problems and write your way out?

I think it was more the latter. I mean, I had a guiding overarching ambition as a writer—not particularly for this book, but just as a writer—which had to do with the two things I’ve loved most in my reading, over the years: the sense of social scope in the nineteenth-century novel, and the psychological intensity of Modernist fiction—Faulkner and Woolf and Proust. And I didn’t want to sacrifice one to the other, or have only one or the other. I wanted social scope and I wanted interior intensity. So my ambition was to try to get both of those things into the book. I started with characters, but some of them were characters that were already in a place, in a world, that was demanding their attention. In a sense, the conjuring act happened right away—I mean, if you choose to write about the head of the New York Fed, it’s not going to be a quiet domestic novel.

One of the things that struck me about Union Atlantic is just how much “world” you give us. There was a piece by the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels in the last year or so arguing that literary novels should be more like “The Wire”—so, avoid locking us in a room with two people and telling us about their relationship, and instead give us more social context, more political context. First of all, I don’t know if you’re into The Wire—

Sure, sure, I love The Wire.

Me too. So, as a novelist, what’s your take on what Michaels is saying?



Emile Zola (1840-1902)

I mean, Tom Wolfe twenty years ago wrote an essay in Harper’s that was basically saying that writers should be more like reporters. I think this is a theme that goes all the way back to Zola and naturalism and writing that is a kind of reportage as opposed to just the marriage plot. I mean, at that point, everything was in the realist vein. Zola is someone who was fascinated by—the way The Wire is—social strata. In The Wire, you know by what kind of car they drive where they fit into the Baltimore world, and one of the things I love about reading Zola is, like, one of the first things you learn about someone is how much they earn. Not because he thinks it’s the deepest thing, but because he knows how close to the surface that is in everybody’s understanding of how people fit in. So, yeah, that’s the curious outward-looking part of me that wants to have that—and also, just as someone who reads a lot about politics every day in the news, and thinks about it a lot, and gets worked up about it a lot, it is frustrating to read so much contemporary fiction that has essentially lobotomized what is an omnipresent, 24-7 flux of stuff that’s coming at us. So, unless that’s sort of justified, it’s beginning to border on the inexcusable. It’s an incomplete rendering of our experience.

Now, you can write historical fiction, which I, you know [laughter], shouldn’t say too much about—but you can write historical fiction and obviate these problems, right? You can write a novel set in the nineteenth-century, or the middle of the nineteenth-century, and you can write a marriage plot, and generate all your drama in the conventional manner that has been for two hundred years. But obviously, you know, that’s not my project.

You mentioned that you’ve written some short stories since completing the novel.

Not many, but yeah.

Is that sense of “the world” more a part of the picture in your short fiction now that you’ve had the experience of writing this socially-minded novel?

Well, it’s interesting, because the last short story I wrote was a short story in which the main character is Obama, so, that’s in “the world.” [Laughter.] He’s dealing with a lot. And that came about because an editor said, “Look, do you want to do this?” I didn’t just sit there and say, “Oh, I think I’ll write about Obama.” But it was interesting, and I enjoyed it. The short answer is, I don’t know the answer, because other than that one project I haven’t really gone back to writing short fiction and thinking about it. I think the point is that if you want to show relationships between micro and macro systems, or experience, it’s very hard to do that in the form of one character, because very few people, given the breadth of—how low the low are, how high the high—the gaps in income and privilege and power that we live with, it’s very hard to put that in one story.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. So, let’s dive more deeply into the novel, starting with Doug, the banker. I was surprised to see that the novel opens with a scene of military combat in 1988, when Doug’s a naval officer on a ship called the Vincennes, in the Persian Gulf. The present of the novel takes place in the run-up to the Iraq War. Which aspect of the character came first—his military identity or identity as a finance guy? How did you build this character?

Well, I thought at the beginning that Henry [Graves, the president of the New York Federal Reserve in the novel] would have an opposite number at the bank, Union Atlantic, in Jeffrey Holland, the head of the bank. But I found him to be a little dull on the inside. So, I was writing a scene of Jeffrey Holland, and Doug kind of came in as the second-in-command and he just seemed more…I was just more interested in that figure. So that’s how he began, and that’s how I started writing more about him. I’m trying to remember the first scenes I wrote of Doug… I can say that I wrote the Vincennes scene in the Persian Gulf not at all clear if it would be in the novel, because, you know, it could easily not be, and it wasn’t clear to me that it was Doug, but it became so. I guess it was understanding him in office life that was what first gave me a way in to Doug. There’s a whole culture, or a hierarchy and a balancing act, with all these different actors in the building, and he’s got a relationship with all these different people and is controlling information.

In that opening Vincennes scene, we witness Doug committing a highly immoral act, and at that point I thought, well this is a character we’re just going to indict—but actually he becomes much more inflected over the course of the novel. We learn about his class background, his mother’s alcoholism. Can you talk about these elements—when they developed, and how important they are to Doug’s characterization and to the book itself?

Well, that was pretty early on. That Finden (the town) represents something very particular to him—that I knew early on. There’s a “fuck you” contained in the act of building this house, and it is heard by his neighbor. So, that sense of resentment of the privilege in which he now takes part was key to this kind of anger. He’s an angry guy, and… how should I put it… both the worlds that he’s operated in—the military and the financial world—if there’s an emotion that vivifies those worlds, I would say it’s a certain kind of male anger. It’s more obvious in the military, it’s more abstracted in finance, but it is powerful. And we have been living with its consequences for a long time. And we still are. I didn’t realize this until later, in writing Doug—I didn’t realize that that’s what I was getting at, why it was important to have the military and the finance stuff together. Not together, like, we see the systems operating together, but through an individual, who participates in both cultures.

Besides Doug, there are three other central figures in the novel: Charlotte, Henry, and Nate. In a recent interview, you were asked which of these four characters you identify with most, and you’d said that in creating each of these characters, you had to expose a part of yourself. I’m really interested in that idea, and wonder if you could say a little more about it.

I think it’s a messy, kind of always-in-process… process. [Laughter.] I don’t think you can write about a character for a long period of time if they don’t interest you, and the interest comes from them being both different, and yet preoccupied by, bothered by, rankled by things that bother, preoccupy, and rankle you. So, in a sense, I always find myself most comfortable writing about someone, or sets of events, that are thirty degrees off from my own experience. Enough to be able to freely—and without trying be true to my life or anybody else’s—import things that are of interest to me. It’s not autobiography, nor is it biography of character. I think it’s like letting those quieter voices that we were talking about earlier get louder so that you realize that a character is headed in a certain direction, and then the brave thing is to let go and let them be something that might be shameful to yourself. I think shame is actually pretty heavily involved in the process.

Confronting one’s own shame?

Yeah. Writing about people wanting things that you find shameful to want. And even if you know you’re writing about a character, the book’s going to have your name on it, which is a good thing—if no serious internal trouble has been overcome in the writing of a book, then there’s not a lot of blood on the floor, and it’s not as interesting to me.

You finished your book the week Lehman Brothers collapsed. How did it feel to you, when the economy actually tanked, to know that you’d just finished a book that very wonderfully delineates—for people who don’t know how banks engorge themselves, and skirt regulations—how a collapse like that could happen?



Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Image from Wikimedia Commons (photo credit: Dmadeo)

It was disorienting, because I’d spent so long thinking and worrying over what level of detail to go into on these subjects in the book itself, and wondering if anybody would even care about the Fed or banks. It was disorienting, because it was such an outsized event for everybody, and yet for me, when I started reading about meetings of bankers at the New York Fed, I was like, oh yeah, I wrote that scene about a year and a half ago. So that was uncanny. And I suppose, selfishly, the concern was that the book would be—I mean, I knew that it was inevitably going to be read in light of that. It just can’t not be. But my only worry was that that would somehow overweight the financial aspects of the book at the cost of the rest of the things that are going on, whereas what had led me into the Fed in the first instance was not banking or finance per se, but a way that we’ve chosen to govern ourselves, which is the tyranny of abstraction in economics as a natural science, which is so much bigger than the Fed.

You’ve said that you started working in the novel after reading a book about the Fed. I was wondering what other kinds of research you did for the book, particularly of the non-reading kind. Did you gain access to the corridors of power?

I did not go and visit investment banks. I did visit the New York Fed—I was an associate at a law firm where a guy there used to work for the Fed, so I was able to go into the New York Fed. Now I currently have a friend who’s a lawyer there, so I’ve been into the gold vault, and I’ve seen the boardroom, I’ve seen the building, so that was all very helpful. And I met with a recently retired Fed official about some of the mechanics. But most of it was reading. Other than some scene setting, ninety percent of it was reading.

A character like Jeffrey Holland, say, who you said you’d imagined early on as a central character—there’s something about the way you describe his bearing, his physical presence, that made me think you’d done some careful observing of powerful people.

I was thinking of Bill Clinton. I was thinking of the large, seductive, sharp, smart, garrulous, kind of winner, and all that that comes with. I mean, he’s not as smart as Clinton, but, yeah.

Do you have a second novel in the works?

I have ideas, I have characters, I have some very preliminary sketches, but I also have a desire to approach it differently, and quite possibly write some of it in the first person.

Besides trying out the first person, how else are you thinking of approaching this second novel differently? Will you outline or map it out?

Well, you know, I’m not an outliner. And I didn’t know a lot about the plot of this book until it developed as I went along. I don’t know whether it’s so much an outline as wanting to know—which maybe I can’t, and it’s just a fantasy—what the central tensions of the book really are, so that one can move to the starting point of that tension. As opposed to the 200 pages of work where you’re like, oh, it’s about that, at which point you then start again.

Further Links and Resources:



• For more about Adam Haslett’s work, or to find links to his recent writing, interviews, and features, please visit the author’s website.
• Check out “Night Walk,” Haslett’s most recently published short story, featuring protagonist Barack Obama.
• Or read Haslett’s story “Notes to my Biographer,” published in 1999 in Vol. 3, Issue 3 of Zoetrope: All Story.
• You can also read “The Beginnings of Grief,” which appeared in 2002 in Issue 32 of The Barcelona Review.
• Read the prologue to Union Atlantic on Esquire.com

Before I recommend or send any book to one of FWR’s reviewers, I always read a sample story or two, a chapter, or maybe the first fifteen pages. If I fall in love, I order a copy of the book for myself. But sometimes there’s a novel or collection that demands to be read immediately. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Random House, April 2010) made me forget I had a job, a website, friends, a boyfriend waiting for me to pick him up, dinner burning on the stove. And even after finishing this book (and sending it off to the reviewer), I couldn’t resist buying two more copies–one to keep and one to share as part of Short Story Month 2010: The Giveaway Project.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This is Robin Black’s debut story collection and a recent Andrew’s Book Club pick. FWR will feature a review of the collection this summer. Jim Shepard describes Black’s stories as:

…beautifully measured and composed in their engagements with emotional crises that are harrowingly intense, if not catastrophic. Few first collections – few collections of any sort — are as intelligent and as moving about both the durability of love and the implacability of loss, or about the ways in which contingency can undo and remake us; about, finally, the damage done and the repair work to come.

I couldn’t agree more: this is one of the most exciting collections I’ve read in years. It’s rare to find a writer so gifted with both style and story, but Black is at once an inspired plotter, a master of character (and empathy), and a deft prose stylist.

To win a free copy of the book, comment on this post!

In your comment, tell FWR about a story collection you love (or one you’re looking forward to reading): on May 31, we’ll do a drawing of commenter names, and one lucky winner will receive a copy of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This. To be eligible, your comment must include the name and author of a story collection. Feel free, if time permits, to tell us more about the book. We look forward to hearing from you!

And stay tuned for more story collection giveaways from FWR’s bloggers on May 17 and May 24.

If you write for another blog or lit site and would like to join the Short Story Month Giveaway Project, learn more here.

Via Scribd, here’s a preview of our giveaway book.

To participate in Short Story Month 2010: The Giveaway Project:

• (1) This month, post an entry on your blog recommending a recently published short story collection (or two, or three).
  The post can be long or short, a review or merely a rave. The one requirement is that you, the blogger, have read and loved the book(s) in question.
• (2) Offer a copy of the book (or each book) as a giveaway to one lucky person who comments on your blog.
  You can choose the winner through a drawing, or by the wittiness of his/her remarks, or by whatever criteria you choose. For FWR’s posts (we’ll have three giveaways), we’re asking readers to tell us about (or at least the name of) a collection they love or one they’re looking forward to reading. Comments that don’t mention a specific collection will not be eligible for the drawing.

[NOTE for blogger-authors: You can absolutely give away a copy of your own collection--but in an effort to keep this as much about community as publicity, please also offer to give away a second book that isn't one of yours.]

• (3) Announce the winner(s) on May 31, 2010, and arrange to send out copies of any books you are giving away.

If you’re participating, drop us an email at fictionwritersreview@gmail.com to let us know. We’ll add you to the list of participating blogs/sites and link to you from this frequently updated page on our site.

So far, participating bloggers include:

- Fiction Writers Review: Anne Stameshkin / Giveaway: If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black.

- Practicing Writing: Erika Dreifus / Giveaways: Who I Was Supposed to Be by Susan Perabo and The Pale of Settlement by Margot Singer

- Fiction Writers Review: Celeste Ng / Giveaway: Southern Cross by Skip Horack

- Fiction Writers Review: Lee Thomas / Giveaway: Short People by Joshua Furst

- Replacement Blog: The Replacement Press / Giveaway: If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home by John Jodizo

- Fiction Writers Review: Jeremiah Chamberlin / Giveaway: What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

-Before There Were Children: Lucy Blue / Giveaway: Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle

INDIE PICKS:

- Strange Weather (Press 53), by Becky Hagenston. Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction.

Praise from Antonya Nelson:

The sensibility overseeing these fine stories is curious, clever, quick, hilarious, and heartbreaking. The world contained between the covers of Strange Weather is both realistic and magical, silly and sublime, ‘romance and raunch. Just like real life.’ When a character working a desk job in a toxic chemical plant announces wistfully that ‘nothing’s blown up,’ the reader completely understands her itch for disaster, for the explosion that threatens. Hagenston truly relishes the human urge for trouble that resides just next to the equally human instinct for comfort. Her liars are among the most truthful characters I’ve encountered in a long while.

- Attention Please Now (Autumn House Press), by Matthew Pitt. Debut.

Praise from Chuck Wachtel:

The central characters of these remarkable stories are oddly ordinary and inordinately odd: that is to say, they are each uniquely qualified to speak for life outside of fiction. Pitt allows them to build the worlds they inhabit from their very particular understandings of what life is, thus endowing their narratives with unpredictable outcomes, and startlingly unexpected revelations along the way. Attention Please Now is a collection possessed of a genuine fictional beauty.

BIG HOUSE PICK: If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Random House), by Robin Black. Debut.

Praise from Jim Shepard:

Robin Black’s stories are beautifully measured and composed in their engagements with emotional crises that are harrowingly intense, if not catastrophic. Few first collections – few collections of any sort — are as intelligent and as moving about both the durability of love and the implacability of loss, or about the ways in which contingency can undo and remake us; about, finally, the damage done and the repair work to come.

Look for a review of Robin Black’s collection this summer on FWR.

Here’s a preview of IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS.