[Editor's Note: There are some differences between poems linked to in their original online forms and the newer published versions in the books themselves. All quotations are from the print collections.]

Post Moxie
by Julia Story
(Sarabande Books, 2010)

No, not just because of her last name, though it does tie in nicely, doesn’t it…

These are stories of angst and the Midwest and alienation, each held still for one stunning moment in an untitled, window-shaped prose poem. I found myself getting into bed at night and reading this book, something I don’t usually do with poetry, which generally requires a daytime alertness. But I didn’t feel any need to interact with these poems, and I mean that as a compliment. I didn’t interpret them or decode them. I simply let each one arrive and depart, and it told its story exactly as I needed to know it.

And I found that to be a wonderfully unusual experience for reading a poetry book. It’s not that these poems are shallow or simple. They have great eerie depths and resonance to them. They’re just so whole. “I am not very smart at the very beginning of spring, when even the sidewalk has hormones,” writes Story. In another poem: “There are this many heads I want to break with this many bottles of Night Train, but I’m blonde and from Indiana so I look at the floor and smile.” Interestingly, for poems that feel so whole, there is an awful lot of breaking up, and not in the romantic sense. “I prefer to forgo the body altogether,” Story writes, and that’s true only in the sense that her bodies seldom are “all together.” They are usually in pieces. The body gets rearranged and moved and even mailed around. It tunnels in and out of landscapes.

Story writes in a style that many of her poetry peers have written in – she accumulates surreal images and conveys deep heartbreaks with a disaffected postmodern shrug. Yet she manages to exist in a completely naturalistic way in this style, and that’s what makes this book truly distinct and memorable.

I take my harp down to the water, but
it isn’t a harp, it’s a person and we’re
falling in love. Birds land on us and I
grip the air with my eyes. Hills are arms
and the landscape is a bucket. His whole
body is taped to me or taped to a picture
of the world.

– from “untitled”

Thin Kimono
by Michael Earl Craig
(Wave Books, 2010)

It may be unfair to drag biography onto the stage, but Michael Earl Craig lives in Montana and shoes horses for a living, and these frequently seem like poems that might be spoken by someone who lives in Montana and shoes horses for a living. They are precise, cool, metallic poems, laconic and wry. They are the poems of observation and spun-off thought that might easily arise from solitary work. The language is plain, unflowery; it’s the disjointed logic of the images that turns the lines into spare poetry. The way white asparagus grows without the sun that would have made its chlorophyll surge, these poems feel like their story-lines have been cultivated in a different environment, so that there is something slightly alien and deprived about them, though you recognize their shapes. For instance, in one poem, a man at the bottom of a pool is “pretending/to be fixing a ladder” while a possibly possessed herd of synchronized swimmers practices around him. The moment has all the reverberations of a short story, but in only nine brief stanzas.

The poems of Thin Kimono are often about people in bleak situations who encounter the indifference of others, whether it’s a man whose dog won’t help him out of the snow or the speaker whose girlfriend throws him out into the night “just as one cracks open the window/of a passing sedan and pokes out/a wrapper.” Other times it’s the speaker who is unsettled but passive in response to images of violence around him–a war photo, a brutalized mannequin, a doomed robin, a stinging behind his own face “like some kind of a problem behind a billboard.” Craig blurs the line between the person confronting and the writer capturing. Feeling like “a man in a park, dripping wet with gasoline,” he is told he is merely experiencing “writer’s block.” Fortunately, nothing has blocked these strange and evocative poems from the page.

Suddenly it was time.
A single black llama ran briskly up a hill.
There was pinochle in another town.
The hungry actress ordered sea bass.
And somehow from my poem came your feeling of consent.

- from “I Was Thinking”

Noose and Hook
by Lynn Emanuel
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)

Let me just say upfront that the middle section of this book is a morality play in which the main character is a dog who speaks in a baby-talk Cockney dog dialect.

OK, maybe I should have worked up to that. Please don’t go, at least not until I’ve told you that this one of the best books of poetry I can remember reading in years. Noose and Hook is recklessly brilliant, both animal and intellectual. It is about world-wearines, poetry, the self, and the way war erodes us, even from a distance. Think of the unapologetic minds of Gertrude Stein and Anne Carson, and you will have some sense of where Lynn Emanuel harkens from (even though she tries to renounce Stein in a late poem). This is her third book, and it has an advanced career quality to it. Not trying to impress, not trying to behave, it can go anywhere the poet wants, and it’s exhilarating.

Now back to that play, “The Mongrelogues.” As if the dog’s language were some sort of Middle English we might find alongside that of The Canterbury Tales, Emanuel takes up the dialect and invests her canine character with a puzzled, then trusting, then indignant take on the world that alternately shelters, abuses, abandons, scapegoats, and interrogates him. The dog’s mistress is named Mistrust, and Dogg must absorb her fate, her reaction to “middle age” and to troubled times. Dogg’s fraught relationship to his mistress is revealed in the way he calls her a speaker of “Engleash,” revealing both the language and power divide between them in one invented word. References abound – to the Bible, Berryman, Wordsworth, and Neruda (“i am tired uf bein dogg,” laments Dogg, just as Neruda’s man laments the exhaustion of being a man), to name just a few. Not unlike Shakespeare’s Caliban, Dogg becomes a kind of litmus test of humanity’s ability to be kind as it explores its own power to judge and dictate another’s fate.

Emanuel has embraced poetry’s devices–its bizarre twists, its metaphors, its music, its puns and wordplay–and yet she has written a book that might well transcend poetry and appeal to many differently tuned minds, simply because of how go-for-broke it is.

Into the clearing of…
she climbed and stood

up from the black boots of her blackouts
into her body.

The coat wept upon her shoulder,
it hung upon her, a carcass heavy on a hook,

and in the sockets of the buttonholes
the buttons lolled and looked.

As she climbed into that clearing
it shook as it took her.

A fever wrote the sentence
and screwed it tight with ache

and the long hair of the grass grew silvery and weak,
lay greasily against the skull of dirt.

My mother was a figure armed with…
and came toward me

flew to me as though I were a sentence
that must be mended, that must be broken

then ended, ended, ended.

– from “The Revolution”

The Madeleine Poems
by Paul Legault
(Omnidawn Publishing, 2010)

Trying to figure out who Madeleine is and why these poems are hers, one can’t help but think of Proust’s madeleines, the bite that evokes lost worlds, and wonder if Paul Legault wants his character of the same name to be a similar device. Yet there is nothing nostalgic in these poems, in which every title remakes Madeleine in a new form: “Madeleine as Home,” “Madeleine as Matador,” “Madeleine as New Frontier,” etc. Ultimately I tend to think Madeleine is really just a material, like carbon, something elemental, of which things are made (“a new thing/of an old thing made/anew”)… or perhaps the pioneering spirit itself, the alter ego/embodiment of wanderlust with its accompanying rudder of shame and violence.

In the only poem that’s just Madeleine in her own skin and voice, she’s just as elusive as anywhere else, announcing that she is the “Madonna of chosen things” and that she will “outlast” us. She’s also a cold and brutal presence, inasmuch as she is present at all. In the end, who she is and why she’s the vessel for these poems is perhaps the least interesting thing about the astonishing images of this book. The way Legault makes abstractions feel visceral is what’s most notable. His grim, ghostly half-history is mesmerizing, peopled with Walt Whitman and Christopher Columbus and many other personas and lands, both identified and suggested.

Though the poems can grow a bit indulgent in their withholding and sometimes circular syntax and heightened, fragmented language, they are more than saved by moments of audacious clarity, as in the poem “Madeleine as James Dean and the Whale,” when the body of the whale is described as “stone washed,” literally so, evoking Dean’s famous jeans in a flash. And even in some of the withholding and circular language, there is a purposeful feeling, something darkly sexual, acerbic, and enticing, not merely remote. “In one of the rooms, time gets really close,” writes Legault, and, with still no idea of what that could mean, you feel it.

These are challenging poems, and this is probably the book that least obviously belongs on this list, but for the adventurous reader/writer of more cerebral fiction, it offers up a great reward.

- from “Madeleine as Tourist”

American Fanatics
by Dorothy Barresi
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)

Dorothy Barresi has described her ideal poetry as “poetry that knows what it knows for only a second, and loves the brute world anyway.” I’m not sure about the fleetingness of the knowledge, but there’s no doubt about the brute world.

The title of the book tells you Barresi’s not messing around, and the first poem gets right to work, taking on religion and its slow burn into extremism in the very first stanzas. The great danger in this world is that it is made up of people who seek “a genesis wrapped/in exodus,” who believe that the better world can begin only when the competing world is destroyed. Her take on this predicament is at different moments profane, worried, questioning, brash. Through it all, God is the essential shape-shifter. “God is hammy as an old rock star,” in one poem, a “brass-knuckled, wire-tapped tough” in another.

Political poems often, with their litany-like and incurious approach, defang their subjects even as they infuse them with more growl. On the other hand, lyrically innovative poems can treat current events and anxieties as unworthy of their high-shelf beauty. Barresi, however, can discuss fanaticism head-on and then wrap her conclusions in this beautiful, vivid image: “Reading the newspapers lately, you’d think/American had been educated/In a single ray of handsome and murderous light/By which we see/individual belief is everything, being free.” She can also pause, amidst poems mostly focused on human foibles, to notice “fog mumbling along/the numbest parts of the morning’s throat” or the way turtle eggs glow “as though they had been pressed through immaculate doorlight.”

Not every poem here is perfect, but even those that don’t quite hit their stride tell us something about ourselves: whether the preening we do through diets and midlife crises or the more serious ways we confront faith, security, and responsibility. They are about looking squarely at those deciding what they’d kill for, while we decide what to live for.

Did I mention that in my catherdral a cardinal’s hat
hangs from the rafters like a tiny blood clot?
Caught up so high, so far into the brain of the thing,
that you can barely make it out?

And a full ration of gently
apoplectic saints
holding their breath in the side chapels,

and one priest
in elegant surplice

coming up from behind
everyone
like Groucho Marx goosing Margaret Dumont.

O velvet lash of the short vowel sound
laid over a flaming poker!
to burn awake
my intentions each day
as I raise myself from the dead.

- from “It Is Good To Be Amongst Catholics Again”

Further Links and Resources

- Ordering directly from the presses is a great way to keep poetry alive and well! To order one of these books directly from its publisher, click on its title in the review.

Julia Story / photo from Sarabande

- Sarabande’s website for Post Moxie features an interview with Julia Story, writing exercises, and recommendations (from the author) for further reading. Two more poems by Story, “Bride/Beer Can” and “Glossary,” can be read at La Petite Zine. Verse Daily has also featured several poems from Post Moxie, including “From Its Plastic Light.”

- In this interview at HTML Giant, poet Michael Earl Craig talks about Thin Kimono, fudge, soundtracks, and “den wash.” At Octopus Magazine, you can read the poem excerpted above, “I Was Thinking”, and two others.

In this video, he reads “I Am Coming Over to See You” and other poems:

Dorothy Barresi

- This interview with Dorothy Barresi (American Fanatics) at Words without Borders focuses on the writer’s relationship with Los Angeles and its role in her poetry. Another interview at West Branch Wired offers a link to two of her poems that first appeared in West Branch 62. At chaparral, you can read two of her poems, “How’s the World Treating You?” and “Responsibility.”

- On the University of Pittsburgh Press’s website, read a longer excerpt from Lynn Emanuel’s Noose and Hook. Via Slate, listen to Emanuel read “The Revolution” (the poem excerpted above). Here, watch her read–backed by a full orchestra–her poem “Desire”:

Emanuel reads more poems from Noose and Hook on the Poets’ Co-op TV Show (Episode 33):

Paul Legault / photo from Omnidawn's website

- Read several selections from The Madeleine Poems on Paul Legault’s website.

Julia Guez at BOMBLOG also highly recommends this book and features an interview with Legault; find out how studying screenwriting informs his poetry and why he recently published an “English-to-English translation” of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

But the countess was also a powerful widow holding sway over a considerable inheritance of land and money, and her family’s political allegiances were a problem for the regents. Was she really an unrepentant, psychopathic murderer—or was she simply a political obstacle to the king? Was she really bathing in the blood of her victims, or was she herself the victim of a witch hunt? Such questions haunt the pages of The Countess (Crown, 2010), Rebecca Johns’s lively historical novel about Countess Erzsebet Bathory of Hungary. Johns beautifully reconstructs the complexity of this 17th century scandal and brings alive the woman behind the myth.

When I picked up The Countess, I didn’t know what to expect. I read mostly literary fiction, so I wasn’t looking forward or hoping for a Gothic tale. I knew Johns’s work from her debut, Icebergs, a quiet novel about ordinary people’s struggles to overcome the extraordinary emotional damages of war. I had been so impressed with that novel’s understated emotional power that I decided to give Johns’s vision of the evil countess a try.

From the moment I started reading, I couldn’t stop. This fictional historical memoir drew me in with a voice irresistible for its clarity, intelligence and modern subtlety. Hardly the truculent blood-lusty pervert, Countess Bathory comes across as an intelligent woman who from a young age understands too well the responsibilities laid on her shoulders: to not only preserve the family’s name and riches, but to care for her youngest siblings against political turmoil, war, and shifting political allegiances. In the character’s own words:

For a long time I was shocked by the idea that the fate of the family would fall on me, that my little sister Zsofia would depend on me to find a husband who would love me and protect her for my sake. I could not imagine that any man would love me as my father loved my mother.

Throughout the novel, Bathory juggles the restrictive proprieties imposed on women’s conduct with the ruthless political maneuvers that her status and wealth demand. Her family’s wealth baits jealous enemies and men all too willing to play on Bathory’s heart for political advantage. When Bathory becomes a widow and her children are too young to take over the family estates, she struggles to protect her sons’ and daughters’ inheritance against those who threaten to steal it. Who could fail to sympathize with such a woman?

Countess Bathory / Image from Bathory.org

For most of the book, I sided with Bathory. I admired her self-control, her inner fortitude, and her boundless love for her children. I felt her wounded pride when less then reliable men played unfairly with her. And for most of the novel I believed her to be a woman who had everything but what she most longed for: love or even respect from the men in her life. Even her son, who provides the pretext for the letters that compose the story, fails to visit her or even send a kind message when she’s in jail, waiting for death to end her misery and loneliness.

But, readers must wonder, is the countess innocent? Johns is a masterful psychologist. She takes care to establish clues to Bathory’s possible neurosis early in the novel when the countess recounts witnessing—as a child—the execution of a gypsy man who sold his daughter to slavery. The gypsy man is sewn alive inside the stomach of a dying horse, and is left there to slowly die of thirst, hunger, and infection. The young countess visits him on the hour of his death, refusing him water. As she relates:

[...he] opened his eyes, struggling and cursing. I spit in his face, and the white spittle caught in his mustache and hung there like a bit of spider silk. I was never so satisfied as I was at that moment, watching him suffer.

A poster from *Bathory*, Juraj Jakubisko's 2008 film about the Bloody Countess

The narrative suggests that this disturbing reaction invokes a curse or, at the least, calls bad luck upon her. Far from resonating with hocus pocus, this moment establishes the basis for Bathory’s most profound emotional distress: the fear that if she can’t make a man love her, she will become as powerless as the girl who was sold into slavery. She especially resents the gypsy man’s betrayal of his daughter; betrayal is another theme that resonates with her life tragedies. This event also establishes the environment of superstition that ruled the Middle Ages and became a deadly trap for Bathory.

Later in the novel, it becomes clear that Bathory remains affected by that childhood event; the gypsy’s dying words revisit her during the most traumatic moments of her adult life—and there are many such moments in this novel. The countess is married to a cold, uncaring man, seduced by indifferent lovers, disrespected by the servants, and devastated by the loss of three of her children.

It is so heartbreaking to see Bathory’s affections crushed at every turn that we forget her historical reputation and hope instead for a happy ending. The beatings and the rather creative punishments of the servant girls (she forces one to breastfeed a wooden log) seem at first only a footnote to the more compelling story of her emotional devastation.

Rebecca Johns

Even as the novel begins to unravel the mystery of the servants’ deaths, Bathory is such an eloquent character that it’s easy to ignore even the most obvious clues: a reader could long hold onto the belief that Bathroy was just an unwitting enabler to the perversions of her more trusted servants, to whom she delegated the management of the household.

It is only late in the novel that the reader fully witnesses the ravaging effects of the countess’s emotional damage as it capitulates in her blackout rages. In a riveting scene, Johns unleashes her most brilliant storytelling gifts, bringing us into the fragmented, haunted mind of the countess when she’s under the spell of her most repressed rage, revealing even in that moment of absolute monstrosity a compelling vulnerability:

A cracking noise, like the breaking of stone, and the room grows dim before me, blackens. I am alone in the darkness, and then, as if from a great distance, colors come back to me, sounds, light. There is a girl in front of me, a girl crying. Her nose is bright with blood and her eyes tear, making tracks in the dirt of her face and the blood…How small she looks, how frightened. For a moment, I wonder what her days are like, what love there is for her, whether she feels fear, or anger, or pity, or love. Whom does she love? What have those she loves done to her? There is blood on her face, running off her chin in little spins and rivulets. I’m not sure how it got there.

The real horror of Johns’s version of this historical monster is that Bathory is not only likeable, a woman we would not hesitate to welcome if we’d met her in real life, but, like most serial killers, she is comfortable balancing her dark side with her generosity and sense of justice. The most lasting effect of Johns’s The Countess is the uneasy feeling readers get that there may be a monster within each of us, concealed behind thick curtains of false ethics and self-justifications.

For the reader who seeks sophisticated characterizations and unreliable narrators, Johns’s work is thoroughly satisfying. She constructs a complicated character whose unrepentant confessions reveal the damaged mind of a woman raised to strive for all the most false and superficial values, a woman whose talents and ambitions become so focused on fleeting and unrewarding pursuits that the results can only capitulate in despair or madness. That Bathory refuses to crumble to self-pity is the spring upon which her disturbing late-life behavior feeds. Her fears give way to a mental breakdown that resolves itself, literally, in bloody murder.

By the end of the novel, I felt all the irony and perverted cruelty of Bathory’s punishment. Not only is the countess trapped in her fairy tale archetype of evil, but she also has the unfortunate fate of experiencing—literally—the restrictions imposed upon her gender by her time: she is walled alive inside a tower in her own estates, abandoned and reviled by family and friends.

The Countess is a complex and artfully constructed story about a powerful spirit perverted by oppressing values, political ruthlessness, and disloyalty, capitulating in a morbid slaughter whose realistic rendering is far more frightening than any fantasized demon vampire plot. Rebecca Johns proves that real-life horrors, the horrors of war and mental damage, are far more terrifying than any Gothic fantasy. I bow to Johns for transcending multiple genres and writing yet another eminently compelling story.

Further Links and Resources

- Learn more about Icebergs, Rebecca Johns’s first novel, at Powell’s Books. And pick up a copy of the Winter 2010-2011 issue of Ploughshares to read a story by Johns, “Perpetua in Glory.”

- You can read Laura Valeri’s interview with the author at The Mojito Literary Society, and here is a widely distributed Q&A with Johns, via Reuters.

- On her blog Illiterati, the author offers this fictional interview with Erzsébet Báthory.

- Would your reading group like to talk to Rebecca Johns about The Countess? Fill out this form on the author’s website.

- Bathory is a frequent subject of the arts and popular culture, inspiring novels, plays, films, comics, operas, metal bands, and even toys–like this doll in a blood bath.

- Interested in some cinematic takes on the legend of the Bloody Countess?

• Here is a trailer from Bathory, Juraj Jakubisko’s 2008 film about the countess; Anna Friel stars in the title role.
• And here is a trailer from Julie Delpy’s 2009 film (which she directed and starred in), The Countess:

After patriarch Mort Foxman passes away, the Foxman clan is forced to sit through what might be the craziest shiva of all time. Narrating this mess of mourning is Judd Foxman, a sad sack with a great comic voice. Just before his father’s death, Judd came home with a birthday cake for his wife, only to find her “lying spread-eagle on the bed, with some guy’s wide, doughy ass hovering above her.” The fact that “some guy” is Judd’s radio-shock-jock boss doesn’t stop Judd from attacking with “a chocolate-strawberry cheesecake with thirty-three burning candles.”

This forces his marriage to end “the way things do: with paramedics and cheesecake.”

Alone and resentful, newly single Judd returns to his childhood home in Knob’s End, New York. Even though his father was not religious, Mort’s dying wish was that his family would reunite to sit shiva for a full week. This family includes: Inappropriate Mom, a bestselling author on child rearing, who favors too-revealing blouses; Phillip, the baby of the family, who dates a cougar therapist; Wendy, the oldest sister, who’s raising three kids in a sexless marriage; and Paul, the oldest brother, who lost his college baseball scholarship after a Rottweiler incident. Presiding over the shiva is family friend Boner, a young rabbi trying to make Judaism cool by wearing Armani suits and diamond studs.

Over the course of the shiva, the brothers give each other black eyes, Judd realizes his adulterous wife is pregnant, and his mother begins an affair with the woman who lives across the street. Some twists and gags are a bit far-fetched—smoking a joint in temple, the brothers cause the sprinklers to turn on—and the author’s need for each character to reach a meaningful epiphany feels forced. But overall, this novel and its narrator’s voice are so smart and funny, they make its flaws seem negligible.

Jonathan Tropper

In one of Tropper’s finest (and most brutal) passages, Judd slams the parade of shiva callers coming through the doors:

“These middle-aged women in the early stages of disrepair…genetics help some more than others, but they are all like melting ice cream bars, slowly sliding down the stick as they come apart.”

Judd’s observations might seem cruel, but they are also startlingly specific, keenly true.

The novel’s real triumph is in transcending mere laugh-out-loud moments with the poignancy of Judd’s descriptions. Seeing (and mocking) others, he can’t help but examine himself. He grapples with questions of his own mortality and options: what should he do next? He loved his wife and was good to her, but still their marriage disintegrated. Like the rest of the Foxman clan, he’s not where he thought or hoped he would be as middle age approaches. But by the book’s end, Judd realizes that “anything can happen,” that the future isn’t mapped out. That it wouldn’t be interesting if it were. And if there’s an epiphany worth believing in, it’s Judd’s: Even (and especially) after a swinging bout of dysfunction, even if you can’t stand the sight of your family, deep down you know, you can always go home.

Further Resources

- Via the New York Times, read an excerpt from This is Where I Leave You.

- Listen to today’s interview (8-25-2010) with Jonathan Tropper on WAMC.

- In this Penguin video, Tropper introduces his latest novel and discusses the challenge of “setting an entire novel in the framework of seven days”:

- Watch and read an interview and Q&A with Tropper at Bookbrowse. And here’s a feature/interview with Tropper in TimeOut New York.

- Over drinks at Brooklyn Public House, Asylum editor Anthony Layser talks with Tropper about This Is Where I Leave You. Does Tropper have a Matthew McConaughey clause protecting his book from sappy romantic comedy adaptations? Is his description of getting kicked in the balls the best of its literary kind? Watch and learn…

- Find out more about Tropper’s other books on his website: How to Talk to a Widower, Everything Changes, The Book of Joe, and Plan B.

- Browse excerpts from The Book of Joe on Random House’s website.

Photo from http://www.mailemeloy.com/

Introduction

In 1993, the late David Foster Wallace published “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction. The essay, later collected in Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, ponders television’s influence on American fiction and postulates a somewhat surprising theory. After considering the ironic, postmodernist work of writers such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, Wallace concludes:

The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. [...] Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval… The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama…

If Wallace was right, then author Maile Meloy is not only a rebel, she might just be leading the quiet revolution. In both her short stories and novels, Meloy has a gift for animating the seemingly banal. She possesses the ability to skirt the edge of sentimentality and melodrama, then elevate the entire work to high art.

Maile Meloy was born and raised in Helena, Montana, in the early 1970s. It was a childhood without television, and by the time Meloy was ten years old her father had her reading Jane Eyre and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Though she was an early reader of the classics, Meloy didn’t pursue writing until many years later.

While studying at Harvard, Meloy took a fiction-writing workshop taught by Richard Ford. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author saw talent in the young writer and encouraged her to study at the University of California-Irvine with his longtime friend Geoffrey Wolff.

By the time her run at Irvine was drawing to a close, Meloy was already represented by ICM über-agent Amanda “Binky” Urban. Soon enough, Sarah McGrath, then an editor at Scribner, called.

Meloy made a heady literary debut with the story collection Half in Love (Scribner, 2002). By that time, Meloy’s fiction had appeared in the Best New American Voices 2000, which was edited by Tobias Wolff. She had also been published in the New Yorker, and her story “Aqua Boulevard” had not only appeared in the Paris Review, but had won the journal’s prestigious Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

Meloy’s first novel, Liars and Saints (Scribner, 2003), appeared one year after her story collection and garnered critical praise and strong sales. Three years later, her second novel A Family Daughter (Scribner, 2006) was followed by awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2003, Meloy won the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, and in 2007 she was one of twenty-one authors chosen by Granta as the “Best of Young American Novelists.”

Throughout this streak of publications and awards, Meloy’s fresh handling of contemporary realism did not go unnoticed by critics.

When Liars and Saints was published, the Boston Globe opined that Meloy might be “the first great American realist of the twenty-first century.” The New York Times Magazine called Meloy’s writing “meticulous realism.”

When the author’s second collection,
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It (Riverhead, 2009), was published this past summer, it landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Applauding her stories, reviewer Curtis Sittenfeld noted “a kind of banal, daily desperation animates many of Meloy’s characters.” And the Los Angeles Times (now Meloy’s hometown paper) wrote that the new collection was “more evidence of Meloy’s fluency as a realist writer, of her Chekhovian resistance to resolving the existential dilemmas posed in her stories.”

Easy answers, it seems, are nonexistent in Maile Meloy’s writing. Her character’s struggles resonate long after a story’s conclusion. Through prose that is concise, confident, and empathetic, she evokes, as Wallace wrote, the “plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions” of life, and treats them with “reverence and conviction.” If Meloy’s new collection is any evidence of what we can expect in the future, it would appear the rebellion Wallace predicted nearly two decades ago is in its ascendancy. Vive la révolution!

[The following interview with Meloy was conducted via email. After the interview had wrapped, the New York Times Book Review named Meloy’s new collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It to their list of ‘The 10 Best Books of 2009’ and called her stories “concise yet fine-grained narratives.”]

Interview

JOSHUA BODWELL: Can you remember back to a short story collection that had a formative effect on you? A collection that made you feel as though you were reading for the first time?

WWCD? Illustration by Tammy Ackerman of North40Creative

MAILE MELOY: The Collected Stories of John Cheever made me feel that way, in my early twenties. I carried it around for months, and still remember where I was when I was reading different parts of it. I was trying to learn how to write stories then, and I felt like I should have a bracelet that said “What Would Cheever Do?”

But the first story collection in my memory is a book of Isaac Asimov short stories on tape that we listened to on a long car ride when I was really young. I remember being absolutely riveted, staring at the back of the front passenger seat, as a woman fell in love with her domestic robot, Tony. I don’t remember the whole plot of any of the stories, but I remember the feelings of suspense and heartbreak, and the need to know what happened next.

Where do your own short stories typically begin? A scene or situation? A narrator’s voice?

They almost always begin with a scene or a situation, often very small, always involving at least two people. But the stories don’t go unless I have the voice. It’s like a getting into a car with a tricky clutch, and you can either get it in gear or you can’t. I think the voice has a lot to do with whether I can get the story in gear and make it go.

All of the stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It remain surprisingly close to the sentiment of the book’s title: the characters are often torn between what they have and what they want. Did you discover this theme in your stories once you started gathering them together, or did you arrive at the theme first and then write stories toward it?

The stories were all written at different times, over several years, and I didn’t think I had a collection for a long time, and I didn’t realize how much they had in common thematically until I read them all together. My editor, Sarah McGrath, suggested the title, which had always been there near the end of one of the stories, waiting to be noticed. It’s from the A.R. Ammons poem that is the epigraph of the book, and I think it’s the kind of title that adds something to the book, and helps bring it together.

Your first collection, Half in Love, was published seven years ago. Do you see any significant differences between the stories in that collection and the stories in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It?

The titles reflect the big difference: Half in Love is more about people who can’t help but withhold part of themselves, and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is about people who don’t want anything withheld from them. It’s a more assertive book in a way.

The stories are also longer, and I’m older, and I’ve tried to do things I couldn’t do in Half in Love. I think “Liliana” might be my first comic story. It started out being my first ghost story, but I couldn’t help finding a real explanation for the appearance of the dead grandmother at the door.

Neither Half in Love nor Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It feature the ubiquitous “title story.” Can you share your thoughts on titling these two collections?

I’ve never had a story title that could serve as the title for a whole book, but both titles were existing phrases within the books. In my story, the phrase is about a crush, but “half in love” is also from the Keats poem “Ode to a Nightingale”: “and I have been half in love with easeful death.” So the phrase had both sex and death in it, and that seemed appropriate to the collection.

I’m very slow about titles, and I welcome suggestions from people who’ve read early drafts. Sarah, my editor, usually comes up with a very long list—I don’t know how she does it. My favorite suggestion for Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, from a friend who’s a comedy writer, was Here Comes Mr. Hockey: The Gordy Howe Story. That still makes me laugh.

In Half in Love there is a nearly even balance between stories written in the first-person and third-person points of view (as well as one second-person story, the stunning “Ranch Girl,” your first story to appear in the New Yorker). However, in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It there is just a single first-person story, “Liliana,” which whetted the appetites of your fans when it appeared in the Paris Review a few months before the collection hit the shelves. Can you talk about your decisions surrounding the point of view in a story? Have you ever “saved” a story by changing the point of view?

If a story works, it’s usually because I’ve found the right voice for it, and the voice and the narration are so entwined that it tends to stay the way I started it. But a few times I’ve changed the narration halfway through. A story in Half in Love called “Four Lean Hounds, ca. 1976” started out in first person, and it’s a story about a man whose best friend dies in an accident while they’re diving together. In trying to comfort his friend’s wife, he ends up sleeping with her. Geoffrey Wolff pointed out to me that if the story is told in first person, you don’t know whether to trust the narrator or not. Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he killed the guy. I didn’t want that kind of confusion—I wanted a story that was true as it was told. First person suggests unreliability so easily, and unreliability might be the most effective use of it, in short stories. I tend to write narrators who are telling the truth even if the characters aren’t, which might be why almost all of these stories are in third person: for the authority.

“Ranch Girl” didn’t work until I started it in the second person. The New Yorker asked to change it to third person, and I agreed, but I always liked it better in second and changed it back for the book.

What I’ve never done is to write an omniscient short story with multiple perspectives, and I would so love to. I read Ivan Bunin’s “The Gentleman from San Francisco” a year or two ago and fell in love with it and thought I must write an omniscient short story, ideally a Russian one, right now. I tried and tried, and kept failing. Close third is as close as I’ve gotten. Someday, though.

You have a great gift for writing both from the male point of view (as in your masterful “Aqua Boulevard”) and about men (as in the story that opens your new collection, “Travis, B.”). There is a wonderful line in “Tome,” the first story in Half in Love, where the narrator, a competent female attorney, says, “I thought, That’s what it’s like to be a man. If I were a man I could explain the law and people would listen and say ‘Okay.’ It would be so restful.” Is there a little bit of the author in that declaration? Is that why two of Half in Love’s six first-person stories are told in a man’s voice, as well as the only first-person story in your new collection? Can you share your thoughts about both female authors writing as men, and male authors writing from a female perspective?

I didn’t realize there were so many male protagonists until I put all the stories together. I think part of the reason I like a male perspective is that it gets me out of myself. I wrote “Aqua Boulevard” at a time when I was working on “Tome” and other stories about women in the west, and I felt like I had that voice down pretty well, but I was so tired of it. So I started a monologue, not knowing where it was going, in the voice of a 70-year-old Frenchman (mimicking a 70-year-old Frenchman I know and love), just to get out of the rhythm of my own voice. And it was hugely freeing. So then I had to add other characters and make something happen.

You have published two novels between your two story collections. Do you think your work as a novelist has affected your short story writing?

Having written two novels might be the reason the stories are a little longer now. But I think that writing short stories has affected the novels more: both novels have slightly story-like chapters, and I think writing short stories trains you to a kind of efficiency, because everything needs to count.

In Curtis Sittenfeld’s review of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It in the New York Times Book Review, she praises your restraint and says, “She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope.” Can you talk about your process of working with this restraint? Do you write long first drafts in order to tighten in successive drafts? Or are your first drafts spare?

They’re spare. I often start with not that much more than dialogue. Then I have to go back and put in details about what things look like and where everyone is and what they’re wearing. What happens between people is the most interesting thing to me. I have to make sure that readers can see the scene, and feel it, but I don’t really care what the trees look like. I can make myself care if the trees are really important.

In 2007, Granta named you as one of twenty-one authors on their list “Best of Young American Novelists.” You followed this honor with the publication of a collection of short stories—a collection of stories that landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, nonetheless. How do you feel about the seemingly endless debate about the state of the short story in America?

I love short stories—writing them and reading them—and so many wonderful writers are writing so many good ones. It’s true there’s a vastly shrunken marketplace, but that doesn’t stop everyone.

The funny thing is that the Granta list of novelists is the reason I have this story collection, now. I was working on a novel when they called and told me about the list, and they needed a short story within a month. I didn’t have any stories, so I got out the five or six that I’d abandoned for some reason, and started working on them. I finished one of them for Granta, but I’d gotten interested in the others. Time had passed, and I saw ways to fix them. I stopped writing the novel, and got used to the short-story pace again, and wrote some new stories, and then I realized I might have a book.

Your stories (as well as your novels) span the globe and time. In addition to your many present-day and domestic settings, in your two collections of stories we experience retired men in Paris, a soldier in London during World War II, diplomats in Saudi Arabia, aristocrats in South America, and a Connecticut power plant in 1975. These stories carry the authority of experience. Can you talk a bit about your research process, as well as how you push beyond the maxim “Write what you know.”

I think you have to find an emotional connection to the story, to make anyone else care about it, but I would find writing only what I know to be limiting. All of the stories you mention above came from fragments of things people told me—about pranks on the pager phones in a power plant, for example, or about inheritance in Argentina. I start with those details, which feel real, and seem promising, and start writing around them. I tend to write what seems like the emotional story between the characters first, and then check the parts I got wrong, and add more details later. I’ve been thinking about a novel lately that would require more advance research than anything I’ve done so far, and I don’t know how that process might change if I do it.

Andre Dubus used to say that he liked to read the first line of every story in a collection, and then go back and read each story in its entirety in the order the author had selected. How important has both sequencing and overall cohesion been to you with your two collections?

I spent a lot of time on the sequence, and wrote an essay about it for Amazon, which you can read here. It’s felt, with both collections, like a puzzle with only one answer. There are stories that need to go early and stories that can’t go early. It’s what makes it a book, and gives it a shape.

Speaking of Dubus, Half in Love has two stories that feature the same characters; a technique Dubus was fond of employing. In your story “Garrison Junction,” we meet the young couple Gina and Chase. They are unmarried and Gina is newly pregnant. Then we meet the couple again near the end of the collection, but they are much older this time and the exploits of their teenage daughter, Amy, take center stage, as noted in the story’s title, “Thirteen & a Half.” Can you talk about these two stories and your decision to link them?

It wasn’t a decision I made until the stories were in a book, and could resonate with each other within the book. I think it was a tiny step toward novel-writing, at a time when I wasn’t sure I could write a novel. There were two other linked stories in my original draft of the collection, but they didn’t really fit, and I took them out and they became the first two chapters of Liars and Saints.

In addition to your writing being exceptionally powerful in its concision, you have a great technical gift for plotting and pacing. Can you take your story “Red from Green” (which first appeared in the New Yorker) and explain why you chose not to resolve the story within the envelope of the central action—fifteen-year-old Sam Turner’s awkward rafting trip with her attorney father and a client—and instead pushed the action ahead by many months to end at the east coast boarding school Sam has left Montana to attend?

I wanted Sam to have time—for the consequences of her decision to leave home to have settled in, and for her understanding of what happened to have deepened, and taken on context. I needed her to grow up a little, before the story could end.

On the flip side of “Red from Green,” the action in “The Girlfriend”—where a father painfully questions the girlfriend of a boy who murdered his daughter—you have compressed the entire story into a very short span of time (with some flashbacks) and in one location (a hotel room). Why did you use this technique here rather than, say, jump ahead at the end of the story and show the father reflecting back on the confrontation in the hotel?

I wanted him to discover what he discovers about his daughter’s death in the course of the story. If he were reflecting back, then the story would begin with him already knowing everything. I wanted him to come to the information as the reader does. As a reader, you think it’s one kind of story, and then it’s another—and in a way, that’s true for him, too.

After thinking about your story “Red from Green,” I realized how many of your stories include attorneys. In addition to that story, I can think of “Tome,” “Garrison Junction,” “Kite Whistler Aquamarine,” “Thirteen & a Half,” and “Travis, B.” Did I miss any? Why do you think you’ve included so many attorneys in your writing?

The easy answer is that I grew up with a lot of lawyers around, so it’s a job for which I have a vocabulary at hand. But the deeper answer is that being a small-town lawyer with a varied practice—there are no corporate lawyers in the stories—is a job that puts you in contact with extraordinary circumstances. Ordinary people deal with lawyers only when something crucial and possibly extreme is happening in their lives, and so it’s rich territory for stories. And lawyers are themselves good storytellers, or should be: they have to build a narrative and convince an audience that it’s true.

When fantasizing about an “ideal reader” in his 1968 interview with the Paris Review, John Updike said: “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a country-ish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.” Do you have any sort of “ideal reader” or audience in mind when you write?

That’s a lovely quotation, but I don’t really have an imaginary reader like that. I write sometimes for people I know, putting in things that might please or entertain them, but I don’t think about them all the time. When it’s going well, I just feel like I’m inside the story, figuring out what the people in it do next.

Is there someone outside your field who inspires you?

Chad Ochocinco of the Cincinnati Bengals. And the acrobats in Cirque du Soleil.

Your stories are set all over the country and all over the world, but where is your ideal workspace?

I have a chair that tilts back like an astronaut chair, and a desk that comes over on an arm, with a laptop on it. I started using that set-up because it was easier on my shoulders to be in the tilted-back position, but now I can’t compose anything beyond an email if I’m sitting up straight. Sideways on a couch with a lap desk works in a pinch.

For Further Reading

- Don’t miss Celeste Ng’s review of Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It here on FWR.

- If you’re shopping for a copy of Meloy’s latest collection, click here to buy from your local indie bookseller.

Sung Woo / photo by Sandra Nissen

Sung J. Woo was born in Korea and immigrated to the United States with his mother and two sisters in 1981; he was ten years old. Several years earlier, his father had moved to this country in order to establish a small business. That business would end up being a small, Asian-themed store in a mall in New Jersey, which in turn would one day serve as the basis for the setting of Sung Woo’s debut novel, Everything Asian.

Though modeled in part on the author’s own life, Everything Asian is more than just a coming-of-age tale or an immigrant narrative. It is also the portrait of a particular community and the odd intersections that take place between people who work in close proximity to one another but don’t always know each other very well. Captured with humor and generosity, the book chronicles one year in the lives of the Kim family as they adjust to a new life in the United States and interact with fellow shopkeepers at Peddlers Town.

In addition to Everything Asian, Sung J. Woo’s short stories and essays have appeared in such places as the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Carve, Pindeldyboz, Paradigm, Storyglossia, Miranda Magazine, and KoreAm Journal. A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from New York University, he lives in Washington, New Jersey. He spoke with Jeremiah Chamberlin on May 15th during the Ann Arbor Book Festival.

Interview

JEREMIAH CHAMBERLIN: Let’s begin with the genesis question. What was your path to writing? Were you someone for whom writing was always important, or did you come to it later in life?

SUNG WOO: Yeah, much later. I wasn’t even much of a reader until 10th grade. My English class at that time did these visits to the library to pick out a book to read for pleasure. I had picked out Steven Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. But this guy named Claude came over, he took one look at what I had, and he said, “Are you really going to read that?” I said, “No.” And he said, “I’ll get you something else.” So he went to one of those spinning racks that had the paperbacks—all the popular ones—and he brought back The Dead Zone. He took Stephen Crane away and he replaced it with Stephen King, and he said, “This is the book you should read.” So that’s how I started reading, with that book. And it’s the first time I ever realized that reading could be highly entertaining.

When you say “entertaining,” what do you mean by that?

That I was so fully entranced with whatever world these people had created that I completely lost track of time. I wanted to do this instead of watch television, which was a total revelation to me.

So when you did start writing, was it out of that want to be able to do for other people what you felt those authors had done for you?

Absolutely. I wanted to replicate that experience because it was so unique for me. And I wanted to do it just like they could. But it was hard! (Laughs.) In my mind it was so clear what I wanted to do, but then what actually came out was so vastly inferior.

It always feels like that, doesn’t it?

It’s true. But this was absolutely what I wanted to do. And since it didn’t even seem possible that I could write something long, I started writing short stories. I just started writing little short stories and I kept doing it.

Did you take writing classes in college?

I did. I took every single writing class I could possible take [at Cornell]. I took my first writing class with Stewart O’Nan.

He’s great. I once heard him say after a reading that when he was a young writer he used to tie his leg to his chair to keep himself at his desk. Did he ever tell you that?

That story! (Laughs.) Yes. He said that when he’s writing he has this urge to get up to look at his bookshelves, for some reason. Doesn’t really help him, but it’s just a habit. And I think having his ankle tied to the chair helped to break that habit.

So have you ever written in Korean, or do you do all your writing in English?

I do all my writing in English. I couldn’t even write in Korean. I can write basic sentences in Korean now, but so much of it I’ve lost. The only Korean that I’ve had to deal with was when I was in college—I did a translation of a children’s book to meet my language requirement. It was fun.

Speaking of kids, you’ve been pretty open about the fact that much of your book is based on your own childhood. So why did you choose to undertake this material as a novel, rather than writing a memoir about that experience?

Somebody else asked me this question, too, because I think I would have gotten paid more! (Laughs.) But the whole idea of writing about my life straightforward, like in a memoir, never really occurred to me, even though I have ended up writing essays that are very personal. Because I always think there’s a stigma of vanity in writing a memoir. Is my life that interesting enough to warrant me writing about it so other people can read it?

But, of course, I did something very similar. You know, this is my story. So why should I think people want to read this one? But for whatever reason, I felt safer, certainly, writing in fiction than in memoir. And I think it turned out better that it was a work of fiction. One of the main things I wanted to do with this book was to create an older Asian-American male character that was not the prototypical Asian father: reserved, emotionally distant, kind of like my own father. I didn’t want to write that person. I thought it would probably be a whole lot more interesting if I could write a character that was almost the polar opposite of that man. So Mr. Kim is completely the opposite of my own father. He is very emotional—to a fault—and annoyingly chatty.

He’s a man who invites the storekeepers across the mall to dinner so that he can practice English and make friends.

Exactly. All these things that we never did I was able to do in this book, which I think is really the power of fiction, you know? To do something that really didn’t happen.

The other thing you can do in a novel is shift point of view. Although this is very much David’s story, his first-person narrative is interspersed with third-person point of view chapters from secondary characters. Was this structure something you decided on from the beginning, or did it evolve during the writing of the novel?

The structure was there right from the beginning. I got it from my friend, mentor, teacher, Stewart O’Nan. His first novel, Snow Angels, has the same structure. Half the novel is narrated by Arthur Parkinson, in the first-person, and the other chapters are in the third-person about his babysitter, Annie, and her life. Now, it’s a little different because with that book there’s just two strands and they go back and forth. With mine you get other characters, as well.

Also, many of the third-person chapters introduce a new voice and then never return to that character’s point of view, whereas David’s story slowly unfolds. He’s the backbone.

He is. I always meant to do it that way. When my agent submitted the book to her first round of submissions, we got three semi-positive responses from houses, and the editors all said, “I would buy this if the entire book was narrated from the point of view of David.” But that’s not the book that I wanted to write. I wanted a book that was a portrait of a family and also the community that they were in. That was very, very important to me.

Why? What would the novel lose if it were just David portraying the community?

It was a way for me to honor where the story takes place. My life was absolutely with my family when I was with them, but I was also part of this bigger family of the strip mall that we were in. It didn’t seem possible for me to do this story justice if I limited it to the point of view of David because there were all these other voices, all these other people. I didn’t really know any of these people, but I saw them all the time.

Then why not write the whole thing using a third-person point of view?

I guess I could have done it that way, but…

You heard his voice this way?

I did. It didn’t seem right to make it any other way.

It’s a very funny thing, though. Two people have commented on this. One is a friend of mine who doesn’t read too many books. Like most men, he reads biographies and stories of war. (Laughs.) But he said, “You know, it’s very funny that in reviews I’ve read of your book, they all mention this point of view thing. Is that a big deal?” I told him, “I don’t know if it is. I think it is, but maybe not for the generic reader.” And sure enough, I have two sisters, both older, and when my second sister read the book, she said, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it was good.” But when I asked her, “What do you think about the switching of the voice?” she said, “What are you talking about?” She had no idea. So I flipped through the pages and showed her here, and here, and here. “Oh, yeah, I didn’t even notice that,” she said. So I think most people don’t even see it.

One of my workshop teachers at NYU, Chuck Wachtel, a wonderful novelist, told us, “The job of the writer is to keep the questions from coming up. That’s the only thing you have to avoid. You can do that, and you’ll have whatever book you want to write.”

So where did this project begin?

I wrote the first chapter, which turned out to be the middle of the book, in 1998.

Which one was that?

It was titled “Cimmetri,” but now is titled “Ted McManus.”

That’s a great chapter.

A lot of people like it. The pantyhose chapter… (Laughs.) I remember writing it on Cape Cod. My wife and I—well, at that point she was my girlfriend—had rented an A-frame in South Wellfleet. I remember the laptop I had at the time because it was one of those laptops with just green screens. I don’t know if it even had a battery. But that was the first chapter that I wrote. I was only half in the thing for a while, though—I would write a chapter here, a chapter there, and then I would do something else. I really wasn’t getting any traction. This was when a friend of mine said, “Have you considered getting up an hour earlier and writing in the morning?” But I really didn’t like getting up earlier, so I asked my boss if I could come in an hour later. She said, “Okay, that’s fine, whatever you want to do.” That started in 2000, and I was done in 2002. So it actually only took two years when I really sat down to write it every morning.

Only one hour a day?

One hour a day. Yeah. And I really didn’t work that much more on the weekends, either.

After that you began revisions?

Yeah. The biggest problem with the book at that point was that the odd chapters, the ones in the third person, went too far out from the center of the story. Right now, the second chapter is from the point of view of the sister, and it involves the mother and the daughter of a pet shop. But in the previous version, it was actually about those people and not about the sister at all. This mother and daughter go into [the Kim’s] shop to shoplift stuff. It’s a shoplifting chapter. So that chapter had to be completely rewritten from the point of view of the sister. And my agent was really the one who drove a lot of this rewriting, because she used to be an editor at Doubleday. And by rewriting I mean completely jettisoning the chapters. Not a page was saved. Just rewriting from scratch.

Similarly, the sixth chapter in the previous version was from the point of view of the chef and his wife. And in the version that finally made it, it’s from the mother’s point of view dealing with these people. So, again, the gist of what happens is there. But it’s literally taking the camera from one person and shifting to somebody else. That’s exactly what I did. But the story’s still the same.

You talked earlier about how important it was for you to capture the community you grew up in. Another thing that the book captures remarkably well is the 1980s. Part of what evokes that time so richly for me is the specificity of certain products—everything from Armor All to Raisinettes are mentioned in this story. Do you think that’s because “things” from our childhood take on extra meaning? Or does it have more to do with the fact that David is an immigrant and, as such, is more highly attuned to the objects of American culture?

I never thought about it. I do mention quite a few things by brand name, I’d say. It was a big deal. Everything was new. I’d never even set foot in a supermarket before I came here. It was a revelation to have a place this big, this bright, with this much food. It was mind blowing. I couldn’t believe this place even existed. So everything was just very, very different. Even television. When I left Korea we had three stations. That was it. And during the day, certain hours, it was blank. There was nothing on. It was snow or the test patterns because there wasn’t enough money to keep the stations busy.

So to come here, I couldn’t believe the number of channels. You know, all of these things really made an impression on me. And I guess maybe this is just a testament to how advertisement and brands work because they got in my brain. We always bought Tide; I had to have Hershey’s. Nothing else seemed like the good thing.

Along those same lines, there’s a strong sense of optimism in the book. Despite the Cold War and a recession and soaring interest rates, this vision of the 1980s is quite upbeat. We even see it in the clever names of the stores in the mall—the luggage store is called In the Bag, the bookstore is A Second Chance, the stereo store is named Hi Fi Fo Fum.

I never even thought about it that way. But it’s probably a reflection of the way I felt. Even though we lived in this little apartment and we had this store that I don’t think we ever made that much money from, I was still very, very happy. I look back and I say to myself, “Why were you so happy? (Laughs.) Your life was not that great. And you were always forced to work! You should not be happy.” But I was. And I guess I was happy mostly because my family was back together. That meant more to me than I thought it did. Because when I think back to my life in Korea, I was far less happy in Korea than I was here. Which really is strange because we had a pretty good life in Korea, even though we had to move quite a bit. But when I got here everything did seem like it could happen.

There was potential.

Yeah, there was a lot of potential here. Also, propaganda from my parents. They were always saying, “You can do whatever you want.”

Do you think these feelings also had something to do with being a part of a larger community? Even though you didn’t know everyone at the mall, they were still your neighbors. Maybe it felt like a shared venture—that you were all in this together.

That’s very true. We didn’t have any real friends. I mean, my parents had some friends from church, when they did go to church. But all of our friends, even my parents’ closest friends, were at that mall. The guy who ran the luggage store was my father’s best friend, and a bunch of other Korean folks there—a guy who sold jewelry, and a guy who sold trinkets—were all good friends. It was like an extension of my family. It has to be. I was there for so long. Just by familiarity they become close to you, even if they really weren’t.

Another interesting aspect of this novel is that unlike most immigrant coming-of-age stories, there’s no cross-cultural love story, no struggle to overcome language barriers, and no identity crisis as the narrator tries to make sense of himself in a new country. All those elements of the book do exist in minor forms—there is love, there are language barriers, there are elements of Korean culture that David and his family struggle to balance with their new lives—but instead the central concern of the novel seems to be friendship. Almost all the characters, in one way or another, are meditating on the value and nature of friendship. Can you talk about that?

I think one of the things that scares me the most about life in general is loneliness. It’s terrible. Just to think about it. And this is probably something that a lot of the characters in the book deal with—some form of loneliness. Mrs. Hong not being able to befriend Mrs. Kim, for example, or really her own husband, since he doesn’t get her either. It’s something that is pretty much pervasive in everything that I write because it’s such a common theme that everyone has to deal with at some point in their lives. Sometimes on a daily basis. It’s very clichéd to say so, but it’s absolutely true that you come here by yourself and you leave by yourself, no matter how many people are holding your hands or are around you when you’re about to die. There’s nobody else dying with you at the exact same moment. It’s you. It’s devastating.

The whole notion of friendship is very mysterious to me. I’ve always been very, very interested in trying to break down my friendships. They’re always very different in the way they work. And some happen so quickly.

Finally, who do you see as the audience for this novel?

With a title like Everything Asian, it’s pretty obvious who the intended audience is. At the same time, though, I’ve always hoped that it would appeal to more than just Asian-Americans. I think these themes that I end up addressing—like friendship, like loneliness, like infidelity—are issues that are pervasive in every culture, in every society. So I’ve always thought that the book would go beyond just being an immigrant narrative.

Also, I went out of my way to create a father character who was not the typical Asian male. So maybe I ended up writing a book that is not your typical immigrant narrative. Which could be good.

It certainly was for me. Thank you for talking.

Further Resources

- Read an excerpt from Everything Asian on Sung J. Woo’s website.

- Peruse the author’s short fiction in McSweeney’s, Carve, Pindeldyboz, Paradigm, Storyglossia, Miranda Magazine, and KoreAm Journal (note: a subscription is required to read the KoreAm story).

- Here are reviews of Everything Asian in Hyphen, on Bookbrowse, in the Christian Science Monitor, and on Book Addiction.

- Watch Sung Woo read from Everything Asian at the The Hive in San Francisco.

- In the following essays for the NY Times, Woo writes about family and grocery shopping and his childhood. And this 2007 article in the Lives section of the NY Times Magazine explores his relationship with his father.

- Check out books by Stewart O’Nan and by Chuck Wachtel. Charles Baxter and Peter Turchi edited a wonderful book on the craft of fiction, Bringing the Devil to his Knees, which includes an essay by Wachtel.