Half a decade later, I spoke with Butler again on the breezeway of his Northwest Florida home surrounded by his three napping bichon frises. His nineteenth book, the novel A Small Hotel (Grove Press), had just been published in August. Whether he’s talking about leading workshop, writing from the dream space, or what to do with “bone headed” reviews, he has a way of stating ideas that is simultaneously practical and radical, and even with the tape recorder running, the graduate student in me found herself reaching for a pen.

Butler is currently a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. He lives in Capps, Florida, which has a population of one.

Emily Alford: In your book on writing, From Where You Dream, you explain that all literary fiction must come from characters driven by yearning. Please explain your definition of ‘yearning.’

Robert Olen Butler: Yearning seems to be at the heart of what fiction as an art form is all about. It’s based on the fact that fiction is a temporal art form—it exists in time—and it’s also an art form about human beings and their feelings. Any Buddhist will tell you that as a human being on this planet, you can’t exist for even thirty seconds without desiring something. My favorite word is yearning because it suggests the deepest level of desire. My approach [to teaching writing] tries to get at essential qualities of process for the aspiring artist beyond what is inherent in the study of craft and technique. This notion of yearning has its reflection in one of the most fundamental craft points in fiction: plot. Because plot is simply yearning challenged and thwarted.

How would you advise a writer struggling to figure out what a character wants?

I’m just fussing at your semantics, but “figure out” implies a thoughtful process in a kind of self aware and conscious state. You don’t analyze the character or look at the character and try to come up with a sound bite of a description of what the character wants. That’s not the way to do it. It’s more like intuition.

You sit with the character, you hear the character’s voice, you get a feel for the character because she’s emerging from your deep unconscious, not as you, but as a stranger in a dream, which we all have. And, you’ll be tempted—because of the way you’ve been trained in craft and technique and, indeed, the way you’ve been trained in literature, especially at university levels—you’ll be tempted to try to translate her into ideas and themes and structures and descriptions of her psyche and her desires. But with yearning, as with all elements of character, I advise just being with her in the way that you’re with another human being. [Think of] the process of falling in love with somebody, or meeting somebody where there’s a chemistry that allows for falling in love. It’s a sort of proximity, or awareness.

At what point does learned technique comes into the process?

The novelist Graham Green said that what you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. Now, my sense is that this runs even deeper than his initial context. This is absolutely also applicable to all the craft and technique you learn. The only craft and technique that you have legitimate access to as an artist is the craft and technique you’ve basically forgotten. That which has gone out of your conscious, analytical mind goes into the same compost heap—the dream space and the unconscious that I always talk about. It dissolves and continues to function in shaping the material of your unconscious self.

That way you establish a sense of the deep there-ness of a character and her reality. A writer ends up creating a character of whom, at the end of a story or a book, the reader may say, “I’ve known this character all along, in a kind of evolutionary way. There are things here I’ve noticed all along, but now they all coalesce for me.” The way all that happens is that the character is created absolutely in the senses, in the moment. Our “knowledge” of a character really is knowledge of gesture and tone of voice and the selectivity of sensual impressions around her that is done by her emotional state. If the artist carefully chooses these, and by carefully I don’t mean thoughtfully, the object she’s creating is organic.

Would you advise writers coming from a workshop culture, where technique feels paramount, to write until they forget what they’ve learned?

Exactly. Or forget that and start writing. It’s not as if those things are erroneous. As an observation about the way many stories effectively work they’re absolutely true. What’s erroneous is the assumption that the thoughtful analysis and willful insertion of that in the work is the creative process, and that’s where the great misunderstanding happens, because, in fact, it’s the antithesis of the process.

Your workshops focus very much on yearning and writing from the unconscious. Most workshops focus on making whatever manuscripts students turn in as close to “finished” as possible. Oftentimes, you tell students to put manuscripts away. What happens when the advice always seems to be to just keep revising until some journal takes it?

Learning to revise from your head leads you to anticipate. It begins to shift your motivation for writing. Real artists write not to be published, not to be famous, not win prizes, not to get sex. You write because you have some deep intuition that behind the apparent chaos of life on planet Earth there is order and meaning, and the only way that you know to express that vision of order is to go back to the way we live that chaotic life, in the moment through the senses, and pull bits and pieces out of it and reassemble them into these narrative parts. If you start perverting that with other motives to write, your ability to become an artist is severely hampered, if not destroyed.

You may become a very polished, published writer, and you may even have a literary career because a lot of book critics don’t have a clue as to how to read an aesthetic object either. But the kind of thing that endures, the kind of thing that those writers began setting out to create, the kind of literature that will be read two hundred years from now and still illuminate the human condition has been lost because of settling for this other thing.

The terrible taint on the artist’s ambition is to be thinking about publication, much less writing for it, much less writing and revising for that. The sad thing is that there are people capable of creating real works of art—I’m afraid that there are future artists who are getting diverted into just being future writers and published writers, and they’re going to end up settling because creating real works of art is a scary thing. Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. You have to stare down your demons every day of your life. Asserting technique to get published in some literary journal is really safe, and artists are not safe. If you’re starting to feel safe, you’re not pushing deep enough.

I’m glad you mentioned safety because I think your new novel A Small Hotel is fearless. Most writers shy away from sex scenes, especially sex scenes between people who love one another because we think, “Cliché!” and “Sentimentality!” A Small Hotel is a novel based around the inability to say the words “I love you,” and it challenges what intimacy is, where intimacy comes from. These are the things people avoid writing about so as not to come off as sentimental. Did it ever occur to you to try to avoid sentimentality?

I don’t think I’ve ever written an un-risky book, so no, it didn’t occur to me. This is the book that has come out of my unconscious. It took the death of my parents. My dad was eighty-eight when he died a few years ago, and then my mom died two and a half years later at ninety-two. When [my father] died, they had recently passed their seventy-first wedding anniversary. The two of them were shaped by familial forces that were very similar to the way Michael and Kelly were shaped. The foreignness of saying ‘I love you’ was the only model either of them had seen in their childhoods. The communicating of it was just the surface manifestation of the feeling, but it shaped their ability to either feel love or express it. That sort of thing gets passed on and on.

Michael really loves Kelly, but he cannot say it. He does not speak that language. Kelly deeply needs it, but she cannot ask for it. She says in the book, ‘If you have to ask it doesn’t count’. And that’s the terrible ironic, tragic reality of so many relationships in this life, and that’s the way my mom and dad lived. But they decided to speak the word and to speak it, frequently. Never a day in my life went by where that word was not used freely and openly. When my father died, I thought my mother would die immediately after, just because of the intense symbiosis. They found each other, my mom and dad, when he was fourteen and she was sixteen. They got married when he was seventeen and she was nineteen. And in the seventy-one years that followed, they just willed that word and that expression into their lives every day. It was a heroic act on their part because, in retrospect, I don’t think either of them either felt it or knew how to feel it. There’s not a day that went by where they didn’t argue furiously as well, but they had to end up saying, ‘I love you.’ It became kind of a compulsion. And there are problems with that too.

Seeing the arguments had an effect on me too, but my ability to feel it and speak it, that feeling of love was preserved in a way that it wasn’t in them. The heroic thing about them is that they knew to create the illusion of love. So, that’s where this novel came from. You know, fuck sentimentality. There have been some fabulous reviews of this book and there have been some absolute boneheaded reviews of this book, and it’s a kind of litmus test for the reviewers in some ways, and that’s fine. I don’t worry about being called sentimental and I just write the books I’m given to write.

I’ve read the good reviews and the boneheaded reviews. I wonder if the reason writers won’t write about love is that some reviewers simply can’t stomach a book about love.

To love and to express it is to be vulnerable. To create works of art is to be vulnerable, and it’s hard for people to let themselves be vulnerable. Especially in this world, where the internet lets us democratically savage one another, it’s even scarier, but the courage to be an artist means also the courage to love and to express it.

Further Links and Resources

Jody Lisberger taught fiction at Harvard with Joan Leegant, and they were MFA students together at Vermont College. This interview recently took place over email.

In terms of moving from stories to a novel, do you think writing a collection of stories made the job of writing a novel easier? Did having those prizes under your belt for your first book create pressure for your second?

Readers and writing students sometimes assume that writing stories is “practice” for writing a novel—that you start “small” and then grow—but I think most writers would say that’s not the case at all. Stories as an art form have their own set of demands. And lest anyone suggest that short fiction is a lesser art, we can look to the work of such story masters as Alice Munro, Grace Paley and Edith Pearlman, who won the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story and whose latest collection, Binocular Vision, was just nominated for the National Book Award.

That said, while writing stories first didn’t make writing a novel easier for me, writing fiction for a long time before tackling this particular novel made a difference. I began writing fiction around 1990 and published Wherever You Go in 2010. That’s 20 years. I teach writing, and one of the hardest things I’ve had to do is tell a student he or she needs to master more of the craft before shackling him/herself to a big project. It’s not that writing stories is easier; it’s just that you can labor on a story for a few months and then put it aside and start another. This allows you to let go of what’s not working and move on.

I was very grateful to have received those prizes. I was 53 years old when the collection came out, and a lot of water had flowed under the bridge by then. When I turned to the novel, I didn’t experience the prize-winning as pressure but as affirmation. Permission to keep going. A prolific story writer once told me that with each story she published, she was given permission to write another one. That’s what kept her submitting and submitting. That’s what those prizes felt like for me.

After writing stories, did you expect Wherever You Go to take seven years to complete? Why seven years?

I don’t entirely recall what I was thinking when I began the novel, which was actually the second half of a two-book contract (the first was the story collection)—probably more along the lines of it taking three or four years. It’s hard to sometimes remember why it took so long. It’s a little like childbirth: you don’t remember the pain, otherwise you’d never do it again. Though I can point to some factors. First, I wrote an entirely different story for a few years, about a group of young women in Jerusalem. When I finished, I saw that it was kind of flat, but on the sidelines were a couple of antsy guys who were almost pacing the perimeter of the narrative, begging to be explored. Who were they? Why were they so agitated? They had a lot of potential. So I pulled them forward and began to write their story, and eventually they became two of the main figures in Wherever You Go. I think that was in year three or so.

I also didn’t work on the book for seven solid years straight. I took a long break from the manuscript at one point, due to a medical issue, which was immediately followed by a visiting writer stint in Israel. All told, I didn’t look at the manuscript for almost nine months. It was the best thing I could have done. When I returned from Tel Aviv and looked at the pages, I knew exactly what I had to do. I wrote straight through and sent it to my agent and that was that. I’m not one of those writers who plans or outlines anything beforehand—thinking about a story doesn’t work for me, I have to discover it in the writing—so I’m groping my way for a very long time. I’ve learned to more or less trust the process and not get too anxious when I don’t know where I’m going for years on end.

One craft challenge is that you tell the story through three distinct and alternating third person points of view. How did you decide to use this structure? Were there points where you questioned your decision? What are the pitfalls to his approach that you think fiction writers should consider? What about the pleasures?

When I was still writing the unsuccessful story of the Jerusalem women, I was experimenting with a kind of omniscience—and it wasn’t working. There was too much distance; I couldn’t sink into any of the characters. I was also indulging an ironic, almost comic tone that was keeping me from getting at the truth of these people’s lives. It was, in retrospect, something of a defense on my part. I think I was reluctant to get inside these people for fear of what I’d find. As I said, that story was a little flat, and the flatness was related to the overly distant point of view. When I started over with the sideline characters, I wrote them in third-person and everything began to flow.

In terms of the structure, I knew from the get-go that I’d be exploring more than one person and that I was interested in the circumstances in which their paths would cross. So that dictated the structure. Three voices has a nice symmetry; it also lends itself to the image of a braid, which is how I ultimately saw the back-and-forth nature of the chapters. If you’ve ever made a braided bread—not coincidentally, the traditional Jewish challah is a braided bread—you also know that often you start the braiding in the middle, at the point where the three strands overlap most powerfully. That’s how it felt when constructing this book. I sensed early on, without knowing the specifics of the narrative, that the three lives would cross when a major event happened in the middle of the book. That too dictated the structure, even before I knew what that event was going to be.

Which is not to say the braiding was straightforward or obvious. I was continually rearranging the alternating sections. For a time, I thought I’d give 50 pages of the first character before shifting to the next; then I thought that would be too trying for a reader so I shortened the number of pages the reader would have about Character A before moving to Character B. Then I feared that structure would be jumpy. I laid out sections on my floor and moved them around. At one point, I hung a clothesline across my writing room and hung sections by clothespins to see how they’d flow. I needed to know what the experience would be like for the reader—what the reader would know or not know, how the reader would encounter the characters in the various permutations. In the end, you just have to hope what you chose is workable and satisfying. No book can be perfect, or perfect for every reader.

Of the pleasures of this approach is that I enjoy reading a narrative with multiple voices. I like the interplay, the variety of tones and rhythms, the subtext that exists in the spaces between the voices. So being able to create such a narrative was deeply enjoyable. I loved inhabiting the different consciousnesses and being able to use a range of colors and tones.

One of the biggest lessons I try to teach students is how to recognize the intrusion of an omniscient voice into their third person stories and novels—a voice that keeps them from getting or staying close to their point-of-view characters. Do you have any particular advice for getting closer?

One thing is to get rid of your preconceptions about a character and allow the character to speak for herself and reveal herself in gestures and conduct. Or if you can’t get rid of your preconceptions, then at least be aware of them. Too often this sort of distancing occurs when we’re engineering the story and don’t want the characters to mess up our plans by being themselves. So we keep things on the surface where we, the writer, are in charge, even to the detriment of the narrative.

One way to get your characters to reveal themselves is to put them in a scene and listen to them talk and watch their body language. Students and early stage writers often think the only way to get inside a character is by giving his or her interior thinking, which can be done to excess where we hear every thought or internal curse word, when many times the most vivid revelations come by way of gesture: the drumming of fingers on the table, the picking at the food, the moment a character chooses to look out the window instead of answering a ringing phone. With gestures like these, you need only a brief or fleeting interior thought to accompany it—and it says volumes. Then you’re getting closer.

I’m assuming there were some particularly difficult parts to write in the novel, given the presence of addiction, assault, exploding bombs and a devastating affair. Can you talk about how it felt to write these scenes? For instance, did Aaron stop short in his assault not only because he couldn’t go on but because you couldn’t? How much do you think a fiction writer should push herself to tell the ugly truths of people’s thoughts and actions?

I may have the opposite problem about telling ugly truths. I have a hard time illuminating the positive. One of the attractions of writing fiction for me is being able to illuminate the dark stuff, to write about the troubled and problematic. So I don’t have a problem with going there or writing about it, though I do have to watch that the tone is not overbearing for a reader.

Which points to a challenge I need to be aware of, which is to allow my troubled characters to rise above stereotype and their own darkness. For instance, an earlier version of the scene in which Aaron begins to assault the woman went substantially further. But then I realized that Aaron would never go that far; that he wasn’t such a bad kid, just a troubled kid. In writing about Regina, who is an addict, I discovered in the later drafts that the reader didn’t see enough of her other sides, her promise and brilliance, so I had to go back and add those to give a fuller picture. It was still the truth—that’s always the touchstone, you’ve got to write the truth—but I had left out some of the more positive elements in my desire to explore the darkness.

You didn’t mention how it felt to be exploding bombs and seeing people die in the novel. Care to comment?

Yes, there is a scene with a bombing. And it was—you’re correct—hard to write. I labored over those details. I wanted to get across the drama and gravity without making it gratuitously violent. I also needed it to be factually accurate. There was a point during my research when I wondered if the FBI would show up at my door because I was spending so many hours online reading about how to make bombs. And you are correct in flagging these as emotionally difficult scenes. I was sobered, as I was writing, by the enormity of what was taking place. I could see this invented building and garden and lawn in my head, and I could smell the burning.

You mentioned tone and coloration earlier. I find the tone of voice, assertion, and cadence that goes along with Aaron’s third person point of view to be particularly strong in an edgy, unnerving kind of way. Was this on purpose? Did you deliberately try to create different intensities or tones in the points of view? Was anyone’s point of view easier to write than another’s?

Thanks for that comment about Aaron’s voice. I loved writing that voice. His edginess and boldness were purposeful in that this was very clearly who Aaron was: a kid with a lot of issues and a lot of strong feelings, and not a lot of opportunity to express—or vent—earlier in his life. Feeding his voice was also a great deal of the political sentiment fueling the book. Aaron is angry and impatient with what he sees as excessively conciliatory views mouthed by either politicians or naive Americans who he believes don’t grasp the situation in Israel. I’ve heard these sentiments, heard voices like Aaron’s, so it was natural that he’d sound the way he does.

Yona’s was the hardest voice for me to write, the most reticent in terms of revealing herself to me. I think that’s because her story was the most personal. I had a much easier time with the two male characters—Aaron because he’s mouthing a lot of rhetoric, which I loved playing with, and Greenglass because his spiritual struggles were something I liked writing about. There are portions of his interior thinking that come straight out of some of the most beautiful Talmudic and biblical passages, and I loved writing those.

Though the three main characters have distinct sensibilities and yearnings—spiritual, psychological, ideological—which, in turn, lend themselves to different shadings and tones, there were times in the drafts when I had to modify the voices so they wouldn’t sound so similar. For instance, each character has problems with their fathers, and I had to work on that so the narrative wouldn’t be repetitive. As I said earlier, I like novels with multiple voices, but writers have to be careful that the voices have variety. I read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections twice while working on this novel, mainly for the unplugged voices that carry that book. Those voices gave me permission—again, that word—to unplug my own characters’ voices. I also saw in The Corrections that I knew instantly whose consciousness was behind any given section because the voices were so vivid. Vividness is important. You want your reader to not just know your characters and be interested in their story but to be enlivened by the narration. You want them to be eager to hear those voices ringing off the page.

Curious that you mention characters’ problems with their fathers. The novel is hugely about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but do you also want readers to see this novel as ahistorical and about father-child disappointments? Did you intend the novel to weigh so heavily on fathers? From the start were you deliberately reaching for something more personal than political, or did that sort of just come about on its own?

No question that father-child relationships weigh heavily in this book. I didn’t put the father issue in there—just as I didn’t put the Israeli-Palestinian issue in there—but that’s what the characters were about and that’s where they brought me. When I said earlier that I’m one of those writers who doesn’t plan, I’m also one of those who doesn’t know what the themes or complications are going to be until the story is underway, until it’s being written. Once I began to explore Aaron and Greenglass, it was apparent that he had a troubled relationship with his famous novelist father. And once I had Greenglass walk into his parents’ New York living room and look around, I discovered he had a fraught dynamic with his father, too. So the family issues were right there alongside the political ones, and they grew up organically around the characters.

The family stories are as important to me as the political elements. Not surprisingly, they’re also connected. Our personal histories drive our choices, including political choices that may, on the surface, look like they’re based entirely on ideology but in truth are also based on psychology. That is what ultimately emerged while writing the book.

In trying to listen to your characters, what has been the hardest thing about writing fiction for you, if you can focus on just one thing?

Probably the hardest thing has been wanting to know what their story is before they’re ready to tell me. Or, as Ron Carlson put it so well in his book Ron Carlson Writes A Story, before the characters even know the story. Carlson talks about needing to “survive” the writing of the story, meaning needing, as the writer, to just stay there in the room, at the desk, in the chair, and wait. This is the hardest part.

I don’t mean only ignoring the impulse to get up for more coffee or to vacuum the rug or check your email. I mean the impulse to leap at some glimmer of an inkling about the storyline and then rush to create a whole narrative out of it because you can’t stand spending one more minute in the state of not-knowing. Carlson counsels staying close to the details your sentences offer you—someone walks over to a window: great: What does he see? Maybe that will help the narrative unscroll. It’s painstaking. That’s why I think so many writers want to outline. But I’m like Carlson; he says he can’t think his way through it. He has to wait for it to come out in the writing. That’s the hardest part. To sit in the chair and wait.

Aaron’s father churns out popular but melodramatic potboilers about the Holocaust. How did it feel to take on this theme? The novel is also risky in rendering a less than flattering picture of Jewish extremists in the West Bank. Were you worried how that might be taken by Jewish-American readers? As an American Jew yourself, who albeit lives and teaches in Israel for a portion of each year, were you worried about not getting the sensibilities right and being viewed as a literary interloper?

The use of the Holocaust for art is a loaded but important topic. There’s a lot of excellent literature that takes the Holocaust as its subject, for instance, Maus, by Art Spiegelman. But there is also a lot of not such excellent literature on the subject, and I ask myself where the line is, and what makes work exploitative and what makes it okay. I think we have to be careful about writers suddenly finding the Holocaust “rich” or “art-worthy.” I don’t mean to suggest that the only people allowed to touch the Holocaust must be, like Elie Wiesel, survivors. Rather, my concern is with what happens when the events themselves recede into history and become, instead, “mere” subjects to be used by writers interested in them primarily for what they offer in the way of built-in drama. Or, worse, for what they offer writers like Aaron’s father, which is built-in sympathy.

The novel also touches on another use of the Holocaust that is very touchy. And that’s the use of the Holocaust for bolstering Jewish identity. It’s an issue much discussed in Israel,  which carries deep and abiding scars of the Holocaust since so many of its citizens were and are survivors, and where many are saying we need to look at the shadow side of this self-identity. That shadow side is explored in the book through Aaron and his need to see the Palestinians as the new Nazis, i.e., the archetypal enemies of the Jews, and how that colors his thinking and drives his conduct.

As for my portrayal of Jewish extremists on the West Bank, I did worry how American Jewish readers would respond, though I have to admit I loved writing that material. These are ideologues and radicals; they live for their cause and are certain of the rightness of it and use pretty startling rhetoric. Actually, I’ve been fascinated by radicals ever since I was a student in the sixties. Their commitment, their passion, their ability to rationalize violence: who are these people? What allows them to justify what they do? I wanted to find out, so I wrote about them.

Fortunately, my concerns about American Jewish readers turned out to be largely unfounded. American Jews are sophisticated about Israel. They aren’t looking to read another Exodus.

That said, it was imperative that I get the details right and capture the sensibilities, and not come across as some carpetbagger or interloper writing about Israel from an American perch without sufficient insight into the society. I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel in the last decade, either traveling there or teaching there, and I lived there for three years in the late 1970s, but, still, one worries. One of the most gratifying reviews came from an Israeli magazine that said it was hard to tell I wasn’t a native Israeli since I’d gotten the pulse of the country so right. That was enormously meaningful to me.

How do you think your starting to write fiction later than some people might have played into helping you write this novel? You had a career as a lawyer before taking up fiction at the age of 40. Does that experience make a difference? Did you ever feel discounted as a writer, or taken less seriously?

There are a lot of myths out there about writing, including that if you’re a real writer, it’s all you’ve ever wanted to do. And the converse: that if you pursued something else, you’re not the real thing. Then I think of the poet Wallace Stevens, who was a vice-president at an insurance company and apparently enjoyed it, or William Carlos Williams, a doctor. Or Chekhov, for that matter, another doctor. Or Annie Proulx, who first published in her 50s. Some of that myth-making is propagated by the media and our youth-obsessed society, which then seeps into the literary culture. I once got an excruciatingly apologetic email after my story collection came out, asking me for my age, because I was being considered for a prize as an “emerging writer” but the cut-off was something like 39. I was 53.

More disturbing than my own personal encounter with these myths is what it says about our society. It takes time to develop one’s craft and to find one’s voice. Not everyone is going to start doing that at age 22 or 25; not everyone has the financial luxury or life conditions at a relatively young age to allow them to spend years honing their craft either on their own or through continued schooling. This was put forth most trenchantly by the brilliant writer Tillie Olsen in her 1978 bookSilences , where she talked about why there are so few women’s voices in the literary canon, along with other voices at the bottom of the economic ladder. Which was where Olsen lived and struggled. Her fiction is extraordinary—her novella Tell Me A Riddle is deservedly a classic—but her output was small. Her life did not readily yield up the conditions for writing. This had nothing to do with her talent, her commitment, or her drive, and everything to do with the realities of her situation.

We all have situations we have to work with and around in order to do our writing. Economic pressures, family needs, illness, psychological hurdles, even—dare I say it?—other interests. Grace Paley was a political activist all her life and said that writing short stories and poetry, versus novels, suited her because it allowed for that. Piling on myths to make us further question our commitment or ability or talent is not helpful.

As to whether starting to write fiction later than some (most?) helped me write this novel, I don’t know. But I sometimes joke that one of the plusses of starting when I did is that, during the long years before I published anything, I didn’t have my parents looking over my shoulder and telling me to give up and go to law school already. Because I’d already done that.

Would it be fair to say that once you’re on the promotion road, nobody much cares about how old (or young) you are? What has been your experience in promoting Wherever You Go? Do you have advice for fiction writers, who nowadays realize that promotion is part of the job?

I know many writers dread or, at best, approach the promotional side of things with the same enthusiasm one reserves for a root canal, but there have been numerous unexpected pleasures for me associated with these efforts. Actually, the age factor has been one of them. Audiences at book talks tell me they find my relatively late foray into fiction inspiring, or at least interesting. People want to hear about risk-taking.

Overall, I’ve found the promotion to have a lot of upsides. One has been experiencing the generosity of other writers, who’ve put me in touch with reviewers or invited me to author events or, like you, hosted me at their campuses. It’s also been uplifting to meet so many readers. I gave more than a hundred book talks in the year after Wherever You Go was published, and though we wring our hands saying nobody is reading serious fiction,  that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve also discovered the vast world of book bloggers, people who read and write about books not for pay or professional advancement but out of the sheer love of reading. Which is pretty amazing. They’ve been very generous in their response to Wherever You Go, posting thoughtful and often wonderfully written reviews, many saying the subject matter was entirely new to them. All of this has been tremendously heartening and one way to combat the sometimes punishing toll that publishing can take on one’s spirit, where you’re at the mercy of critics or your book is ignored in the press or an Amazon reviewer has been mean to you or you’re enduring any number of the myriad ups and downs that exposure can bring.

I think fiction writers need to adjust their expectations about what their publisher can and cannot do in the way of promotion, and then decide how much they want to take on for themselves. Time spent on promotion—and it takes time, no question—is time not spent writing fiction; on the other hand, if you devote five or seven years to writing a novel, you may decide it’s worth devoting one more to getting the word out so that readers who’d be interested in your book will hear about it. I also think many of us suffer from a romanticized notion of what publishers used to do for writers back in the day. In fact, not every writer was sent on “the book tour,” and often those tours were terrible—near empty bookstores, inappropriate venues. Because of the Internet and the shift to a greater egalitarianism in the reviewing world, there are now many more opportunities for writers to get their work out there than there used to be. Rather than bemoaning a somewhat mythical past, I say we should seize the bull by the horns and be glad for such robust online activity around writing and literature and books.

Dare I ask, what do you suppose the bloggers will be blogging about for your next book? Can you tell us a little about it?

I’ve got a very early stage novel underway set in central Massachusetts about late middle-aged people who leave their conventional lives, where they did all the “right” things, to form a commune with the goal of making their lives truly their own before it’s all over. Talk about the psychological driving your choices. I’m 61 years old. This is much on my mind.

In closing, can you speak specifically to what you had in mind in calling this novel Wherever You Go? As you set out to write a new novel, do you suppose you are seeking to take us to the same “place”? What do you think we as writers and readers need or want to find, wherever we go?

The title comes from a famous passage in the biblical Book of Ruth in which Ruth, the Moabite, pledges allegiance to her mother-in-law Naomi after the men who bound them together have all died: “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.” It’s a poetic passage that invokes loyalty—to a person, a land, and a God. Which is, of course, one of the main themes explored in the book, the idea of committing oneself to a particular land and a particular vision of God’s plan, whatever the cost. I wanted to hint at the underside of that unconditional loyalty, suggest there’s a steep price to be paid for such fealty.

But, as you imply in your question, “wherever you go” has many meanings. This is a story about expatriates and individuals seeking to reinvent themselves in a new place, who take their baggage—literal and metaphorical—with them wherever they go. The question of how much your past drives your present is also one that the book wrestles with, the tension between the old and the new.

Until you posed this question, I hadn’t thought about the phrase “wherever you go” relating to what a fiction writer does for a reader, by being a kind of guide or, perhaps more aptly, a siren, luring them to go where we want them to go, asking them to accompany us on a journey. There is definitely something to that in the pact we make as writers with readers: I’m going to tell you the truth, but it will be through the means of invention. This requires that we as writers have to earn the reader’s trust and cooperation. We have to write with authority—get the details right, stay true to the characters, use all our powers of observation so that we illuminate the human condition with honesty and insight and compassion. This is the reader’s right. All of us— readers and writers—should settle for no less.

Further Links and Resources

That’s how I’d have capitalized this recent article by The Atlantic, which asked that rather big question. Describing Alex Jenni, a French biology teacher who recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary award, the article noted,

In the Alexis Jenni school of thought, a writer may be someone, anyone, with a compulsion to scrawl or the conviction of having something to say. A writer is not defined by his career, but the simple act of writing regularly. And authors who found success through the muck of making ends meet have taken that approach for some time now, in practice at least. [...]

T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, was inclined to keep his day job even after it was financially necessary. When the Bloomsbury group offered to set up a fund that would allow him sufficient funding to become a full-time writer, the poet turned them down. “This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of everyday life—he was a commentator on the quotidian,” British Library curator Rachel Foss told The Guardian.

For modern-day counterparts to Eliot, there’s Days of Yore, a website that interviews artists “about the years before they had money, fame, or roadmaps to success, and inspires you to find your own.” Here, Deborah Eisenberg discusses her “late start” to writing and Jennifer Egan describes how she went on an archaeological dig. But this isn’t just a nostalgic look-what-crazy-job-I-did-when-I-was-young-and-hungry site.  The site’s co-founder and editor, Astri von Arbin Ahlander, a self-described “aspiring artist” highlighted in the Atlantic piece, argues that the day job is a way of life for today’s writer:

Says Von Arbin Ahlander, “We’re kidding ourselves if we think we can make a living on writing.” As for the romantic ideal of the leisurely writer life, slowly crafting one’s masterpiece in the calm solitude of a big, empty house: “I mean, that’s over,” she added, “Unless you’re a trust fund baby.”

So if 99% of writers today need to have a “real job”—beyond pounding furiously at a typewriter all day—then what DOES make a writer a writer? One commenter put it bluntly: “I became a writer when people started to pay me for my writing. Before that, I was an aspiring writer.”  Another took the oppoite view: “I dislike the very concept of ‘being a writer’. That is something fakes and wannabes say at bad parties to impress the foolish. [...] I’m quite happy to say, if the subject ever comes up, ‘I write’, but never ‘I am a writer’.”

Here’s a better question: Why such angst about a self-imposed title, a person who writes versus a Writer?  It’s a question of proving your seriousness.  Most other professions have clearly defined borders: lawyers have law degrees and bar memberships; doctors have M.D.s and board certifications.  Realtors, health inspectors, schoolteachers like Alex Jenni–each needs certain objective qualifications and credentials.  You know they’re serious because they’ve spent time in school and training; you know they’re (ostensibly) qualified because they’ve been tested and granted licenses.  So you turn over your lawsuit, or your appendix, or your child, and let the experts work.

Writers operate outside these boundaries.  You don’t need an MFA–or even a high school diploma–to write.  You just pick up your pencil and go.  Anyone can call himself or herself a writer, and anyone can be a writer.  Democratic?  Yes.  But that also makes it hard to prove your seriousness, which is really the topic the Atlantic–and the commenters on the article–delicately circle around. Who’s just a dilettante, and who’s a capital-W writer? Is it a career or just a temporary occupation?  Something you happen to do, or something you are?

Recently a stonemason (yes) came to repair the foundation of my house.  He made up haiku while he was working, he told me, reciting one to me as he chiseled away the old mortar.  But he was quite firm: he was not a Writer.  He was a stonemason, the last in a long line of stonemasons, the “and son” of DeAngelis and Sons.  That was his art.  The haiku, he insisted, wasn’t writing, just something he did to keep his brain active.

So was he a writer?  Are you?  The answer may all lie in your attitude towards your art–or towards that “something you do” just to keep your brain active.

Further Reading:

• A related question: do you have to be a genius to create a work of genius?
• By the way, does “work” writing count as “real” writing?  In the Huffington Post, Holly Robinson says yes.

The second story, on being grateful for what you have, concerned the December in the late 1930s when my mother and her six siblings got off the school bus to find that their farmhouse had burned to the ground. My grandmother stood there by the smoldering foundation holding the only things she managed to grab as she ran out—the family Bible and two dresses on hangers. Everything else was lost, including their savings; in those early post-Depression years, my grandfather did not believe in banks. The neighboring families took them in by twos and threes that winter and (she always presented this as a fitting conclusion) gave them gifts of new Christmas ornaments.

The third wasn’t really a story but, rather, ingredients toward one, which I combined and recombined—a collection of mementos from my mother’s high school years. Her senior yearbook, with its twenty graduates—all those smooth, expectant faces gazing out and up toward a future that even in my childhood, of course, had long since settled into circumscribed lives centered around coal mines and factories. My mother’s radiant photograph captioned in iambic tetrameter: “She leaves a string of broken hearts.” And all the little mementos and keepsakes she kept in a small cedar jewelry box, its neat brass clasp opening with a whiff of past-preserved: twin black Scottie magnets which seemed ever to repel each other, a broken gold watch whose pinching wristband seemed itself a reproach to my encroachment.

What I was drawn to in these stories were all the wrong things. The dark pressured suspense of gypsies in the woods, molten mounds of gold and silver in the snow and charred timbers. The perplexing symbols of those two dresses or Christmas ornaments decorating loss (for years I rehearsed what I’d rescue if our house caught on fire). Souvenirs as synecdoche. Behind it all, the reminder of the utter unknowability of someone I was with every day, the vastness of the absences in a family’s past. The primary lesson, I suppose, was what reticence can teach, or at least coax forth—how we construct another’s life to the extent we can from remnants and fragments, much as I used to try to piece into a whole understanding my mother’s countless letter drafts to her own mother from the scraps in her wastebasket, revised until she’d written out anything that might cause any worry, revised until they said almost nothing at all. Torn in half, torn in half again. We are all fine here, she’d write in her tidy run-ons, the weather is unusually warm. Or sometimes just her full name, written over and over down the page. If, as Eudora Welty learned in her own childhood, one secret is often offered up in place of another, in my own family—which was loving and secure but also securely contained, each of us keeping our own counsel—I was another degree removed from those secrets, trying to assemble a story from whatever images and objects were offered or found or forgotten.

∞

My husband, Matthew Fontaine Maury Gildea, grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, because his parents drove there from Charlottesville for their honeymoon and decided to stay. Both my husband’s parents were Virginians, centuries back on his mother’s side. He was descended from French Huguenots, the Fontaines and the Maurys, who had come to Virginia in early 1700s. We have John Fontaine’s memoir, written between 1710 and 1719, on our shelves, there are plaques honoring his forebears on the walls of the Huguenot church in Charleston, and outside Charlottesville you can still see the marker on the site of the boarding school run by Fontaine’s grandson, the Reverend James Maury, where the promising and privileged boys he taught included Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison. History weights my husband’s very name, the first Matthew Fontaine Maury—Reverend Maury’s grandson— being “the Pathfinder of the Seas,” the author of The Physical Geography of the Sea, the first American to systematically chart wind and ocean currents. In my own family, I knew the names of my great-grandparents—and that’s the edge of my map; anything prior to that becomes a dissolve, a blank page, terra incognita. When my mother told me the fire story, I longed to look into that rescued Bible; I felt sure it was the repository of what would otherwise be lost, and perhaps now indeed has been.

∞

I was born in Hocking County, Ohio, where both of my parents had been born and raised, my mother in New Straitsville and my father in Enterprise, but we lived during my early childhood in a larger town called Logan. My memory of southern Ohio has a noirish pall over it, all semi-darkened rooms and parlor silence; outside, a perpetual light rain scented with coal, cinders always crunching underfoot. When I was seven, the auto-parts factory where my father was working closed down, so he and his fellow workers drove all around Ohio together looking for work. My father was eventually hired at the Ford plant in Sandusky, by Lake Erie, and so we moved four hours north to our new home in Clyde, about an hour south of Toledo. The distance from family was significant for my parents; we returned to Logan often on weekend trips. I recall that for a while, when we’d drive south to visit my grandparents, I’d feel excited, alert, as, just past Columbus, we crossed the terminal moraine—the line where the glaciers had stopped and the land shifted dramatically from dead flat to rolling hills. Over time that too receded, and instead of feeling I was returning to the place I was from, I began to feel that I was from nowhere at all. And that didn’t trouble me; it kept every road open.

∞

So it was that I grew up in Sherwood Anderson’s hometown, Clyde, Ohio, which had served as the model for his seminal collection of linked stories, Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919. In the front matter of the collection, there’s a map which is still quite true to the town’s layout, if skewed in scale, a kind of through-the-looking-glass glimpse. I used to turn just to that map, that visible connection with a place I walked every day—Main Street and the alley behind, Buckeye Street (eventually my family’s own address), Waterworks Pond—sensing some kind of larger resonance just by its transmutation, and often just transparent translation, into tales. Winesburg’s “Hern’s Grocery” was a thinly-disguised Hurd’s, the small grocery on Main Street where my mother sent me in the summertime to buy bread and milk. Herman Hurd had been Anderson’s boyhood friend; as Herman died in 1963, before we moved north, the shopkeeper I remember must have been his brother, Hiram. Herman’s son Thaddeus, an architect, became the town historian, the founder of the Clyde Heritage League, and a highly respected if, to me, rather forbidding figure (my memory substitutes photos of Ezra Pound).

In many ways, Clyde in the 1960s still resembled the town that Anderson had known (he left it in 1897), a place anchored by a stubborn stasis and insularity which was both comforting and exasperating. The Presbyterian Church’s bell tower was screened in by then (no longer having, if it ever did, the stained glass window Reverend Hartman broke in “The Strength of God”). But the town still had its hitching rails in place along Main Street when I was little, many of the streets were brick (I loved the cobble-cobble of tires passing over them), the dime store its original pressed-tin ceiling. And there was a long-defunct grain elevator in the middle of town, right by the railroad tracks that people had once believed would transform Clyde into a Cleveland or a Columbus. [Above image courtesy the Sherwood Anderson Foundation]

Instead, it became, as the city-limits signs still proclaim, America’s famous small town. If Clyde in itself wasn’t very distinctive—a single block of downtown with three stoplights, the fathers all working at Whirlpool or Ford or GM, the mothers at home endlessly making their ends meet—at least it could take pride in imagining itself as representative or definitive, a model, an emblem. Not that the townspeople generally were aware of Anderson’s book during the time I was growing up there, or the acute depiction of their town in it, its sympathetic but clear-eyed portrait of largely inarticulate, isolated lives marked by stunted ambitions, limited resources, thwarted desires. Anderson, in later years, recalled the reception of the book as hostile: “The people of the actual Winesburg protested. They declared the book immoral….” He writes of New Englanders burning copies outside of their town library, just as I’ve heard was done in 1919 in Clyde. Walter Rideout makes a persuasive case for Anderson’s revisionist account as a defensive reaction “to the erosion of the fame Winesburg had helped to bring him”; the reviews, as well as the letters he received around the time of publication, were actually predominantly positive. But what I knew firsthand in the 60s and 70s was that “Winesburg” was largely unchanged, and that Anderson, in his hometown, was unknown.

Anderson himself wasn’t a presence for me until I was twelve or so. My father was then, and remains, a champion reader—voracious and speedy, and not so much indiscriminate in his tastes as democratic. He was a regular patron at the library, where he favored hefty historical novels (I remember him dispatching Herman Wouk or R. F. Delderfield doorstops in no time), but he also would buy paperbacks by the pound in the nearby town of Fremont—John MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard—and would read through a grocery bag of them each week at the Ford plant where he worked a brass tumbler at twenty-minute intervals. I had settled on writing as my calling by the time I was eleven, and it was around that time that he bought a college literature text at a garage sale for me for a dime. Red cloth binding and about four inches thick, it included some Anderson’s stories—“I’m a Fool,” “I Want to Know Why,” and “Death in the Woods.” My father pointed out Anderson’s name in the table of contents and said, “This man grew up in Clyde.” It’s difficult to describe the enormity of the impact that had on me then, and thereafter—the possibility it fostered in me, the nascent sense of kinship. “I’m a Fool” and “I Want to Know Why” left me with an empty and unsettled sadness, but “Death in the Woods” felt like a folktale. I was as drawn toward the narrator’s need to tell the story as to the story itself. It would become a kind of touchstone for years; returning to it and reentering it, understanding more of what it had to offer, I began to see it as a barometer of my own growth as a writer, and a measure of how much farther I still had to go.

∞

In the Clyde Public Library, an oil portrait of Sherwood Anderson, a broadstroked rendering in umber and ochre based on a 1923 Stieglitz photograph, hangs over the fireplace in its rotunda reading room. I spent quite a bit of time reading opposite that painting while I was growing up. And then in summers when I was in college, I was employed at the library as a page. W.S. Merwin has written of those “angels” which all burgeoning writers need to encounter along the way, the teachers and kindly adults who take an interest at critical moments, who tend a passion with their direction and respect. For me, that angel was Marjorie Buck, the head librarian during my school years. She spoke softly and always very precisely, and had both a librarian’s thin-lipped primness as well as a generous and listening deference. She steered me early on from the YA books toward Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and to Frost and T.S. Eliot; she allowed me to borrow books that didn’t circulate, including the full four feet of the Harvard Classics and a beautiful gilt-edged, leather-bound set of Conrad that was kept in a locked cabinet in the basement. In a town full of recreational readers checking out the same handful of mysteries and bestsellers over and over, she would quote Shirley Jackson, P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh. She confided to me when I started working there that for years she had kept the subscription to Poetry magazine active solely for me—no one else had ever checked it out.

Marjorie was also unlike most women in town in that she had gone to college, and, as her husband was from Germany, had traveled widely in Europe. She told me a story once that I think Anderson would have enjoyed: at a meeting of the Clyde Garden Club everyone was asked to write down on a slip of paper the place where they would “most like to live in the entire world.” Marjorie said that was a difficult decision for her (Paris? Florence?), but she ultimately, loyally, decided on Stuttgart, where her husband had grown up. She then collected the slips of paper and read them aloud, and was startled to see that she was the only one in the room who hadn’t written down Clyde, Ohio. “Imagine,” she said to me, her smile both gently sympathetic and genuinely baffled. Imagine.

∞

Anderson’s A Story Teller’s Story, published in 1924, was his first of three overtly autobiographical works; he also published Tar: A Midwest Childhood, a semi-fictional account, in 1926, and his Memoirs. Really, all of Anderson’s autobiographical writings could come under the heading of “semi-fictional”—Anderson was by nature an embellisher, a teller of tales—he revised fact or fiction by repeating it aloud, retooling the narrative toward better effect with each new listener. But the basic players in his own story were these: the hardworking, gaunt, self-sacrificing mother who dies young; the ne’er-do-well footloose yarn-spinner musician father; the meager, hardscrabble childhood; the romantic, dreamy, misfit siblings; and young industrious Sherwood—“Jobby,” the go-getter whose own silver-tongued talent leads to success in advertising and business and a profitable marriage, but mires him in an empty life which he then dramatically abandons for art. His exit from the paint company he owned near Elyria, Ohio in November, 1912 was one such moment that grew in the retelling—the dramatic departure from the business world, the refusal to be a “mere peddler of words,” as Kate Swift will later warn George Willard in Winesburg from becoming.

The event does have firm basis in fact. Anderson had already written his apprentice novels Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men, and the stress of his strained marriage and family life, and immersion in work that felt dishonest to him were all increasingly taking their toll. He dictated a letter, then wrote a cryptic note to his wife saying, “There is a bridge over a river with some cross-ties before it. When I come to that I’ll be all right.” He walked out of the building, and turned up in Cleveland four days later. The story he made of this psychological crisis was that it marked his immediate departure for the writing life. Of course, it wasn’t that clean a break—it took about three more years for him to head to Chicago and fully embark on a writer’s life, and even then he had to return to advertising occasionally. But metaphorically, certainly, it was a division line, his own terminal moraine, a gesture that was more than telling. In recasting that gesture as a poem, I tried to imagine the missing days in that fugue state, while letting him tell his story the way he had parsed it out through his Winesburg characters. My own orienting insertion was my grandmother’s Logan farmhouse, whose roof had a great W N spelled out in slate shingles—the mark of its builder, William North, my father told me. I wondered as a child what person would ever dare leave so large a signature.

∞

What drew me from the start to Anderson’s fiction was his plain speech; his effort to honor, give name and voice to, unacknowledged lives; the poetry he recognized in the commonplace: “There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.” Anderson’s work derives from the oral storytelling tradition, but what made it distinctive, what makes it—at its best—riveting still, were its lyrical modernist undercurrents and its psychological acuities: the curtailed, halting, pulsing rhythms of speech and what those currents carry; what is revealed through what we suppress or what is generated between what we juxtapose—what simple words and their colors can convey and what rises out of language’s failure. (“It had the appearance of fumbling,” Faulkner wrote, “but actually it wasn’t. It was hunting, seeking.”) His voice was as familiar as a relative’s to me: those dovetailings of naivete and down-home turns of phrase and exaggeration’s swagger, laid over a solid foundation of humility, compassion, decency—in stories marked by the struggle between silence and expression, ineffectuality and control, desire and denial. His prose strives toward a purity—as Faulkner said, “The exactitude of purity, or the purity of exactitude, whatever you like”:

His was not the power and rush of Melville, who was his grandfather, nor the lusty humor for living of Twain, who was his father, he had nothing of the heavy-handed disregard for nuances of his older brother, Dreiser. His was that fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity, to milk them both dry, to seek always to penetrate to thought’s uttermost end.

For all these kinships I felt, I discovered early on that what I didn’t share with Anderson was a need to invent myself through story. My impulse rather was to seek out others’ stories in my own—an inclination toward essence rather than elaboration, toward metaphor more than description, suggestion rather than narration. Which is not to say that Anderson didn’t also incline toward poetry: he did publish three books of Whitmanesque verse. But Anderson, like Faulkner, wrote his best poetry within his prose. “It is a job for a poet”; “It needs the poet there,” he wrote in “Hands.” Such was the case throughout his fiction. His unsaids and untolds were what spoke to me most strongly, how a poet’s tools operated beneath those passive (“it needs”) gropings for “truths.”

∞

I’ve given this essay the title “A Story Teller’s Story,” and I’ve referred mostly to Winesburg, but the destination of the journey is “Death in the Woods,” the first story by Anderson that I read, and the one to which I’ve returned most often. It appeared initially in a magazine in 1916—so, written around the time he was writing the Winesburg stories—then was related again in Tar in 1926, and then was included in Death in the Woods and Other Stories, in 1933. It’s set quite clearly, given the placenames, in Clyde. The story, in first person, narrates the life of a woman named Mrs. Grimes, once a servant girl but now an old woman who lives on a farm with her abusive husband and son. On her way back from town where she’s gone to buy food for the men and the livestock, she freezes to death, and a pack of wild dogs make a kind of ritual circle around her body. The narrator lets us know then that he observed this death as a boy, with his brother. Tells how the brother related the story when they get home, of his dissatisfaction with the brother’s account. The story is his effort to do the story justice:

The scene in the forest had become for me, without my knowing it, the foundation for the real story I am now trying to tell. The fragments, you see, had to be picked up slowly, long afterwards.…
The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.

It’s fascinating to compare this version with the one that appeared five years earlier, though Anderson continued to revise it, repeatedly, after its appearance in 1933. What he appends to the 1933 version is his sense of the inadequacy of the story he’s just told: “I am only explaining why I was dissatisfied then and have been ever since. I speak of that only that you may understand why I have been impelled to try to tell the simple story over again.” If that sense of distance between the story I need to tell and the story I’m able to tell called to me at the earliest stage of my apprenticeship, it does so no less now. The restless effort to honor a life by piecing together its facts and remnants (like torn letter drafts, isolated keepsakes) and sketching the boundaries of its mystery, the desire to give voice to that life, the recognition that what’s unknowable and elusive might be conjured in the effort—those were ambitions I recognized and admired.

Death in the Woods

The story is about the storyteller,
about getting the telling right.

The narrator is recalling the winter
he and his brother, just boys, found a woman

frozen to death in the woods.
She’s been made old before her time

by a hard life, hard men. She’s beautiful
in death, of course. Her clothes worried

from her body by a pack of dogs
that have circled her dying, left an iced zero

around her in the clearing. It’s that circle
in the story that always gives me solace,

the drumbeat of that path, the dogs running
nose to tail. And the boy, now a man,

can’t stop telling this story. He invents a life
for the woman in an effort toward honor,

he erases it and starts again because
to be done with it is a disservice. The point

of the story is to keep her cold mystery,
keep that circle drawn around her

higher and higher, a glass wall, keep everyone
from getting any closer.

(Section 4 of “In the Pines,” Fimbul-Winter 74-75)

It’s the Anderson of “Death in the Woods” that feels most like my forebear, my kin—if Melville is Anderson’s grandfather, I’ve long felt that Anderson is mine. A print of that Stieglitz photograph, the one which was the basis of the painting presiding over the reading room in the Clyde Library, was the first picture I hung when I moved into my Warren Wilson College office. Anderson’s fiction, the landscape of his stories, is the place I come from—in the same way that I’d later feel I came, as well, from the worn, industrial landscapes and perspectives of the poems of James Wright, who said, “The spirit of place…isn’t simply image but presence…the genius of place.” And if place, as Welty says, is our source of inspiration and knowledge, if a writer’s honesty begins there, she also allows, “You can equally be true to an impression of place.” That impression, for me, has now been shaped by Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Virginia, Michigan, Texas, and North Carolina, as well as Ohio, and it’s been informed over the years by so many other writers. If I came into writing feeling largely without history or place, writing became a means of discovering both; it also became, as it did for George Willard, a means of discovering a way out, the road ahead. Sherwood Anderson gave me a map.

Further Links and Resources

In this auspicious moment, Penkov delivers a heck of a book. Its bold subtitle promises us broad cross-sections of Bulgarian society, and he resists commonplace post-Communist sentimentality to show us a broad range of Bulgarian society—older generations who leave themselves behind in the face of change, younger generations that lose their way, people who leave home and come back changed, people who leave home and never come back at all. Penkov gives us specific, intimately drawn glimpses into the various Bulgarian species of this thing we call the human condition, and he does it with a well-honed style that is not merely ornamental.

Since the book’s subtitle invokes a nation and its history, it’s fitting that history plays a key supporting role in Penkov’s dramas, and he finds a variety of ways to invoke that history. The title story, about a man’s failed attempt to reach out to a beloved cousin, unfolds around the Serbian-Croatian conflict at the turn of the millennium. “The Night Horizon” conjures up the ghost of hostility between Bulgaria and Turkey, the nation that occupied it for centuries. “Buying Lenin,” which appeared in The Southern Review and Best American Short Stories 2008, gives us a Bulgarian émigré to America who buys Lenin’s preserved body on eBay for his grandfather back home. “A Picture with Yuki” wades into the problematic relationship between Bulgarians and gypsies.

This variety helps keep East of the West from covering the same ground over and over. Sometimes history remains silent and inscrutable, sometimes it’s an ever-present roadblock that must be danced around, and sometimes it weighs so heavily on people that they significantly limit their life choices. The seventy-one-year-old narrator of “Makedonija,” who has the broadest perspective on Bulgarian history of all the characters in the book, becomes as haunted by old letters from his dying wife’s long-ago first love as he is by his own memories of war.

I’ve seen men with their eyes gouged out. Men close to me, barefooted, with wrists tied together behind their backs. Hanged on the village square for everyone to see. As I lie in bed, eyes shut tightly, I still hear the rope creaking when the bodies sway, and I can hear the sound the bodies make swaying.

Image courtesy Paul Eliasberg

History, invoked in this way, metes out ancestral punishment on those who get caught beneath its steamroller by circumstance. In “The Night Horizon,” an obsessive Turkish-bagpipe maker foists a male name (Kemal) onto his daughter so that she can “properly” carry on his family craft. After all Turks are ordered to take Bulgarian names, he is taken away from his home (whether to imprisonment or death we never know) and his daughter takes up his ethno-historical conflict:

Sometimes Kemal took her bagpipe above the village to play with the echo. Once, she saw cars on the road below her, bumper to bumper, with mattresses, chairs, wooden cribs roped to the tops—blue, green, yellow, red cars, blood flowing away from the mountain…. Down the slope she watched people from the upper hamlets haul their households on their backs like camels…. Pots and pans and spoons and ladles and metal plates jumping wildly and catching the sun like gold coins. So Kemal struck her song with the bagpipe…

The characters in East of the West each have their own historical burdens to bear, and individuals—or families, like the one in the title story that gets torn apart because of a daughter’s love for a man across the river in Serbia—can’t carry them for very long. In “Cross Thieves,” which unfolds in 1997 as “once again the government has fallen,” Bulgarian history becomes a kind of currency in itself:

Gogo and I steal things and sell them, mostly to Gramps. We snuck into the biology classroom and took the skull our teacher used for an ashtray. Later Gramps claimed he resold it as an authentic skull from the 1944 Communist uprising…. We’ve stolen coils of copper wire from the physics lab (a Soviet leftover from the ’68 Prague spring), a map of the Balkan Wars (vintage, first edition!) a globe (with the USSR still whole and strong). In Bulgaria today there is a black market for everything, it seems.

In this collection we also see—no surprise for a formerly Marxist country—history manifesting itself as class conflict. In “The Letter,” a girl steals from an older compatriot woman who has learned English and, after marrying a British businessman, basks in relative luxury in a small village. The people identify Missis, as she is called, as being “British” because she has taken on a new identity. “This is how you learn your English,” she tells the young thief. “This is how you marry Mister and live rich.” Class conflict also shows up in “A Picture with Yuki,” in which the phrase “class enemy” is used the traditional Marxist way, as well as in “Devshirmeh,” where a down-and-out emigre to Texas watches his daughter disappear into a higher social class because his ex-wife marries an expat Bulgarian doctor.

In Penkov’s work we see class and history affecting the lives of almost everyone, and the English language often appears, like it does in “The Letter,” as a dividing line. It is part of the complex negotiation with Bulgarian-ness, foreign-ness, and the ever-present issue of social class. The elderly protagonist of “Makedonija” tells us, “I listen to the English and all the words sound like a single word to me, a word devoid of history and meaning, completely free.” The émigré narrator of “Buying Lenin” “memorized words and grammar rules and practiced tongue twisters, specifically designed for Eastern Europeans…. Remember the money, remember the money, remember the money. Phrases like this, I’d heard, helped to break your tongue.”

Perhaps Penkov’s best and most crystalline expression of Bulgarian-ness comes in “Devshiermeh,” the final story in the collection (and, as is often the case with first books, the longest). Émigré narrator Mihail (Americanized, to his annoyance, as Michael even by his Bulgarian ex-wife) takes his daughter Elli for the weekend and goes fishing with a fellow ne’er-do-well friend named John Martin:

“Yad, John Martin,” I explain, “is what lines the insides of every Bulgarian soul. It’s yad that propels us, like a motor, onward. Yad is like envy, but it’s not simply that. It’s like spite, rage, anger, but more elegant, more complicated. It’s like pity for someone, regret for something you did or did not do, for a chance you missed, for an opportunity you squandered. All those feelings in one word. Yad….”

Though yad might not line every Bulgarian soul, it aptly describes the free-floating tension that filters through the psyches of Penkov’s characters. Yad accounts for their endless wrestling with their national identity, so strong that it survives crossing borders and cutting off ties to the past. A great quality of Penkov’s stories is the sudden—but, in retrospect, inevitable—emergence of his characters’ destinies. At their halfway or two-thirds points the stories turn, and around that corner its people fall inextricably into the nest they have made.

This is expressed most beautifully in “A Picture with Yuki,” in which a Bulgarian/Japanese couple living in Chicago travel to Bulgaria to seek fertility treatments—a return, for the husband, fraught with all the wrestling over foreign-ness and Bulgarian-ness that his yad can handle. During a drive to the country, they may or may not hit a gypsy boy on a bicycle, who later falls into a coma and dies. The boy’s father, not knowing their possible role in this death, asks the couple to take a picture of the dead child for his nekrolog—a death announcement to be posted at the cemetery gates.

The gypsies bring the boy outside and prop him up on pillows to take his picture, then invite the couple to stay for dinner. The couple never mentions the bicycle accident, and afterwards the weight of their uncertain guilt threatens to demolish their relationship and rebuild it around what is unspoken. In moments like this, Penkov’s work supersedes the confines of any national literature and presents us as we are—with our worries, with our yad, with our furtive gropings toward meaning—no matter how much we may wish to be some other way.

Further Links & Resources

• Check out other FWR pieces on Bulgarian literature.
• Here’s an interview with Penkov in The Dallas Observer’s book blog.
• Read an archive of Penkov’s work on Blackbird.
• Penkov offers a list of how to write about Bulgaria in GRANTA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Links and Resources:

The French words we used were foreign to both of us, from now on it was a language we had to bend to what was in our own minds, to what we wanted to say, no longer, as at school, simply decoding and repeating. We were both making the same effort to communicate and we were doing it slowly, patiently, which may be why we were very quickly able to say important things to one another, such as I’m all alone. Me too.

So begins the short friendship of Raj and David, two young boys in Nathacha Appanah’s novel The Last Brother, whose names both mean “the king.” Both boys are also malnourished and suffering from traumatic losses: Raj has recently lost two brothers in a catastrophic storm that devastated a large portion of the island of Mauritius, where he and his family live, and David, a ten-year-old Jewish Czech boy orphaned by the death of his parents in the concentration camps, has been sent into prison exile on the island with a small number of other European Jews. David also suffers from malaria, and then becomes sick with dysentery, which ultimately leads to his death.

I should say that it is giving nothing away to mention that David dies late in the novel; the reader learns this in the first chapter when Raj describes the sharpness and immediacy of his grief as he stands before his friend’s grave some sixty years later. In fact, this graveside remembrance is the narrative occasion for this novel. For it is the older Raj who relates the story of their friendship and who, to the day of the story’s telling, still does not know how David managed to escape the camps and be exiled to the Beau-Bassin prison camp in Mauritius, where Raj’s tyrannical father once worked as a guard.

As readers we are meant to presume that Raj, the narrator sixty years hence, is relating the story to us in French. What is shared and communicated to the reader has been, for the most part, related in one language: French in the original, and English in the translation. But The Last Brother is polyphonic in two senses of the term. First, a number of languages are spoken throughout the novel, even if they are rendered almost entirely in one language in both the translated and original text. Raj refers to the language he spoke with his family as his mother or native tongue without ever explicitly naming that other language. Second, the narration and dialogue suggest amongst the characters a range of voices and moods, which change depending on who they are speaking to, in what language, and why. The major example of this second point is the fact that French is the only common language between the boys, and they both learned the language in school rather than at home. So there is a hesitancy and deliberation to the boys’ conversations as a result: they are able to adequately articulate themselves in French, but neither is fluent. The deliberateness with which the boys communicate feeds the motif of linguistic difference in Appanah’s novel, and their deliberateness in speaking to one another propels the story emotionally as well.

Appanah’s rendering of language issues and translation strategies in the original work also seems to have influenced award-winning translator Geoffrey Strachan’s translation of the novel. In translating Appanah’s words, Strachan had to do more than find a way of rendering the author’s lyrical prose in English. He also had to preserve the moments when the language the characters are using shifts from one to another. How to do this while preserving the lyrical, poetic, dreamlike quality of Raj’s recollections is the trick to a successful communication scheme.

As I read The Last Brother with an eye toward the polyphony of both the novel and the translation process, several questions and insights were sparked for me as a fiction writer, a translator, and a literary critic. Although I have yet to translate a work that requires translation communication schemes, in the novel I’m writing, which is set in the immigrant neighborhoods of contemporary Paris, several of the characters are fluent in English and French, and a few of them are fluent in Kabyle (the language of indigenous Algerian Berbers). Arabic peppers the linguistic landscape of the city as well. I write with the presumption that my readership will be primarily Anglophones with little to no background in French or Arabic, and no background in Kabyle. So, I face several tasks in constructing polyphonic dialogue for readers. For instance, if I include a line or two of dialogue in the “original” French, how can I seamlessly convey the meaning of these lines through the narrator’s or other characters’ reactions? If I include lines of dialogue in English that were spoken in French or Kabyle, what strategies can I use to make it clear that the conversation is either taking place in a language other than English? What does it mean to write “Sofiane replied in French,” rather than to include his words in French? In both the original and the translation, The Last Brother offers several strategies that respond to these sorts of questions.

Here is an early scene in The Last Brother featuring Raj, his mother, and his schoolteacher that sets the terms for the representations of power dynamics through language, and the emotional stakes of speaking French in the novel. This scene offers one example of how Appanah’s original work seems to have informed Strachan’s decisions about translation strategies for language shifts. Shortly after the deaths of his two older brothers, Raj moves across the island with his mother and father for his father’s new job as a guard at Beau-Bassin. There, Raj enrolls at the local school. His teacher, Mademoiselle Elsa, approaches Raj’s mother soon after Raj’s arrival to emphasize the boy’s scholarly promise. She says that Raj is one of the best students in French and English in school, which is impressive, she asserts, given how much catch-up he had to do as a late arrival in the school year. She entices Raj’s mother to support and encourage Raj in his studies in a poignant way that introduces a motif that courses throughout the novel: the connection between language fluency and basic survival. Raj was talented and smart enough that he held great promise to receive a prestigious scholarship, she assures his mother. With this scholarship, Raj would have a place at “the best high school,” and the scholarship would also provide money for books. But more importantly, the teacher emphasizes, some of this money would be left over for food for the family. So Raj’s proficiency in languages offers potential financial remuneration, which could provide nourishment and sustenance for a family who would pick mangoes from trees and “crouch down, eating our mangoes with both hands, with the juice trickling down our forearms, quickly catching it with our tongues… we ate the whole mango, the skin, the little, rather hard tip that had held it to the branch and we sucked the stone for a long, long time until it was rough and insipid, good only to throw on the fire.”  So in this scene with the schoolteacher, language is transformed into manna.

In turn, the French language in particular is marked in The Last Brother, not only as a means to scholarly success and potential sustenance, but also as a language that can offer indicators of and subsequently level unfairly wielded power differentials. At rare but regular intervals, Raj’s father would drink and then return home to beat Raj and his mother so severely that both of them would be left exhausted and unable to function for days. An especially harsh beating lands Raj in the hospital with broken ribs and a fever, among other injuries, and it is in the prison hospital that Raj formally meets David, who has been admitted with malaria. (As the novel progresses it becomes clear that, similar to the potential for Raj’s language abilities to feed the family, the fact that David suffers from malaria and then develops a fatal case of dysentery underscores the silence and mystery surrounding his and the other Jewish prisoners’ experiences of exile and imprisonment on the island of Mauritius).

Raj explains that his father beat him particularly badly on December 26, 1944. In fact, Raj’s injuries from his father’s beating are so severe that he can neither move nor speak. When the father delivers Raj to the hospital for medical attention, the man speaks to one of the prison hospital nurses:

He stopped several times and each time in his womanish voice he said, in French, fell out of the tree. I did not know my father spoke French, enough, at least, to lie and cover up what he had inflicted on his own son. Indeed, maybe he spoke English or Spanish or Chinese as well, nothing would have surprised me, the truth was I did not know him at all.

In a different scene, the father’s boss comes to the house to speak to him. There, we see how his use of French reveals his own precarious position of power at the prison. And in both cases, Raj gleans new perspective on his father as he reflects upon the father’s use of French. The perspective offers Raj some emotional distance in the moment, and in retrospect, Raj can see how powerless his father was.

This passage about the father speaking French gives way to the scene in which Raj and David meet for the first time. This is the passage in which both boys are in the hospital. They are able to speak to one another as Raj recovers from his father’s beating and David nurses his malaria. Their initial communiqués are awkward for Raj, and seemingly for David as well:

I had the impression that he was waiting for me to speak and so I said, speaking in French, as I had learned to in school, separating out the syllables, with a picture in my head of the sentence being written out by an imaginary hand as I spoke it, ‘My name is Raj and I live in Beau-Bassin.’

David looked at me and said to me, just as slowly, ‘My name is David and I live here. But I used to live in Prague.’

As I read this scene the first time, I knew right away that I would use a later part of Raj’s description of their meeting as the epigraph for this essay. I worked through a close reading of the passage I quoted in the epigraph; I was curious to see whether or not I could determine how Strachan’s translation and Appanah’s original intersected and diverged.

I realized that this scene’s emotional impact in fact comes to fruition through the translation communication scheme that Strachan used. It might seem odd that such a strategic and practical concept within the rewriting of a passage from one language to another could lend a scene its emotional power and depth. But it might help to look first at a few examples of how communication schemes are used in other scenes of the novel before returning to the scene of the boys’ first meeting.

Typography—and particularly italics—is a fairly standard way of offsetting the use of foreign words and phrases. In Strachan’s translation of The Last Brother, italics are used first to offset phrases in the original French, which establishes the expectation that when a word or phrase is set in italics, we can understand that it was originally in French. In speaking with Madame Ghislaine, a local aristocrat of sorts for whom Raj’s mother works and for whom Raj has begun working in late 1944, he recounts that “for several weeks I had only opened my mouth to say, as my mother had taught me, Bonjour, Madame. Merci, Madame. À demain, Madame.”  The shift between Raj’s native language and French as he speaks to Madame Ghislaine is represented through this common use of italics. In the English translation, Strachan further underscores this shift by preserving the original French, assuming the reader’s familiarity with basic French salutations.

It’s worth noting that this is a far cry from the use of modern European languages in English-language literary works such as Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1937). In flipping through the first few chapters of Barnes’ novel, the foreign phrases jump out from the page; they, too, are set in italics, for example, “Roba vecchia!”, “Wir seltzen an dieser Stelle über den Fluss—”, “Garde tout!” Nightwood was written during a period when an educated, literary American readership could be assumed to have a more-than-basic handle upon reading several European languages. I bring this up because French serves as the unspoken, universal language in The Last Brother, and the fact that Strachan only left untranslated the most basic communication phrases not only underscores Raj’s hesitancy in the language, but also speaks to how expectations of American readers have changed over the past century, and how cultural context can inform the way in which a translator approaches a communication scheme.

The italics in this passage of The Last Brother, thus, offer a typographical example of how to denote linguistic difference within both the original literary text and its translation. It is a simple and effective means of communicating to the reader of the translation, in turn, that throughout the rest of the novel, when italics are employed, it can be assumed that the original language was French, as is the case later in the novel when Raj describes the blue and white sign that hangs over the prison gate, which reads Welcome to the State Prison of Beau-Bassin.

This is an issue I am considering but have not yet addressed as I work through revising the current draft of my own novel. In the earliest drafts, I tried to avoid italics in order to underscore the fact that the linguistic landscape in contemporary Paris is a polyphonic one, but I decided that making a critical point in such a subtle manner serves the novel neither emotionally nor aesthetically. Another possibility would be to use italics early on in order to suggest how disorienting the range of languages beyond French and English is to the American narrator. Again, this ultimately strikes me as too subtle. At this point, I’m considering italics for the foreign phrases and words that the American narrator does not understand, whether in French, Kabyle, or Arabic. It remains to be seen, but Strachan’s use of italics in his translation here offers another possibility: once it is established that italics connote, say, French, the words and phrases in italics will be understood by the reader to be in French from that point forward.

Another strategy for denoting linguistic difference while maintaining the same language within the text is to simply alert the reader that the dialogue they are about to read was spoken in a particular language. I had been trying to avoid this strategy in my own writing; it struck me as obvious and inelegant reportage. But the ways in which the phrase “in French” is used in The Last Brother serves as both a communication scheme and a means of establishing details about the setting. In the prison hospital, French is the lingua franca between staff and patients. We learn this when “[The nurse] placed her hand on my brow, took out a thermometer from one of her pockets, thrust it under my tongue for a moment, and said, in French, ‘Your fever’s gone. You’ll be able to go home soon.’” The use of this communication scheme at this moment in the story and its translation suggests several things. First, of course, Strachan assumes that his translation’s readership’s knowledge of French is limited to the most common phrases. So his approach in this case could not be to simply leave the French in the original, as he did with the initial italicized phrases spoken to Madame Ghislaine. It for this reason that he directly translated Appanah’s “en français” to indicate to the reader what language the nurse was speaking.

Even more interesting here, however, is the fact that the nurse’s voice is not described: she is quoted directly, where Raj’s father was not. Nor does Raj reflect retrospectively here on what it means for the nurse to speak to him in French. It is a means of offering further details about the atmosphere and culture in the prison hospital, one that sets us up the reason for why David and Raj speak French together without prompting on either of their parts. The “in French” strategy, thus, offers a means of relating to the reader which language will be privileged in a given setting without directly stating it as such.

With this example from The Last Brother in mind, I experimented with revising a scene in my novel in which the narrator, who speaks French quite well, listens to and becomes lost in a conversation that shifts between French and Kabyle. Since she understands and has the context for only snippets of what is being discussed, her reactions are limited to confusion and, in moments, tuning out the conversation in order to pay attention to what’s going on around her otherwise. To address directly the fact that other characters were moving back and forth between French and Kabyle offered me a moment where I could elaborate on the narrator’s fears of appearing to not understand, to be lost. So for my purposes, this strategy opened up the possibility for further character development.

So, then, here is how the translation communication scheme employed by Strachan in the hospital meeting scene between the boys resonated with me. In this scene, Raj’s use of the phrase “speaking in French” suggests a deliberateness, an attempt to make contact with someone unknown and clearly foreign (Raj notes in an early description of David how striking his pale hair and skin were to him). Raj’s deliberation is underscored by the intentionality of his own strategy for parsing through the French: the separation of syllables, the pictures of the sentence in his head, written by an imaginary hand. It is as if, in speaking to David in French, his deliberateness with the language is the medium through which their communication must pass. They cannot establish direct contact.

In this powerful moment in both the novel and the translation, the older narrator Raj explains that the boys “were very quickly able to say important things to one another, such as I’m all alone. Me too.” There is an urgency in their need to communicate the desperation of their respective situations. Raj has lost his older brothers, and is subject to his father’s violent whims, and his family survives on the edge of starvation. David, meanwhile, is sick, malnourished, in exile and imprisoned, and completely alone in the world. The desire to speak to one another becomes a basic need for both characters. The leveling of power dynamics and social and cultural difference is an intrinsic part of the polyphony of The Last Brother, and almost nowhere in the novel does this resonate as deeply as in the passage in which Raj and David first speak. When I arrived at the final lines of this passage, I heard the French in my head, like an echo of the English translation, as if I were there with Raj and David as they said to one another, “Je suis tout seul.” “Moi aussi.” The echo literally sent a shiver through me.

As the novel progresses beyond their early interactions, their common language continues to offer both bridges and barriers to their rapprochement and increasing dependence on one another. For Raj, David becomes a surrogate brother. Raj “others” David, in a sense, referring to him in near angelic terms as pale and ephemeral, and yet his grief over David’s death sixty years later seems to far outweigh any grief he feels—or allows himself to feel—over the death of his brothers. David, meanwhile, escapes from prison with Raj’s help, and so becomes completely dependent on Raj’s assistance to navigate and attempt to flee the island. In the latter third of the story, the boys seek a port in which there is, allegedly, a ship bound for Palestine, which David calls Eretz (presumably short for Eretz Yisrael, a common name for the Jewish promised land before the state of Israel was established). This port is never found. But in the meantime, the boys’ fascination and frustration with one another’s differences are palpable. As Raj recalls:

The words collided with one another in my throat, came tumbling out of my mouth in a chaotic fashion, just as in a dream, when one is desperately trying to speak. I longed for him to understand my mother tongue so that what I was saying might flow more freely, so that I might use just the right word, express my precise feelings to him.

This description of the limitations of Raj’s scholastic proficiency in the French language suggests, wrenchingly, the linguistic scrim that remains between the boys, which also limits their ability to relate to one another the things they have experienced and lived. Of the star of David that he wears around his neck, David explains to Raj that David was the king of his people. Raj is at first annoyed by and skeptical of this assertion, since David cannot conclusively prove it true. Raj is just as frustrated by the fact that his name also means “king,” and he has even less proof than David, since there is no river or symbol named Raj to parallel the star. This passage underscores the importance of objects and symbols in their conversations, and reminds the reader of the scrim of French.

The older Raj who relates the story of his friendship with and the death of David longs for the other boy to be able to tell his story “in his own words and with the things that he alone could see.” Part of what Raj imagines David might relate (the italics are original, and following the communication strategy established by Appanah and maintained in translation by Strachan, they suggest that the older Raj believes that David’s “own words” sixty years later would have been uttered in a language different from Raj’s): “On the other side of the barbed wire I saw a dark boy with black hair…his eyes as black as billiard balls…if he’d not been weeping he would have frightened me with his face like a savage’s.”

The linguistic difference between the two boys remains tangible and painful for the aged Raj who recounts the story, and the fact that he imagines David describing him as a savage underscores two things: first, that the narrator Raj (who lives in Europe and is widely traveled) is now well aware of the social perceptions of him as a man of color; and second, that French as a common language can only take them so far in Raj’s imagination. So painful is this barrier that later in his life, Raj orders a French-Yiddish dictionary, and can only go so far as to look up the words for “hunger,” “brother,” and “mother” before he begins to weep. One of the most intense images in the novel is the dictionary sitting on a kitchen counter, still wrapped in bubble wrap. Raj’s hands are shaking so badly that he asks his wife to open the package for him.

One curiosity remains for me about polyphony in The Last Brother: in the later chapters of the novel, Raj’s linguistic limitations seemingly fall away while David’s remain. When Raj describes the way in which he relates details of his life with his brothers, and his brothers’ subsequent deaths, he seems to leap ahead of David in his ability to communicate in French. Following a full page of specific details and emotional complexities that Raj relates to David about the lives and deaths of his brothers, he tells the reader, “And David’s eyes wet with tears and questions, David did not understand, he got everything mixed up, he said only one body, two brothers… maybe he’s still alive your elder brother.” The rush of emotions that the young Raj experiences upon hearing David’s hope that one of his brothers survived is represented by the subsequent run-on sentence of which his reaction to Raj’s story is a part. The rush of words and suggestions establish yet another facet of the novel’s polyphony. Here, perhaps, we can assume that the narrator Raj, in relating this moment, is overcome with emotion once more. The rushed tone that is suggested by the run-on is altogether distinct from the quiet, sparse, poetic quality of the narrative voice employed throughout much of the novel. Yet what purpose did it serve here for Raj to suddenly recall himself as speaking far more proficiently in French than he had previously been capable? Particularly since David’s response is fairly wooden in the translation, suggested by the construction of the italicized sentence, and possibly the use of the word “elder,” although I don’t claim to know if this word was less anachronistic in early 1945 than when Raj relates the story sixty years later.

In fiction, dialogue often acts as conduit and conductor between characters. But in the case of The Last Brother and its translation, the linguistic choices that characters make go beyond communication and character development. In a kind of narrative alchemy, both the direct and indirect dialogue seems to take on physical properties. Once manipulated in the mouths of the characters, language serves to transform and develop the setting, themes, motifs, and—perhaps most importantly—the act of speaking in and of itself. The Last Brother is as much about the power of language as the ineffability of historical trauma. Yet there were several moments later in the novel, such as the passage in which Raj seems to leap ahead of David linguistically in describing his brothers’ deaths, when I was pulled out of the narrative due to stylistic choices that seemed intended to underscore the balance between what is articulated and what goes unspoken. Was this a deliberate choice on the part of Appanah that was then faithfully conveyed in Strachan’s translation? As deliberate a choice, perhaps, as Raj’s and David’s early moments of French conversation were marked by deliberation out of necessity? Was this choice, then, a means of conveying to the reader how painful the linguistic scrim between the boys remains for Raj, sixty years hence? As a literary critic, I find myself posing these questions, recoiling from them, and then embracing them as unanswerable. The fact that I cannot answer these questions is likely part of the point. And as both critic and fiction writer, coming to this conclusion excites me. I wonder about how my own decisions about communication schemes will be received by my readers, and what they might see in my work that I might not. It also serves as a possible cautionary tale: ought I to be careful with how far I try to take critical points within my fiction writing? I would be interested to hear what other writers think.

Perhaps the seemingly obtuse moments of more eloquent communication in The Last Brother are meant to throw into relief the experience of being unable to fully comprehend what it would be like to live through the experiences that David did. One of the most compelling things about The Last Brother as a novel is its basic premise: nine-year-old Raj has no idea that a war is raging on three continents. It is through knowing David (and David’s recollections of the ghettoization and imprisonment of his family, followed by the death of his parents) that Raj first learns of the Second World War and the Shoah, and he is still grappling with it sixty years later. The novel concludes on what could be dismissed as a contrived or cliché statement, given all that Raj has related to the reader: “I tell myself that in a minute I shall recount David’s story to my son, so that he, too, may remember.” But what can be intuited from this final statement, perhaps, is that such cataclysmic world events exceed language, and can never be fully explained or retold enough times. The words must pour from Raj’s mouth again. Perhaps his assertion that he will repeat his own version of the boys’ story then underscores David’s silence within the story, and the absence of the exiled prisoners at Beau-Bassin from history.

Further Links and Resources

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In the interview, Campbell answered most of my questions before I was even done asking them, jumping in with stories about her mother’s reading habits (she reads about a book a day) and thoughts on how hard it was to name her most recent novel (dissatisfied with her initial efforts, including The Fishing Dog and Margo Crane, her agent finally came up with Once Upon a River). In the interview, whenever she laughed, I found myself laughing, too.

Campbell’s charisma is formidable and her energy infectious. This same energy can be found in the churning rivers and restless characters of her new novel, the follow-up to Campbell’s acclaimed story collection American Salvage. The protagonist of Once Upon a River is Margo Crane, a teenager who has grown up along the fictional Stark River, obeying its currents and snooping for its secrets. The river and Margo are linked by more than proximity. From the opening:

The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane’s heart. She rowed upstream to see wood ducks, canvasbacks, and ospreys and to search for tiger salamanders in the ferns… Her feet were toughened against sharp stones and broken glass. When Margo swam, she swallowed minnows alive and felt the Stark River move inside her.

After an incident involving Margo’s family occurs—a wrong committed and duly punished—Margo flees to the river, finding in it both an escape from pursuit and a shelter from danger.

Throughout these pages, Margo follows the river and her impulses into a series of relationships with men. There are dramatic turns throughout the book, such as when a meth dealer comes searching for Margo, or when an angry cousin swipes her boat, or when a friend in dire circumstances asks a grave favor. These are solid pleasures, and Campbell renders the conflicts in the book well, expertly managing tension to keep the reader glued to the page and never settling for symbolism when she can make a scene more interesting. By choosing to frame the action of the story around scenes of Margo struggling and surviving, Once Upon a River makes the argument that struggling and surviving are what life mostly consists of, at its deepest level, and that growing up is more a matter of competency than of wisdom. And Campbell’s writing sings most clearly with Margo’s practical pursuit of the things she needs to survive—someplace to wait out the winter, a way to get to Kalamazoo, a license that will allow her to hunt out of season—and the things she desires: trust, sex, love.

It is the evolution of Margo’s relationship with men that, perhaps, provides the structural backbone of the book. In the beginning of the novel, after Margo flees her family, the first man she encounters—a big, hard-drinking man who is, himself, hiding out on the river—does his best to protect her from the dangers of his world, including a brother with a history of drugs and his own drunken rages. Throughout the novel, Margo’s dependence on men makes her restless, and the female models she encounters leave her dissatisfied. In the end, Margo lives alone on the river, a satisfying and solitary existence. She is, finally, unwilling to even entertain the notion of a man interfering with her life. Not because she might desire a companion, but because she won’t risk sacrificing her hard-fought independence.

Jane Smiley, in her recent New York Times review, is correct that the novel is, at its heart, about freedom. But Margo’s freedom is linked inextricably to self-sufficiency. To Margo, wealth is as much a prison as poverty if you can’t live the way you want to. For Margo, that means being able to hunt and butcher a buck, to fish, to eat mushrooms and edible ferns. Margo’s desire for freedom results in a restlessness that dogs her, a permanent growl of dissatisfaction that sinks into the background so we don’t hear it any more, like the hum of a power line. At the very end, these forces seem to have abated temporarily, which is the best, it seems, Margo can hope for. Alone with the river, Margo is at much at ease as she can get, and a moment after all that tumult feels well-earned, a miracle.

This isn’t the first book of Campbell’s to feature Margo—she has appeared, sometimes unnamed, in every book that Campbell has written so far—but it is the book that shows how Margo became herself, an almost mythic figure of rural America.

Further Links and Resources:

• For more on Bonnie Jo Campbell’s work, interviews with the author, tour dates, and publisher information, please visit the author’s website.
• You can also follow Bonnie Jo Campbell on her blog, The Bone-Eye: A Writer’s Adventures.

• Read Greg Schutz’s review of Campbell’s National Book Award-nominated collection American Salvage, which FWR published last May.
• Listen to Brian Short’s July 27th conversation with Bonnie Jo Campbell from his interview series, “Michigan on the Page.” This Michigan Radio series is a web-exclusive program in which Short talks with authors, editors, and teachers from around the state about Michigan books and what it means to be a Michigan writer. You can also read transcripts of the interviews. Recent guests include:
  

  • Lara Zielin, author of the forthcoming novel The Implosion of Aggie Winchester.
  • Christopher Leland, author most recently of Love/Imperfect.
  • Jeremiah Chamberlin, Editor-in-Chief of Fiction Writers Review.
  • Steve Amick, author most recently of Nothing But a Smile.
  • Patricia Clark, author most recently of She Walks Into the Sea.

Born in London and raised in Wales, Van Booy now lives in New York City, where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and is involved in the Rutgers Early College Humanities program. His work has been translated into thirteen languages.

Earlier this year, as Van Booy was working through the final stages of Everything Beautiful Began After, he conducted an email conversation with FWR Contributing Editor Joshua Bodwell about his work, philosophy, and the literary life. In his introduction to the interview, Bodwell describes the author’s novel, writing:

In the elegant, seemingly Old World prose Van Booy has become revered for, the novel traces three lives set against the Mediterranean heat of Athens: those of the drunken but brilliant American George, the searching French artist Rebecca, and the British archaeologist Henry. New York Times best-selling author and National Book Award-finalist Andre Dubus has called the novel, “A powerful meditation on the undying nature of love and the often cruel beauty of one’s own fate.”

During their conversation, Bodwell and Van Booy touch on everything from morality in fiction to when it’s appropriate to wear a pocket square. On the difference between the story and the novel as forms, Van Booy has this to say:

For me, a novel is like a city coming to life around you—but a world one can never really inhabit. A short story is a late-night conversation with a stranger in the park: very immediate, intimate, fleeting. Writing a novel is different. It’s really all inspired revision. Did you know that the John Harrison clocks from the early 1700s required about eight hours to disassemble and about the same time to reassemble? Sixteen hours of non-stop labor all to make one tiny adjustment. Writing a novel is worse. It has to become an obsession—and where would we be without Harrison’s clocks? “Lost at sea,” I hear you murmur.

Author image credit: Wang Yin

You can also win one of three signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a quiet American!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a lot!

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

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

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

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

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

Have you spent much time in Israel?

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

And how much time have you spent in Germany?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And teaching them, too!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Links and Recommendations

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

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

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