In the days prior to the publication of his second novel, The Millions had the pleasure to chat with Ben Marcus about The Flame Alphabet — an apocalyptic tale about the toxicity of human language — along with everything from the development of his work and the labels people assign fiction to the ranking of MFA programs and the perils of colicky babies.

The Millions: The Flame Alphabet — which features first-person narration and a single protagonist — has been described as your most “accessible” book to date. Would you agree with this assessment? Given the more “experimental” nature of Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String , how did the structure and prose style for The Flame Alphabet come about?

Ben Marcus: Who is setting the bar for what you call accessibility? The definition of “accessible” is “easy to understand,” and so much of the fiction I love is just… not that. It is complex and rich and sometimes puzzling, and it stays with me precisely because I can’t quite wrap my head around it. Sometimes it is lucid and approachable on the surface, and other times the language is congested in order to fire up strong sensations. Accessibility is such a strange, sad measure of the writing I love. Dora the Explorer is accessible. The Unconsoled is not. But I have never been deliberately difficult, if that’s what you’re getting at. That has no appeal to me. I’ve always tried to write the fiction that compels me the most — I have to feel passionate, engaged, and nearly desperate if I’m going to get anything done. When I’m working on material that is conceptual or abstract or in some way difficult, I strive for clarity, transparency, a vivid attack. After Notable American Women was published, I felt pretty strongly that I wanted to try something different, just on the compositional level. I wanted a single narrator, a precise timeline. I was curious what narrative momentum would deliver to me and how that would impact the fictional world I wanted to create. I was just hungry to put on a new disguise and go prowling. At that point I had no idea what the book would be, but I must have been craving order, some formal simplicity. Of course I quickly found a way to muck it up, but for a little while it was like writing with a new body and the whole experience woke me up and mattered, at least for a while. If The Flame Alphabet, as a result, is easier, then that’s an accident. If anything, I hope it is a much harder book, on the emotional level at least.

TM: How do you view the development or progression of your work, from The Age of Wire and String to Notable American Women and now The Flame Alphabet?

BM: The simple answer is that I have changed my techniques in order to avoid the relentless sameness of my material, but I have probably only found new costumes, not new creatures entirely. In the past, if I wanted to sound a note on a piano (in prose), I didn’t just have to purchase and install the piano, I had to build it. But before I built it I had to grow the trees whose wood would yield the piano, and probably I had to create the soil and landscape through which those trees would burst. Then there was the problem of the fucking seeds. Where did they come from? I had to source them. With such mania I was either onto something or I completely misunderstood what a fiction writer was supposed to do. Simple things, even entirely undramatic ones, could not occur unless I created them from whole cloth. I was superstitious about taking anything for granted, but it also locked me into a kind of fanatical object fondling that could, on a bad day, preclude any exploration of the human (even though the process of trying to remake the world on the page is fairly, pathetically, human). This set of interests kept me away from what is usually called narrative. It wasn’t some ideological position, or an artistic stance, it was just one set of obsessions winning out over another. On the other hand, I think that I have always tried to create feeling, and then to pulse it into the reader with language. It’s very difficult to figure out how to do this. Storytelling is one way — conventional narrative or whatever you want to call it — but are there other methods worth exploring? The ground shifts, and I change my mind about what might work. How to create immense, unforgettable feeling from language? This ambition hasn’t really changed, it’s just that I want to cultivate new approaches, to try to circle in on a more vivid way to accomplish it.

TM: Was your writing process at all different with The Flame Alphabet given its more traditional narrative structure?

BM: It was. I wrote The Flame Alphabet relatively quickly, in less than two years. I worked every day and usually produced a few pages. I rarely reread the previous material each day before starting to work (whereas in the past I have been a compulsive re-reader before beginning the day’s work). I also, against my nature, allowed myself to use functional, placeholder language sometimes in order to keep my momentum, telling myself that I would go back later to make the language more interesting. And I did go back later, and later, and later. Unlike with my earlier books, I cut as much as I kept, or more. I have four or five hundred pages of deleted material. After I finished the first draft, I cut a 70-page section in the first third of the book and re-did it from scratch. I also cut a 50 page section, in Part 2, that introduced a new set of characters and conflicts. These people never returned. Thank god.

TM: I read somewhere that you began writing Notable American Women after discovering an old — and somewhat patronizing – encyclopedia actually titled Notable American Women. The Flame Alphabet is a book about the toxic language of children. What was the genesis of that idea?

BM: The idea came about when an obsession — language — collided with a fraught emotional container — family. I think of language as being tremendously potent. It causes deep feelings in us, so much so that its effects would seem nearly chemical, medical. Once I started to think of language as medical, a kind of drug, I wondered what an overdose would be, what would happened if the drug of language was toxic to some people if taken in high doses. This alone wasn’t that interesting, but it did give the book a basic problem, a conflict, to work from. At the time I was thinking about characters who have something crucial taken from them — what they’ll do to recover what matters most to them. So I took language away from Sam, my narrator, but that wasn’t enough of a loss. He also had to lose his child, his family. And these losses had to be connected to each other, maybe inextricable: thus the child as weapon. The child you love is the one who is harming you. This made the morality of the problem much more difficult, more inaccessible. I didn’t realize any of this at the time, but I think that I was looking to escalate the problem at every point in the novel. If there was a crisis, it needed to deepen, to worsen, and the escalation had to maybe beget the plot. This all sounds a bit too insider baseball. I didn’t know a thing when I started.

TM: In the book, Sam and Claire are part of a secretive and strange Jewish sect? And toxic language is, by some, thought to emanate first from Jewish children. What was behind your decision to make your main characters Jewish?

BM: The forest Jewry that Sam and Claire practice is invented (maybe). They worship in isolation, in the woods, receiving their Rabbi’s sermons through a complex, hard-to-operate radio that frequently fails them. But even if their process is invented, the content of their religion is tied closely to Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah — it is not strikingly fictional. They respect the ineffable and see religious wisdom as essentially nonverbal, enigmatic, and elusive. The cautions against language, against understanding itself, to me come from not just Kabbalah but from Christian mysticism as well. I quickly determined that if I made up a name for this religion it amputated the whole thing of its vitality. I wanted the religious activities in the book, for all of their strangeness, to feel believable, to feel true. To me, Judaism, with its deep respect for intellectual interrogation, for the slippery vicissitudes of Torah interpretation, could accommodate a sect like the forest Jews in this book. As this sect started to take shape, and I explored the isolated nature of such anti-communal worship, the intense loneliness of true religious commitment, this produced a lot of dramatic material, and the potential for sorrow. Connected to this, I have always wanted to invent a religion in fiction, and to me this was a chance to do so in a way that felt bound to my own personal religious experience.

TM: I was discussing The Flame Alphabet with a friend and she said that children’s language as a toxin was an idea that only a parent would have. As a father of two, what impact do your children have on your writing or the way you approach your work?

BM: My daughter, who is seven now, had fierce colic as a baby, and her scream was military grade. I remember once I was changing her diaper on the bed and out of nowhere she released a scream so piercing, so beyond anything I’d ever experienced at the sonic level, that I nearly threw up. But those days are gone. She is a sweetheart with a gorgeous voice and we tease her sometimes because even if she tried she can’t scream like that anymore. One thing that’s been interesting to me about having kids is how I now see myself differently as a son to my parents. I am more aware, I think, of how easy it is to take them for granted as providers: machines of support and love. Parents are the people you can sometimes safely experiment on, testing dark moods, dumping anger and fear. Bragging. There are so many behaviors you can only really safely show to a parent.

TM: Shifting gears a bit, when it was published, some readers said that Notable American Women was not experimental enough. So that is possibly something you’ll hear about The Flame Alphabet. Does being labeled an “experimental” writer” mean anything to you?

BM: Anyone who believes that you can make art from language is part of a small, nearly-vanishing community, and we should all form a wedge and march on the enemy. Do we need different uniforms in this struggle, different stripes on our arms so that it’s clear who the realists are? Maybe, but I care less and less. I find myself fascinated by various techniques of fiction writing, and ever since early college I have tried to read all across the divides, before I even know there were divides. I love what William Trevor can do with a short story, and at the same time David Markson is staggeringly brilliant to me: the simplest language, yet utterly original on the page. We are in a time when narrative tradition is getting honed and exquisitely refined by the novelists who are considered major: very subtle improvements on an established method. But the premise of art is that writers will seek new methods to reach people with language. This isn’t experimental at all: it’s traditional. It’s a tradition for artists to push forward and try to do new things. Such a project has defined the making of art from the very beginning. There’s nothing more traditional than that.

TM: Shifting gears again, every year we see a ranking of “the best” MFA programs, followed by numerous rebuttals to the list of “best” MFA programs, followed by vigorous defenses of various MFA programs. As someone who has been both a student and a professor at MFA programs (at Brown and Columbia), what’s your reaction to this annual ranking and subsequent controversy?

BM: I don’t pay much attention to the rankings of these programs. I do spend time trying to improve the fiction concentration at Columbia, and I am very much engaged by the question of how best to teach students of fiction, how workshops should be structured, how the secondary reading courses might work, what form of criticism can best incite a student’s improvement. I’ve been teaching in MFA programs for over 20 years now. I wonder how to make the Columbia program matter as much as it can, how to build its value to student writers, how to improve it at every level. I care a lot about teaching, and what’s interesting about MFA programs is that there is not a lot of history to fight against. It’s relatively new, when it comes to academia, anyway, and this is, I think, liberating.

TM: What are you working on now?

BM: I am editing a collection of stories, which should be out sometime in 2013.

TM: And looking at the year ahead from the point of view of a reader, what books are you most excited about?

BM: John D’Agata’s Lifespan of a Fact, Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Michael Chabon’s new novel, Marilynne Robinson’s essay collection. Then there’s a novel by some freaky writer I’ve never heard of named Heidi Julavits. It’s called The Vanishers, and it’s amazing.

TM: Returning to The Flame Alphabet, the book trailer — featuring the animation of Erin Cosgrove — is intensely beautiful and creepy. How did you come to work with Erin?

BM: I met Erin through Creative Capital, an angelic organization that is boundlessly helpful and generous to artists. I watched a feature-length animation of Erin’s called What Manner of Person Art Thou? and I was just stunned by its genius. So I asked her if she might want to make a short film that could serve as a book trailer, and she agreed. We bounced around a bunch of ideas but we kept returning to the notion of a traditional trailer. Because Erin works in animation, she could animate whole scenes and we could build up the kind of atmosphere that’s in the book. Erin worked tirelessly, for months, and the result is what you see. I’d really love to work with her again.

Image Credit: Flickr/Double–M

Behold the man — Bradford Morrow, who spans in both biography and experience the best explorations of the teachers and writers of two centuries, the 20th and our new toddling era. Both a generous reader and writer, a community-maker in his years as founder and editor of the pioneering Conjunctions, bearing standards paradoxically rigorous, curious, and fluid, author of Giovanni’s Gift, among some other eight books, this year he came out with two new books: one, the novel The Diviner’s Tale, a genre cloverleaf, combining elements of paranormal mystery, the detective story, the confessional, and a shaggy-dog story, told by a woman whose credibility proves as convincing as Norman Rush’s similar feat of male-to-female ventriloquism in Mating. The second, the collection of short stories The Uninnocent, shows similar insight, plunging the reader again and again into some icy waters. Why? Because he pushes characters to extremes while luring us into unguessable sympathies: you, dear reader, become complicit with the metaphysical and actual body count of these stories. Who would you be under such complex circumstances? Would you dare call yourself good?

Such is the sly question in ghostly ink between Morrow’s lines. Meanwhile, his formal play (see, for instance, the highly pleasurable psychological Rubik’s cube of a story,”Mis(laid)”) is subtle; in its subtlety lies intrigue.

*And if you want more gritty specifics embracing Morrow’s upbringing and aesthetics, in addition to the interview that follows, may I direct you to the well-written biography?

** And if you want the opening of Paradise Lost, one of the undergirdings of postwar American fiction, see this:

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us . . .

Edie Meidav: May I ask you to connect the two following dots in your first answer?

(First dot) You have tackled so many large topics in your work, and have used such varying technique, and yet your last novel, The Diviner’s Tale, as well as this most recent book of short stories, The Uninnocent, both come out of a truly American gothic sensibility. The Uninnocent bears every kind of smudged, glowing thumbprint of America gone awry: absentee fathers haunt these stories, as do grotesque physical accidents, incest, murder, subterfuge, numbing devices.

(Second dot) You have a deep connection to Willa Cather.

Can you connect these two points for your lay readers?

Brad Morrow: That’s a really intriguing question. I see several possible ways to connect those dots, although perhaps the simplest explanation for what on the surface might seem an affinity for two quite different aesthetics would be to cite Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” — as a writer my interests are wildly wide-ranging. My taste in literature, like my taste in music, and even in people, is eclectic. I’ve never been one to limit myself in my preoccupations, my affections. Which is not to say my taste is chaotic or even all that catholic. Just that for better or worse I manage a wide embrace. Besides Willa Cather, I’m completely devoted to John Donne, for instance, and Yeats. But also William Burroughs and William Gaddis. What these writers have in common, for want of a sharper word, is genius. Originality, dynamism, vision, and a gift for language that’s electric.

Two more specific vectors between the gothic and Willa Cather involve, first, her use of landscape as an active character — a trait that’s ever-present in my most gothic work — and, second, for all her reputation as a kind of pioneer realist, Cather is a modernist chronicler of all manner of violent and tragic behaviors. Her landscapes are often aggressive, uncooperative, and even fatally destructive to the humans who inhabit them. Likewise, her characters are capable of depravities that would take aback the darkest noir writer. When the cruel Wick Cutter blithely slits open the eyes of a woodpecker in A Lost Lady and enjoys watching the poor creature flop around helplessly trying to find its way back to its nest, you know you’re in the presence of a writer who understands evil. Murder, betrayal, deception, downfalls. Cather explores all these themes pretty relentlessly, though she also is a brilliant celebrant of human triumph against adversity, as well.

Another personal connection to Willa Cather, having nothing to do with the gothic, is that my mother was born and raised in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and my grandparents, great grandparents, and great-great grandparents farmed the same rolling Nebraska lands that Cather’s family did. Most are buried there, many a stone’s throw from the graves of Cather’s family and friends. So there’s that, as well. Cather and I, generations apart, left small towns in Nebraska and Colorado to end up in New York where we each became novelists and editors. Sentimental or not, I feel she’s a kind of forebear.

EM: Again, forgive me this dyadism, two quotations:

“We were uninnocent, but the very isolation that in some ways damned us has also acted as our benefactor and protector.” — The Uninnocent

“The druggist’s was empty, its row of stools with mottled vinyl aligned kind of sad somehow before the long counter, Coke taps, pie racks, ketchup bottles, the stainless-steel malted cup — ” — “Whom No Hate Stirs None Dances”

While I don’t feel this about every writer, may I venture that in your embrace of such complex and often evil characters, a lapsed idealism lives? Not that polemic pulses your fiction, but rather that some American nostalgia unites these stories. As if all might be better if we could get back to — to what? The land, perhaps, the freedom of an individual facing the vastness of the world and needing to make those insuperably huge American choices. Cather’s prairie redux! As if each character might, somewhere before the second coming or apocalypse, recognize the worth of ethics and community. Your characters are often anachronistic vigilantes, pursuing their own form of righteousness. I might be pushing it here, but the voice rising from your pages suggests that while your pariahs’ psychologies rarely bear Edenic backstories, the arcs of their stories contain a ghostly hint: some lost key lives in the backstory of the States. Discuss?

BM: I agree that many characters in these stories would like to get back to the Garden but that the path, if there ever was one, is overgrown with thorny flora and guarded by treacherous fauna. Indeed, Jack, in “All the Things That Are Wrong With Me,” tries to create his own Edenic animal garden in which the lion lies down with the lamb, but he is blinded by naïveté and an ignorance of community rules, and so is fated for a hard fall. Both narrators in “Lush” try their very best to overcome alcoholism and injury, but in the end it’s unclear if their dreams, despite their striving and hope, can finally create a haven that’s strong enough to protect them from their demons.

As for the role of America in the book, I can say simply that the stories were meant to be individual investigations rather than a political map of the patchwork quilt that is our culture. Having said that, though, it is interesting that the first story in the collection, “The Hoarder,” involves a family moving from place to place across the country, beginning in the Outer Banks on the East Coast, passing through the Midwest and pausing in the Southwest for a time, then ending up in California. The youthful collector, on his own westward journey, at first contents himself with innocent enough things to assemble — sea shells, birds’ nests, pottery shards; things he finds on beaches, in forests, and on the desert. But just as the country itself in its westward expansion, fueled by Manifest Destiny and other questionable political philosophies that hardly disguised an underlying rapacity, moved inevitably away from idealism, this boy increasingly finds himself driven to take things from others in order to feel in control of a life that’s slipping away from him.

While evil is obviously universal, various forms of evil portrayed in The Uninnocent do seem to me to be, as you suggest, distinctly American. An unstable idealism that sometimes erupts into irrevocable acts of violence or crime does reside in the hearts of many of these characters, which despite my better judgment is one of the reasons I so deeply empathize with even the worst among them. Some are naive, others psychotic, still others believe that they are doing the right thing even though the rest of the world would strongly disagree. Just as America is a young country, a number of people portrayed here struggle with maturity at a fairly tender age. Again, I’m not saying the characters in The Uninnocent are meant to be small portraits of the country itself. But all of them are in one way or another the products of America and, as William Carlos Williams put it, “The pure products of America go crazy.”

EM: How does music affect your writing?

BM: Music was crucial to my life long before I ever thought of writing, even well before I got into reading books beyond The Phantom Toll Booth or The Cat in the Hat. My mother was church organist and choir director at the First Methodist Church in Littleton, Colorado, and was an accomplished opera singer. She had me taking piano lessons before my hands could barely reach the ivories and my feet the pedals. So music is in my blood and soul. Every kind of music, I might add, from classical to jazz, rock to rap, from sea chanteys to you name it. I’ve learned a lot from Bach and Stravinsky, Debussy and Copland, Bird and Coltrane, Leadbelly and John McLaughlin, the Geto Boys and NWA. A list of all the composers and musicians who have influenced me would run into the hundreds. I doubt I could write any of the sentences that I do without that core musical background. Narrative, be it on the scale of a short paragraph or a long novel, is told in words whose origins are ultimately musical. Emerson wrote, Every word was once a poem. And I would suggest that every poem was once a musical phrase.

EM: Who was your first ideal reader?

BM: I had a professor at the University of Colorado, the late and much-missed Edward Nolan, who had an enormous impact on me and read my work with care and blazing intelligence. He got me to read Woolf and Yeats and Ezra Pound and could discuss the dynamics of a sentence or phrase with dazzling precision and nuance. But in fact I have been blessed over the years with a number of dear friends who happen also to be super sharp readers of my work, and who’ve been unafraid to suggest possible improvements to this text or that. Rarely have I felt like I’m singing alone in the dark, thanks to these gracious intimates.

EM: When I first read your response, above, I thought you had written thanks to these gracious inmates. Which made me think, since I believe you have a great panopticon view of American letters (belles lettres?) and much recent literary history — what is your view of our current literary prison? Prison or paradise? While we are a rebellious clan, is there some uniting moment which we are living through? DeLillo once famously said the novelist had great freedom, living in the margins of a dying art, yet also that terrorists had usurped our ability to form compelling narrative. Answer any part of this, or go off on your own spree.

BM: I may be overly optimistic or utterly blind, but my view of contemporary American fiction is that it is as rich as ever. Some of the best work is being written in what until recently was considered, at least among the conventional literati, genre fiction. Horror, gothic, mystery, fantasy, fabulism. There are so many stunningly original and serious writers working these fields. I have to think that anybody reading this interview would agree. Just one example, though there are many, would be Elizabeth Hand. She composes sentences of ravishing beauty. She is capable of creating metaphor systems that are so dynamic and provocative. She can turn a fictive moment that seems deeply rooted in the everyday into something that, in fact, touches upon the sublime, the miraculous. Just read her novella Cleopatra Brimstone and tell me that American fiction isn’t pulsing with life. Like I say, I could list dozens of authors here whose work I admire and follow with care and excitement. That said, I do think that much contemporary criticism is stuck in the past and that too many reviewers want those who are exploring ways to revolutionize genre to stick to the rules. I think of them as genre police. They make too many false arrests and lead potential readers astray, keep them caged away from renegades whose work they might well dig reading.

EM: Coming off your rich response: did you have an early model in your young life of generosity, whether literary or existential?

BM: A few, Edie. Ezra Pound had a huge impact on me. Poet, critic, translator, editor, promoter of others’ works, shaper of Kulchur. Even now, looking back to the Pound Era (Hugh Kenner’s phrase for those astonishing years that saw everyone from Joyce to Eliot to Williams to H.D. rise into view with novels and poems sizzling with genius), I marvel at how crucial Ezra Pound’s generosity was to modernism. So certainly Pound. Also, I was devoted to Allen Ginsberg who similarly moved outward beyond his own poetry to help other writers find their voices and audiences. Kenneth Rexroth, who introduced Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl and was at least initially godfather to the Beat movement, was my mentor when I was in my 20s. Like Pound, Kenneth was a critic and translator as well as an exceptional poet who delved deeply into the mysteries of love. His generosity toward me, a young writer 50 years his junior, was a real inspiration. Kenneth was a polymath, knew everything about everything, truly the most exquisite mind I have ever encountered, and so he too was a model. Interesting that I’m only citing poets. The most generous prose fiction writer who inspired me in my 30s was John Hawkes. His generosity toward me I try to pay forward as often as I can. Jack was constantly encouraging me and a whole host of other writers — Jeff Eugenides, Rick Moody, Joanna Scott, Mary Caponegro, so many others. I will never forget his introducing me at Brown University when I gave my first public reading. He had a wild wit, a luminescence, that inspires me to this day.

Novelist Paul Russell has taken this forgotten figure, a footnote in the biography of a twentieth century genius, and brought him back from the shadows in a remarkable novel, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov. It is fiction built on fact, a Nabokovian exploration of the slanted truths of fiction. The title’s echo of Nabokov’s novel about biography, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, is no accident. Sergey narrates his own story here in a voice that’s a cousin of his brother’s brilliantly freaky ESL English, and not a poor cousin either. The book is an homage to Vladimir Nabokov that also functions as a work of literary criticism (Sergey reads his brother’s early novels with intense familial understanding) and, like the best art, a work of life criticism, too.

Unreal Life is Russell’s sixth novel. His other books, which include Boys of Life, Sea of Tranquillity, and The Coming Storm, touched on some of the themes he explores here: love, art, beauty, and same-sex desire. But Unreal Life is Russell’s first historical novel, his most ambitious work, and his most epic. He has taken his old themes and put them at the center of the tragedy of modern European history.

Russell lives in an old farmhouse in Rosendale, New York — he teaches literature and creative writing at Vassar College on the other side of the Hudson. I recently spoke with him there about Sergey and Vladimir and the uses and abuses of fiction.

The Millions: When did you first think about writing a novel about Sergey Nabokov?

Paul Russell: My answer should be, “Ever since I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov back in the early ‘80s.” I was certainly aware that Nabokov had a gay brother about whom he had very mixed feelings; he writes candidly — albeit briefly — about those mixed feelings in his autobiography Speak, Memory. But it wasn’t until I read Lev Grossman’s essay “The Gay Nabokov” in Salon that I realized here was a subject that had been lying in plain sight for years, and I somehow hadn’t seen it. So I’m very grateful for Lev’s work for making visible certain possibilities for story-telling that should have been obvious; I’m rather embarrassed they had to be pointed out to me like that!

TM: Why a novel? Did you ever consider doing a biography instead?

PR: I don’t really have the patience or talent or temperament to do the kind of research you’d have to do to write a proper biography. It seemed much more congenial to forge Sergey’s memoirs rather than have to track down real life, reluctant sources.  I’m a very shy person in many respects; if I can’t do a project while sitting at my desk in my study, chances are I won’t do it. I’m not so good at uncovering facts, but have become quite skilled at dreaming my way toward them. Besides, when I asked Lev if there was other material he’d come across in his extensive detective work but left out of the published essay, he told me he’d put in everything he had. The farther Sergey’s life strayed from his brother’s, the fainter the trail becomes.

TM: This is your first novel about a real person, right? Did you feel trapped or liberated by writing about someone who actually existed?

PR: A little of both. In one sense I had the plot, the basic trajectory of Sergey’s life: his unhappy boyhood in Russia, the family’s flight into exile after the revolution, his Cambridge education, his years in Paris, his Austrian boyfriend, his death in a labor camp outside Hamburg. In another sense, I didn’t have the plot at all — by which I mean the day-to-day details and concerns and preoccupations, all the various eddies that roiled the larger current as it swept him inexorably along toward his fate. I knew about Hermann Thieme, the Austrian, but I had to invent all the other love interests. I knew the famous people Sergey was friends with, but most of our daily lives aren’t lived among famous people. I had the skeleton; I had to invent the organs and musculature and flesh.

TM: When I wrote Gods and Monsters about movie director James Whale, I first felt freed by having facts to draw upon. Later, however, I became frustrated knowing that no matter what I invented, my protagonist would still have to end up at the bottom of his swimming pool. “Quit complaining,” my agent told me. “Most writers don’t know where their story will go, but you’ve been given a great ending.”

PR: I think it was Hemingway who said, “Follow any life far enough, and it ends badly.” For me, the great looming end was Sergey’s death in a concentration camp. This presented a number of difficulties, especially since, from the beginning, I wanted to write in the first person. I felt it important to give a voice — quite literally — to the silenced brother. To have the fiction of that voice somehow continue into the abyss of the camp seemed not only impossible, but in some way indelicate, even obscene. For a while I toyed with the notion of switching to the third person in order to follow him into the camp; in the end I chose to include a brief Afterword summarizing what happened to him after his arrest by the Gestapo in December, 1943 (he died in January, 1945).

TM: Sergey is not the only historical figure here. You also include Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein. What was it like using famous figures fictionally?

PR: Great fun, actually. Stein and Cocteau, paradoxically, intimidated me less than some of the minor characters whom I invented out of thin air. They practically wrote themselves in that their fictional incarnations often quote or at least paraphrase their real life counterparts in dialogue.

TM: What are the legal issues with writing about real people? What are the moral issues?

PR: The legal issues, at least in the US, are simple: you can say anything you want about the dead. The moral issues are, obviously, more complex. In terms of famous people like Cocteau, Stein, or Vladimir Nabokov, I think they’ve ceded any claim to privacy. Sergey presents a different case. He didn’t call attention to himself. He didn’t inscribe his heart on a page for all to see. Some people will feel I shouldn’t have written about Sergey at all, that I’ve stolen something that isn’t mine, that I’ve violated a privacy that, by virtue of the unassuming life he led, he still should retain his right to. Did I struggle with this question a lot? Not really. That may seem profoundly or perversely strange, but in order to write Sergey I had to become Sergey. For instance: I have no religious beliefs whatsoever, but in order to write about Sergey’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, I had enter as deeply and seriously into the mystery of faith as I could. Ballet doesn’t interest me at all, but I had to become a balletomane—or at least try to understand what it is to be a balletomane. Does that sound like madness? It’s the reason I write: to live more abundantly as others than it’s possible to live as myself. Because in writing about Sergey I was also writing about myself — not the self I had previously been, but the expanded self I was forced (or privileged) to become through the very act of imagining Sergey. There’s that line from Rimbaud: “I am someone else.” That’s what I strive for — at least in my writing. Maybe in my life as well.

But back to Sergey, and my violation or consecration of him. I knew from the beginning that, however complicated he might turn out to be as a human being, I wanted to honor the memory of this gay man who was silenced in so many different ways — by his chronic stutter, by his outré sexuality, by the labor camp, and finally by his brother, who failed to mention Sergey’s existence until the third version of Speak, Memory. I think Nabokov, to his credit, eventually regretted that — but it took him a long time to come to terms with his own collusion in that silencing.

TM: What would Sergey have thought of this book?

PR: Part of me suspects he’d have hated it. The Nabokovs were, in general, a reserved lot. But then I remember a letter he wrote to his mother, one of the very few instances of his correspondence that survives. In it he talks eloquently and openly about his love for Hermann Thieme:

There is such light in my soul, my entire life now is such [unprecedented] happiness that I can’t help but tell you about it. There are people who would not understand it, who do not understand such things at all. They would prefer to see me in Paris, barely making it by giving lessons, and at the end, a deeply unhappy creature. There are some talks about my “reputation” etc. But I think that you will understand, understand that all those who do not accept and do not understand my happiness are strangers to me. I wanted to tell you all this and, most importantly, I want you to accept my present life seriously — it is so extraordinary and fairy-like that  one has to [think] about it; and the way how many people do it — one can come to a completely wrong conclusion.

So I’d like to think that Sergey would have wanted his story — especially the story of his and Hermann’s love — to be told, and told forthrightly.

Readers will have to make up their own minds.

TM: Your most important famous figure, of course, is Sergey’s brother, Vladimir. What is your history with Nabokov? He is a very important writer for you, right? When did you first discover him? How has your relationship changed over the years?

PR: My first encounter with Nabokov’s work was beautifully Nabokovian. I was a junior in high school, and had checked Pale Fire out of the library. It didn’t have a dust jacket, so I had no warning of what I was getting myself into. As I began to read it, I couldn’t figure out whether John Shade was a real poet, and whether the poem was a real poem (whatever that might mean) and whether I was supposed to take the increasingly erratic commentary by Charles Kinbote (a real scholar?) seriously. I soon put the book down with a shudder — as if I’d stumbled on something monstrous. But as with all things monstrous, I couldn’t stay away for long. The next year, knowing a bit more about it, I read it through, and was delighted, especially by Kinbote’s wild and swooning erotic commentary, with which I completely identified. Then a few months later I happened to come across a description of Kinbote as the novel’s “mad narrator” and was once again thrown for a loop. It hadn’t occurred to me that Kinbote was mad. And of course, now I have enough confidence in my own powers as a reader that I can see that dismissing Kinbote as merely mad misses the point entirely.

By the time I’d finished college I’d read all Nabokov’s novels, and wrote my honors thesis on him. I was at the same time trying to become a fiction writer by imitating the master. That was of course a terrible idea, though it took me a long time to realize that. In graduate school I intended to write my dissertation on Dickens, but ended up returning to Nabokov — unfinished business, I guess. By the time I completed my dissertation I’d freed myself of his influence — in fact, I never wanted to think about him again, which is the way I imagine many people feel about their dissertation subjects. When I started teaching at Vassar, I realized I didn’t want to do scholarly work but instead write novels, so that’s what I did. Most readers would probably agree that, up till now, my work has been distinctly un-Nabokovian (a reviewer in The Village Voice once described me as a cross between E.M. Forster and Jean Genet!) I do think there’s something poetic in having finally learned how to write like Nabokov — only not the genius Nabokov, but the forgotten Nabokov of modest and dissipated talents.

The first third of The Stranger’s Child, Hollinghurst’s fifth novel, indulges a pleasure common to recent historical fiction. The book opens in 1913, when Cecil Valance enjoys a day at a fellow Cambridge sodomite’s family estate, where he scratches off a poem in a 16-year-old girl’s album. That poem, thanks to a Churchill speech, becomes a national elegy for England’s World War I dead, of which Cecil becomes a member. In the third and fourth sections of the novel, set respectively in 1967 and 1980, an enterprising writer, Paul Bryant, sets out to write Cecil Valance’s biography in an attempt to uncover the contours of the poet’s sexual lilt. If the early sections of the novel excite our desire to read between the lines of the codes of the past, adopting a style not unlike Evelyn Waugh, but with fewer double entendres, the latter sections call that very desire into question.

I met Hollinghurst at his room at the Grand Hotel on October 27 in Minneapolis, where he was on book tour. The hotel was a hilariously ugly Vegas-like concoction in the city’s downtown. I sat down on an armchair next to a strange coffee table shaped like a silver tree stump. He sat on an office chair at a desk in front of his laptop. We started by chatting about James Wood’s unflattering review of The Stranger’s Child in The New Yorker and I turned my digital recorder on. What follows is a pared-down version of a one-hour conversation.

The Millions: Do you read reviews?

Alan Hollinghurst: I do, unless very strongly warned off them by some kind person. There’s no point in upsetting oneself unnecessarily.

TM: So did you read the James Wood review up to the very end?

AH: I did. But actually, when he got to the bit when he was imagining how I might write something, it just seemed so pathetic that I stopped taking it seriously.

TM: When he did the parody of you?

AH: Yes, it’s very ill-advised to do something like that, I think. It exposes your own fear of the charge that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

TM: I know you lived a very social life during your time at the Times Literary Supplement. But when you’re in the process of writing novels, you don’t seem to be living a very social life, as far as I can tell. All these profiles describe you as somewhat reclusive.

AH: I do rather play that up for profile writers. (laughs) I’m actually very lazy, and put off doing anything for as long as possible. But a combination of reasons will bring me to my desk. And then when I get on with it, I do get on with it. It is, after all, how I make my living, what I feel I’m supposed to be doing in this life. So I’m then very disciplined. But I have quite a social life in the periods when I’m not writing a novel. This book took me four years to write, but there were quite a few periods during those four years when I wasn’t at my desk.

I love society. And it’s true I used to live a more social life before. Working at the TLS threw me into the whole world of literary parties and book launches, which I used to go to all the time. Like any professional world, the behavior is extremely repetitive in nature. I described in The Stranger’s Child, Paul Bryant having this experience, of going to a party and staggering out at a quarter to nine, drunk, hoping to find someone to have something to eat with. And then having a horrible blur of that night after night. (laughs) So that was a kind of socializing I really quit quite happily. I think as one gets older one just wants to see the people one really likes and not be bothered by all sorts of mere social obligations.

TM: I’m trying to get at the machinery of writing. Joseph Conrad takes a trip around the world and finally settles down to his desk and writes about Africa and Latin America. My assumption had been that you had lived your youth and then decided to sit down and write about what life is like in society.

AH: One has reserves of memory, which is obviously a writer’s main resource, really. It’s not really a problem. I think the way I write I tend to have periods of exposure to life, as it were, where particularly dramatic, thought-provoking or stimulating things might happen. Then there are periods where I withdraw and reflect on them. But it’s not as if I did everything in my youth and then retired to write about it for the rest of my life. Writing is a constantly growing, alternating process. It’s reassuring to know that one still has pockets, areas of one’s life that can still be explored.

TM: There are a lot of holes at the end of this book. There are lingering questions about all sorts of things we realize won’t be answered. When you leave those holes, do you, as the novelist, have them filled in for yourself?

AH: No, I don’t actually. I really want the reader to be left in as great a state of speculation as a lot of the other characters are both [in the earlier sections] and those who weren’t there but were trying to work it out later on [in the later sections].

What to leave out is so important. I like the fun of withholding information, the trickle of disclosure, the distance that might create in the reader.

TM: But does not knowing those things make it harder for you to do your work as a novelist?

AH: Yes, it was very hard. (laughs) But you’re right, if I had written a more substantial outline of all the stuff it might have felt different. But actually being in uncertainties seemed to be somehow part of it. Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps I could have written it much more quickly if I had outlined it all.

TM: But did you consciously decide that there were things that you yourself wouldn’t know when you started the book?

AH: Yes, I suppose so. It’s so peculiar talking about unknown things in stuff that is fiction. In a way, I feel I don’t know anything about my books except what’s on the page. It’s not completely true, because in the process of writing there are projected scenes that don’t get written and scenes that do get written that get cut out. So there’s a slight blurring of that idea. People often come up and ask what happened to characters in The Folding Star and it’s not just me being tediously teasing when I say, “I don’t know.”

TM: So there’s Paul Bryant in The Stranger’s Child and Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty. They’re similar characters in that they’re likable as we see them. We read them from their point of view. Nick is something of a moral coward. Paul is covered in moral turpitude. In both novels, I’ve heard you say before you don’t like to tip your cards, you don’t like to make moral judgments. And yet there’s a moment at the end of both novels where you snap the reader awake to the point where they realize these characters may be worse than they have been presented as being.

AH: But there’s a complicated moral thing going on. I don’t like to seem as a novelist to be rewarding and punishing. I hope the reader is led on these complicated processes of identifying with the character instead. I deprived Paul of all sorts of things which Nick has. That came from a determination not to keep writing characters who shared all my own enthusiasms and experiences. He has no understanding or appreciation of music at all.

I hoped that in the long confrontation with Daphne in the end, we would have two characters the reader had an inward relationship with and now were head-to-head with each other. Neither behaves terribly well. The reader might not know where their sympathies lie.

TM: But there’s a trigger in both. Why do you wait to the end to give us this little knock?

AH: I guess it seemed to me quite effective. I’m trying to get away from certain novelistic stereotypes not to write books where the last minute revelation of a secret explains everything else. But nonetheless it’s hard to resist putting it in.

TM: I didn’t much care for the television adaptation of The Line of Beauty. I thought the book was very funny, but when I saw the adaptation I saw moment after moment that seemed to suck the comedy dry from the book.

AH: Well it was different in a lot of ways. I did sometimes feel that even the characters who more or less had the lines in the original book didn’t quite seem to get them. It would be a bit invidious to pick out people who don’t live up to my expectation. I think I hear the tone of things in my head and I’m gratified when readers do. But I don’t think they do necessarily. And the shooting script is such an exiguous thing. It’s this tiny little column. The dialogue is so pared-back. I think it worked best in the things that weren’t funny at all. My feeling was it got better after a rather clunky start. I was actually quite moved by the third episode. It’s a very constrictive sort of medium, the TV.

TM: I interviewed Colm Tóibín a few years ago and he went on a rant a bit about John Updike’s infamous review of The Spell. He said that it just showed that Updike had a “super-developed heterosexuality” that just “eats” into his work. I thought I would just let you respond to the review yourself.

AH: Well, it was deplorable in various ways, but I also remember being very amused by it. There was this person who had gone to rather extraordinary lengths in his details of heterosexual sex and for whom the analysis of sexual behavior seemed to be so fundamental to his work as a novelist. But who was giving the impression in this review that everything he knew about homosexuality he gleaned from my novels, like he had never come across it in real life at all. I thought it was absolutely extraordinary, therefore so absurd, the old way he put it about the animating chirp of the female presence or something that he so missed in my books. It was terribly silly. It showed that he had chosen to emphasize his own failure with this large and interesting aspect of human behavior.

TM: You have a lot of very good-looking characters who seem to enjoy this aristocratic privilege of their good looks. I know so many gay men, who no matter how good-looking they are, are extremely uncomfortable with their looks, simply because they are subject to the interests of other men. So why do you keep returning to this character who I don’t believe exists in real life?

AH: (laughs) Yes, well, I suppose vanity is a form of insecurity isn’t it. It’s true. Nick is uncertain about his looks. He looks in a mirror when he’s going on his first date. And he’s seeing what could be attractive to someone else. That’s the fundamental thing that’s happening at that point. But really he is magnetized by what seem to be the greater attractions of other men. Perhaps people rather lose themselves in the worship of beautiful people. You think these characters should be more neurotic? (laughs)

TM: Well, maybe it’s again what I like about your books. There’s a certain indulgence of fantasy and then a deconstruction of it. You have these characters for whom the obtaining of and the act of sex is so easy.

AH: Well, I’ll certainly ponder it when I write my next book. There’s a yearning for a world of superb sex and beauty, but there’s often quite a lot of anxiety and comedy about the failure to attain that. Will’s adventures in The Swimming-Pool Library are quite farcical

TM: In your profiles you say you don’t want to be seen as a gay writer. I guess the best defense of that is that you don’t wish to be seen as a herald of your people.

AH: Yes, I don’t feel able or have any desire to take on any representative role or take on anyone else’s agenda. I always wanted to write my own books about rather odd people. This came up again recently in an interview in The Guardian with someone who didn’t really understand what I meant. I was so hoping that we could get beyond the whole gay writer thing now, which I feel stuck in. It’s a very changed sexual world in which we live now. It’s changed a lot from when I started writing. [Being gay] just wasn’t such a significant thing anymore. But I’m afraid the interviewer adhered to the type of broad-minded straight bloke who had come to interview this demon of perversity and that was the story. There’s a strong desire in the media to maintain these types. I believe that article was entitled “Sex on the Brain.” And there was nothing in it about sex. [It was] the idea that gay books have to be dangerously and obsessively sexual.

TM: But being dangerous is part of what has made being gay a rich and interesting literary subject for so long. So if it ceases to be dangerous can an interesting novel still be written about homosexuality?

AH: I see your point absolutely. I think that’s why I keep going back to write about periods in which being gay was more challenging, more emphatically critical of the status quo. That thing E.M. Forster said about Maurice that being gay is what saved him because it turned him into a critic of his own society. That’s always been rather fundamental to me actually.

But I was bored with the association of gayness and licentiousness in the straight imagination. I feel a certain thinness in the social subject of gayness at the present moment.

TM: Do you laugh at your own jokes when you write?

AH: Yes. But not absurdly…Wit is a quality which I really appreciate in novelists. I don’t mean telling jokes. You get it in James. You get it in George Eliot. This wonderful play of intelligence which I really prize, which often finds things funny in something more serious. That’s something I admire and strive to maintain.

If you don’t think the lads dominate the Irish literary landscape with all manner of Colums and Seamuses, quickly, name three Irish women writers. I’m guessing two of those would be Edna O’Brien and Emma Donoghue. And one of those would no doubt be Anne Enright, whose novel The Gathering, garnered the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2007.

Enright has followed up that dark novel with The Forgotten Waltz, which on the surface is a lighter more external narrative. Set in 2009, Gina Moynihan, a married mid-30s IT professional, looks back at her adulterous adventure with a married man named Sean. It’s a survey of that dysfunctional coupling with precise snapshots dating to Gina’s first sighting of Sean at her sister’s housewarming barbeque seven years earlier.

The period of her dalliance corresponds to the economic bubble known as the Celtic Tiger when, much like other countries riding an economic upswing, the material world dominated the attentions and energies of Ireland’s striving classes (and then some). And so Enright, who is acutely observant and precisely expressive, paints that consuming hysteria as the backdrop for the Gina’s romantic and illicit thrill seeking.

Robert Birnbaum: Did you look at any news source this morning?

Anne Enright:  Umm, yeah I glanced at the papers.

RB: What the big story for you today?

AE: Me, I am checking the Eurozone and keeping an eye on the banks. Whether they are going to fall apart — how slowly or how quickly.

RB: Who is going first — is Greece going?

AE: Greece hasn’t gone. They really are going to work to keep it together. There hasn’t been any doubt about that for a while. On the panic level, the worst panic level was probably September, October 2008. After Lehman’s, when the Irish government guaranteed all the banks. Everybody was going crazy about this decision that was made to guarantee all deposits in Irish banks. But in fact I had gone to bed the night before with the assurance that I was going to go into the bank and take all my money out the next morning.

RB: How much has the defanging of the Celtic Tiger affected you?

AE: Personally, I am really lucky. I am always out of sync with Ireland, you know. When Ireland was booming away, I was sitting in my garret, writing The Gathering, rearing two small children out in Bray, which is south of Dublin, wondering why this had nothing to do with me. All I got from the boom was ripped off.

RB: Oooh.

AE: It’s true. Childcare, fees, everything was ridiculously expensive. My nieces and nephews are coming up to their 20s now — so my generation and their generation missed the worst of it. The worst of it hit the people in their 30s. And their early 40s, who really felt the need to buy a house they couldn’t afford, in a place they didn’t want to live and stuck with partners they don’t like anymore.

RB: Much like the characters that appear in The Forgotten Waltz.

AE: Yeah, The Forgotten Waltz is full of real estate that’s unsellable.

RB: Is this an Irish novel?

AE: Umm, when you think about it, it’s a highly contemporary novel set in February 2009, when the economy is falling. There is real estate in it. There’s money in it.

RB: Designer names.

AE: Designer labels. You look at John B. Keane’s The Field, and love and land; we always understood the connection between the two in Ireland. So, it’s Irish to that extent. It’s also interested in family ties and family love and what’s the difference between romantic and family love. That’s quite Irish as well. It’s Irish in that you can’t get away from those forces. The novel is a highly individualistic form — my characters are dragged back to the communal, (laughs) blood ties — and that’s quite Irish.

RB: To look at it, the focus appears to on adultery. But–

AE: Yeah (pauses) actually, it’s a book that seems to be about adultery but is about a different kind of love that sort of creeps in afterwards. On February 6, 2009, it was a day of snow in Ireland and the place was stalled. I was making a journey through the countryside with my family in the snow with all of them annoying me about how to drive –

RB: (laughs)

AE: “Watch out for the black ice,” and all of that, in the back of the car. It was a very melancholy sort of moment — the country was falling and we didn’t know how fast, how far. And something about the stillness of that day (pauses) — you know, it made me think of the silence after all the noise; all the hubbub has stopped. And that’s when reality come stealing in. I’m not against reality. The adultery part of the book is glorious and fantastic, full of denial and bliss and getting away with it–

RB: And passion.

AE: Passion, a bit like the boom. Doing what you want. The country was doing what it wanted for a while.

RB: Maybe, it could be viewed as mass hysteria.

AE: Well, there was a hectic quality to those last years. And there was a lot of — you were not allowed disbelief. If you said it’s all going to come falling down — no, you have to believe in property prices, if you don’t they will crash.

RB: Barbara Ehrenreich has written about this industry of self-improvement rooted in being positive and upbeat.

AE: But it really works economically. Until it doesn’t work at all. It’s a confidence trick — you take belief out of the system and all the money turns into dust.

RB: It’s true in a lot of areas. It’s true in sports. Is it true in writing? Writers don’t have any confidence (laughs)

AE: Writers have a lot of emotions about their work, and about themselves in relation to the work. None of them matter that much. It’s just a way of making you get to the desk a bit more, with more intensity. But yeah, writers always think their work is no good and they have no confidence and yada, yada, yada.

RB: After you won a major prize and went on to work on the next book how did you feel?

AE: I felt just fine. The whole prize thing was so external and so much hard work, actually. And I felt so relieved to get back to the desk, you know.

RB: You were in some way anonymous before winning the Man Booker.

AE: I felt a bit robbed in that way.

RB: (laughs)

AE: Because books are incredibly personal items and you have to keep vulnerable, to keep your vulnerability at the desk. Too famous is not good — for whatever limited amount of time that that happens.

RB: Did I read correctly that you never returned to the room where you wrote The Gathering?

AE: You’ve been doing your research? (laughs) Well, it’s a small room and full of books, it’s a bit unmanageable as a space. No, I didn’t go back, really. I mean, I never wrote in that room again.

RB: Are there other things in your life that you do but can’t explain? Like that — can you explain why you never wrote in that room again?

AE: I didn’t realize I wasn’t going back for a long time. And then I did [realize]. Yeah, I knew why — it wasn’t much.

RB: Sometimes we call those ghosts or skeletons, hanging there, not fleshed out.

AE: Yeah, it’s more an aura.

RB: When I spoke to John Banville recently, he was very positive about the future of the U.S. — the great hope of civilization. When you come to the USA what do you see and feel?

AE: It’s more interesting going to China and looking around China (both laugh). Sean in The Forgotten Waltz, says you should go to Shanghai, just to see that it’s all happening, it’s all real. It was very much my experience in Shanghai, these eight-lane highways with no cars on them. Ah, what do I think of America? Elsewhere is always important for Irish writers because Ireland is a little bit like that room where I wrote The Gathering. (laughs) I always wanted to come back to it (laughs). It’s a complicated place for writers. It’s the origin, it’s the spring of it, you know. The place things come from.

RB: The U.S. is the place things come from?

AE: No Ireland is. Elsewhere is really important for Irish writers because that’s where your book goes. And, the flavor of the readership is important. Or the critical response. America has always been a great opportunity for Irish writers.

RB: And the Continent?

AE:  France is slightly impermeable to foreign influence. They say in France, “But we have so many great French writers” — none of whom are translated into English, of course. You want to say, “But who are they?” Germany is important.

RB: The French like Paul Auster and Julian Barnes?

AE: Yeah, they like what they like. Paul Auster walks down the street in Paris and he is bothered. People take his picture. Germany is interested in Ireland in a way that France isn’t. France thinks we are savage (pronounced with French accent).

RB: (laughs) Well, so that should be a positive. Does that mean wild?

AE: Untamed.

RB: Don’t the French use the word apache as a positive description?

AE: I know — of course, they consider themselves very tamed, very sophisticated. It’s not so interesting to be looked upon as some sort of wild object. Fintan O’Toole wrote an article in The Irish Times about how important America was to a whole generation of Irish writers, but he didn’t include me in the list. He said partly because I was a woman. I didn’t know that as a woman I would be less interested in America. I am a little outside the run of regular Irish writing which has post-colonial concerns. So I don’t write about that kind of power relationship between the rural and the urban between Ireland and England, between the noble savage and the chilly aristocrat. Within that argument, America is clear space and an opportunity. And also it has a huge diaspora Irish community. So there is a kind of melancholy connection between the two countries — of loss and opportunity.

RB: Irish Americans are strongly supportive of what is exported from Ireland?

AE: In the readings you meet them. My name is Anne Theresa. I met an Anne Theresa Enright in Australia — Melbourne. And I met an Anne Theresa Enright; it may have been in Kansas, I’m not sure. They looked like each other. They didn’t look like me. I knew there were different Enrights. I am signing books and there is often, there used to often be a Bernadette. We’d know when she was born. She was born when the Song of Bernadette came out as a movie. And then Martinas were born when Saint Martina was being canonized. Not only can you spot trends, you can know what age people are when they tell you their names. Why did Banville voice his admiration for America — he wants Americans to buy his novels? They do. They love him.

RB: I live here and I have my disappointment about the USA. I am buoyed by this Wall Street occupation.

AE: Who’d a thunk it. In Ireland there was a march  — 50,000 depressed middle class, middle-aged people walking silently through the city, through the streets in their good shoes. Not their best shoes, but in their decent walking shoes.

RB: One day?

AE: One day. Nobody burned any cars. In Greece they were turning cars over in the streets.

RB: Do you believe in class warfare? Isn’t there complicity between such people?

AE:  Yea, but of what kind? It’s a bit like Regina says in the book — the way people have, the way men have of getting ahead. For no ascertainable reason the guy just has a talent for being “on side.” It’s not an envelope full of money. It’s not any of these things — it’s just because–

RB: How or why did you decide to use the title, The Forgotten Waltz?

AE: I was sitting in a chair downstairs writing and the afternoon radio was on, the classical station and he said that was the “Forgotten Waltz” by Franz Liszt. I was half way through the book and I just put it in a headline, as an email to my editor. And I don’t talk to him really at all when I am working. I pressed send to see what it would look like. And then it came back and it was on the title of the email and it looked just fine.

RB: There are no other obvious reference points in the book.

AE: There are various dances.

RB: You also title the chapters after pop love songs.

AE: There is one reference. I mean, there is nothing cheesier than putting “a waltz that has been forgotten” in a book called The Forgotten Waltz. Gina is in the room at the hotel where they have their affair, and says, “…the shape of our love in a room like some forgotten music, beautiful and gone.” So that’s the waltz. Also, I wasn’t going to do explicit descriptions of sex in this book because I didn’t think Gina would. A forgotten waltz is a better way of describing what has been going in between her and Sean. This romance, this game.

RB: And the chapter titles? Any concern that they will be distracting if the reader notices what they are?

AE: I wanted the songs to be catchy and a bit kitsch. Because love is best described in song, I think. The thing I like about pop songs is that they are aware of the foolishness of love. They are delighted by the foolishness of love. I mean, Gina clearly is a woman who likes to be in love and who wouldn’t, ya know? Do they stick in your head and annoy you?

RB: No, they don’t annoy me. It’s another thing to reckon with for a close reader. Do they mean something? Are they clues to the chapter? Is there a code in their order?

AE: Well, there’s a whole heap of The Good Soldier [Ford Maddox Ford] in my Forgotten Waltz – after the fact. Edward, in it, falls in love with the girl at the end — his ward. It depends how plugged in you are to music.

RB: I was tempted to create an iTunes playlist to see if there was a message in the sequence

AE: No, it’s a little more arbitrary that that. As in some of the chapter titles were there before — Like “There Will be Peace in the Valley” which is sort of a little anomalous. And “Love is Like a Cigarette” which is slightly anomalous too. Before it gets into the catchy, boppy, you know, “the Shoop Shoop Song.” Yeah. And then the Leonard Cohen — I had a lot of doubts about putting in the Leonard Cohen. Because his lyrics — he’s too interesting (laughs). You know?

RB: You must listen to music a lot?

AE: I listen to classical music. I had some trepidation with the song titles because I hate the way boys do music — because I always like the wrong things. “Oh you like that, yeah?”

RB: Give me an example.

AE:I don’t know — it’s sort of what I mentioned about men — they use music as a counter. I don’t know what the game is. ”You say Arcade Fire?” “Oh you like Arcade Fire?” “Yeah, I don’t know about Arcade Fire.” Constantly pushing their taste. In a kind of slightly strange–

RB: Using groups as identifiers or parametrics. You are supposed to understand something about someone.

AE: It’s slightly a competition and it’s slightly warm — because music is a filter. If you like something you are really quite exposed by liking it. I listen to Bach. No, I don’t. My husband brings in the new stuff. I am slow to catch on to his stuff. It’s amazing that with the Internet our external sources get smaller and smaller. It’s all about selecting.

RB: Your life is composed of writing and raising your kids–

AE: Which isn’t conducive to keeping up with the music scene, I have to say.

RB: How old are your children?

AE: Eleven and 8. I couldn’t even listen to music after they were born. That was the thing that went.

RB: Because?

AE: I don’t know. It wasn’t talking about emotions that I had.

RB: Did you play Mozart to make your kids smarter?

AE: There’s Mozart around. I do love Mozart. But I didn’t do that. Actually, it put Rachel to sleep. Now they’re coming in and she has her earphones on. Do you know Adele? Adele is on the other end. She can sing.

RB: How much of your life is now devoted to the persona of being a writer? Conferences, festivals, awards juries, and on?

AE: I get invitations — I’m a conscientious sort of chick. I said yes and I went to Australia. It was amazing. I suppose it was amazing. Martin my husband said, “Just do it, do the year.” As opposed to Linda, Roddy’s wife—

RB: Roddy Doyle?

AE: Yeah. When he won [the Booker] they looked at the schedule and decided what he was going to do and said no to the rest of it. He’s very unswayable. I met Kiran Desai. She had won the Booker. And we met in Colombia — in Cartagena. I was there for 2 days. I mean what a life. It was fantastic. I didn’t have much time to go outside.

RB: You would never had gone there–

AE: No. And to meet Kiran Desai, also a great pleasure. Although we did kind of glance off each other. And she said I am going to sit down in March. I emailed her next March and she was doing something else. (laughs) Really, it was hard. I have to say, ”No more, absolutely no more.” So then I sat down in January and looked at the wall for three months, until March basically. I had the book started. It’s the same thing, the same problem as it always is. You have to sink in order to write a book. I don’t mean in a depressive sort of way.

RB: Focus?

AE: It is like a depressive state. You have to sink into it — not even focus. You have to diffuse as much as anything else. Just in those early days — to lose control of it and to be helpless and not know what you are doing. And then the focus comes sentence by sentence.

RB: A vulnerability and openness. I’m reminded of Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) who said that in order to hit really low notes, to sing in low registers, you almost had to go to sleep. Almost suspended animation, hibernation

AE: Ah, ah hah. Those are both good.

RB: Was it hard to come out and talk about The Gathering — since, as you say, it was more private, seemingly more personal?

AE: The great thing about having done two books — people ask if they are autobiographical? — and I am really delighted when they ask that because it means I have succeeded in what I wanted to do. And I have never bothered about those questions. But you know, I steal from my own life quite freely. So some of it, yes for sure happened to me.

RB David Shields [Reality Hunger] would say it was all autobiographical.

AE: (laughs) You have no other place to write from. You can’t be someone else at the desk.

RB: You change some names and some nuance and–

AE: No, actually it much more mechanical, no as organic as that. You steal a bit. For example, I once took a train journey to Gstaad, and I’ve been waiting to use that train journey for 20 years.

RB: You have vivid recollection of the details, exactly as you think it happened?

AE: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

RB: What now?

AE: I have nothing on the screen for the first time in 10 years. This summer I stopped working for the first time in 10 years. I would be in holiday saying, “Isn’t it lovely being able to write my book in the sun?” And so I stopped. We went to South East Asia for a long trip with the kids — came back and I had two weeks when I didn’t work.

RB: That’s a good feeling?

AE: It’s like being young again. It’s amazing. I haven’t a single idea, a single fragment.

RB: I assume you love writing and are devoted to it?

AE: But this is the first time I’ve stopped in 10 years, yeah. Maybe it’s a bit like ooooooooohh yeah? No I am very poor company when I am not writing — so I do need it. Everybody around me needs it.

RB: Am I the only person willing to talk with you right now (laughs)?

AE: I’ve been fine.

RB: You don’t know what to make of it?

AE: Yeah, it’s great. I mean, I have some intimations.

RB: Is there anything else you want to do in addition to writing?

AE: No (pause). No.

RB: You produced a TV show.

AE: I did yeah. I was a baby. I was one of those trendy young media types that get burnt out, thrown on the scrap heap in four to six years. So I was that one.

RB: Like Tina Fey?

AE: No she’s a bit older and she is a much better manager than I ever was.

RB: Like the woman in the BBC’s “The Hour”?

AE: The woman in Broadcast News — Holly Hunter (laughs). No, I used to do things to earn money and there is a kind of balance there. Where you are writing stuff to earn money, but you are writing. So that’s OK. It’s as good a reason as any other. And so it really pushed you. And you go places where you wouldn’t necessarily have thought to go. And I am a great believer in a bit of hard work actually. I was reduced to walking around hands on my forehead saying “Where’s my book?” So, I don’t have to do that so much anymore.

RB: Do you have a timeframe for writing a book?

AE: No.

RB: You churn away at it?

AE: I do.

RB: Can you imagine spending seven to 10 years writing a book?

AE: I can. You know Trollope wrote for three hours every morning. And if he was finished with a book an hour and a half in, he would start another book. But he knew three hours was it.

RB: Do you look forward and have a sense of where you want to go, what you want to accomplish?

AE: (pause) Staying alive is a good way of advancing in the literary world. I am slow — I did a count. It was too scary. I reckoned I have five books left — but it was too scary. I am quite interested in looking at the idea of the late style. And the feeling after a certain stage that you don’t give a monkey — so that you are able to expand on the page or go somewhere strange. Strange (chuckles), I don’t need more strange.

RB: You don’t strike me as someone constrained by much.

AE: No, I wouldn’t mind — you change so much from decade to decade. I like to sort of reflect in the book, where I am. Or find out by writing the book where I am. So, I am into my 50s now and I am thinking it would be good to write some longer, more — having a book that you don’t really know what the edges are so precisely. Does that make sense?

RB: When you are well published you have a couple of jobs.

AE: Yes, it’s an absolute full-time job — the Booker was another full time job. And I had two full-time jobs already. I had a home to run and I had books to write. It was a third full-time job, for sure. And then there’s being the travel agent. After the Booker, I was on Expedia saying, ”I think I can do this — this journey can be done in under 20 hours.

RB: What’s your feeling about winning awards in the future (laughs)?

AE: I am sure I will get a bit plaintive. After the Booker they don’t give you any little ones any more — they give them to other people on the way up.

RB: Some people claim about these awards that they don’t mean anything until you win one–

AE:  They mean everything when you don’t have one.

RB: Really?

AE: Yeah. “If only I had the Booker.” I was taking to my husband, we were in Indonesia and we were looking at shooting stars and my daughter asked me what I wished for? And I said, ”Probably that I win the fucking Booker Prize.” (laughs) I really wanted it.  Ever writer has that–

RB:  Some awards seem to mean something and some seem to be beauty contests.

AE: Yeah, yeah, sure.

RB: I like the IMPAC Dublin because the long list comes from librarian nominations from around the world.  Also, the MacArthur–

AE: And the Lannan. I’m the only person I know who doesn’t have a Lannan (laughs).

RB: We could talk some more but you need to go. So thanks.

AE: Thank you.

Image Credit: Robert Birnbaum

This month, Avid Bookshop opened its doors in Athens, Georgia, three years after proprietor Janet Geddis was struck with the desire to own a bookstore.  Geddis started with no bookselling experience nor any financial backing, but since 2008 she has sought wisdom from the best in the business and raised enough money to get her charming brick-and-mortar store up and running.  Along the way I admired her (Twittered) enthusiasm and tenacity, as well as her unwavering connection to her local community. I even ordered a few books from her online store.  I looked forward to conducting this interview; I knew the day would come soon.  Now I have another reason to go to Athens (the first one being my sincere hope of running into the B52s).

The Millions: What made you want to open a bookstore–especially at this juncture in the world of reading?

Janet Geddis: I love books. I will refrain from discussing how much I love touching them and smelling them and that whole true but perhaps overdone monologue. I opened Avid Bookshop for so many reasons, but one that comes to mind at the moment involves the sheer number of books that are out there. There’s more out there to read than at any other time in the world, and the number of options is growing exponentially. Readers can use help from us to discover which of those books should be their next read.

For me, owning a bookstore is the perfect way to combine several things I am passionate about: my city, reading, bringing people together, and talking about books.

TM:  Can you talk a little bit about how you got to this moment — with opening weekend just behind you? That is, what went into learning how to run a bookstore, raising funds, getting support, and so on?

JG: I went to my first Book Expo America event in 2008, just a few months after deciding I wanted to open a bookstore. Most people I talked to at BEA immediately asked me, “So, have you worked in a bookstore before?” They were always surprised (and perhaps a bit disapproving) when they learned that, at that point, I had zero bookstore cred. (I wonder now why they asked a yes or no question like that if they were so sure I had had bookselling experience.) I admit that I felt dismissed by some publishing folks I met, and that’s okay. It took a lot of convincing to show people — myself included — that I was serious about this as a career move and that, despite my lack of bookselling experience, I actually did have what it took to start and run my own store.

Much of what I learned I encountered in the lulls, the times when I had unexpected delays in my opening process. When I began this journey, I had a business partner. After the first year of research, she changed her mind (for very good reasons, I might add), and I had to take some time off to decide whether or not I wanted to pursue our dream on my own. I didn’t have the best timing for this dream, financially speaking. Though I had no personal debt, I did decide to open a small, independent book business right as the country’s economy crashed and small business funding got even more difficult to come across. Over the last few years, I’ve met so many kind and thoughtful bankers who loved my bookstore business plan but simply couldn’t take the risk on a brand-new business like mine.

So among the loan proposals and failed angel investment plans and some personal health issues, I went to every single bookselling conference I could get to. I visited every bookstore I could and made sure to set aside time to talk with some veteran booksellers about my idea. I also talked about my dream of opening Avid Bookshop with many folks in my community and realized I was hitting a nerve. My city is artsy and creative and has really vibrant culture, yet we had no bookstore that sold new books and hosted events. It’s the ideal town for an independent bookstore, so when people heard about my plans, they did all they could to rally behind me as I continued to put the plan together and raise funds to open.

TM: Was there any specific advice you got from veteran book people that helped you in this process? And was there a specific bookstore in the country that particularly inspired you?

JG: This question makes me extremely nervous, as I’m continually afraid I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings by accidentally neglecting to mention a certain person or bookstore that really helped me out. That said, I would love to say that WORD Brooklyn showed me that a really small store can have a really big impact, and Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn showed me that, when a community supports you, you can exceed even your own expectations for your business. Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, GA demonstrated to me how invigorating it can be to sell books to kids. Over the Moon Bookstore & Artisan Gallery (Virginia), Books & Books (Miami), Bound to Be Read Books (Atlanta), and many, many more highlighted how loyal customers will be to owners and booksellers who are genuine in their love of people and books. And now I’m getting nervous, ’cause I know I missed some obvious people here.

TM: What’s the hardest part about being a bookstore owner in 2011?

JG: One of the most frustrating parts about being a bookstore owner in 2011 is probably what was hardest at any other point in bookselling time: there is so much to do I feel I can never, ever keep up. Already it’s hard to keep my head above water (and I don’t mean this to complain: I’m having an amazing time so far — but this is so incredibly hard). I knew going into this that I would not be sitting at the front counter for hours on end, feet propped up, cup of tea on the desk with a book in my hand. But no amount of preparation could have readied me for the volume of work. And the better I get at it, even more work follows.

TM: What makes Avid special?

JG: It’s difficult to pinpoint what makes this store special, but I’ll risk it with the following claim: I think it’s the amount of love that went into creating this shop that has made it even more magical than what I dreamt. Many people I’ve never met have walked in and said that they’ve been following our story over the last few years and are thrilled that we’re finally open. And then there are some friends and family who have been by my side this entire time, and they’ve been proud to come into the store and see the wall they painted or the shelf they installed or the shelf talker they wrote. All along I said I wanted a community-focused bookstore, and that has really come to fruition so much sooner than I’d expected. I think the bonds with the community are going to just get stronger the longer we’re here.

TM: What has been the most surprising aspect of getting into the bookstore business?

JG: This is something I probably shouldn’t admit, but I’m shocked at the number of serious readers out there! For so many years I thought I was one of a small crowd, that there existed very few people who read as voraciously as I. Boy, was I wrong. It’s a great surprise, though my happiness at this discovery is certainly tempered by my frustration that, all of a sudden, I have no time to read. I have gotten about 80 pages into The Night Circus over the last ten days, whereas before I would’ve had it read in two days. I miss reading and am soon going to start taking regular days off (gasp!) in order to keep up with my book addiction.

TM: What’s the first book you will hand-sell with a vengeance?

JG: This reminds me of that impossible question, “What’s your favorite book?” Oh my. I can feel my heart rate increasing as I try to come up with an answer for you. I can say that I have spoken passionately about Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow, Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, and Laurel Snyder’s Bigger Than a Bread Box enough to convince several people in the last couple of weeks to take a chance on these works they’d not heard of before. I keep telling people that I am on a mission to get people to read books that are not marketed to their age bracket or gender.

Image credit: imanavidreader.blogspot.com

In the 35 year period in which he has made 17 films (among which are Matewan, Eight Men Out, Return of the Secaucus 7, Men With Guns) MacArthur grant-winning director John Sayles has also published seven books, including the National Book Award-nominated Union Dues and two full-bodied novels, Los Gusanos and, most recently, A Moment in the Sun. And yet, as he mentions in the conversation that follows, he has never received one note or letter from anyone who has read any of his books — a correction the cross-country reading tour (in a rented Prius) Sayles and his partner Maggie Renzi embarked on, will no doubt make.

A Moment in the Sun, in nearly 1,000 pages, delves into a sketchily acknowledged period of American history — the rise of Jim Crow, effectively thwarting Reconstruction in the South, the road to the Cuban Spanish-American War, American imperialism running rampant in the Philippines, and the greed-fed Yukon gold rush. As it happens, the American involvement in the misnamed Philippine insurrection also serves as the setting for Sayles latest film, Amigo.

This, my second chat with John Sayles (we last met in 1995 for his Cuban exile novel, Los Gusanos), turned out to be a lengthy conversation touching on his new opus, his new film, the perils of independent film making, and any number of asides and anecdotes from a full and storied creative life.

Robert Birnbaum: Its International Free Press Day — in case things like that matter to you. I haven’t seen any reviews of your new opus. Maybe because it is too long for reviewers?

John Sayles: There have only been the publishing trade magazines, Kirkus and those. One of them called it a cat-squasher of a book.

RB: How imaginative. I saw an article on the fact that you are visiting every state including Alaska.

JS: Just about, yeah.

RB: Is that fun?

JS: Yeah, I like reading. The book is long enough so I am reading a different chapter every night so I don’t get bored with it. One thing that is nice is that it is almost all independent bookstores.

RB: The chains seem to be going out of business (laughs). Who would have thought it?

JS: Also the chain stores don’t do readings in the mall that often. I have written three novels before this and a couple of short story collections and to this day I have never gotten a letter from someone who has read one of my books. I run into people who have seen my movies all the time. Most people don’t know I write books.

RB: Didn’t you win a National Book Award or something?

JS: That didn’t change anything. I was nominated.

RB: You haven’t published a book since Los Gusanos [1991].

JS: A short story collection, Dillinger in Hollywood. But that was about five years ago or so. Nation Books published it — they hadn’t done fiction before so it was pretty new to them. Doing readings is kind of like theater, where you are looking at your audience. Which is nice for a book, to actually see somebody who is going to read the book or at least buy it.

RB: Unlike most book tours, which is one sealed tube after another — you are out among the people.

JS: We like driving across the country.

RB: Are you rejiggering your budget now that gas prices are soaring?

JS: No, but we are renting a Prius. I am almost too big for a Prius but it’s OK. Mexico is just about out of oil — which will be good for the pollution in Mexico City.

RB: The week I was there it must have been really unusual because it was not bad at all.

JS: They have a few good days, but the rest of the time it’s like breathing bus exhaust.

RB: I’ve lost track of Mexican politics — did they just have an election?

JS: They are about to have a big one. What’s happening is that the narcos have a bigger army than the government.

RB: That stuff is ripe for fiction — lots of books are coming out of the borderland. My favorite is The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. Do you know it?

JS: No.

RB: Let me backtrack, you’re filming in Mexico?

JS: We shot a few movies in Mexico. Most recently we have been filming in the Philippines. We have a movie coming out in August — Amigo. It’s set in the same time the book is, with none of the same characters, but it does have to do with the Philippine-American War.

RB: What did you call it?

JS: The Philippine-American War.

RB: The one after the Cuban Spanish-American War?

JS: It was called for years the Philippine Insurrection but then the question is how can you insurrect if it’s your country?

RB: This is a fun period of history to rehash — imagine you read a lot since what you bring forth in A Moment In the Sun is not much in American history textbooks? By the way, is Tolstoy a favorite author (laughs)?

JS: I never read Tolstoy. I am so uneducated for a writer. I never took an English class in college. Or a literature class. So I come to these things very late. Mostly American writers. I don’t really know the British guys. Don’t really know the Russian guys. Don’t know the French guys. When I read them they’re good. But if you are going to read Tolstoy–

RB: I haven’t read War and Peace either — I can’t read Russian novels because since I can’t pronounce the names I can’t remember them.

JS: Oh yeah, right.

RB: I was thinking of the breadth and scope of War and Peace and A Moment in the Sun. There is a big story here — which I assume will not be a movie. Like Los Gusanos.

JS: Two things. I came across the fact of the Philippine-American War when I was doing research for Los Gusanos. I’m thinking, I’m 37 years old, how come I haven’t heard of this? Why wasn’t it taught in some way with the Spanish-American War except for a couple of catch phrases? And then I asked some Filipino-American friends and they said, “We know it existed, but we weren’t taught this either.” So that got me suspicious — then interested. How come this was erased? And it coincided with this other thing that grew into a novel, which is the last nail in the coffin of Reconstruction. When the Southern states got rid of the rights of black people to vote, of black men to vote.

RB: That will come as a shock to some readers. But it is the reason for the importance and impact of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History.

JS: Stuff gets left out. What interested me — I did a lot of reading of newspapers from the time and fiction from the time, even magazines and stuff like that — just how overt the racism was. We have a lot of euphemisms for things now. We were Imperialist. Mark Twain was in the Anti-Imperialist League. One of the biggest journals in North Carolina was a newspaper called the Caucasian.

RB: Have you noticed — I thought American exceptionalism was a criticism, like imperialism, but now it seems people are embracing it.

JS: I would embrace it if it were true. Certainly a lot of historical movies and fiction are about those tensions between those promises written in italics and the reality of what’s going on. It would be great to be able to say we can live up to our promises — compared to a lot of countries we are tremendous. You go to other places and you say, ”Oh shit, I get it, why people are so happy to come to the U.S.” But still, you have to live up to your talk. Especially if you are going to ask people to bleed and die for it.

RB: Richard Rodriguez wrote a piece today on Osama bin Laden’s death in which he found the celebration “unseemly,” college kids wrapped in American flags cheering, “USA, USA.” He decried that as patriotism — what Pat Tillman did was patriotism.

JS: It has become a kind of patriotism. There are guys who are offshoots of the Tea Party who go around with an American flag and say, “Kiss this or I am going to punch you in the head.” And they punch people in the head who don’t do it. They are usually a little drunk at the time, but it is something that you can run unto.

RB: In the South or everywhere?

JS: Everywhere. It’s a kind of jingoism, very aggressive and it has its equivalents in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany. It’s usually young men and it’s tribal. And they’ve decided this is my tribe. You know, this whole thing of being critical of your own troops at all is very, very new anywhere in the world, in the history of mankind. People used to bring their conquered enemies’ heads back. In this country, we took people who transgressed too much, we’d kill ‘em and put their head on a stake and everybody came out and cheered. There are scenes in A Moment in the Sun where everyone wants to get in to see a public execution.

RB: There’s a public execution [hanging] in True Grit. I thought the brilliant part of that was to let the white men have last words and when the Indian started to speak they just released the trap door.

JS: It’s an interesting thing the Coen Brothers understood. They went back to the original book. Joel [Coen] actually discovered it — he was reading it to his son to sleep. He said, this is really good. And he remembered the core of the John Wayne movie that was good was the dialogue from the book — he [Charles Portis] is a really good writer. And they understood that they didn’t have to write brilliant dialogue, there is already brilliant dialogue. But the John Wayne movie was sentimental. They made a non-sentimental version of it where you realize at the end this girl is really bloody-minded. Her high values and stuff like that has gotten 15 people slaughtered and a couple of horses. Is that really such a great thing? And Rooster Cogburn, every time he sees an Indian he kicks him off the porch.

RB: Right. (laughs)

JS: He hates Indians. And half-breeds even worse. That’s our hero. If you are near a military culture, and I have lived at various times near Army bases and Navy bases and whatever, it is a culture, like the cop culture, that is very separate from the rest of us. There is this feeling that you can’t criticize the war because a relative of mine died in it and gave his life for it. So criticizing the war is criticizing their sacrifice. And it is hard to make a distinction for someone who lost somebody.

RB: Well, that was a problem during Vietnam — how arrogant we protesters were toward people who supported the war. Assuming that it was all about rational disputation.

JS: That was always my problem. I went to the marches but I never joined the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]. I thought they were talking out of their assholes about “the people.” I had a lot of cops in my family. Some of them were terrible human beings, some were great guys, some were good cops and some weren’t. But cops are just doing their job, with a limited perspective. The same thing with soldiers. Guys I went to high school with got drafted. OK, they weren’t from anybody who had any kind of analysis to go to Canada or protest. It was just like, “Ok, they say I gotta go, I gotta go.” And then you try to do your best survive.

RB: Do you know of Karl Marlantes’s book, Matterhorn?

JS: No.

RB: A recent Vietnam novel by a vet who spent 30 years writing it. It has a really interesting back-story. It’s a profoundly unsettling book — a very plausible and harrowing picture.

JS: There’s a cat, his first name is Kent, [Kent Anderson], I think, who wrote a book Sympathy for the Devil and then Night Dogs,which follows the hero of the first book when he gets out of the service. The writer was a Green Beret. So, it’s got that combination of really good writer and somebody who has been there. And eventually what happens to the character and what happens to these Special Forces guys, very often they are in the thick of it, is they’re an elite — you see it in the book about Pat Tillman, ”You’re an elite. You are better than the regular soldiers” And they go out and kill and are killed and are writing their own rules. Finally, they are killing Americans, because they are fucking with my gang. And then the poor guy in the second book, he is in Seattle working for the cops and suicidal but ready to shoot anybody else who fucks with him because he’s been made into this killer. And the book is about him finding a way to back off from that Green Beret code a little with some kind of honor. It’s really well written.

RB: Pretty complicated stuff. So here’s what I am wondering about — clearly you have dedicated a lot of time to this novel, but you mainly make films, is there some kind of multiple personality at play here?

JS: You know, the stories come to me and they seem like they would be interesting to pursue or not. Usually they come to me in the form they are going to end up as. And sometimes it’s, “Oh God, that would make a great movie, but there’s no way in Hell it’ll ever get it made.” This one started as a screenplay. Only the Royal Scott character, the black guy, is in it. And it follows events in Wilmington [N.C.] where he is from and then Cuba and the Philippines. But then when I finished it and we did some scouting of locations, we said there is no way in Hell somebody is going to give us enough money to make this movie.

RB: Well, Ed Zwick made Glory.

JS: He has made some really good movies, but he is a much more mainstream guy.

RB: What are the chances of Hollywood looking at you, not as the ingrained indie person (laughs)?

JS: I’ve been doing it for 35 years and they haven’t offered me, “Oh we have some money, make a movie.” The last three movies were all financed just by money I made as a screenwriter. Nobody before that would put together an advance. So we are basically in the vanity publishing business. I happen to make more ambitious movies and I’m lucky enough to have a bread job that now and then pays very well. And I can add it up and cover my expenses.

RB: Now it’s all easy access by viewers to movies — has that helped you?

JS: It helps but access to the money of the people who are accessing the movies is not there. They have not “monetized” is the computer phrase. So how to get money back from illegal downloaders? If they are young, they are only interested in looking at something on their computer screen and something else that is happening at the same time. So this one sat there for a bunch of years.

RB: This one?

JS: A Moment in The Sun. The screenplay was called Some Time in The Sun, back then. And then I thought, one day, I was cramming too much into two hours and 10 minutes — what if I made it into fiction, could I expand it? Then I wrote some chapters, invented a couple other characters. There are four major characters in the book — to cover different aspects of that time. And then I had to put it aside to work. I make a living as a screenwriter for hire and I think I directed two other movies.

RB: Are you a script doctor also?

JS: Not really a doctor. Really what I am is a screenplay writer. Very rarely am I called in over a weekend to change one element. That’s what a script doctor does. I have done major rewrites on things. Sometimes you get credit, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you ask for credit. Sometimes you are pleased when you don’t get it. So finally what happened — it had been sitting around, kind of started. Which was the same thing that happened with Los Gusanos, I was working on other things and then I had a period of unemployment and then a nice big juicy screenplay Writer’s Guild strike. Los Gusanos was written during a strike and I wrote this one, 85 percent of it during a strike.

RB: (laughs)

JS: While we were also going around the country doing publicity for Honeydripper, our last feature. We went to 36 cities by air and if you have traveled domestically lately you’re in Raleigh–Durham airport for six more hours with a delayed flight, so you better have a book to work on. So I had a lot of that. Or you’re in Israel and you’re awake at three in the morning and can’t get back to sleep because your body thinks its 10 a.m. and you’re back at home. So you are going to be up for five hours and nobody else is around. I actually write very fast. I actually wrote this thing in about a year. Including research.

RB: Wow. How much revision

JS:  You know, the revision is interesting. I did my own revision — really only a couple of weeks of that. I took the main four characters’ chapters and I extracted and combined them via computer, into the Book of Royal, the Book of Hod, the Book of Diosdado, the book of Harry, and then read them to make sure–

RB: –for continuity.

JS: And then my literary agent Anthony Arnove, who was Howard Zinn’s agent, took it around for almost two years.

RB: Did he do any editing?

JS: No. So in about a year and a half — a little bit more — we had gone through all the major publishers, including people who had published me before, 17 years later.

RB: All owned by conglomerates now.

JS: So we got two bites, “We want it, and I just have to ask the people upstairs.” And then they never called back. So obviously the people upstairs said no. Then Anthony went to the second tier of smaller publishers, not quite the university presses. And McSweeney’s said yes — I had never heard of them. I had done an interview for the magazine, but I didn’t know about the books. Most of their stuff goes to a much younger audience.

RB: They have been ambitious enough to publish Stephen Dixon.

JS: Anyway, so they assigned — Dave Eggers had a couple of notes about the beginning of the book and then he got busy and they assigned an editor named Jordan Bass. My first editor ever was Peggy Yntema, who lived here in Cambridge and was Julia Child’s next-door neighbor. She worked for Atlantic/Little Brown. It was a similar thing — Peggy didn’t consider herself a writer, but a reader. So what I got from Jordan were some structural ideas — flip things around a little bit except there is the chronology of history so you can’t do it too much. And a lot of talking about this and that — I would say no I want to do it this way and he was fine with that. Interestingly, I thought the book was going to get smaller but it got a little bit bigger. Jordan would say it would be awfully nice, now that I think of it, to have a chapter about this. We did this in this chapter and 200 pages go by and we don’t hear from this guy. Where is he? He’s in Fort Huachuca. What’s he doing? And so I said what he would be doing — and Jordan said that sounds like a chapter. So it actually got a little bit longer. But it was fun. Compared to the rewriting I do for Hollywood which is very market driven, once they [McSweeney’s] decided to do the book they just wanted to make it more fun to read. Nine hundred sixty pages as opposed to 930 was not a big enough difference for them to worry about. It’s not like, “Oh god it’s 10 minutes longer, it’s going to be hard to get the people in and out of the theater.”

RB: I have been surprised that given what I thought was a generation of seemingly literate movie stars and actors who were branching out into film production, that they didn’t option and finance more literary fiction. I would have thought you would be a likely candidate for those people.

JS: Nah, they are young enough so that the independent filmmakers they know are Quentin Tarantino. And what happened — the studio system took a big hit economically, like everybody else, and they cut all the development people. Tom Cruise even got fired. They came up with an excuse, ”he’s crazy” or something, but he is running a studio now, kind of. But he had a development deal and they said, “Uh uh, no more.” Sumner Redstone said he’s too crazy. So all those people still have those companies, but they don’t have much money. So they still have to say that would be nice, but how are we going to finance it.

RB: Cruise has money. You’re saying he‘s not using it to make movies

JS: Well, you make one or two movies with your own dough and you don’t have money anymore. And truly, if you are smart what you say is “and then how do we market it, who is going to distribute it?” To this day there are only 52 weeks in a year and there are a finite number of screens in America that show movies and so there’s a finite number of possibilities to make your money back. And when you look at that and you look at how many independent movies there are trying to crowd in there you have to say “Jeez, maybe we can’t spend 20 million dollars on this.”

RB: You remind me of Richard Price describing to me the art scene in New York. There are only X number of important walls in New York that X squared artists are vying for.

JS: Richard would know.

RB: I started thinking everybody ought to adopt an artist — given that contemporary culture doesn’t appear to value what goes into a life of creativity.

JS: Not for itself — if you get hot and get to be a celebrity–

RB: Sure, if you get hot.

JS: What I see is these young art people coming out of RISD are these Shepard Faireys — before he did that Obama, he did one for us. And he does this interesting avant-garde street stuff. But he also designed the new Mountain Dew can. Who’s the other guy from Texas, he’s an artist but he directs movies? He did that Basquiat movie.

RB: Julian Schnabel. He’s from Texas?

JS: Brownsville. He’s done a couple of really good movies. He did the Cuban one [Before Night Falls].

RB: I ate at the same parador in Havana that he and his crew ate at — they have his picture on the wall. He didn’t film there but I guess he was doing research.

JS: He hangs out at the Nacional [in Havana] When I went to the Partagas cigar factory they proudly showed me the guest book and the guy who came before me was Arnold Schwarzenegger who came down illegally on an airplane bought cigars and went home. That’s a good example [Schnabel] of a guy with real business sense. The minute he got into art he said, how do I parlay this to become a brand? So there is that.

RB: He was controversial as an artist like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. He got real credence with his movies.

JS: There’s a guy who is an heir of big Chicago fortune. He had a band for 10 years and he just made a movie — I knew the gaffers and some people who worked on it. Every great black character actor is in it. I hear he spent over 105 million dollars of his own money. I spent my own money too, but it’s like 1.5 million.

RB: (laughs)

JS: First of all I hope it’s good because I want to see a good movie. Second of all, he put it where his mouth is — it’s not a lot of his money, he has a lot more. Are you going to hold him to a higher standard than someone who only had a quarter of a million dollars? Mel Gibson used his own money to make his movies. Some of them were good.

RB: Which ones?

JS: You know I liked parts of Apocalypto. There are some good ideas.

RB: That’s the one after the Christ movie.

JS: Yeah.

RB: Do you read much contemporary fiction?

JS: I don’t get to read much fiction. I get to read things that I am asked to write screenplays of, research. As I said, I am still catching up with these classic books. I read in Spanish, so I read some of those people. Names go by me and they may be really well known and I don’t know who they are.

RB: I was wondering if there was anything recent that you had read that you were dying to do?

JS: The first screenplay I ever wrote — for people to see a screenplay, was based on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Which is incredible in its cinematic imagery and iconography and stuff like that. I adapted — this was a job I got paid for and was never meant to be the director — Peter Matthiessen’s Killing Mr.Watson, with Tommy Lee Jones (in my mind, anyway).

RB: It wasn’t made was it?

JS: No. It would have been a great film.

RB: Yeah.

JS: There’s Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel — cause it’s this weird black humor comedy and strange baseball story. One of the lead characters name is Gil Gamesh—a banned baseball player who once killed an umpire with a fastball. So every once in a while there is something where I just say that would make a great movie. But usually the scale of it is just too outside my finances.

RB: No doubt that’s frustrating?

JS: I found other things to do.

RB: (laughs) You’ve learned.

JS: For a filmmaker to have made 17 movies in 35 years is pretty good. And most of them — we don’t always have enough money to do them justice, but most of them, there was no fighting a rear guard action against a studio to change things or tell you who to cast or whatever, so I have been really lucky.

RB: That would be a sign of success — being able to continue making what you want to make.

JS: I don’t know if I will be able to make another movie.

RB: Do you have that feeling every time you finish a film project?

JS: In the last 15 years, yeah. We only got to make Amigo because we discovered this story in the Philippines and there everything costs a third less.

RB: Did the Philippine government contribute?

JS: Not any money but the Minister of Education sent out a broadside to all the colleges and high schools saying this is a movie you should check out. We’re trying to get Noynoy [Benigno Simeon "Noynoy" Cojuangco Aquino III] to come — he’s the president.

RB: What about the boxer, Manny Pacquiao?

JS: He has been in a couple of movies — he’s not much of an actor. He is in more commercials than anybody.

RB: Is he a god there?

JS: Oh yeah. He’s incredible.

RB: Is he running for president?

JS: He’s a congressman.

RB: And a basketball player. Wow.

JS: And a pretty good boxer. Imelda [Imelda Marcos, of 1060 pairs of shoes fame] is still in congress.

RB: I thought she was dead.

JS: He’s [Ferdinand Marcos, husband of Imelda] in a mausoleum in the dark. When you go to it and open the door the lights come on and there he is.

RB: Is it like Lenin’s Tomb?

JS: A little bit.

RB: The Marcos’s are not in total disgrace in the Philippines?

JS: You know it’s pretty factional. His family is pretty powerful. There is a church up where he is from and you go in and there is a big picture of him with angels and one of the angels is Imelda.

RB: Sounds primitively tribal.

JS: That‘s what the problem with the Philippine revolution was. You have a country where probably 12 languages are being spoken — at least five major ones. Filipino was made the national language and then people on the rest of the islands are pissed off because they don’t speak it.

RB: Should the Philippines be one country?

JS: Should anything — should Indonesia be a country? Should the United States be a country? We got lucky. We only had to massacre a lot of Native Americans and there was just empty space and every other place evolved from a lot of little warlords. Afghanistan — not a country.

RB: I think the word “balkanization” comes from the post-WWI attempt to create countries out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We see what’s happened there.

JS: Yugoslavia — not a good idea. It was a fiction but not in the minds of the people who created it. And still in Mexico, you go to the Indian villages and they are Huichol or whatever they are first. Then they may have some allegiance to the state politician and then Mexico, third or fourth.

RB: What percentage of Mexico is Indian?

JS: People who consider themselves Indians and not Latinos is probably 20 percent. If you look at the people’s faces — when we were making Men With Guns down there, our costume designer Mayes Rubeo, who is Mexican, had gotten these extras together, from the town — Zongolica. The extras from the town looked exactly like the people who came down from the mountains. But when we tried to put Indian stuff on the guys from the town, they said, literally, “What do I look like, Tonto?” And so, so many people are part or emotionally Indian but they don’t want to talk about it.

RB: I assume that these are the most impoverished people. Are there any recent films that have excited you?

JS: I really liked one that came out this year called Winter’s Bone. Really nicely made. Maggie [John’s partner] read the book and actually felt like they made some improvements in the film — you know streamlined it. The filmmaking is very good and the casting is very good. So the technical aspects, even though they are modest, really work well.

RB: Someone told me that they even managed to make the trees look ugly.

JS: It’s interesting because it could have been made into Thunder Road, a similar movie they made about moonshiners in the late 50s, early 60s. Those same guys who were making moonshine are now making crank.

RB: The movie managed to make a part of America look more foreign than Afghanistan.

JS: There is a redneck America that’s pretty scary.

RB: There’s a writer named Joe Bageant who just published a book called Rainbow Pie, A Redneck Memoir. He just passed away while he was living in Mexico looking for cancer curatives. He insists the white underclass in this country is invisible and disenfranchised.

JS: Harry Crews is great about those people — there’s a line from his autobiography [A Childhood: The Biography of a Place], “I was the only kid in my neighborhood who didn’t have pellagra [a vitamin deficiency disease].” He learned how to read, his mother barely did. The man he thought was his dad but was really his uncle really didn’t read. And they were just getting by, barely, barely. We shot down in Greenville, Alabama and all around Greenville there are these little towns, half the town burned down and they just left them that way because they had no money to rebuild.

RB: What did you shoot there?

JS: We shot Honeydripper — in Greenville and Georgiana, Alabama, which is where Hank Williams grew up.

RB: How did you come to that area?

JS: You know we were looking for cotton fields; we were looking for locals that understood that it would be a good thing for a movie to come there. And they have a very good film commission.

RB: Alabama?

JS: Yeah. So we found some cotton fields and of course people reneged at the last moment — we’d wake up in the morning and they would have harvested our set. It turned out fine and the guy who was the mayor of the town was cool. That really helped.

RB: Isn’t there a story in A Moment in the Sun that you could make on the cheap?

JS: The problem is if you are going to use professional actors you are paying union wages, using a professional crew, you are paying union wages. So in this country you are talking about 3-5 million dollars. That’s a lot of money.

RB: Not when movies are made for hundreds of millions–

JS: Yeah but for an independent film where you are not going to get any money back–

RB: No, I understand. Why are you not going to get any money back?

JS: What comes back to the filmmaker is very small. Our movies don’t even play the art house circuit — we’re just not on the list. So if we make a movie for a million and a half we have a chance of getting some of our money back. If we hit 3-5 million forget it.

RB: Who knew? I have always looked at you as a perennial–

JS: Well, we’re perennial because we like to do it despite not getting any money back. And I have this bread job.

RB: I’m looking for one of those.

JS: I’ve been very lucky — I don’t get paid as much as I used to as screenwriter. I don’t know anybody who does. There’s been an adjustment like in any down market.

RB: (laughs) A correction.

JS: Yeah, a correction. I could write a lot — I’ve written maybe 95 screenplays in over 35 years and even at scale that’s a lot of money. If I put three or four jobs together and don’t have a coke habit or a lifestyle that eats up a lot of money…

RB: So your intention is to continue to make movies as long as you can finance them?

JS: Yeah, I have a bunch of ideas…

RB: You are not tired of the struggle?

JS: No, the making of them when you get to make them is a lot of fun. And I like actors. We had a great crew in the Philippines — really talented people. So that part I like. And the actors, if you say here’s the limbo bar, you get scale but if you want to go under the limbo bar you can be in this movie, the actors are willing to do that. Because it’s about the acting. And the other thing that’s a relief — well first of all we are very efficient. It’s only five weeks out of their moneymaking schedule if they are working for scale. The other thing is the deal is just with me — we’re going to work on this together. I edit it. It’s not between you, me, a studio head and a focus group in Milwaukee. There is something where they trust me to use their best work.

RB: I’ve worked on a few small film projects and it was just fun.

JS: It can be. It should be. There is a great quote from Ingmar Bergman where someone asked him, ”Why don’t you work in Hollywood?” His answer was, “You know in my country we make movies with 20 of our friends. In your country, you make them with 100 of your enemies.” That’s not exactly true but it can happen that way. You can be making a movie for studio and the director is very hostile — I basically avoid that.

RB: One of the attractive things about Robert Altman seemed to be his concern for the actors and crew.

JS: My friend Mary Cybulski, who is a good script supervisor and now a stills photographer, who shot stills on Amigo, worked for him. She said it was like this hippy colony that would come together for one movie — everybody was invited to dailies, we’re all in this together. And that was a lot of what he enjoyed about filmmaking, was this group of people who got together to do this thing. He was still in charge of it, but there was this feeling that you didn’t need to be afraid to say, ”I have this idea.” He might try it, even if it was a lousy one.

RB: There was a recent biography of Altman that was excellent — basically it was an oral history, using mainly interviews from a broad stripe of people [in their own words] who knew and dealt with him.

JS: Also, he got the biggest compliment, which I sometimes get, which is that these really well known actors were willing to work for scale, or a lot less than they would normally get, just to be in his movies. Woody Allen gets that. I am amazed sometimes who says yes. For Matewan we spent quite a bit of time looking for a James Earl Jones type because we thought we would never get him. It was my third or fourth movie — we couldn’t find anyone who was going to be right for the part. We were already in West Virginia and finally contacted his agent and the agent, thank god, they don’t always, passed our request on to James Earl. I get a phone call and there’s Darth Vader — he asked me what it was about. And he was a great guy to work with. So you do have to ask — you never know.

RB: That’s right.  I‘ve always thought that we are two phone calls from someone for which we have an idea.

JS: And not if that person has become such a citadel. For instance, for about two weeks there was a chance I was going to write a script about Django Reinhardt for Johnny Depp. Apparently Depp wants to play Django — to the point he‘s learned how to play the instrument [guitar]. He really wants to do it but he is so booked, and because people didn’t get into gear quick enough they lost their opportunity; Johnny was gone for another two years. So you can get the phone call but the phone call is, “Ok call us in two years because he would love to play him.”

RB: I guess when you are hot that’s what you do.

JS: I’m sure that every once in a while they say to their people I need two months. Tell the people who are waiting for me if they can wait two more months I’ll do it then.

RB: Where are you in your travels for this book?

JS: We are really at the beginning of our tour. We have done Hartford — read a couple of Mark Twain chapters there because his house is there.

RB: He has one in Elmira NY — as is his grave.

JS: We did Philadelphia last night. Boston tonight, then New York, Baltimore and D.C., then Ashville, North Carolina. Lexington, Kentucky. Will Oldham who is now kind of a rock star, who was the kid in Matewan, we’ll stay with him there. Then to Oxford, Mississippi. We are staying three blocks from Faulkner’s house.

RB: Do you know Richard Ford?

JS: I know who he is.

RB: Ole Miss just gave him [and his wife] a professorship. They seem to be pumping up that department – Tom Franklin is there.

JS: That’s good. There’s a great article — years and years and years ago Terry Southern wrote an article for Esquire, just when Faulkner was getting the Nobel Prize, Southern decided to go to Faulkner’s neighborhood to see what they [his neighbors] think. He was from Texas, but they still could tell he was an outsider. So everywhere he went, people’s voices would go up. Either they would say, “It’s only the outside agitators who are making trouble down here.” Or else they would start saying “nigger” just to see if they could get a rise out of him. He was already freaked out. And then he decides to go to the public library to see if they have any of Faulkner’s books. There are three books by Faulkner there and every one has “nigger lover” scrawled right on the inside cover.

RB: Oxford is pumped up to be the Austin, Texas of Mississippi — an island of worldliness in a desert of parochialism.

JS: I lived in Atlanta for a while and the joke was because Athens, Georgia was nearby — Athens is pretty hip now, but at that time it was really redneck. The whole joke was that if Atlanta was the Athens of Georgia, what’s Athens? Atlanta is not the Athens of anything. But it was more livable than a lot of other places in Georgia. But places change–

RB: Have you spent any time on the Gulf Coast — Mobile, Alabama?

JS: Yeah a little bit. But more in the Redneck Riviera in Florida. But a little in Mobile–

RB: That strikes me as nice place to live.

JS: It’s interesting. Mobile has a Mardi Gras and only two years ago it had two Mardi Gras. It was only two years ago, the king and queen of the white Mardi Gras allowed the king and queen of the black Mardi gras to come and visit for an hour. And then they all went to the black Mardis Gras. And it was like we aren’t going to have one Mardi Gras, but we are going to at least acknowledge each other. It was a big deal. Mardi Gras started in Mobile. It’s an old French Cajun tradition.

RB: I don’t think of Mobile as having French influence.

JS: They have quite a bit. You go there and there is still some of that Cajun influence there. Pirates were there. I worked almost a year for a movie called The Alamo. Remember I said there were movies for which I didn’t want credit? They didn’t keep any of my stuff. One of the problems was, the studio making it was Disney and it was right after 9/11 and they wanted something to wave the flag about. And I said, this is nothing to wave anybody’s flag about. The Mexicans acted terribly and the freedom that the white guys, the Americans, were fighting for was the freedom to own slaves. That’s what they were pissed off about — Mexico had outlawed slavery. You couldn’t get rich without slaves — in the cotton and cane business. And their buddies over in Louisiana were getting filthy rich. So there was this incredible cognitive dissonance [about the making of the film] — we don’t want to know that about our history. One of the things I ran into was that Jean Lafitte, like most pirates, was in the slave business. He would sell black people for a dollar a pound — literally a dollar a pound — to Jim Bowie, who had an in with the Louisiana territorial government — it was illegal at the time to import slaves. He’d bring these slaves in for a dollar a pound. And Bowie would pretend he was trying to stamp this out — he’d claim the people who brought in the slaves ran away. And then there was an auction, which of course was fixed to sell the slaves at a fixed price to the people that ordered them in the first place. You always think of Lafitte as this independent guy but forget like all pirates he was in the slave business. And he had connections in New Orleans — that’s he how ended up in the Battle of New Orleans. He kind of said, who’s going to win this thing?

RB: Speaking of New Orleans, do you pay attention to David Simon’s Treme on HBO?

JS: I’ve seen only a couple of times — I don’t get time to be anywhere to see it. I like it. I’ve worked with John Goodman [who is in Treme] a couple of times as an actor. I like him. I have written five different screenplays set in New Orleans. I did a major treatment for a miniseries on Louis Armstrong. So it’s a place where I really know the history. It’s still a fascinating community. I have friends who live there. It’s always fun to visit.

RB: What about The Wire?

JS: I‘ve seen bits of each season, two or three shows. That’s one of the things Maggie and I talk about, when we are home for a couple months, we’ll watch the whole thing.

RB: That’s the way to watch it.

JS: I have friends who worked on it. What I liked about it was that although it had the cop thing going for it, it got into these other areas and showed how things are interconnected — politics, the waterfront [unions] and the press and schools and everything like that.

RB: I taught in the Chicago Public Schools and the season in the school was dead on — it even brought back the smells.

JS: Charles Dutton [the actor] knows some of these guys in prison and Simon used some of their real names in the series. And they are trying to get paroled — they’ve been in for 20-25 years and ”this is not helping us to relive our old crimes.”

RB: It’s cool that HBO is using established fiction writers.

JS: I’ve done probably five projects for them. I was even on a Howard Zinn project.

RB: Oh, right. It became The People Speak.

JS: Well, yeah. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck godfathered it. I wrote one about the mill girls in [Lawrence] Massachusetts. It was fun. And it was good. And then they just said, “Ehhh, every week it’s a different story.” That was my experience. The writing was fun. They don’t pay that much compared to features.

RB: Don’t you get it on the backside?

JS: If it happens.

RB: The Wire must have big DVD sales. Deadwood.

JS: Those are where they win their Emmys. The Sopranos and True Blood, Big Love. That’s where they make their money. It’s a funny business because they are not selling commercial time. They are trying to get people to subscribe because I watch this one — when I get my new cable package I have to get HBO. Showtime does the same thing. Some of the other cable networks still sell commercials. I am learning this because I am working for some of these guys. Whenever I come in they say, so this is an hour show. And I have to ask, “How long is your hour?” For HBO it might be 54-56 minutes and the advertising is for their own shows. On something like USA [Network] it might be 43 minutes and that’s more like working for the networks.

RB: Has the digitalization and miniaturization of the hardware made it easier to make films?

JS: Yeah, this last one, Amigo we shot on a Red camera, a kind of digital camera. You don’t have to buy the film or develop film. That saved is quite a bit of money. And everybody edits on digital already, this way it’s already on digital. There’s only one version. Over 50 percent of the movie theaters are showing digital around the country.

RB: Is there still a noticeable difference between film and digital?

JS: There used to be — it’s gotten better. In the first years it was like any home camera used to be — everything was always in focus. So no matter what focal length you wanted. Now they are using film lenses so if you want to throw the focus out and concentrate the eye of the viewer on a certain thing, you can do it. And the ability to look into a bright sky and not have it burn out is getting a little better — you still have to be careful where you point it. There are maybe three shots in Amigo I don’t like.

RB: That should increase the amount of time during the day you can shoot.

JS: A little. The initializing, when the computer has to reboot, is a lot shorter. A 10-minute reel is the most you can get into a 35mm magazine, so you shoot 10 minutes. Plus you can shoot with a second camera without wasting film, so even if most of it is not usable it’s great.

RB: Has it changed the way you perceive the images?

JS: Uh, nope. Really, what it is, I have made enough movies now — it changes the way you schedule your day. When you choose second camera positions well, it means your actors don’t have to do a comedy scene 20 times. If you are going to do three different angles, you only have to do it 10 times. That’s nice to have. Three movies ago I switched from editing on film and splicing and all that stuff to doing it by computer. I am not a great computer guy, but I learned it. I learned it in a day. The nice thing about it is I save an hour a day just not changing reels.

RB: Does what used to cost five million dollars now cost, say three million?

JS: More like half of the film stock outlay. The thing is on a 20 million dollar or more movie it still will only save you half of the film stock cost, but if you are a low budget filmmaker, that’s a big deal.

RB: So how long is it going to take you to get back home?

JS: A month. We have a couple days at home and then we go to the Philippines where Amigo is opening on July 4 — the former Philippine-American friendship day.

RB: What is it now?

JS: They finally de-emphasized — well, we left.

RB: What happened to Subic Naval Base?

JS: It’s gone. Clark Air Force base too. Subic is now the world’s biggest duty free place—it’s an economic zone. All the old military buildings are like malls. And there’s one Filipino family — somebody married in — the O’Donnell family or something like that and they run that whole area and Clark, which was in Angeles City — we were kind of giving it up, and then taking it back and then Pinatubo erupted and covered half of it with volcanic dust. (Both laugh). So when we made Amigo it’s about bunch of Americans who are garrisoned in this little Filipino town — now there are no Americans here. So we had to get all our friends, their sons, between college semesters, if you can get your ass here you can be in a movie. We had a German guy, with prison tattoos from East Germany. A couple of Latin Americans–

RB: So what’s your plan with this movie?

JS: It will open in the States in August 19, mostly in cities with large Filipino communities.

RB: Which are?

JS: San Francisco. LA. San Diego. Novato, California. Chicago, around New York there’s a couple places. Near Phoenix. Jersey City. And then the second tier is to go to the regular art theaters. So we’ll see what the traffic will bear. We didn’t do very well with Honeydripper, unfortunately, which people really loved if they saw it.

RB: I didn’t see it.

JS: It only played here for a week.

RB: Going to the movie theater is not much of an experience.

JS: A lot of them have no personality.

RB: What are going to do come September?

JS: I already have three or four writing jobs so I‘ll be writing for someone. I met the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and they have been wanting to have a movie made about that case for a long time. And there is all this new information. So I have written a script on that and it’s out in the world of people trying to raise money for it. None has been raised yet. So that’s a possibility. It would be great to start to prep for that movie. And if that doesn’t happen, in about a year we will reassess, if it seems impossible, maybe I write something that can be made for less. Or just not make movies — that’s always a possibility.

RB: What about writing crap (laughs)?

JS: You know I get hired to write stuff they don’t want to be crap — some of it doesn’t turn out very well. Most of it just doesn’t get made. In the Writer’s Guild there is this thing we all have to deal with — nobody likes to be rewritten, but if they didn’t rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, we wouldn’t have much work. If everyone only wrote one script there would only be a fraction of the work. So I am happy rewriting something or being rewritten. And you hope it turns out well. You hope it gets made, first.  You get more money if it gets made. I worked on Apollo 13 — I didn’t get credit on it but it was really fun to work on it. It was a really good movie. It was a satisfying experience.

RB: Directed by Philip Kaufman.

JS: No that was the Right Stuff. Ron Howard did Apollo 13. Kauffman’s making a movie — hasn’t directed in seven or eight years. A friend of mine is in it — about Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. We’ll see.

RB: Who plays them?

JS: Nicole Kidman and a British actor who played in Croupier [Clive Owen]. Neither of whom is American

RB: So, I know you have to join the soiree upstairs. Thanks very much.

JS: Thank you

Image Credit: Robert Birnbaum

Thompson spent a day on most pages of his book. Certain pages, the ones that include intricate Middle Eastern designs, took three days. The cartoonish surrealism of Thompson’s first book Good-bye, Chunky Rice and the simplified, stripped-down drawings in his account of first love in Blankets offered some solace against depictions of abuse and sexual frustration. But the exotic, overbearing detail of Habibi can disturb. The beauty of the book both attracts and alienates.

I met Thompson at the home of mutual friends, a Spanish couple, a writer and painter, in Iowa City on the morning of September 25. The hotels in town were overbooked thanks to a Saturday football game, so he had stayed there the night before. He met me at the door, wearing yesterday’s shirt, looking well-rested. We sat in a huge white room. Sunlight came in from long vertical windows hitting several paintings, including a few of recognizable spots in Iowa City. A cat came by occasionally to rub up against our legs. What follows is a pared-down version of our interview.

The Millions: Was there any moment as you were beginning this book when you sought permission to write it? You are a white person from a very Christian family in Wisconsin. Was there any voice in the back of your head saying, “You don’t get to write about black people or Arab people in the Muslim world”?

Craig Thompson: I didn’t worry about that specifically, partly because the two characters — Dodola and Zam, an Arab girl and a black boy — delivered themselves fully realized from my subconscious. So they already were characters that existed outside of me and they dictated a lot of the things they did. I trusted the Turkish writer Elif Shafak — she wrote The Bastard of Istanbul — who describes fiction as a way to live other lives and in other worlds. You don’t need to have those experiences directly. It’s almost a shamanistic journey where by tapping your own imagination you access these other roles.  And I trusted that.

With all my work, I struggle with giving myself permission to do it. And that comes from coming from a very religious household and a very anti-art household.

I come from very lower-working-class roots, so it’s not like my parents wanted me to have a more high-powered career, like being a doctor. They actually wanted me to have a more modest career, like being an electrician, something that’s very practical. [They wanted me to do] something that serves society rather than [something that] serves oneself, which is their perception of art. Every day I struggle with allowing myself to be an artist. And I have to try to trust the instinct that hopefully art also helps other people and not just oneself.

TM: Do you graft a Christian ethos onto your art then?

CT: Well, for me the Christian ethos is not to judge other people. No human can judge another. I think I am true to that in my art. When you’re a writer, you’re not judging your characters. You can live a lot of different roles on paper without judgment.

TM: A lot of Orientalist art from the 19th century is aesthetically pleasing, but it’s all in service to an ideology that has caused an incredible amount of destruction in the world. How do you square that problem, especially in the current era when there are an enormous amount of issues with the way people regard Islam, the Muslim world and the Arab world?

CT: Well, that exactly is the intent [of the book], to bring up the correlations between the turn-of-the-19th-century Orientalism with the new brand of Orientalism that exists throughout the world, this new Islamophobia and this labeling of people as the other. I was also thinking not of Orientalism, [but of] the Arabian Nights as a genre, like cowboys-and-Indians. So cowboys-and-Indians is a sensationalized version of the history of the American West and doesn’t really reflect reality. So I wanted to work with the Arabian Nights genre in the same way and steal from all these tropes and not shy away from their inappropriateness.

There’s a very offensive Islamophobia that happens in the media, especially the conservative media. But then there’s also this overly-PC, liberal reaction to tiptoe around a lot of subjects which I think is its own form of insult, because the Muslims I know are very open-minded people and would rather engage in a dialogue.

I don’t know if I’m sidestepping the question, but the book all along was a mash-up of the sacred medium of holy books, like the Koran and the Bible, and the vulgar pulp medium of comic books. For me Orientalism is like a comic book, like superhero comics, with all the sexism built into it. Orientalism is eroticized and sensationalized and you could say the same for superheroes.

TM: You were drawing these very intricate decorations all by hand, and if you look closely you can see that. This part of the decoration [pointing to one part of a random page] is different from that one, even though they follow the same pattern. I imagine the labor that went into that was extremely intensive. By doing these patterns you were aping what an artisan from this other part of the world does. Was that your own personal way of getting into the mindset of the culture?

CT: You’re nailing it exactly. I hate using the terms East and West because they are purely imaginative boundaries. But in the Western world, at least, art is placed on this pedestal. There’s so much ego tied up in the artistic process. In contemporary art, in fine arts, it’s more common for the artist to be more of an overseer, where they come up with the concept, but then they dictate all the actual labor to a bunch of unnamed assistants. And that’s always really offensive to me. We cartoonists in general have a more modest approach to our work where it’s just got to be us alone in our studio for hours and hours. You can’t fake comics really, or actually you probably could, but not in the old-fashioned alternative comics world. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, there’s all these artisans and craftsmen who work meticulously and have a lot more skill, but do it without the monetary reward and the egotistical reward. So I did want to pay tribute to those people. But even that sounds a little pretentious, because I was still just working with the very malleable form of ink on paper. I’m not carving wood or laying tile-work or doing something much more complex.

In a very small way I wanted to pay tribute to that and just be responsible for every single drop of ink on the paper. Throughout the book, people were pressuring me to get an intern to help me out. They could see that was wearing myself down a bit. But it was just really important in the end to make sure that every single line was my own. It was an act of defiance against the digital age where everyone is rubberstamping everything.

TM: You open each of your books with a major trauma that shadows the rest of the narratives.

CT: Well, it’s not a conscious thing, but it’s interesting what you say about how it shadows everything after. I think that’s similar to our own lives and the traumas we carry. To some degree, you’re always carrying that with you. Certainly you’re always carrying your inner child with you and the damages that happen to that child. And other people aren’t aware of it. Only you are. I like that you say that. That resonates with me.

TM: One of the issues I have with seeing major traumas in the opening pages of your books is that it’s impossible for me to, say, forgive your parents when I read Blankets for what they do early on, or to believe in any real good in the world of Habibi because of what I see in the opening pages.

CT: Well then how do you live in the reality of our world?

TM: I’m not very forgiving.

CT: (laughs) I was waiting at a bus stop once and I was assaulted by six drunken rednecks. Waiting at the bus stop with me was this retarded man and they didn’t hurt either of us badly, but they pushed him to the ground and kicked him a couple of times and spit on him. And of course after they left, this retarded man was bawling. And he came to sit with me on the bus. And he was just torn to pieces. “Why do people do this?” he said. I said, “Something like this could happen to anyone.” He’s like, “I don’t want to live in Portland anymore if something like this could happen.” And I was like, “This could happen anywhere. It’s just random that it happened in that location.” He was like, “Why would I want to live in this world anymore?” He was just saying it in this very pleading way. It was this really interesting dialogue I had with this mentally disabled man. And I was just trying to encourage him. “Yes, this could happen anywhere. Horrible things happen everywhere.” He was telling me what he was doing. He was going to see a friend. I said, “You’re going to see a friend. There’s good people in the world. That’s what you have to focus on.” At the end of our bus ride he was as happy as could be. He was really happy to make a connection on the bus. He was standing at the door of the bus, like “Bye friend!” He was really happy.

I think that’s a theme in my work. The world is a horrible place and humans do horrible things to each other and you have to work for positive energy and to carve out a place of safety and shelter within each other.

I open Blankets with a lot of negativity because I wanted to communicate to the reader why Christianity was so important to me as a child. It really was this shelter. I wasn’t really a happy child. I was an unhappy child and not comfortable in my skin and not comfortable in my environment so, like a lot of people, all my comfort and solace was in religion. Even at that tiny age.

TM: There is something about the world of Habibi that is unrelentingly vicious. In the world of Blankets you offer some moments of escapism, but I never felt there was a way to escape Habibi. I was thinking of Cormac McCarthy as I was reading Habibi. [I open a random page of Blankets]. I just pulled this up, but the mere fact that you can just walk in the snow and enjoy nature and have some kind of breathing space resonates in Blankets. I don’t know if you saw that difference as well.

CT: I love Cormac McCarthy. I think the essential philosophy to his work is the viciousness of human existence and that may be true of Michael Haneke too. I would acknowledge both of them as inspirations. But I’m more of a positive nihilist. I have a nihilistic view of humanity and a belief that humans will wipe each other out of existence. But that makes it even more important to labor in a positive way now. That energy continues on. I think life continues on whether or not the human species will.  With Habibi, I was processing some major heartbreaks and I was processing health problems. I was processing a lot of frustrations with the art world or at least the comics industry.

TM: What were the health problems?

CT: Some of that is in Carnet De Voyage [Thompson’s account of his trip to Morocco and his European book tour for Blankets]. A very crippling hand pain, at the time. I had to take months off at a time where I couldn’t draw. So there was that sense of despair around: “Do I have to figure out a different career?” “Will I be able to draw for many more years of my life?” So there was a lot of anxiety caught up in what I was passionate about doing: drawing.

TM: I may be sounding like your parents now. But: You have hand pain. You suffered heartbreak. The industry that you’re in, like everything in publishing, is falling apart.

CT: “Unprofessional” might be a good word.

TM: But how does that lead to writing about child sex slaves?

CT: “Child slaves.” I think for a child those two terms feel synonymous. And there’s more slavery in the world now than ever before in human history. And capitalism and global trade are probably the main fuel for that. Wealth in the Western world only feeds off poverty and exploitation of people in other countries. So there’s processing that American guilt of being a participant in this imperialistic machine.

I’ve always wanted to do a book about sexual trauma. In Blankets, I talk briefly about being molested as a child, but that’s almost insignificant [compared] to some people who were very close to me as a young kid who were raped. Before I knew any positive form of sexuality, I knew rape. Growing up — and I grew up in a small town -– I assumed that every woman was raped. And that was my social circle. And ironically, once I moved away and lived in bigger cities, that proportion got watered down so it wasn’t like everyone I knew was raped. But everyone has either been raped or abused or had some spiritual abuse imposed on them through religious dogma or just had a natural clumsy awakening into sexuality.

TM: I know you were going for something that bordered on magic realism. But looking at the landscape of this book, I don’t think you have to change too much to make it something that could take place in our world as we know it. Here we have a boat in the middle of the desert. How did you walk that line where if you changed one millimeter of a percentage of the laws of physics you could imagine those things existing?

CT: That’s a good question. I think I saw this after I had written this into the book. There’s these photos of the Aral Sea after a big drought and there’s all these fishing boats stranded in desert, basically. That’s a very realistic little detail. The things that I chose to exclude were guns and television sets. I didn’t want people in slums all hanging out around television sets the way they would in reality. So in a way I took away things that to me were boring to draw or more mundane or things I just wasn’t interested in.

TM: Star Wars.

CT: Star Wars? You must have read this in another interview then.

TM: No, because I was thinking of it as I was reading it. The boat looked like the Jabba the Hut skiff that was in the middle of the desert. And then there’s the sand guys with the masks…

CT: Yes, the Tusken Raiders.

TM: Did you do that and think, “Oh man, I just cribbed from George Lucas, who cribbed from other people”? Or did you pay tribute to him consciously?

CT: I can’t recall. I do know that I was thinking of the book in a Star Wars-y way. And I’ve described it this way in interviews that it doesn’t take place in any specific geography or time like Star Wars, which supposedly took place long long ago in a galaxy far far away.

That was always disrupting to me as a child that this futuristic-looking world actually happened “long long ago.” And also that he was filming all these things in North Africa and his other-planet landscape was all drawing from the influence of North Africa. In Carnet I talk about going to Morocco and seeing everybody in Jawa costumes. And I was really using a lot of those hooded djellabas in Habibi so I was thinking this is basically Star Wars. I’m not meticulously researching any place. I wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t want to get caught up in the real details, the historical, heavily researched details, because there was this emotional core, this very heavy relationship that I wanted to focus on. And so the rest of it was collage. It was taking elements from different places and cultures, which is also Star Wars, I suppose.

TM: Given the history of racism in comics, when you sat down and drew these characters, were you thinking: “No that doesn’t look quite right, no I can’t do that”?

CT: I don’t think I worried about it much. I feel like Zam is drawn very realistically for cartoon-y style. Whereas other characters, like Hyacinth in the harem, is a weird caricature of certain guy. And I just embraced that. I don’t think of it in an ethnic way. I just think of it as a cartoonish caricature to make him that strange lunkish build. And there’re a lot of characters where a cartoonishness is built into their design. I feel Dodola and Zam are definitely the most beautiful characters in the book. I want the reader to be attracted to them.

In the rape scene, originally, I had a much more grotesque character. And I didn’t like how it felt sensationalized. So that character ended up looking more and more attractive. At a certain point, he was almost a pretty boy. And that’s when I added the element of these aviator glasses. Because I felt like it put up some distance from him and obviously he is a monstrous character. But if you were to remove those glasses he would almost look like a classic Aryan pretty boy.

TM: There isn’t a panel in your book that doesn’t seek out some form of aesthetic pleasure. Why do you depict something like this [pointing to the rape scene in book] in a way to make it beautiful? People hate Schindler’s List, among other reasons, because the black-and-white is so gorgeous.

CT: I tend towards the sentimental. So there are times where I try deliberately to pull back and have an unbiased camera angle. I don’t know if I’m necessarily trying not to make it beautiful. As I said in depicting the rapist, in earlier drafts he was more monstrous. Even the way things were framed was a little more horrific. Finally, I found that it was more powerful to use that Hitchcock-ian method of just “less is more.” The camera is still in there. But there’s just more formalistic structure to it. Coldness isn’t the word. But I’m trying to create some emotional distance in depicting these things. I want the reader to have their own emotional reaction and not impose an emotional response on them through the drawing style.

TM: You haven’t worked with color in any of your four books. Is there anything about color that turns you off?

CT: No, I wouldn’t say it turns me off. For me, cartooning is a cursive shorthand for a bigger drawing or a painting. And I still adhere to those principles. I want the drawings to have a hand-written quality. For me, color is just an added layer of process that in some ways actually creates some distance from the reader. And I love it when artists work in watercolor, in a really organic medium like that. There’s a little bit of laziness in me where my books would take even longer to get out if I was also coloring them. And I wouldn’t want to hand off the responsibility to someone else because of that obsessive-ness of wanting every line to be my own. Also I recognize some of the actual printing mechanics and expenses of adding color as an element. Chris Ware, of course, is a master of color in comics. He talks about comics as typography. I think of comics as calligraphy. And for me the purest form of that is just the ink on the paper. It’s just the artist’s brush or nib.

Nikolai Grozni’s debut novel, Wunderkind, is a searing tale of music behind the Iron Curtain, two years before the fall of Communism. Konstantin, a 15 year-old piano prodigy, is a student at the Sofia School for the Gifted, and spends his time raging against the inhumanity of the regime, acting out, rebelling against his teachers, and playing the piano with desperate abandon. It is an outright autobiographical text, Grozni admits; he himself was an accomplished concert pianist in his youth, and studied at the Sofia School for the Gifted in the late 1980s. After stints at the Berklee College of Music and a Buddhist monastery, he obtained his MFA in creative writing from Brown, and currently lives in France.

One of the most beautiful things about Wunderkind is its contrasts in tone– like Chopin’s Ballade No 2, which Konstantin takes on, knowing that it is “too elusive, too impossible to measure” even to be meaningfully recorded; it begins with a Mozart-esque simplicity, and then moves into more moody territory, before exploding with rage. Grozni captures the angst of adolescence as Konstantin moves through the sad beauty of Sofia in a way that seems almost romantic; but those passages will be followed by reminders of the inhumanity of the world he lives in. It is a landscape that recalls Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go — Grozni’s characters are doomed by the system but full of life and hope, scraps of beauty in a dystopian paradise. With a blistering narrative of violence and lyricism, Grozni captures them playing their instruments.

“Nothing is more difficult than to talk about music,” wrote the composer Camille Saint-Saëns of his own attempts at writing music criticism; “it is already tricky enough for musicians, but it is almost impossible for others: even the strongest, most subtle minds lose their way.” Grozni manages to pull off the near-impossible feat of not only writing about music, but of doing so in a way that pushes the reader to the limits of what language can express.

I had a chance to chat with him when he was in Paris to read at Shakespeare & Co.

The Millions: You really nail the anxieties of being a musician in this book. That passage where Konstantin describes the feeling of becoming incredibly self-conscious while performing, and to continue performing you have to forget what you’re doing again — it’s so right on. To a certain extent, when you’re playing the piano, you have to just not think about what you’re doing. How is it for you with writing? Is there a similar call for conscious unconsciousness?

Nikolai Grozni: Absolutely, only in writing it is much more difficult to achieve. When you play an instrument you can always count on the sounds and harmonies, even accidental ones, to carry you away. With writing all you have is the sound of your own thoughts. It could be maddening, boring, or cathartic.

TM: I think one of the things that says so much about Konstantin and the problems he has living under the Communist regime is the fact that he can’t commit to one set of fingering — “By the time I learned a piece well, I had access to at least three or four sets of fingerings, which added a degree of unpredictability to my playing because I could never really know for certain how my fingers would fall when I walked onstage and faced the grand piano.” This seems irresponsible or self-destructive on one level, but is also perhaps a safeguard against becoming an automaton, because it makes it more likely that you will remain uncomfortably conscious during the performance. How does this fit in with the larger subject of the book? It seems everyone around Konstantin is a Communist automaton, whereas all the “misfits” of the school — Vadim, Irina, Konstantin — have this uncomfortable awareness. It doesn’t necessarily serve them well.

NG: It’s true, Konstantin’s biggest fear is that he will become an automaton, a cogwheel in the system, like all the rest. This affects his piano playing as well. He is constantly aware of the dangers of playing a piece the same exact way again and again. This is the reason why he also can’t write anything during his literature exam — he is afraid that by allowing the thoughts of the teachers, of the apparatchiks, in his head, he will become one of them. What fuels his rebellion is a deep sense of anger at the world around him, and, ultimately, this very anger destroys both him and Irina. But Konstantin wants to fail, that is the paradox. He feels that if he fails he will have proven to himself that didn’t get corrupted.

TM: Your descriptions of the music are wonderfully synaesthetic — did that come naturally? Were you always thinking about music in literary terms, even back then?

NG: I’ve always thought about harmonies, notes, and passages in terms of colors and visual portraits. I think this probably comes naturally to kids with perfect pitch — when you have nothing else to hold on to but sound, you begin adding colors, feelings, and ideas. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is a perfect example of how a composer sees the music.

TM: Are there other writers who have written about music who influenced you, either positively or negatively?

NG: For me, Franz Liszt’s Life of Chopin is one of the best books about music. Chopin’s letters and George Sand’s diaries are also excellent sources of inspiration. Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser is a fantastic book but there’s not much music in it. When I set out to write Wunderkind I wanted the book to look like a conductor’s score.

TH: You have this fascinating passage in the novel where Konstantin claims that Chopin is the only composer to write in the first person, speaking directly from his own experience, whereas other composers are writing in the third person, telling out about things that happened to other people. It’s an interesting observation coming in the middle of a novel in the first person. Do you share his impatience with the third person?

NG: I love the first person, in writing, in music, and in life. All great modern novels, as far as I am concerned, are in the first person (Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, Beckett’s The Unnamable, etc.). Incidentally, all three of my Bulgarian novels were written in the third person, and I think there are many advantages of telling a story in an omniscient voice — the ease of changing stage sets, of doing travel, exposition, tension, and, very importantly, humor — but, in the end, I felt that I would never be able to go far enough in revealing consciousness in the third person. For me, the purpose of writing and reading is to understand and reveal the mind, and while there’s a great deal that can be glimpsed and inferred about the mind and the human condition from third person stories like Chekov’s “A Nervous Breakdown,” they can hardly compare with the authenticity, depth, and rawness of the first person narrator in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. After all, third person means someone else; first person means you.

TM: Can you talk a bit about the frequent use of mythological material (Icarus; Prometheus; Erebus, god of Chaos; Erinyes, the Furies)? You seem to be rooting Bulgaria in this heroic, invented past; there were so many mentions of Thracians that I had to look them up — they are a tribe from Greece who were apparently the original settlers of Sofia — and was delighted to find that Orpheus was meant to have been king of the Thracian tribe of Cicones!

NG: You don’t have to do a lot of digging in Bulgaria to find the old gods. The pagan past is very palpable and vivid even today. There are cults of sun-worshipers who wake before dawn and perform oblations at sunrise; there are thousands of ancient temples and pagan sites in the mountains, a lot of them still waiting to be excavated. Orpheus is believed to have descended to the underworld by entering a cave in the Rhodope Mountains. On top of that, Bulgaria is a place where black magic has always played a very powerful role. When you hear that someone is a witch or a sorcerer, it’s not at all a joke. People pay a lot of money to destroy someone through magic.

TM: Were you really a monk in India? How did that come about?

NG: I’ve always wanted to live in India. Even as a small child I was convinced that if someone wanted to meet the wise men and learn the truth, he or she would have to go to India and live up in the mountains. So, one day, while I was still in college, I just packed my bags and left for India. I stayed there more than four years, and, yes, I was a Buddhist monk. I learned Tibetan and studied at one of the best Tibetan Buddhist universities.

TM: How did you end up in France?

NG: I’m not sure. It started as a why-not idea, and I’m still here, three years later.

Image courtesy Cara Tobe

As is frequently the case, having met and yakked with young novelist and NYU writing mentor Darin Strauss back in 2002, on the occasion of the publication of his second novel The Real McCoy, he and I kept in touch and resumed our conversation for his 2010 memoir Half a Life.

Though, for a number of reasons, Strauss’ tome is not my kind of story — the memoir recounts a profound event in his life when, as a teenager, he runs into and kills a bicyclist — as Strauss is a bright, thoughtful, and engaging conversationalist, I was pleased to talk with him again. In the course of the chat that follows, we talk about this event that has been central in his life, its aftermath, why he wrote the book, readers’ responses, his own post-publication conclusions, and a wide swath of topics, literary and non-literary.

Robert Birnbaum: If I didn’t know you as a writer of three well-regarded novels, why would I want to read this book, a memoir?

Darin Strauss: Well, I think this book [Half a Life] has had more commercial appeal than my novels. I am not a fan of memoirs in general. I am a novelist and I will remain a novelist but I think this story — I should say what it’s about. I was in a car accident in high school — I was driving in the far left lane. A young girl on a bicycle on the shoulder swerved across two lanes of traffic into my car and she died.

RB: Does the sentence “I killed her” apply to this?

DS: Well, yeah. That was the thing I couldn’t say for a long time. The first sentence of the book is, ”Half of my life ago I killed a girl.” Which is something it took me 20 years to be able to say. I think she was at fault but I was driving a car and hit her and she died — it’s linguistic cowardice to avoid that sentence.

RB: Saying you killed her doesn’t assess responsibility. Blame is a separate issue.

DS: Yes, I think I blamed myself in the past more than I do now. But to answer the first question, the reason I wrote the book is because of the response I got. I did something on This American Life about the accident. Which was the first time that I had done anything publicly about it. The first time I told anyone besides the people close to me was on National Public Radio. I thought I would just do a radio thing about it, but I got hundreds of emails asking me for the text saying they thought it would help them or someone they knew who was going through some sort of grief. And so I thought I should maybe do it as a book — I was always as a kid going through this wishing there was something I could read that would help me. There isn’t anything specifically for people who are survivors of these accidents. Which police call dart-out accidents. And there are 2,000 of those a year and people who are in these dart-outs, or no fault deaths as the insurance companies call them — people who are not at fault are more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress. And so, there was no book for me and so I thought I will write a book for the 18-year-old me who didn’t have the book. And the response has been amazing. Overwhelming. I got emails from people who were coming back from Iraq suffering PTS, or someone whose brother committed suicide. There’s something beneficial in reading a story about someone who is going through grief if the story is told honestly.

RB: What is the benefit?

DS: There are things that I hadn’t seen written about that I wanted to write about. The performative nature of grief — how people don’t feel sad 100% of the time but have to pretend that they do because society expects you to act a certain way. How also we have inappropriate thoughts at these moments, inappropriate actions. I hadn’t seen that written about or examined enough so I wanted to look at that. It’s funny, my editor said I should cut something out of the book that was about that. The girl cut in front of my car. I hit her. She died. But as she is lying there in the street some pretty 18-year-old girls came over to me and asked me if I was okay. I can only explain it by saying I was in shock, but these girls were cute and I started flirting with them. As the bicyclist is dying in the street waiting for the ambulance. That’s something I was always embarrassed about but felt I should write about because it was one of those inappropriate moments that I think reveals something about the way we were designed not to deal with grief. But the book’s editor wanted to cut that out because it made me look too unsympathetic.

RB: Isn’t that the point?

DS: If the book is only about me trying to look sympathetic then there is no reason to write the book. I didn’t want to write an advertisement or a piece of propaganda for me. I wanted to write about the young me as I would write about a character in a novel. And look at all that person’s flaws and hold them up to the light. Because I think that’s what we get out of good fiction, too. Good fiction teaches you how to live. What I turn to good fiction for is not the plot really — that’s what hooks you into the story. But it’s the observation of how people go through the world. And you learn by seeing people be imperfect and so that’s what I wanted to do. Hopefully — I didn’t set out to write a self-help book but if —

RB: Those tend not to hit their target. Are there stories that shouldn’t be told? Or needn’t be? Years ago Stephen Dixon wrote a book called Interstate, in which two infants are shot and killed in a drive-by and the father who is driving the car descends into a pit of despair. My son had just been born and I just couldn’t read past the first chapter.

DS: I remember the book — it’s the first chapter played out again and again, with different ways the father would handle it. Yeah I think there are some stories that are — but even that handled really well could be great.

RB: Even handling it well —

DS: I know what you are saying. That’s why memoirs for the most part turn me off. When memoir opens itself up to criticism it’s because it’s prurient or self-aggrandizing or salacious in some way. So this was an attempt not to — I wanted to make it an anti-memoir. I was going to do the book with Penguin but I ended up doing the book with McSweeney’s —

RB: Why?

DS: I said, I don’t want to write a memoir, I just want to write about this accident and what I learned from it. And I want to do that because people responded really well to the This American Life thing. I wanted to examine it a little more deeply than I did on the radio. (I am actually embarrassed now — having written the book I think the early piece was kind of glib.) But I am not sure how long it’s going to be — it might just be 50 pages. It’s just going to be about the accident. My editor said, that’s great but it has to be 200 pages. We are happy to print it — we need for it to be a viable paperback. It’s got to be 200 pages. I said, what if the story is only 50 pages? He said, well you can pad it. I said, forget it, but then Dave Eggers contacted me or maybe it was Eli [Horowitz] — and McSweeney’s said they would publish it at 50 pages. I said, that’s great, and it ended up being 200 pages. It’s longer than I thought it would be but it’s still a short book.

RB: Why are there no chapter headings or numbers or titles?

DS: I wanted it to have a disjointed feeling in the manner that you feel when you go through something like this that life comes at you in a disjointed way.

RB: Can you start anywhere in the book and move backward or forward?

DS: I don’t think so — I hope that there is an arc to it. The challenge was to — every book is a magic trick. Every realistic novel pretends to be realist but is actually a complete fabrication. The trick is to make it seem like it’s not. [In] this book [it] was more difficult to do that because I wanted to remain truthful and to be respectful of the girl in the incident, but also I was very aware that I wanted it to be a good reading experience — not just to be a therapy exercise for myself. So I thought, I have to make an arc and a dramatic structure and all that but I wanted it to be less visible. And wanted it to be somewhat disjointed especially in the beginning because that’s the way we experience these things. So hopefully it was mirroring that.

RB: How firm is that border between fiction and non-fiction?

DS: Ah, I’m not a non-fiction writer for the most part, so my wife who is a journalist would laugh and say, “Are you sure you are not making things up? Are you being truthful?” So that was the real challenge — to remain absolutely faithful to the facts. I didn’t want to make anything up.

RB: Two of your novels were based on historical figures or characters —

DS: Chang and Eng, my first book, which was about two famous conjoined twins, I took a lot of liberties.

RB: I noticed you refrained from using “Siamese twins.” [laughs]

DS: Yeah, because I was corrected a lot. People from Thailand are sensitive about that. I sold the book to Thailand — it’s not very often there’s an American book about Thailand. They were going to make a big deal of it and fly me out for a Thai book festival, and then they translated it [laughs] and I kept hearing from the translators that they were having a lot of problems: ”You’re making stuff up here. This is not what happened in Thailand back then.” And so I never got the invite. I took a lot of liberties with old Siam, too. I wrote that book when I was 26 and broke and couldn’t afford to fly there. So I bought a Let’s Go Thailand and used that as my research and invented stuff. Which is okay. A novelist doesn’t have to tell the truth. The beginning of Kafka’s Amerika is the Statue of Liberty holding up a big sword. There is a debate of whether he was trying to make a point or he didn’t know.

RB: Alan Furst, who rigorously researches his novels, says he doesn’t take any liberties because as he says, “a lot of blood was shed” in these stories. And beyond that readers still have unwarranted expectations —

DS: I think we talked about this four years ago [more like nine years]. There is a quote from [E.L.] Doctorow where he said, “that historical novelists should do the least amount of research they could get away with.” The key part of the sentence is what you can get away with. You don’t want to make ridiculous mistakes. You don’t want to embarrass yourself or take the reader out of the situation. But you can take liberties because it says “novel” on the book.

RB: More and more it says, “Such and Such, a novel.” And less and less do people pay attention.

DS: It’s true. Although writers go into a publisher and say “novel,” and the publisher kind of slides out into another room. I have a number of students trying to sell novels and they have been told to say it’s a memoir, it’s easier to sell memoirs. But Doctorow once told me that he received a letter from someone saying, “In Arizona there aren’t X kind of cactuses which you had in your book.” He said, “There are in my Arizona, madam.” Which is a dashing way of saying he screwed up but he didn’t care.

RB: Tom Franklin [for Hell at the Breech] pointed out that readers would heckle him about armadillos and the shape of a cigarette tin.

DS: Yeah, yeah. Bellow said he was tired of being crucified on the cross of American Realism. Hopefully a novel gets to deeper truths than the shape of a Lucky Strike container. But you do want to be truthful enough — if it’s not plausible the reader will lose confidence and then the book is lost. I was just talking to someone about Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, where she apparently makes tons of mistakes about Boston geography, saying something like Harvard was in Porter Square and things like that. Which took Boston readers out of the book. I didn’t notice it because I am not from Boston. So I thought it was a great book.

RB: Who am I to say something is irresolvable. But I was reading an essay by Curtis White [The Middle Mind] and he refers to William Shawn as the publisher of the New Yorker. I didn’t think it made the rest of his remarks without value, but I wondered about what editors or fact checkers were doing.

DS: I know there are fewer and fewer fact checkers. My wife works at Newsweek and they hire younger and younger people and they have fewer and fewer people to catch mistakes at these magazines. There has been a loosening of standards across the board but that’s a different conversation.

RB: There is always Edward Jones — he spent 12 years writing The Known World, intending to research from a long list he had, and he never used that list. And he most definitely made stuff up. But I dare you to identify it.

DS: Exactly.

RB: [chuckles] Though a history professor from Texas was upset that in my various online citations of my chat with Jones I had no problem with his approach.

DS: I don’t know why people come to fiction with that expectation — that it’s going to be the same as a biography or something. And have the same standards of factualness when it’s a fairy tale — what Nabokov called his books. Peter Carey told me when he writes about his hometown he purposely puts in mistakes just to piss people off. That’s kind of funny.

RB: The other side of the coin is that you can get a certain kind of pleasure out of a book that is about a place with which you are familiar. I loved [the late lamented] Eugene Izzi, a Chicago crime story writer, or I suppose people in Boston like Robert Parker and they expect everything to be as they know it.

DS: A lot of Jon Lethem’s popularity came from taking Brooklyn as his literary subject before anyone else had, and people turned to Motherless Brooklyn — I’m from Brooklyn now so it feels his territory because he wrote about it. So there is a pleasure for natives in reading about their home turf.

RB: So we have variable valences of why we derive pleasure from reading — some are higher than others but when we talk about this stuff we are supposed to say smart things —

DS: Yeah hopefully we turn to books for the writing or the moral truths or whatever you get out of it but there is something nice about saying, “Oh I know that street.”

RB: I find I have learned more history from Gore Vidal, Edward Jones, Alan Furst, John le Carré, John Lawton, and Philip Kerr than as an undergraduate history student.

DS: I was talking to a writer friend David Lipsky. He wrote a book called Absolutely American about West Point and the book about David Foster Wallace where he traveled with him [Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself] — kind of a new way of doing biography. It got good reviews, but I am not sure reviewers understood how revolutionary it could be. Even when people say the novel is in trouble and there aren’t as many readers, which people have been saying as long as there has been a novel around, I am sure more people read about the French-Russian war than read War and Peace, but nobody goes back to read the newspapers. These made-up stories are the way future generations find out about these things. I am sure more people read Libra by Delillo about [Lee Harvey] Oswald than anything else.

RB: Than the Warren Commission Report [laughs].

DS: Exactly. Or anything. If you think about it like that then we have a certain responsibility to be honest.

RB: There is a mistake about the way history is taught — the emphasis is on minutiae and not narrative — not the juicy stories about human frailty and foibles. And what do you know after you know all the details?

DS: Look at the political discourse. It seems like people know nothing.

RB: I see signs calling for the impeachment of the president. And I am sure that the sign carriers know nothing about impeachment. The House decides there is to be a trial —

DS: — based on crimes and misdemeanors. It’s not like saying we don’t like the guy. It’s like if the president is unpopular he should be impeached. The memories are so short — the Clinton impeachment was 10 years ago or so. He was impeached but not forced to leave office. I don’t what it is — there is something narcotized about this country.

RB: I look at James Howard Kunstler’s website ClusterFuck Nation and he decries the public conversation, and he recently asked, “Where did all the sensible people go who used to stand up against the kind of radical silliness that is so prevalent now?”

DS: It’s very strange. Where are the country club Republicans who were fiscally conservative but didn’t want to get rid of public education or meddle in social issues? Didn’t want to overthrow the government?

RB: Sold out? Went to ride their horsies? They supported McCain.

DS: The thing about McCain that was so weird — there’s a great McCain piece by David Foster Wallace — he was honorable enough to do the right thing —

RB: — once in his life.

DS: But in the worst circumstances. To have his fingers broken and to refuse medication — after all this torture to say, “I’m not the first in line so [other] people should go home before me.” Which is the most noble thing I can imagine. And then to totally sell out, which makes me think if you can stand up to Viet Cong torture but not attack ads, it says something interesting about power.

RB: And that we are more complicated. I think in some twisted way McCain feels entitled because of his war experience. He is convinced of his own nobility and that the rest of it is just politics. And in a way it is just politics.

DS: It is just politics although he did bring Palin onto the national stage. And so if she is the next president we have him to thank.

RB: My son brought home a chart from school in which he was asked to evaluate himself in ten categories and his teacher would also. The point of the exercise was whether the world was better off with you in it. His self-score was 96 and his teacher scored him 89. They were obviously close, but the class participation was scored a 5 by the teacher. I bring this up because how we see ourselves is a fluctuating thing. And I wonder about this when I try to assign a value to a book like yours. If I understand you correctly the people who benefit from this book are people who have had a similar experience.

DS: Most people have had a similar experience — it doesn’t have to be as spectacular. Everyone carries something that they are guilty about.

RB: You’re extending the franchise of this book.

DS: I’m telling the response I have gotten. People that carry something they are guilty about around or feel a grief they don’t know how to express. It’s been more universal than I thought. Which has been nice. It’s strange for a fiction writer. If you write a novel and people email you it’s generally, I liked it or didn’t like it. Not, here’s my terrible story please tell me what you think. I was doing Philadelphia NPR, and they took callers and each call was sadder than the one before. One woman called in saying her son was killed in a car accident and she had never seen grief written about in that way and she thanked me. That was weird since I wasn’t sure that people who lost kids in car accidents were a demographic for the book. And then a guy called in whose daughter was killed in a car accident and his wife was made quadriplegic and he is taking care of his wife now and his daughter is gone. I didn’t know what to say and he asked me if he should reach out to the driver. I said, “I am only a story teller, I don’t know. If it would make you feel better I think you should.” It sounds like Dr. Phil but I didn’t know how to respond.

RB: Well, you wrote the book – need you say anymore? Or what more is there to say?

DS: I don’t think so but these kinds of books open you up to that. Right before I published I heard from A.M. Homes, who wrote a really good memoir, and she said, ”Be prepared. It’s exhausting.” And Dave Eggers who edited the book with me —

RB: He has his own story.

DS: He said you have to prepare yourself. People want to talk to you in a way that they don’t with novels. In a way, it’s better if they don’t meet the novelist because the novel stands as its own thing and meeting the novelist can muddy the feeling you get from the book. But if you are writing about yourself, people want to meet you and talk to you to see if you compare to the you in the book or how you are now after you have written the book. So it’s much more intimate.

RB: With the expectation that you have some expertise.

DS: Surprisingly that’s happened a lot. Maybe I just choose subjects that are arcane. My first book about twins — anytime conjoined twins are separated around the world I would get a call from some reporter asking about conjoined twins. And I would say, I’m a novelist.

RB: The world’s foremost authority —

DS: — on Siamese twins. For my third book, a novel called More Than It Hurts You about Münchausen by proxy where a mother injures a child, I was on Good Morning America talking about Münchausen’s disease with an expert. I kept saying I’m happy to go on TV but I’m no expert on this. But maybe that’s not true — Roth said one of the jobs of the novelist is to be smarter on the page than he is in real life. So I had to become an expert — at least temporarily.

RB: It does also speak to the efficacy of the so-called talking cure.

DS: That’s been one of the moving things. I kept a file with hundreds of emails now and a number of them have said, I haven’t told anyone this. I’ve never met you but I haven’t told my husband or something like that. That’s a validation of the talking cure. I had terrible experiences with therapy. Another reason I wrote the book — to figure out what I think about this. That’s the way I do it. Since I’m a writer, to understand how I see something I write it down. It’s much more effective than therapy — sitting at the computer working my way through something.

RB: People certainly organize their perceptions of the world differently — some effortlessly. To me everyday is a new day, almost like starting over again.

DS: Maybe that’s why people look for help — they don’t know how to organize their lives into stories until they see someone else do it. With this book I stumbled into therapeutic cures that I didn’t know about. Not that the book should be therapy for me. If it’s just therapy for me then I should write it and not publish it. I hope it has value beyond being cathartic for me. In this disorder called complicated grief therapy, which is a fancy way of saying people are sad, the therapy for that is that you are to talk into a tape recorder and say what makes you sad and then play it every night for 16 weeks. It sounds like torture — it’s thought to be effective because you have a tape, a physical object that you can turn off and put away. I didn’t know about it until I was researching the book. But writing the story every day and turning the computer off at night was a version of that therapy. The book is like my tape. And then talking about it to you and on the radio and to crowds at readings is like A.A. — making a public confession. So to me it was a great therapy. You said something about organizing life; my friend David Lipsky was saying anyone who teaches writing by saying you should show and not tell is going to fail. As he put it, “life is showing all the time, what literature does is tell you what that show means.” Movies are a show, life is a show. What books can do is tell in a way the others can’t.

RB: Where do these clichés come from, like “write what you know”? What do you know?

DS: Exactly. It’s bad advice for other reasons too. If you only write what you know, you will never know anything new. That’s the weird thing about our education system — right now in the Army they force you to take classes all the time as an adult. Which makes sense — why only be taught for 16 years of your life and then never be taught anything again? That’s to last you for 70 years. Why is that the method? Why wouldn’t you want to keep learning?

RB: There is some science that holds if you continue to learn that is in fact a benefit to your brain.

DS: Yeah, I read about a study that said you should try to switch things up every week just to keep your mind active without taking a course. Open doors left-handed one week and right-handed the next — just to teach yourself even in the most minor way something new to keep your brain active.

RB: When I drive to places I try to take different routes each time. I leave enough time so I may get lost or just wander around. So when will you be done with this?

DS: I was taking to Dani Shapiro who was nice enough to review the book for the Times. I didn’t know her beforehand, but I thanked her for the review and we got to talking and she was saying memoirs kind of never end. A novel is over when your next novel comes out but people still talk to her about the memoir she wrote ten years ago. Because it’s personal, and you are opening up your closet. We’re a voyeuristic society. I find most memoirs distasteful — it’s strange I ended up writing this. I thought, I will never write about this, I am a novelist. Not only that but I don’t read non-fiction a lot so I would never want to write a memoir. Something about this story was very insistent, asking to be told. I realized in writing the book that I had been writing about this all along. The girl’s parents at her funeral told me, we will never blame you — don’t worry about that. But whatever you do in life you have to live it twice as well because you are living for two people. And then they sued me for millions of dollars after that. After they said they wouldn’t blame me. The important thing from that is I took that very seriously, living for two people. I think that’s why I wrote Chang and Eng. That book deals with how we are different people at once. The end of the book — “this is the end that I have feared since we were a child.” So the “I” and the “we” means they are both one and two people. My second book was about a guy who lives in NYC and becomes an imposter and doesn’t tell anyone about his past. I had this accident in high school, went to college, and then moved to NYC and never told anyone about this. My third book is about a family from the suburbs with a secret that no one knows — I was growing up in the suburbs and had this secret, so obviously this has been informing my writing, in a way I hadn’t realized, forever. I wonder how stark a line it will draw in my fiction.

RB: Have you started the next novel?

DS: I have — I wanted something light after this. We’ll see. Writers often have this one thing they obsess about. Roth seemed to be writing the same book for a time — now he is writing obsessive books about being older. I wonder if my obsessions will change — a lot of writers have their one subject and keep writing around it, circling it. Bellow, no matter where his books were set, wrote about what it means to be a thinking person in a society where thinking people are not valued. And Updike had his pet obsessions — they seemed to be about a good boy being naughty. What does that mean? Bellow also said he didn’t want to go there because he didn’t want to know why he was writing what he was writing. Now I know and I wasn’t Bellow to begin with.

RB: Have been teaching since we last spoke?

DS: I went to Columbia as an adjunct for a while and came back when this new director of the creative writing program [of NYU] Deborah Landau, who amazingly re-energized, not even re-, she energized NYU faculty and brought in a bunch of people. I was lucky to be hired by her. She brought in Junot Díaz and Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer — she brought in this amazing constellation of people. On the poetry side she brought Anne Carson and Charles Simić. It’s an amazing place to work. I have my office there because I can’t work at home — I have three-year-old twin boys. And I go to work and it’s almost stiflingly overwhelming because you know these incredible people are doing incredible work — that’s both energizing and terrifying.

RB: Yeah.

DS: In some ways it’s beneficial to the writing — it forces you to return to first principles all the time. You have to tell students why you think something works and why it doesn’t. It gives voice to your aesthetic in a way that helps you form it. Also, it keeps you open-minded because you are reading people who have a different aesthetic. And you try to help them not by saying how you would write it yourself but try to get them to figure out how to be more successful in what they wanted to do. It can also be stultifying. It’s like when you try to walk up the stairs if you spend the day telling people, ”Well you put one foot in front of the other, and then you lift up your knee and move it forward and put the other foot down.” When you walk the stairs next you will be pretty self-conscious about it. It’s a balancing act.

RB: You use novels in your courses.

DS: In the Crafts classes — I often use books that I think are flawed. I teach Marry Me by Updike which is a good book but not his best.

RB: Glorious failures?

DS: Yeah. I wouldn’t say the book is a failure — but when you see a great writer make mistakes it can be instructive. I teach some all-out masterpieces. I shouldn’t say this but with modern academia you are also expected to have from many different — from both genders and a lot of different ethnic groups. You have to fill those slots.

RB: You feel that is an obligation? Are you conscious of it?

DS: Yes, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing — you want students from all different backgrounds to feel you are not being exclusionary. But I wouldn’t teach an author I don’t like.

RB: Right, it’s not like the choices are limited.

DS: I teach Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith. I like Zadie’s work better.

RB: I wasn’t impressed by Lahiri’s stories. I liked the film of her novel, The Namesake.

DS: Her stories are well-constructed. They are ingenious but they aren’t exciting language-wise.

RB: How well-read are your students?

DS: It varies. A lot of undergrad students are well-read, but I am often shocked at how they are not. A lot of people want to be writers who don’t care about why or how to get there. So when you come across someone who is paying a lot of money to go to grad school and one assumes they are trying to make that their life, it’s very strange to see that they haven’t read that much.

RB: Assuming it is a prerequisite of being a decent writer?

DS: Yes. It’s kind of like saying I want to be a professional baseball player but I don’t watch or practice much baseball. I just want to put on the glove and play. It’s fine if you are doing it as a social activity. When you make a commitment to be a writer then it’s strange you wouldn’t want to learn about it.

RB: Despite the warnings and evidence, your students still aspire to become writers?

DS: Yes, that’s something I feel guilty about in teaching in these programs.

RB: How many students have you had over the last ten years or so?

DS: 30 a year for nine years. Whatever that is.

RB: 270. Of those, how many have published one book?

DS: Two so far. But a lot of them were undergrads and they are not 30 yet. I think more will do that. It’s a good grad class if two or three publish.

RB: And what are the rest doing?

DS: I don’t know. That’s what’s scary about these programs. They are expensive, although NYU is good about giving money and they are working on making it free for everyone. Then I would feel less guilty about it. You can get a lot out of learning how to write and learning to be a reader.

RB: That’s one self-justification of teachers — you get better readers.

DS: Michael Thomas [Man Gone Down] tells all his students that if they are taking these courses to be writers, it’s a bad idea. This will help you become a smarter reader and if you chose to become a writer, good luck.

RB: Being a smarter reader is a great benefit.

DS: It sure is. But the issue is, is it worth the money? NYU is very competitive to get into — 30 fiction students out of about 800 are accepted.

RB: Like the Writer’s Workshop.

DS: Yeah, and once you are in that circle of fire you are expected to get somewhere. Maybe two out of 30 will publish one book and one of those two will have a career. It’s very tough.

RB: To quote Fats Waller, “One never know, do one?”

DS: [laughs]

RB: Thomas hasn’t been heard from since he won the IMPAC award in 2007.

DS: That was recently. He teaches at Hunter.

RB: That’s an interesting place. They have —

DS: — Peter Carey —

RB: — Colum McCann.

DS: A small department [Tom Sleigh and Gabriel Packard]. McCann won the National Book Award last year and Peter was nominated this year and they are both really, really good.

RB: McCann is Mr. Exuberant.

DS: He really lives up to the image of the Irish raconteur, try to go out drinking with him and you won’t make it home. A great writer. Peter, too. He was a teacher of mine at NYU. It ended up working out for me, but when students ask if should they get an MFA I never give an unqualified yes.

RB: If someone asked me I’d ask, what are the choices? Go into plastic.

DS: I did a reading with Jennifer Egan and she hasn’t gotten her [MFA] and she wondered if she missed out. It hasn’t hurt her. She is having a good career. I tell students if they need the time to write and have people read their stuff then it’s great. I was talking to someone taking a course from Oscar Hijuelos, and he was considered the worst one in the class and the teacher was hard on him saying he shouldn’t be a writer and then something switched and one day he came in with the beginning of his first book and he was great all of a sudden. There shouldn’t be anyone who is an arbiter, saying you can’t write because sometimes it takes people a while.

RB: Isn’t it the same with editors and buying books? Think of all the stories about writers who have gotten 20 to 30 rejections and then one editor says, “Yeah” and they are off.

DS: Proust had to self-publish the first volume of Remembrances of Things Past. One of the things that’s great about him is that everyone said his sentences are too long, that’s why we can’t publish him, [both laugh] so at the beginning of the second book, the sentence is one of the longest in the entire book. What a great fuck you.

RB: It’s fascinating that these literary chats are an attempt to regularize an exploding array of characters and stories. It seems like an untameable beast. As we talk here, what are we explaining or clarifying? The best stuff is maybe what we can’t explain.

DS: That’s true. Writing can be taught to a degree. The best thing it can do is save you years of self-discovery — which may not be a good thing. Maybe you should learn on your own. You can teach people tricks you have learned from reading but obviously you can’t teach talent. Maybe you can help students achieve the maximum from their talent.

RB: Talent can be overrated. There’s something to be said for perseverance.

DS: Lethem who taught at NYU said this to me once: talent was kind of meaningless. Whether you publish or write good books it’s the people who keep trying, keep trying. There’s that Malcolm Gladwell theory — which sounds kind of glib — 10,000 hours at something will make you great at it. I don’t know where that number comes from but it’s probably true. If you sit in the chair for 10,000 hours and that translates over four or five hours a day for eight years, six, seven days a week —

RB: Well, that’s from the outside, from an external observer. Our sense of that time must be indescribably different.

DS: The first 7- or 8,000 hours are fumbling around being terrible — people who are talented might not progress because they are too embarrassed to do the apprentice period. They can’t allow themselves to be bad.

RB: Or someone tells them they are crap and they believe it.

DS: Or someone tells them they are great and they believe it. You really have to get in there in those hours whatever the magic number is, and force yourself to work hard. When I was a grad student it wasn’t the most talented people who moved on — it was the people who could take their first draft and make it a second draft. For example everyone at that level can do a pretty good first draft. It’s people who listen to criticism and say, “Fuck that, I’m good enough” who don’t go on to make a good first draft into a great second draft.

RB: Writing fiction must be about delayed satisfactions — writers take five, eight, twelve years to finish a novel.

DS: The problem with Foer and Zadie Smith being as good as they are – and I think they are both really good writers and I’ve heard they are good teachers – they are dangerous examples because of their early success.

RB: Don’t try this at home, kids.

DS: Exactly.

RB: There seems to be an attitude about Foer in the literary world. Have you noticed that? Jealousy?

DS: Yeah.

RB: In addition to the normal quotient of anti-Semitism? [laughs]

DS: I ran into Jonathan Wilson, a professor of mine, and he was planning on giving talks on new takes on anti-Semitism. I asked, what was he going say? He said, “It exists.” [laughs] If there is bad feeling toward Jonathan [Foer] it’s because he has outsized success. That’s hard for people to take. I’m sure a lot of the anti-Franzen griping is the same thing. You make the cover of Time and people will grumble — that’s the way it is.

RB: I remember getting into it with a writer when they retracted a review of Foer’s second novel and came up with a negative one.

DS: I hate when people retract reviews. My first book was badly reviewed in the Washington Post for what I thought were silly reasons. The reviewer didn’t like three things about the book — I named certain characters after my friends (I thanked friends in the afterword) and very minor characters had similar names. The reviewer asked, “Is he playing games or writing a serious book?” I thought, well why are those things in opposition? Second, how am I as a white male in the 20th century qualified to write about Asians in the 19th century? And third, she claimed five words I used were not in currency in the 1800s. She was wrong about that. Those words were found in Shakespeare. I was really pissed off. I was doing an interview somewhere and this reviewer who is also a novelist was there also, doing an interview. And they said such and such is here, she wants to meet you. I said that’s okay and I sneaked out the back.

RB: [laughs]

DS: And she came around and ran into me in the parking lot. She said, “Hey I am so-and-so and I gave your book a bad review.” I said, “Yeah, I remember.” She said, “I’m really sorry I kind of liked the book. I was in a bad mood and my husband is Asian, and I thought I should say something about that.” I thought it was crappy she liked the book —she was entitled to her opinion but to apologize for it was even worse.

RB: Do you write reviews?

DS: I wrote a few that I regret — not that the book was good. It’s not good karma to write negative reviews. I am going to stop doing it. I wrote a good review of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, which I thought was a good book — that was fun.

RB: As I have said many times, I think book reviewing, especially in newspapers, is a degraded enterprise.

DS: [Martin] Amis has a great quote about that. He said something like, “Reviews are the only forum where the practitioner is working in the exact same mode as the art itself but generally doing it less well.” You don’t have movie critics making a movie about the subject of their reviews. So yeah, I think it’s degraded. There was a recent review of Roth where the reviewer wrote, “I never read any Roth until this book was assigned. I dismissed him without thinking about it.” This is Philip Roth, maybe the greatest living American writer. Not having read Roth, having dismissed him, shouldn’t that disqualify the reviewer?

RB: I recently reviewed the new Cynthia Ozick and according to the dust jacket it was an homage and reworking of Henry James’ The Ambassadors. I hadn’t read that book. It bothered me that other than an epigram from The Ambassadors, I had no clue of anything Jamesian. I see that quite often, that certain stories are tied to an older work. Why tell the reader — if they are familiar with the referred-to book they should recognize it and if not they should not be distracted?

DS: On Beauty is supposed to be an homage to an E.M. Forster book, which I never read. But I liked Smith’s book. It might be a way to spark your imagination. Doctorow’s Ragtime’s plot was lifted from a 19th century novella by Kleist.

RB: And you know this, how?

DS: I took a class from him and he said so.

RB: But was it on the dust jacket?

DS: No.

RB: Does it improve your enjoyment of Ragtime? What does it do for the reader if he knows?

DS: It’s a way of coming clean. Lifting plots is as old as Shakespeare but now people are so afraid of even the whiff of plagiarism they feel if they are upfront about it it’s okay. It’s okay whether you own up to it or not because there are only 36 stories out there anyway, and certainly Zadie and Doctorow made something new. But I don’t know why people feel that compunction to own up to stuff. This is something that I have noticed that’s new — even novels are listing all the books used for research. But why bother, it’s a novel.

RB: Over the weekend I read a book that very much resembles [Cormac] McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men — an unstoppable psychopathic killer searching for the protagonist — even when that came to mind I wasn’t put off because the writing was crisp and propulsive. But I could already imagine reviewers taking the author to task for lack of originality.

DS: When I said there were 36 plots, that’s based on this crazy French book called The 36 Dramatic Situations — the author, Georges Polti, spent his life doing a scientific study of writing and came up with the fact that there are only 36 possible stories and there is a wide berth within those. Number 1 is revenge and number 1A is revenge, father against son. You know there is a limited scope within which to work, so what? Why not do what Shakespeare did and use famous stories? There is something energizing about having every plot and format to work with.

RB: Do you ever think about what you would have done if your writing hadn’t panned out?

DS: Oh wow! Well, when I was a kid I thought I might be a lawyer —

RB: — and then you were sued —

DS: — and then I was so turned off by the lawsuit — I wasn’t angry with the parents, they had just lost their daughter and were very vulnerable. But I was certainly angry with the lawyer — he knew they had no case and he actually screwed them over because he told them they could make millions. But they ended up getting the most nominal sum from the insurance company just to make them go away. Which they could have gotten at the outset. And so they had to take five years of legal fees out of that. So they received almost nothing. It was just awful. The police said I wasn’t at fault, five witnesses said I wasn’t at fault. He tried to say I was drunk — 10 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday. Then he tried to say that the policeman who said I wasn’t drunk, was drunk.

RB: [laughs]

DS: It was just an awful experience, dragging me through the mud. And so I thought I am not going to be a lawyer, that’s an awful thing. But I don’t know what I would have done. I don’t know that I could do anything else, so it’s hard to say.

RB: Sold insurance?

DS: I could have done something like that.

RB: A trader or speculator?

DS: That might have been more satisfying. Writing is great in so many ways — being your own boss —

RB: As Shaw said, you don’t have to dress up.

DS: Yeah, so in all the obvious ways it’s great. It is also a job where you are never not working. So I kind of envy those people who are 9 to 5.

RB: How much has your writer life changed now that you are a writer dad?

DS: A lot. The book is short —

RB: [laughs]

DS: The book is short. I started it when my kids were one — to have one-year-old twins in the house means all hands on deck.

RB: One of the challenges of journalism is to write within a word limit.

DS: Thank you so much for having me back.

RB: My pleasure.

Image credit: Robert Birnbaum