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A conversation with Chris Bohjalian about his gripping new novel, Secrets of Eden, is sprinkled with unexpected observations and self-revelations.

“Here’s a strange confession,” Bohjalian says good-humoredly during a call to his home in the small town of Lincoln, Vermont, where he lives with his wife and teenage daughter. “The better one of my books is, the less time it takes to write. The books that have taken the longest time to write and that I’ve really struggled over aren’t necessarily the books that I think are my better books. There are some real clunkers in that batch.”

“I’m interested in seeing what happens to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.”

Then, describing his workspace—the library in his “1898 Victorian village house”—Bohjalian says, “The library sits at the corner of the house and juts out ever so much, with southern, eastern and northern exposures. So I can watch the sun rise over Mount Abraham—I start writing usually at 5 or 6 in the morning—and I can chart the progress of my day and the progress of the book by where the sun is and where it hits my desk. As you can imagine, there are lots of books, piles of books, shelves of books. But it’s pretty neat. I’m obsessive-compulsive about neatness. I need to have nothing on the floor as I’m working, and the desk needs to be pretty clean.” He adds, “I think tidiness is overrated. I wish I could get over my clean-freakness.”

But maybe, just maybe, Bohjalian’s “clean-freakness,” is what underlies the clear, clean prose, meticulous research and vivid descriptions that are characteristic of all of his novels, and are particularly evident in Secrets of Eden.

This latest story—a mystery that does not at first appear to be a mystery—unfolds through the overlapping perspectives of four central characters. There is the Reverend Stephen Drew, a small-town minister who suffers a crisis of faith when a parishioner, Alice Hayward, is killed by her husband in an apparent murder-suicide just hours after he has baptized her. There is Catherine Benincasa, the state’s attorney, who is not so sure the crime before her is a murder-suicide and is also not so sure that the good Reverend Drew, who appears distant and cold, is not in some way complicit. There is Heather Laurent, author of best-selling spiritual books about angels who is drawn to the tormented Reverend Drew and whose own parents died in a murder-suicide after years of spousal abuse. And there is Katie Hayward, the teenage daughter of Alice and George Hayward, and longtime witness to—and a collateral victim of—her father’s abuse of her mother.

Actually, as Bohjalian reminds the caller, there is a fifth perspective in the book. “The first character that appeared to me is a character who appears in the novel only through her diary. That is Alice Hayward. The diary was really important for me because I wanted Alice to have a voice, even though the book begins with her death.”

Though he did not know it then, the seed for Secrets of Eden, Bohjalian says, was planted back when he was researching his novel The Law of Similars (1998) and a victims’ rights advocate he was interviewing “reached into her folder and tossed onto the table between us two Polaroid photographs. The Polaroids were of head indentations in sheetrock. The advocate was trying to help a woman extricate herself from a violently abusive relationship. The photographs stayed with me a long time,” Bohjalian says. Then after the publication of The Double Bind in 2007, dozens of women from across the country wrote him about his portrayal of the violent attack on his character Laurel Estabrook, wanting to know how he heard the details of their personal stories. “Violence against women in this country is absolutely epidemic,” Bohjalian observes. “I thought about those images of head indentations in sheetrock and wondered if there might be a novel in that subject.” He decided there was.

So Bohjalian interviewed victims’ rights advocates and victims of abuse. He “spent a good deal of time” with his good friend and pastor, to whom the book is dedicated, discussing crises of faith and pastoral counseling of women victims of spousal abuse. He asked his teenage daughter to read and critique a draft of the book, especially the section about 15-year-old Katie Hayward. “One of her notes,” he says, “was, ‘I don’t talk like this, and I don’t have any friends who talk like this.’ . . . My wife is also a spectacular editor and is the most honest reader I have. I’ve also been lucky to have the same editor, Shaye Areheart, since 1995. So I have two generations of very smart women preventing me from shooting myself in the foot.”

In conceptualizing his story, Bohjalian also drew on deep personal experiences. “My parents didn’t have nearly as horrible a marriage as Heather Laurent’s parents, but a lot of the fights described in the book were just pulled from my own childhood,” he says. “All of my books have got strange unexpected autobiographic minutiae. [For example] there is a lot of me in Stephen Drew. Of all the first-person voices I’ve done over the years I think his might be the most me—that juxtaposition of faith and cynicism. Certainly I love my church and my fellow parishioners, but I can’t tell you how many Sunday mornings over the years I’ve sat there in the pew thinking to myself, oh, suck it up and stop whining, for crying out loud.”

From this unexpected mix of personal experiences and careful research, there emerges a novel with resonant psychological and social implications. “I don’t know that I think of myself as a social novelist,” Bohjalian says, “but there’s a component to my work that involves an important nonfiction issue. That doesn’t mean that my books are polemics or op-eds. I’m interested in seeing what happens to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. But what I hope I’m doing first and foremost is giving a reader a ripping good yarn, a book that makes them want to frenetically turn the pages. I’m interested in a good story, and if that story is grounded in a social issue, then all the better.”

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

While reading any Jasper Fforde novel, the rule of thumb is to expect the unexpected. In his eighth novel, Shades of Grey, the British master of devilish plots and ingenious wordplay proves that rule once again.

Shades of Grey catapults readers into a weird new world where we are all made strangers in a strange land. The novel takes place in the distant future, one in which humans are pretty much the same as they have always been, but with one crucial difference: rather than being able to see the entire spectrum, individuals can only see one color, and the color you can see foretells your destiny. If you’re lucky enough to see Purple, you’re royalty, sitting at the very top of the social order. Just hope you see something other than Grey, which is so low a social standing, you may as well be kneeling.

Eddie Russet, the novel’s unlikely hero, has it slightly better. He’s a Red—just one level above Grey in the grand scheme of things—but a very good Red. He hopes that upon coming of age and taking his Ishihara (the test which determines just how much vision you have of a particular color), he’ll have enough Red vision to qualify for a job working for National Color, the highest governing agency in Eddie’s world. All this changes, however, when he’s sent to East Carmine due to bad behavior and finds himself falling madly in love with a surly serving girl named Jane Grey.

Desperate to win Jane’s friendship, Eddie goes out of his way to impress her every chance he gets. Under her guidance, he begins to push boundaries, and even worse, to question the world around him. Eddie starts to realize that the world may not be quite as rosy as he had previously believed. Sometimes ignorance truly is bliss.

Apart from his dazzling Red abilities, there isn’t much that’s extraordinary about Eddie, but according to Fforde, it’s Eddie’s utter unremarkable-ness that makes his story so important.

“I didn’t want to make him too special,” Fforde muses, speaking from his home in Wales. “When you look at great conflicts like the World Wars, the most interesting characters for me are not the frontline heroes who have been born into a ruler society and could make things happen there, but the people who are basically lower middle class. I think it’s far more interesting for someone like Eddie because he’s only a notch above Grey, so he’s really quite low down, and it would be very, very easy for him to do nothing. And I think that’s really important, because the most extraordinary heroes, I think, of any great conflict or any huge sort of social upheaval are the people who could have done nothing and it would have been okay, and no one would have held it against them.”

Of course, those who have even a passing familiarity with Fforde’s other books know that social satire cloaked in the extraordinary is his bread and butter—his first series features a literary detective, Thursday Next, who can enter works of fiction and frequently goes up against a mega-conglomerate named Goliath that seeks to control the entire world.

Comparing the new series in scope to his previous works, Fforde remarks, “In Shades of Grey, I wasn’t trying to get too serious, because it’s not really a serious book at all.” He continues, “The Thursday series or the Nursery Crime series, they’re kind of silly whimsical books.”

Still, these so-called “whimsical” novels often have a darker tone. Fforde explains that his fiction is all about “being outside of that comfortable area, and tackling the things you don’t really like to write about.”

He says, “With Shades of Grey, I try to start off the book with a slightly Utopian feel, but an uneasy one, so that you might say, ‘Okay, this is not terrific, but maybe it’s the best we can get,’ but then of course as the story progresses, we realize there is a much darker side to this. Also, when you’re creating a story that you want to progress into an adventure story, you’ve got to have a fantastically good baddie, and you have to make things pretty bad for your characters to try to battle against.”

Even if he may have “inadvertently written a serious book,” Fforde is still Fforde here. Shades of Grey is fantastically funny in all the ways Fforde fans have come to anticipate. “Mostly it’s about trying to make the words dance a bit on the page,” he explains. “I think comedy is so important. I think there are so many serious books out there that are not real books because they don’t have comedy in them. Even in the darkest times of human endurance, there will always be comedy.”

All laughing matters aside, with Shades of Grey, it’s obvious that Fforde is breaking new ground. Perhaps the biggest change here is that for the first time, rather than borrowing from pre-existing literature, Fforde created all of his characters and the entire world from scratch. This was a crucial step for him as an author.

“No one will argue when I say it’s a departure,” he says, “but I think it’s a very necessary departure. I think authors have to stretch themselves from time to time to avoid becoming stale. I’ve been stealing other people’s characters for seven books now, and there’s a huge amount of fun to be had there, but it’s not something that can be mined forever, so you have to move either on or sideways or back, but you have to keep moving or else it all goes nasty.”

Is he worried that this departure may leave some fans behind? Fforde acknowledges that he’s taking a risk with his new book, but also says, “Writing without risk is not writing, as far as I’m concerned. . . . Although Shades of Grey is a very different idea from my previous works, I’m hoping people will read it and say, ‘Yeah, it’s not Thursday but it’s definitely a Jasper book.’ ”

A novel containing adventure, romance and a conspiracy involving missing spoons? Even with Thursday Next nowhere in sight, readers will be hard pressed to categorize Shades of Grey as anything other than a “Jasper book”!

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Read a review of Shades of Grey.

When Louise Erdrich finished writing The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, she went back and read through the works of William Faulkner. "I do that every so often," Erdrich says during a call to her home in Minnesota. "And I always dip into Proust. And then I dip out of Proust."

This makes sense, in a literary sort of way. To immerse oneself in the most luminous of the novels in Erdrich’s Dakota cycle—Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988) and, now, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse—is, in some ways, to plunge into a Proustian stream, where time flows backward as easily as it flows forward. Even more to the point, over the years, any number of reviewers have seen parallels between Erdrich’s creation in novel after novel of a mythical Ojibwe Indian reservation and its environs near the Minnesota-North Dakota border, and Faulkner’s creation of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

"I’ve finally figured out that I’m just working on one long novel," Erdrich says in response to a question about the layers of legend and meaning that accumulate with each new novel. "I think it is useful to have read the other books. But I try very hard to make each book its own book. It is its own book. But they all connect in some way."

Those connections are strong in The Last Report. Ostensibly, the action of the novel revolves around the investigation of the possible sainthood of Sister Leopolda, who had been a nun at the reservation mission. Leopolda has been credited with a host of miracles and the Vatican has sent a priest to conduct the inquiry into these claims. Among the skeptics is ancient Father Damien Modeste, who has quietly ministered to the spiritual needs of the reservation’s inhabitants for more than 80 years. Through this priest’s memories, we see a number of the familiar events and characters from prior books, but in a new light. More importantly, we see Father Damien, who has been more or less part of the background in the previous books. In fact, The Last Report becomes the story of Father Damien, and Erdrich tells this story with the same immensely satisfying mix of humor and pathos, legend and dream, wisdom and poetry that typifies the best of her novels.

According to Erdrich, The Last Report was one of the hardest novels she has ever written. First, it presented the usual problem of keeping characters and events consistent with the earlier novels ("I have a wonderful editor named Trent Duffy. When the manuscript first goes to him, I’ve always made some major error, usually having to do with who was around when and what they were doing. He keeps a file on every character and he’s got a very sharp eye."). Second, her ambitions for the book were large. "I wanted it to be written at the level of a poem. And yet I wanted it to be coherent and have the complexity that it needed. It was hard for me to get there. I threw out huge amounts of paper. I kept the recyclers in business. I think coming to terms with the subject was difficult. And finding out how to end it was hard, too."

Despite difficulties with the composition of this novel, little seems to keep Erdrich from tapping into an incredibly rich river of story. After growing up in North Dakota where her German-American father and Ojibwe mother taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school, Erdrich went east to attend Dartmouth. She was just 28 when Love Medicine was published; the book became a surprise bestseller and captured the National Book Critics Circle Award as best work of fiction. Not even the devastating suicide in 1997 of her former husband and long-time collaborator, Michael Dorris, seems to have dammed her creative flow. Since then she has published two novels, a children’s book, short stories and poems. She has also rebuilt her life and opened a bookstore with her sister. As we converse by phone, she coddles the newest addition to her family, a four-month-old baby.

But Erdrich’s concern at the moment is how The Last Report is understood. In the novel’s first chapter a young woman named Agnes DeWitt encounters Father Damien, a Catholic priest en route to an Indian mission. When he drowns in a flood, Agnes has a direct experience of God and decides to assume the priest’s identity. The fact that Father Damien is actually a woman in disguise will surprise readers of Erdrich’s earlier work.

"I didn’t want [the book] just to be about this revelation that this priest was a woman," Erdrich says. "That really wasn’t the point of it. That’s why from the first chapter, this is not a secret from the reader. I don’t want the book to be about gender politics or even about church politics. That’s in there, of course. It’s implicit in choosing what the book would be about. But I most wanted it to be about this very human choice that she made and how that choice shaped a life. I also wanted it to be about a priest who is in many ways converted by those who he/she has come to convert."

The character thinks and behaves as Father Damien during the day and in public and as Agnes in private and at night. Erdrich says she developed a set of rules to determine when the character would react as Agnes and when he would react as Father Damien, not merely as a mechanical exercise but to further her exploration of the complexity of human identity. "That is a consistent question for me," she says. "I like addressing the mystery of identity, probably because I have a variety of identities of my own."

Erdrich says the question of Father Damien’s identity evolved as she wrote the book. "I wrote the first chapter and I really didn’t know until writing the very end of the chapter that this priest was a woman," she says. "It was one of those situations where a character surprises you. When I went back to look at the description of Father Damien in Tracks, I realized that I had really written a rather gender neutral person and that this was somehow there all along. These books have really always come up with surprises for me, yet when I have found out something new about a character, it has almost always been consistent with previous descriptions. So it seems to me there is some unity that underlies it all that I am capable of somehow tapping into."

Agnes/Father Damien eventually abandons rigid church dogma and dispenses love and forgiveness to all comers. In a mysterious and moving scene near the end of the novel, Agnes/ Father Damien at least temporarily defeats Death, who comes to her in her sleep, by recalling all the people she/he has been able to forgive since coming to the reservation.

"Most of my books are about revenge," Erdrich says. "So it’s interesting to write forgiveness into a book. I think forgiveness is a lot tougher than I’ve had the grace to understand."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

If the extraordinarily gifted writer Allegra Goodman is pursued by demons, they must be sprites of comedy rather than the harpies of despair, which haunt so many other novelists. Goodman is effervescent during a call to her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She laughs frequently and heartily.

She seems as surprised and delighted as any common reader by the antics of Sharon Spiegelman, the plucky heroine of her second novel, Paradise Park. "Sharon is certainly a flawed character," Goodman admits during a serious moment, "but she's also a fascinating one. A very vibrant and very human one. She's someone I enjoyed spending time with." Many readers will enjoy spending time with Sharon, too.

Jilted on a trip to Hawaii by her 35-year-old graduate student boyfriend and folk-dancing partner, the 20-year-old Sharon sits in a hotel room surrounded by her few worldly possessions and wonders, "Why were all his harebrained schemes so important? I mean, what about my journey, and my odyssey?" And with that, she cuts her losses, sells her return ticket to the mainland and embarks on one of the most memorably comic spiritual quests in contemporary fiction.

This is the early 1970s, and Sharon is very much a child of the era. She goes through a back-to-the-land phase, growing pot with her Hawaiian boyfriend in the wilds of Molokai until his family summons the dutiful boy home. She finds Jesus and becomes born-again. When that doesn't quite work out, she enters a Tibetan monastery, where she eventually muses to herself, "You've achieved some real peacefulness and had some awesome spacious days, but that time has passed and it's too bad, 'cause you still need so much more teaching, but until you can get yourself and all your inner voices to shut up again, that isn't going to happen." She studies religion at the university. She helps out at a self-help seminar for couples. But somehow none of the revelations and epiphanies ever fully takes hold. As Goodman says, laughing, "Sharon is not always completely grounded in reality. She is in touch with her flighty, spiritual side."

Goodman, who grew up in Hawaii but was "a little girl in the 1970s," gets so much of the language and attitude of the era right, and uses it to such hilarious effect, that one can only marvel. 

Much of the humor of Paradise Park arises from Sharon's loopily sincere way of thinking and expressing herself. According to Goodman, it was imagining—or hearing—Sharon's voice that triggered the book. "It was a really powerful voice, and I wanted to develop it and see how far I could go with it. I really enjoyed writing in the first person for an extended length of time. I often felt that she was sort of telling the story and I was writing it down. It's a wonderful, liberating feeling to let go like that."

Goodman adds, "In some very basic way, the book is a coming of age story. It's about somebody who really grows up. The lightning bolt, the road to Damascus experience is part of our culture and part of our therapeutic culture as well. You have to 'hit bottom,' you have to 'be inspired.' We have so many expressions for this. Sharon is trained to look for these things. But the reality is these experiences don't always take."

"You can have a transformative experience, but you still have the same problems. You wake up the next morning and you're still the same person," Goodman points out. "I was fascinated by the idea that there are some parts of your identity that stay the same no matter what. The book takes place over 20 years, but Sharon is still Sharon at the end of the book. She's really blossomed in many ways, but she's still Sharon. What changes and what stays the same and how those things work together, all of that really fascinated me."

Goodman says she was also interested in the genre of confessional writing, first introduced by St. Augustine in his Confessions. "The ironic thing is that Paradise Park is a confessional in an age where we've sort of gone past confessionals, in an age where the idea of sin isn't really very strong in someone like Sharon, who forgives herself for everything. Sharon has the form of the confessional, the memory, the journey, without the consequences that Augustine had. However, the intensity and the immediacy of her desire is still there, as it was with Augustine."

Eventually, Sharon begins exploring her Jewish heritage. She is drawn progressively toward stricter, traditional practices, ending up for a while in a closed community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where she meets and falls in love with a musician named Mikhail.

"I find the appeal of tradition to people in the modern world very interesting," Goodman says by way of explanation. "I enjoyed trying to show the attraction this incredibly traditional, closed, very, very structured way of life would have for somebody like Sharon. My hope is that by the time you get to that point in the book, you can see why she's running toward it, having played out this end game of all her choices and her many identities. But then again, she's still Sharon, she's still got that wild heart beating inside of her; she still needs to be her own woman."

And Sharon being Sharon, Paradise Park finally resolves itself in unexpected ways, which Goodman hopes will give the reader as much pleasure as it obviously gave her.

"The reader is always in my mind when I'm writing, Goodman says. "I don't visualize actual faces, but—this is going to sound really weird—to me the act of writing is like a performance. I wake up and I have my notes, and it's almost like going up in front of a room full of people and extemporizing a speech. That's what it was like to write this book. That's what it has been like for all of my books. I sit there with the reader in my imagination. There is a sort of improvisational thing that goes on where I'm laughing and I'm imagining the reader is laughing, if it's funny. Or I'm sitting there and feeling sad. Feeling it. Hearing the voice, seeing the hand motions, feeling the whole thing as if I'm acting out the book. That's very much the way this book is. It's really alive for me. If I don't have that living, tactile, improvisatory experience when I'm writing it, then it's not working."

In Paradise Park, it was definitely working.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

In The Millionaires, his remarkable—and very timely—third novel, Inman Majors explores a banker’s impulse to make lots of money, no matter the risks. Following Swimming in Sky and Wonderdog—each of which could accurately be called a coming-of-age novel, though in very different ways—Majors has now written an incontrovertibly grown-up book. At 480 pages, The Millionaires is almost as long as the first two novels combined, and the story of two small-town brothers who rise to dangerous big-city heights is as big and ambitious as the physical book itself.

As the novel opens, Roland Cole, a former Tennessee farm boy, is running for governor of his home state. Roland has no political experience, but he and his brother J.T. have turned their father’s tiny small-town bank into a state-wide banking empire, and they can afford to hire Mike Teague, a former lobbyist and veteran political consultant, to help them channel into politics their growing ambition.

Rolling out over the next five years according to the structure of a de casibus tragedy, The Millionaires tells the tale of the rise and fall of great men. Along the way, and without distracting from his page-turning plot, Majors also manages to explore the collision of the old and new South, as well as the eternal conflict between duty and drive, love and desire, self-respect and desperation, and countless smaller warring impulses in human nature. BookPage caught up with Inman Majors to discuss his big book.

Your last book, Wonderdog, is a comic novel about a moorless young man that takes place against a Southern political backdrop. Is it fair to say that The Millionaires is a more serious exploration of some of the same themes?

Absolutely. My father was a longtime lobbyist in Nashville, so I’ve spent a lot of time in and around the political arena. When I was young, Dad would take me out of school for a few days each year so I could hang out with him down at the legislature and see how the political process worked. I didn’t realize I was taking notes for future books at the time, but I guess I was.
 
The protagonists in this novel are ambitious, and they’re driven as much by the urge to win, to be triumphant, as by any winning prize: “Some folks are lucky to be satisfied with what they have,” Roland Cole tells Teague. “Men like us, though, we want to be in the game.” Are men like Teague and the Coles more interesting to write about than folks who are satisfied with what they have?

Ambitious people take more risks. They win bigger and lose harder, and the tension between success and failure makes for interesting characters. In my real life, I’d rather hang out with the solid, steady type. But when I’m at the computer, I’ll take the edgy, daring folks every time.
 
Mike Teague leaves his job as a high-school history teacher, he says, because “the bureaucracy and behind-the-scenes politics proved beyond trifling, beyond exasperating.” Are you suggesting that it’s impossible for human beings to escape politics, even when they’re far removed from government?

I was actually suggesting that school department meetings are Dante’s final ring of hell. No, seriously, you got what I was after. Teague realizes that you can’t escape politics in any walk of life—youth sports, church choirs, etc. There are always going to be people maneuvering to do things the way they want. So Teague decides that life is politics; he might as well play at a high level and be paid accordingly.
 
You write from the point of view of dozens of characters in this book—not just the protagonists, but virtually everyone who makes an appearance: gravediggers, farmers, grandmothers, waiters, wives, mistresses, etc. Did you find it hard to speak in so many different voices as you were writing?

I think it was Faulkner who said that all writers are frustrated actors. So I loved waking up each morning and putting on a different character’s outfit each day. I will say that my wife preferred my gravedigger attire to the scanty number I donned for the waitress.
 
“Bankers weren’t supposed to be wildcatters,” J.T. Cole observes after a vast savings-and-loan operation is closed in a sting. As you were writing this book, did you have any inkling that the S&L scandals of the 1980s would be replayed in another banking crisis just as The Millionaires hit bookstores?
 
I, and my 401K, had absolutely no idea the book would be timed with the current financial crisis. The good news is The Millionaires is really topical right now. The bad news is everyone’s too broke to buy a book.  
 

Margaret Renkl is the former books editor for the Nashville Scene.