All Interviews

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

James Lee Burke

Two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke’s  latest novel, Rain Gods, finds the crime master at the top of his game. Burke, best known as the author of numerous books starring his Southern sleuths Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland, has also crafted other works of fiction that transcend the mystery genre, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Lost Get-Back Boogie. Burke is that rare thriller writer who can combine gritty plotting with colorful characters and poetic descriptions of physical settings, while also managing to neatly circumscribe the action with a noirish sense of the sociopolitical American landscape.

Rain Gods is set into motion when the dead bodies of nine young Thai women—human “mules” in a heroin smuggling scheme—are discovered in a remote South Texas churchyard. Sheriff Hackberry Holland—Korean War vet, former ACLU lawyer, and reformed drinker and contrite ex-womanizer—takes on the investigation, which reaches into many sleazy worlds but mainly pits him against a formidable yet strangely compelling madman named Preacher Collins. The strong narrative offers a starkly realized Texas backdrop with occasional echoes of his beloved Louisiana, a healthy amount of violence and suspense, and a continuously intriguing whodunit feel that will satisfy his many fans. Burke took the time to answer a few questions about the new novel from his home in Montana.

Your protagonist, Sheriff Hackberry Holland, is 74, has chronic back pain, night terrors about his Korean War POW experience, has sworn off drink, and now doggedly chases bad guys in a wide-open—some might say godforsaken—Texas landscape. What inspired you to develop this character, and can we expect to see him as the star of future novels?
Hack first appears in my work in three short stories contained in the collection titled The Convict. He is also the narrator of my third published novel, Lay Down my Sword and Shield. I think he's one of most intriguing characters I have written about, and I suspect I will be writing more about him as well as the rest of the Holland family.

In the course of Rain Gods, it is suggested that Holland and his nemesis, Preacher Collins, are “two sides of the same coin.” Does either one bear any resemblance to the coin that is James Lee Burke?
My own life is an enormous yawn. I think that's the reason I'm often invited to speak before groups of insomniacs.

Two current events are referenced in Rain Gods that seem crucial to the narrative and character development: Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. How do you think these events have affected American society?
The antagonist in the novel is a man known as Preacher Jack Collins. He's narcissistic, messianic, and convinced that he is the left hand of god. Needless to say, he's an extremely dangerous man. The novel has many symbolic overtones. We live in a time when men who in my view are absolutely ruthless have hijacked Christianity and used it for their own agenda.

With its South Texas setting, Rain Gods automatically conjures a strong sense of border politics and the issue of Hispanic immigration. Holland’s investigation directly—and often uneasily—involves the FBI and ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Do you have a personal view on the immigration issue or any cynicism regarding the related work of federal agencies?
I think the people who serve in federal law enforcement do the best they can with what they have. I used to work for the United States Forest Service and the Job Corps, and I was always impressed with the quality of men and women who serve our government. I think the immigration difficulties we are experiencing today are directly related to our policies in Latin America, and also the wish on the part of many business interests to see an end to labor unions.

Your treatment of women in Rain Gods might be viewed as extreme. Juxtaposed with the dead Thai drug mules and strippers and escorts are tremendously strong figures like Holland’s devoted deputy Pam Tibbs, the defiantly combative strip-club owner’s wife Esther Dolan and the feisty country singer Vicki Gaddis.
The three women you mention are among the strongest characters in my work. The victims of the sex trade are not dealt with individually because they are not central players in the story. However, my experience has been, as Orwell once said, that people are always much better than we think they are, no matter what roles they occupy.

Deputy Tibbs, though young enough to be Holland’s daughter, has romantic designs on him. The age difference bothers him, yet we’re tantalizingly left hanging about exactly what happens between the two of them. Any hints about what happens between the two of them?
I never know what lies next in the story. I believe the story is written in the unconscious and the artist is its incremental discoverer rather than its creator. At least, that is the way it has always been for me.

Three of your previous books—In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, Two for Texas and Heaven's Prisoners—have been adapted for the screen, and Rain Gods would also seem to be a logical candidate for a film. Have you been satisfied with Hollywood’s treatment of your work?
My experience with the film industry has always been a good one. In each instance, the creative people involved in the project treated the work with respect and did the best job they could. A writer shouldn't ask for more.

You’ve been referred to as “a Faulkner of crime writing.” How do you feel about that designation? And, since you began your career as a writer of “serious” fiction, has your work in the crime genre fulfilled your literary ambitions?
The comparison with William Faulker is very complimentary, but Faulkner's work is on a level with the work of Shakespeare and Chaucer and Homer and Keats. The only change that has taken place in my work is the fact that with the writing of The Neon Rain, some of my novels were narrated by a police officer, namely Dave Robicheaux. The themes, the settings, the type of people I write about are the same as the ones we encounter in my first novel, Half of Paradise.

Rain Gods is chock-full of details on myriad topics—the Korean War, the drug trade, seedy night clubs, firearms, federal law enforcement, all manner of Texas geography and flora and fauna, etc. How much research do you do, or is it all second nature by now?
I do little if any research. Most of the people I write about are composites of people I have known. Hemingway once said that once the author knows his characters, he can place them in any setting or era he wishes.

Holland’s antagonists in Rain Gods are a motley bunch of lowlifes, all fit for a Tarantino film. Have you known many people like this in the course of your life?
I was a social worker in California and handled the cases of many parolees and mental patients, some of whom were among the most interesting people I have ever known. I also made recordings of the inmates in the work camps and what was called "the block" at Angola Penitentiary in 1961. I was occasionally a police reporter and worked a bit in the oil patch, and lived in an urban slum and the poorest part of the southern mountains. I may have had few other talents, but I was always a good listener. The great stories are in the air, all around us, everyday, no matter where we're located. All we have to do is listen.

What the heck is creosote?
It's a viscous oil produced by the creosote bush. It's often used to treat wood, particularly railroad ties.

You were born in Houston but have a home in Louisiana, which one would assume is your spiritual literary base given your many Robicheaux novels. Still, you’ve written about Texas in the Holland stories. Which locale do you prefer to bring to life in fiction, and is there another Robicheaux tale on the horizon?
To me, the South and the American West represent the entirety of our experience as a nation, for good or bad. The challenge for the artist is to see the larger story in its smallest component, like coming to know a beach through a grain of sand. I'm writing another novel narrated by Dave Robicheaux now. I hope to write many more stories before I catch the train. In fact, when the latter event occurs, I'm taking my notebook and pen with me.

RELATED CONTENT

Read all our reviews featuring the novels of James Lee Burke.
 

Two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke’s  latest novel, Rain Gods, finds the crime master at the top of his game. Burke, best known as the author of numerous books starring his Southern sleuths Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland, has also crafted other works…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Julia Alvarez

"If you live and pay attention," says writer Julia Alvarez, "life gives you so much to write about." Alvarez has indeed been paying attention. As a child, she and her family fled the Dominican Republic to escape the harsh dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (her father had secretly been involved in the underground). Many miles and many years later, she speaks from an office at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she is writer-in-residence and the author of books for both adults and children, such as the award-winning How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies and Something to Declare.

Her latest is Return to Sender, a novel for nine- to 12-year-olds about a sixth-grade boy on a Vermont farm who befriends the daughter of undocumented Mexican workers.

Alvarez and her husband live on their own small farm, along with cows, rabbits, chickens and a new barn. She speaks on the day before America’s presidential election, prompting her to muse, "When I get to vote, I get weepy. I know what it costs to get to this. Members of my family died so I could have this day."

When 10-year-old Alvarez and her family arrived in New York City in 1960, books and later writing became her ticket to freedom. "We had landed in this land that I had always heard was the home of the free and the brave, but I didn’t find it very friendly at all," Alvarez remembers. "The kids on the playground called me ‘spic,’ they made fun of my accent, and they told me to go back to where I had come from." 

Salvation came in the form of reading, guided by teachers and a librarian—and reading was something new. "I came from an oral culture," she says. "I was surrounded by the world’s greatest storytellers, but we were not readers. I never saw my mother or father reading a book."

Eventually, Alvarez became a writer, realizing that there were some stories only she could tell. She says her books usually start with what she calls "the pebble in my shoe." "It’s something that I try to shake," she elaborates, "but I keep going back over it. It’s usually something that has unsettled me."

Return to Sender began when a farmer brought a Mexican farm worker in to see her husband, an ophthalmologist. Alvarez and her husband soon discovered that undocumented Mexicans were doing most of the milking on the dairy farms in their county. They met some of these workers, and Alvarez was asked to help with a schoolgirl who didn’t know enough English to communicate with her teachers or classmates.

Certainly Alvarez could relate—on more than one level. She notes: "It’s not just down in the border states that [immigration] is an issue. It’s reached Vermont, and it’s so much the issue of our times: mass movements of people from one place to another. As we globalize, people become aware of other opportunities and possibilities, and want to create a new story for themselves—and therefore leave everything to remake their story."

As Alvarez began to help out in the classroom, she realized that not only was the Mexican girl disoriented, but so were her classmates. Over time the children befriended each other, until the girl suddenly returned to Mexico with an aunt, while her parents continued to work in Vermont.

"The kids were really traumatized that their classmate had disappeared," Alvarez explains. "This doesn’t happen in their United States, that somebody disappears because they’re not supposed to be here, and their parents could be rounded up and they would be deported and put in holding. All of this can be very troubling stuff in fourth and fifth grade. And I thought that we need a story to understand what’s happening to us."

Return to Sender tells this tale from both sides, using the voices of Tyler, a Vermont farm boy, and Mari, who was born in Mexico and now lives in a trailer as her dad and uncle work on Tyler’s family farm. Tyler’s father was injured in a tractor accident and can no longer handle the daily chores by himself. Mari’s mother has been missing for nearly a year, and Mari and her sisters aren’t sure if she is dead or alive. Their mother returned to Mexico when her own mother was ill, but she hasn’t been heard from since attempting to secretly cross the border to return to the U.S.

Does Alvarez worry about introducing such heavy concepts to young readers?

"I’m not just a writer," she replies. "I’ve also been an educator for three decades. And a story protects us in a way. In a sense, it’s a safe world in which to consider what’s going to hit you broadside in the real world. You give kids the things that are bombarding them in their real lives, but it’s within a safe context. It gives them a way to navigate through the world."

Alvarez navigated herself through many different parts of the U.S. early in her career, working as what she calls a "migrant writer," teaching poetry wherever grant funding was available, including Kentucky, California, Delaware, North Carolina and Massachusetts. Now that she’s settled in New England, she still travels to the Dominican Republic about six times a year, to see family and to visit Café Alta Gracia, a 60-acre coffee farm that she and her husband own.

"The mountains here in Vermont remind me of the mountains of the Dominican Republic where we have our farm," she says. "We don’t have winter there, of course, but the lush greenness of the mountains and a certain kind of accessible mentality—there’s something that’s very simpatico about the Vermont culture and my Dominican culture."

Although Julia Alvarez has found a place to call home, she continues to write about people caught between cultures. "Displacement is just part of the human story," she says. "You don’t have to be an immigrant to write about that, because we’ve all felt it."

"If you live and pay attention," says writer Julia Alvarez, "life gives you so much to write about." Alvarez has indeed been paying attention. As a child, she and her family fled the Dominican Republic to escape the harsh dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (her…

Memoir

Rick Bragg

There’s just something about Southerners. "When they start telling a story, they roll with it," says Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, who has told a story or two himself. "Their sense of timing, drama, irony is just beautiful. They can tell you a story and you’ll be laughing so hard you’ll have to lie down on the carpet. It’s the same way with the sad stories, and the language is just prettier."

The happiness, the pain, the rich language and the soul of the South are alive in Bragg’s new book, Ava’s Man, a profile of the author’s maternal grandfather. It’s the natural follow-up to All Over but the Shoutin’, Bragg’s best-selling memoir of growing up poor in the Alabama hills, the son of an alcoholic father and a mother determined to provide for her kids. Many readers of Shoutin’ wanted to know how Bragg’s mother, Margaret, acquired her indomitable spirit. For Bragg, the answer was clear: Margaret’s spunk came from her father, Charlie Bundrum. But Bragg had one problem writing a book about this fascinating man — he never knew his grandfather. "He died in the spring of 1958, one year before I was born," the author writes. "I have never forgiven him for that."

Without Charlie to interview, Bragg mined his own family for the stories he tells in Ava’s Man. "We kind of built him up from dirt level," says the author, speaking from his home in New Orleans. "Physical description, personality, foibles and outright flaws, we put ’em all in there — much to my Aunt Gracie Juanita’s chagrin." Charlie as Bragg portrays him wasn’t perfect, just real — a moonshine-drinking, raw-boned man with big ears and a bigger heart.

As a New York Times reporter, Bragg interviews people for a living. However, in his research for Ava’s Man, he found that interviewing strangers is one thing; interviewing his own family was another story.

"It was nerve-wracking," he says. "These are your people. You don’t want to say anything that will cause them pain." He also discovered a downside to the Southern art of storytelling. "They’d get right to the good part" of a recollection about Charlie and a dog, "and then one of them would say, ‘You know I had a dog like that.’ The story will take a hard right turn and that turn will branch off like a roadmap. It can take three or four hours to steer your mom back to where they started. There were stories they started I still don’t know the end to."

But over time and over tales, Charlie came alive for the author, who recognizes much of his grandfather in himself, for good or for bad. "Charlie loved more than anything else on earth the curves in living," says Bragg. "He didn’t want a long straightaway, he loved the unexpected, and I do, too. That’s why I do what I do for a living. He had a terrible temper and mine is . . . I wouldn’t say legendary but it’s pretty damn well known. He wanted to tell you a story, and I sure do love to tell one. I hope when I open my mouth, a little bit of him pours out."

Though the two share storytelling skills, Bragg differs from Charlie in other ways. Charlie was a skilled carpenter; Bragg’s brothers have been known to laugh when he picks up a hammer. And though Bragg is proud he doesn’t own a suit, he has never had to endure hardship like Charlie, who kept his family going through the Depression.

A devoted father who loved his seven children, Charlie "did the things you have to do to keep them. He worked himself to the bone to give them everything he could. I’ll take risks. He took responsibilities." It is a choice that Bragg, single and childless at 41, may never face himself.

In writing Ava’s Man, Bragg preserves not only his grandfather, but the Southern storytelling tradition that pieced Charlie together for him. "You can’t assume storytelling stops at the county line, but I believe we have a richer tradition of storytelling," says Bragg. "It’s deeper and wider. You can’t walk down the street without hearing a good story."

That, he worries, may change. Popular culture and gentrification are robbing the South of all that makes it unique. "The deep South, the South I really know, is just as endangered as the rain forest. Accents become more bland, country music used to be Merle Haggard who’d gone to prison, Johnny Cash, who had a dark soul. Now these singers wear hip hop clothes and Versace. Faith Hill and Shania Twain are beautiful but about as country as Siegfried and Roy."

If All Over but the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man have made Bragg the poster boy of Southern storytelling, he enjoys using his reporting skills to show the world how the South really is. "People assume racism has some particular claim down here. I’ve lived all over the country, and there’s no line of demarcation. Some of the most miserably racist places I’ve been have had nothing to do with the South," says Bragg, who then waxes eloquent about grits.

He wrote most of Ava’s Man quickly, passionately. He stopped cold as he approached the ending, where Charlie dies. "I couldn’t kill him. I tried and I tried. I’d call my mother or her sisters, [and say] ‘Tell me something that can help me through this.’ But I just didn’t want to kill him," says Bragg. When he was able at last to reach the end, "I felt a sense of loss I’ve never had. I’m a reasonably tough man. I’ve been shot at and beat up, but this was awful."

To compensate, Bragg added "my favorite thing I’ve ever written in my life, about if he had lived five or six more years. I would have known everything. He would have taken me fishing, bought me candy. I’d have known what he looked like, what he sounded like, his mannerisms, how he stood."

He would have been able to ask Charlie the question that’s been bothering him. "I want to know what he was afraid of. He did not seem to be afraid of anything," says Bragg. "But I don’t think he would have answered me. I think he would have slapped me on the knee or back and would have started telling a story."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

Author photo by Marion Ettlinger.

There's just something about Southerners. "When they start telling a story, they roll with it," says Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, who has told a story or two himself. "Their sense of timing, drama, irony is just beautiful. They can tell…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Leif Enger

Leif Enger's novel, Peace Like a River, is generating enough pre-publication buzz that it is already being compared to Charles Frazier's 1997 surprise National Book Award winner, Cold Mountain. That's not a bad comparison. Both novels seem to have come out of nowhere and arrived fully formed, alive with inspired casts of characters and powered by an old-time joy in storytelling. Of the two, Peace Like a River is the more humorous, though its humor is shaded by enough tragedy to make the experience of reading it complete and resonant.

And there all comparisons should end. Because Peace Like a River casts a spell all its own. The spell is already being felt in the book world: enthusiastic booksellers are raving, and at a recent national book convention Peace was listed as the "buzz book" to watch. All this attention comes as a total surprise to the book's author, Leif Enger. "I'm completely amazed by it," he says during a call to his home in Minnesota, where he lives with his wife and two sons. In my greatest dreams of success—which every struggling writer lives upon—I didn't dream that something like this could happen."

Enger, who has wanted to write fiction since his teens, was a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio from 1984 until the sale of Peace Like a River to publisher Grove/Atlantic allowed him to take time off to write. In the 1990s, he and his older brother, Lin, writing under the pen name L.L. Enger, produced a series of mystery novels featuring a retired baseball player.

"It was one of those mercenary adventures that comes up empty-handed," Enger says with a remarkably good-natured laugh. "Nobody really read them and they didn't get much attention and we didn't get paid very much for them. We had a lot of fun doing it, and it was a fabulous apprenticeship for me."

By the time he began to write Peace Like a River six years ago, Enger had given up great expectations of publishing glory. "I figured since I had given commercial writing my very best shot, I was free to just write something that I could read to my wife and kids. When I finished a scene I would gather them around and read it to them, and if it didn't make them laugh or if it didn't provoke some strong reaction, I knew I had to go back to the drawing board. What I wanted to do and what I think I did is just put everything that I love into it. I didn't think about the book commercially until I was over half done and I realized the book was going to have an end."

As heart-warming as all that sounds, Enger also notes that the kernel of the book "was a little bit of desperation." Peace Like a River is set in the Midwest in 1962 and is an account of events that occurred when narrator Reuben Land was 11 years old. As a boy, Reuben was so severely afflicted by asthma that he was unable to draw breath at birth and was only saved by his miracle-performing father, Jeremiah.

"When I was starting the book six years ago, my son was fighting a terrible case of asthma," Enger says. "He was just fighting for breath. It was terribly frightening for Robin and me. We didn't know what was going on. We didn't know how to treat it. We didn't know how to prevent it. As a parent you want to work a miracle. You would take your son's place if you could. Basically I wanted to understand what he was going through and I wanted to somehow translate my wish for his good health into the book. All I knew at the beginning was that the narrator was asthmatic and his father did miracles."

From that beginning, Enger weaves a story that is a surprising and beguiling mix of heroic quest, cowboy romance and moral fable. Reuben's older brother Davy gets caught up in an escalating feud with two small-town bullies, is charged and tried for murdering them, and when the verdict seems about to go against him, escapes on horseback for parts unknown. Reuben, his father and his younger sister Swede set out in their Airstream trailer to find the outlaw Davy Land, and along the way, Reuben learns more than most of us about sacrifice, redemption and faith.

Reuben's younger sister Swede is a writer of heroic cowboy verse about a complicated hero named Sunny Sundown. Her talents, swift wit and force of personality hold her older 11-year-old brother in her thrall. The two share a fascination for the West and, indeed, seem to live out a kind of timeless cowboy adventure.

By rights, a storyline like this should not work in a literary novel like Peace Like a River. But such is Enger's unflagging, high-spirited storytelling that the relationship between Reuben and his cowboy poet sister is a high point of the novel. As is her clunky, comical, oddly affecting verse.

"That stuff was tremendously easy to write," says Enger, who relates childhood memories of long summer afternoons dressed in a breechcloth roaming the woods and fields around their home in Osakis, Minnesota, with his older brothers. "I'm kind of like Reuben, in that I'm a very slow study of things, and don't think well on my feet. But I love people who are fast and brilliant like Swede."

He adds, "Swede almost had to be a poet and write heroic couplets and cowboy verse because I grew up being read to from Robert Service, who wrote the great sourdough poetry, The Ballad of Dan McGrew, The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill and The Ballad of the Iceworm Cocktail. And then there is Robert Louis Stevenson. Mom read us Treasure Island every year for many years, starting before I was old enough to understand any of it. It was confusing to me, but I loved it. I loved the play of words. I loved the language. He was a strikingly contemporary writer for the time; he was ahead of his time. He's my favorite writer of all time. I just love his poems, his great adventure tales, his brand of moral fiction."

Then, finally, at the very end of our conversation, Enger describes one of those unexpected moments when creative opportunity presents itself: "I was about 20 pages into the manuscript and was working on it early one morning when my youngest son, John, got up and came toddling in in his pajamas. He said: 'How's it going, Dad?' I said: 'It's going pretty well.' He said: 'You got any cowboys in that book yet?' And I said: 'No, not yet. But that's a fabulous idea. You think I should?' And he said: 'Yes!' I said: 'Well if you could give me a good name, I'll put a cowboy in the book.' And he said: 'Sunny Sundown.' No hesitation. Sunny Sundown. He'd been thinking about Sunny, apparently, for a while. I just happened to be at a spot where I could take off into it. By the end of the day the first few stanzas of Sunny were written and I just never looked back."

And thus a cowboy, a cowboy poet and a novel of uncommon appeal are born.

 

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

Leif Enger's novel, Peace Like a River, is generating enough pre-publication buzz that it is already being compared to Charles Frazier's 1997 surprise National Book Award winner, Cold Mountain. That's not a bad comparison. Both novels seem to have come out of nowhere and arrived…

Pop CultureArts & Culture

Michael Lewis

In his first book, the widely and deservedly praised Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis tweaked the noses of the powers-that-be at the investment banking firm Salomon Brothers and apparently provoked nary a ripple of recrimination. His sixth book, Next: The Future Just Happened, is not yet in bookstores and it has already infuriated former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt. And Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, is not going to be happy with it, either.

This is not because Michael Lewis has suddenly lost the sense of humor or flair for storytelling we experienced reading Liar’s Poker or The New New Thing, his book about Jim Clark and Silicon Valley. Rather, in Lewis’ eyes, Levitt and Joy have become so swollen with self-importance that they offer inviting illustrations of the status upheavals spawned by Internet technologies and radically democratized access to information. It will be no comfort to Levitt and Joy to learn that Next comes with its own megaphone — that old technology called television.

For, Next, the book, is the fraternal twin of Next, the BBC television documentary, which features Lewis as the on-camera guide to the New Internet Order. The documentary will premiere in the U.S. in two two-hour segments on A&E on August 5 and 6 at 9 p.m. ET.

According to Lewis he was "stewing" over the weird ways in which the "transformative technology of the Internet was touching people" and feeling frustrated because pursuing this idea required more work than he could possibly accomplish on his own, when the BBC came calling with promises of a research team and a travel budget.

"I don’t think I would have written the book if the BBC hadn’t come along," Lewis said during a recent call from Paris, where he and his family have lived during the two years he worked on the book and the documentary.

In Next, Lewis weaves a series of themes into the swift, sharp, often-funny narratives that comprise the bulk of the book. "The Internet creates chaos in any relationship that’s premised on an imbalance of access to information," Lewis says, describing one of his themes. "The legal profession, the medical profession and parents in relation to their children have enjoyed superior status because they have had better access to information. I found myself looking for the effects in the world of eliminating these imbalances."

A related idea, which Lewis attributes to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andy Kessler, is that Internet technologies empower the fringe over the center. "For example, we spent a week in Finland asking the question how did a society that was basically a nonentity in Europe become a society that is now on the leading edge of technology and the communications revolution?"

Lewis’ final overarching theme is that "one day thousands of years from now, if people are still alive, they’ll look back on this period as the endgame of democracy. I don’t mean that democracy is coming to an end but that it’s becoming more and more extreme. The democratizing instinct wants to level everything."

Lewis says he struggled to embody these themes in the narrative. "What Next really wanted to be was a series of arguments about how the world is changing and how the Internet plays a part in that. But I’ve always felt the essay is a cheat. It’s harder, more challenging and more interesting if you can turn it into a narrative. So I go looking for scenes. I structure pieces of writing like a novel."

Lucky for us. Particularly in the first two-thirds of the book, where Lewis relates the stories of three teenage boys whose lives are profoundly changed by the Internet, the narratives are compelling. There is the moving story of Daniel Sheldon, a brilliant boy who is basically educating himself on the Internet, because the schools in his working class English town have failed him. There is the weirdly disturbing story of Marcus Arnold, who has become an extraordinarily popular dispenser of legal expertise via the Internet, even though he is only a teenager and has never opened a legal book. And there is the surly Jonathan Lebed, who made a killing in the stock market by trading online, often from the school library in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, and ran seriously afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the process.

It’s the story of Lebed that leads Lewis to interview Arthur Levitt in what is probably the highpoint — or lowpoint — of the book. With a sort of deadpan humor, Lewis exposes Levitt’s empty pomposity and self-satisfied platitudes in a scene that might have made Mark Twain proud.

"It was shocking," Lewis says, reflecting on his interview with Levitt. "He’d been all over television talking about this case . . . but while I’m talking to him it becomes clear to me that he doesn’t understand not only this case but also the way the markets actually work. The 16-year-old kid’s description of the world is much more persuasive than the head of the SEC’s. That was something that took me a minute to get my mind around. Here in a microcosm was what I’d been talking about. The head of the SEC’s authority was badly undermined because he didn’t know what he was supposed to know, and that information was widely available on the Internet."

Lewis delivers a similar comeuppance to Bill Joy near the end of the book. Joy, who was responsible for the technology behind Sun Microsystems, has recently become famous for an essay warning of the dangers of new technologies. This strikes Lewis as ludicrous. "I found his article completely unpersuasive. It read like the work of a charlatan to me. All of its clout as an argument came from the fact that it was written by someone everybody thinks is a genius. . . . The Internet has vaulted computer scientists to a new level, where they can now start meddling in the big questions of social philosophy. They want to be grand old men in a world that’s designed not to have grand old men. I thought it was important for that reason to hurl a stink bomb into their world."

Of course Lewis’ stink bombs usually come with a strong dose of common sense and a big whiff of laughter. "I’ve always been somebody who laughed at inappropriate moments," he says. "Humor is a natural predisposition for me. . . . Humor is my spitball."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

In his first book, the widely and deservedly praised Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis tweaked the noses of the powers-that-be at the investment banking firm Salomon Brothers and apparently provoked nary a ripple of recrimination. His sixth book, Next: The Future Just Happened, is not…

NonfictionTrue Crime

Ann Rule

True crime author Ann Rule gets to know the kind of people most of us hope we’ll never meet. The long-time chronicler of murders most foul is fascinated with the personalities of those who kill as a matter of choice.

Early in her career, the author got a close-up glimpse of one such frightening character. When Rule was just getting started as a crime writer in the early ’70s, she worked at a Seattle crisis clinic with the soon-to-be-revealed serial killer Ted Bundy. In the decades since that coincidental meeting, Rule has become America’s top true crime writer, with 16 best-selling books to her credit.

In her latest study, Every Breath You Take, she descends into the twisted mind of Allen Blackthorne, the handsome, brilliant and self-made (right down to renaming himself) multimillionaire who instigated the 1997 killing of his former wife, Sheila Bellush. After years of threats and terror, Sheila was shot and slashed to death in front of her two-year-old quadruplets. Blackthorne was convicted of her murder in July 2000 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

"I’m always looking for the protagonist who appears to have everything in the world," Rule said recently from her home in Washington state. "The rest of us think, boy, if I were handsome or pretty and smart and charming and wealthy and popular and had love, why wouldn’t I be happy? But these people never get enough. And, in the end, many of them will kill to get what they want. If I find the right person who looks good, but under that façade is basically evil, the book’s very easy to write. I just kind of follow along with the action."

But Rule doesn’t rely on action alone to propel her stories. She also delves into the family histories of her principal characters, trying to discover why they act as they do. "When I was a little kid and my grandpa was a sheriff in Michigan," Rule says, "I was allowed to go up in the cells and visit with the women prisoners. They just looked so nice. I was always asking my grandfather, ‘Why would they want to grow up and be a criminal?’ The why of murder always fascinates me so much more than the how. I wanted to understand the psychopathology, why some people would grow up to be criminals. I found that if you can follow the family pathology back, often there are clues."

With a degree of foreboding that is chilling to contemplate, the victim in Every Breath You Take chose Rule to be her voice from the grave long before she was murdered. "Kerry Bladhorn, who is Sheila Bellush’s sister, sent me an e-mail [in February 2000] and said, ‘I’m going to try one more time to find you.’ She told me that her sister, when she got divorced 10 years earlier from Allen, had said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, please have it investigated.’ And then she said, ‘Promise you’ll find Ann Rule and ask her to write my story.’"

Rule concedes that her book would have been derailed had Blackthorne been found not guilty. "It’s always a gamble for me," she explains, "because if someone is acquitted at trial — and I try to be at every session of the trial — I really could not write about it. They could say that I was invading their privacy."

Beyond the common trait of guilt, Rule says the criminals she writes about share other similarities: "I think the lack of empathy is the first thing. . . . All of them, I would say, have deeply entrenched personality disorders. In their minds, the world revolves around them, and the rest of us are one-dimensional paper-doll figures who are put on earth to make them happy. I don’t think they attribute the feelings to us that they have themselves. It doesn’t really matter who they hurt. Yet they’re all chameleons. They fool us. They give us back whatever we might want from them, if it suits their purposes."

Rule says her authoring chores have evolved into a fairly predictable pattern: "I’m always working on three

in a sense. I’m publicizing the book that’s done. I’m writing the book that’s in the hopper, and I’m doing a little advance research on the book to come. I don’t write on two books at a time. I may stop to do an article or two in the midst of a book, but I get so immersed with the characters involved that it’s awfully hard to pull me away."

Her next book will be about Anthony Pignataro, the plastic surgeon from Buffalo, New York, who poisoned his "faithful wife of 20 years," albeit not fatally. "It took her a very long time to even believe that this man she’d always stood beside would do that to her," Rule says. "I’m going to tell the story from her viewpoint."

Beyond telling good and true stories, Rule has a more basic agenda. "The thing I hope to do, although I know it’s impossible, is put myself out of business," she says. "I want to warn potential victims. Many of them are women, and many of them are battered women. It’s a cause for me. When I look back, though, so many of the books I’ve written are about wives who just couldn’t get away. But I’ve heard from probably a dozen or more women who’ve said, ‘I’d be dead if it wasn’t for something I read in one of your books.’ That makes me feel so good."

Thanks to the public nature of trials and the media interest in them, even the most heinous killers get to tell their story. Rule believes their victims should be heard, too. "I always want to give the victim a voice," she concludes. "One of my main tasks is to let the reader know the extent of the loss and what might have been if this person had been allowed to live."

Edward Morris writes on books and music from Nashville.

True crime author Ann Rule gets to know the kind of people most of us hope we'll never meet. The long-time chronicler of murders most foul is fascinated with the personalities of those who kill as a matter of choice.

Early in her career,…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier feels lucky. Not because her novel Girl With a Pearl Earring has sold one million copies and is still making the bestseller lists. Not because she has just released her new novel Falling Angels. She feels lucky because she lives in the modern era. "I'm incredibly thankful to be born when I was," says the author. "It's only relatively recently women have more choice. I have opportunities even my mother didn't have."

Chevalier's novels show just how far women have come. The author set Girl With a Pearl Earring in 17th century Holland and gave her narrator, Griet, a true artist's passion and eye. Born to a lower class family, the best Griet can do is work as a housemaid to the artist Vermeer. The new book, Falling Angels, takes place in Edwardian London and tells the story of Kitty Coleman, a young wife and mother. Chafing against her role as matron, Kitty thwarts convention — and her family's wishes — by becoming a suffragette.

"Since I write about women in the past, they're invariably going to be circumscribed by circumstance," says Chevalier, speaking from her home in North London. "There's going to be a conflict with them wanting to have a life different from what they have."

Griet from Girl With a Pearl Earring manages this conflict by quiet subversion. She cleans Vermeer's study but over time comes to influence his art as well. She plays a part in the creation of a masterpiece, but still, she is aware as a young woman and a maid that her role is restricted. "People ask why Griet couldn't have gone off to become a painter. Well, that wasn't how it was," says Chevalier. "What women could do was very limited then. I chose a realistic ending, not a romantic ending."

While Griet operates within the narrow social avenues open to her, Falling Angels' Kitty Coleman actively defies them. The book opens in London, in January 1901, after the death of Queen Victoria. "That's when attitudes changed," says Chevalier. With Victoria's death, some of the previous era's confining notions about societal roles began at last to give way — good news for Kitty.

"For the first time in my life I have something to do," Kitty says of her stance as a suffragette. She takes up her mission with a convert's zeal but not everyone in her life is as enthusiastic. Her husband and daughter feel dismayed and abandoned, her stuffy mother-in-law is apoplectic and their upright neighbors, the Waterhouse family, are mortified. By telling the story through multiple points of view, Chevalier makes sure everyone gets a say, particularly Kitty's daughter Maude and Maude's best friend, Lavinia Waterhouse.

Maude and Lavinia begin their friendship in a cemetery, which Chevalier bases on historic Highgate Cemetery near her home. "It's this grandiose place, all Gothic excess," says the author. "It's Victorian, overgrown with ivy, the graves are tumbling down." The cemetery in the book becomes a recurring symbol, the site of beginnings as well as endings.

Kitty, the central character in Falling Angels, is headstrong and impulsive, more of a rebel than the author herself admits to being. "When I was 19, I went to Oberlin and went around everywhere saying I was a feminist. I used to make all sorts of pronouncements [like] 'Men and women [are] absolutely equal.' Now I'm 38 and married with a kid and I understand how things aren't equal," she says. "I'm not sure I could call myself a feminist. I'm much more wary of labels than I used to be."

One label she does not mind owning up to is that of outsider. "I'm comfortable with that," says Chevalier, who was born in Washington, D.C., and has lived in London since 1983. Chevalier came to London after college for a visit, took a job in publishing and stayed. She's since acquired a husband and a son, not to mention a reputation as a novelist who articulates the way women negotiate the demands of society.

Though she hasn't picked up an English accent, she has embraced what she considers an English sensibility. "At first that English buttoned-up-ness bothered me, but now I find I don't always trust American emotionalism. It feels overdone."

Even the English have been effusive about Girl With a Pearl Earring, though, and the book's success still takes the author by surprise. "When I see my name in the paper, I somehow think they're referring to some other Tracy Chevalier." It also puts her under pressure. "People wanted this book to be Girl Part II, but I didn't want to be boxed into that," says Chevalier, who confesses Falling Angels "was a hellish book to write. I wrote the first draft in third person. It was like a lead balloon. I read the first draft and cried. I wanted to throw it away."

She turned to the work of another author and found a way out. "I read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. She did such a fantastic job using different voices and I thought, with Falling Angels, I've told it in the wrong way. I wanted it to have lots of perspective."

After wrestling with the initial draft for a year and a half, the rewrite went swiftly, blissfully. "I rewrote 90 percent and it became a great pleasure. When you carry a story around in your head for a couple of years, it's like knowing your own family's stories; they just stay there. It gets easier," says Chevalier, who's already tackling her next novel, a return to the past, to art and of course, to women, all of which come together with the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. These rich medieval tapestries are displayed at the Cluny Museum in Paris, just a Chunnel ride away from London. And Chevalier will probably tack up a poster of them in her office to inspire her as she writes, the way she did with Vermeer images while working on her previous novel.

"I'm no art historian. I'm not a social historian. I write about things that interest me," Chevalier says. "I feel comfortable looking into things I don't know too much about. I want to learn."

Like women around the world, the author says she struggles to balance the demands of career and family. "I love my son, but my time for writing is broken up into little bits," she says. But still, she counts her blessings. "I'm in the perfect occupation. And think of Kitty in Falling Angels, how frustrated she was trying to achieve independence. I live in a world more open. I feel privileged."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

Tracy Chevalier feels lucky. Not because her novel Girl With a Pearl Earring has sold one million copies and is still making the bestseller lists. Not because she has just released her new novel Falling Angels. She feels lucky because she lives in the modern…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Robin Cook

Robin Cook’s latest medical thriller may seem like yet another example of the author’s uncanny ability to anticipate national controversy, in this case the uproar over federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. After all, the Harvard-trained medical doctor-turned-novelist has been writing well ahead of the public-debate curve since his breakout novel, Coma, nearly 25 years ago.

But in fact, Shock, Cook’s expose of the private infertility industry, was actually delayed nearly a year by an arrival of a different sort — Cameron Cook, the author’s first child.

Did fatherhood turn life upside-down for the 61-year-old dad?

"Oh wow, absolutely!" he chuckles by phone from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. "Especially since the boy took over my writing room. I wrote the last two books on a card table in the living room."

Impending fatherhood may have played a role in turning the doctor’s mind toward the dramatic possibilities behind the closed doors of America’s infertility clinics. It is largely within these privately funded clinics that controversial stem cell research is being conducted because the federal government, beset by anti-abortion groups, has refused to grant it funding.

Shock, named for the technique of fusing two cells, is a return to form for Cook, whose last outing, the Atlantis-themed Abduction (2000), was considered pretty farfetched even by science fiction standards. This time out, he’s back to what he does best: spinning a suspenseful tale, one that places curious female Harvard grads in mortal danger as they seek to uncover the truth about a mysterious clinic that’s harvesting more than HMO dollars.

When the two grad students — prim-and-proper Texas debutante Deborah Cochrane and her street-smart New York girlfriend Joanna Meissner — answer an ad in a campus newspaper to earn $45,000 by donating eggs to the Wingate Clinic on Boston’s North Shore, their goal is to raise enough money to write their master’s theses in Venice. But when Deborah wants to know more about the fate of her eggs, the clinic stonewalls her. Undaunted, the pair concocts aliases to obtain employment at the creaky former psychiatric hospital. Suffice it to say that going on for their doctorates might have been the better choice.

Cook admits the timing of Shock was fortuitous. "I suppose you could say that it’s the most like Coma in that it deals with an issue that everybody seems to be concerned about," he says. "I wrote this book to address the stem cell issue, which the public really doesn’t know anything about. Besides entertaining readers, my main goal is to get people interested in some of these issues, because it’s the public that ultimately really should decide which way we ought to go in something as ethically questioning as stem cell research."

As a doctor, Cook marvels at the enormous potential of this evolving medical field. "This is the most promising aspect of medical research that has ever come along. It’s going to make even the discovery of antibiotics pale in comparison," he predicts.

"Up until now, all of the medicine that we’ve done has not been curative; it’s been a way of helping the body’s own defenses in some form or fashion. This stem cell research has the potential for creating true cures for many human illnesses. If you’re a doctor, the idea of actually having the ability to cure people rather than just kind of putting your finger in the dike and keeping it there is the most exciting aspect of it."

Pro-life groups, however, have condemned stem cell research for tampering with human life, albeit at the microscopic level.

"That is the main problem, that it does brush up against the whole abortion issue, which has been a real conundrum in this country," he says. "Because the government up until now has decided not to fund this research, it pushes this research, which is going to be done, into the private labs, just as I do in the book. And once it’s in the private labs and nobody knows what they’re doing, they’re doing whatever they like."

Which brings up everybody’s favorite question: Couldn’t that make human cloning a reality?

"Yes, absolutely," Cook insists. "With the pressure on the infertility clinics, that alone is enough to encourage people to ask for it and various and sundry researchers to go ahead and do it. There is no question in my mind that it’s going to happen. Again, part of the reason is that all this can be done behind closed doors, and they use private money, so it will happen."

The author admits he never thought he would have so much compelling material to work with when he began writing fiction in 1970 after completing medical school at Columbia University and post-graduate training at Harvard.

"If I tried to be the writer I am today a number of years ago, I wouldn’t have very much to write about. But today, with the pace of change in biomedical research, there are any number of different issues, and new ones to come," he says.

No longer in private practice, Cook remains on the staff of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. Keeping his lab coat handy helps him turn our fear of doctors into bestsellers.

"I joke that if my books stop selling, I can always fall back on brain surgery," he says. "But I am still very interested in it. If I had to do it over again, I would still study medicine. I think of myself more as a doctor who writes, rather than a writer who happens to be a doctor."

And after 23 books, he has come up with a diagnosis to explain why his medical thrillers remain so popular.

"The main reason is, we all realize we’re at risk. We’re all going to be patients at some time," he says. "You can write about great white sharks or haunted houses, and you can say I’m not going in the ocean or I’m not going in haunted houses, but you can’t say you’re not going to go in a hospital."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Naples, Florida.

Author photo by John Earle.

Robin Cook's latest medical thriller may seem like yet another example of the author's uncanny ability to anticipate national controversy, in this case the uproar over federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. After all, the Harvard-trained medical doctor-turned-novelist has been writing well ahead…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Ivan Doig

Since the publication of his beautiful memoir of growing up in Montana, The House of Sky (1979), Ivan Doig has been hailed as a great Western writer. That reputation was burnished by the publication of his marvelous Montana trilogy, English Creek (1984), Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987) and Ride With Me, Mariah Montana (1990), which masterfully portrays the lives of four generations of the McCaskill family in Two Medicine country, Doig's lovingly invented landscape near the Rockies in Montana.

But like many ambitious writers who find their subjects and locales beyond the bright lights and big egos of the East Coast publishing world, Doig bristles just a bit at being pigeonholed as a Western writer.

"I find that's kind of an odd fence that's put around those of us who happen to live out here on this side of the Mississippi River," Doig says during a call to his home high on a bluff over Puget Sound, just north of downtown Seattle. "Writers of my generation are always described as writers of place. Maybe that's true as far as it goes. But what about the poetry under the prose? What about the fact that when readers raise their hands at book signings or readings, it's the characters and the language they tend to mention?" Doig says. "It seems to me the 'Western writer' tag shortchanges the pretty sophisticated literary effort that's gone on among my writing generation out here. It's going to be interesting to see after the publication of The Eleventh Man, am I still going to be a Western writer after taking these characters to Guam, New Guinea, Fairbanks, Alaska?"

Interesting indeed. The Eleventh Man, Doig's ninth novel and 12th book, is a panoramic page – turner about World War II as seen mostly through the eyes of Ben Reinking, a GI reporter assigned by the government's propaganda machine to write about the exploits of his former teammates, who comprised the starting lineup of the "Supreme Team," a championship Montana college football team that went undefeated in 1941.

"My imagination works best when it has a jumping off place of fact," Doig says, explaining the seed of his novel. "Somewhere in The Eleventh Man, the newspaper man Bill Reinking [Ben's father, an appealing small town newspaper publisher] says 'history writes the best yarns.' I thoroughly agree with that. Quite a number of years ago in the library of theMontana Historical Society in Helena I came across the half – lore and half – proven story of an entire Montana college football team that had gone into World War II, and the starting 11 had all perished in the war. The library is the greenhouse of the imagination for me. I suppose I tucked that away and my mind worked on it and at some point wondered, what if you were the 11th man while the war was taking its toll on all the others?"

The toll of war is widely and deeply felt in The Eleventh Man. As a war correspondent, Ben travels to every theater of World War II to write about the experiences of his former teammates, allowing Doig to work his magic over a much wider landscape than in his previous novels.

Some of that magic derives from the language Doig deploys in telling his tale. He has often used the phrase "poetry under the prose" to describe the effect he is looking for, by which he means "an interior rhyme or chime of language, something in a sentence which you hope will surprise and delight the reader, at least a little bit. I work at it also in the vernacular that my characters will talk, whether it's military, here in The Eleventh Man, or forest rangers in English Creek. I try to get a shimmer of how people will talk about their work or because they are in their work," Doig says. "I've often warmed up for the morning's work by reading 10 pages of the Dictionary of America Regional English, which is the great University of Wisconsin project to capture how people say things in various parts of this country."

Doig's cast of characters here is large and vivid. And although this a novel of war and football, his women characters – a Russian woman pilot ferrying bombers from Fairbanks to the Soviet Union, for example, or Cass Standish, an American flyer in the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) with whom Ben develops a complicated wartime romance – are among his most interesting characters."

I sometimes take more pleasure in writing the female characters than male characters for some reason," Doig says. He adds: "I did have great good luck here. Everybody who saw this piece of writing before it emerged into galleys was a woman, starting with my wife Carol."

In fact, Doig and his wife have an unusually close working relationship. They came to Seattle together in 1966, when Doig entered a Ph.D. program in American history at the University of Washington. She has always been the first reader of his writing, his co – researcher and his research photographer. They sit across from one another at a trapezoidal desk they designed for the large converted family room where they work, looking out over Puget Sound from a bluff some 300 feet above the water. "We're both old newspaper people," Doig says. "In our newspaper and magazine past both of us shared space with people we didn't particularly choose to. You learn to have a cone of concentration over you. So it's never been an issue with Carol and me."

Turning reflective, Doig adds, "I've always seen writing as a profession. I have been, I suppose, kind of prickly proud about being a professional, all the way back to being a magazine freelancer here in Seattle, during and after graduate school. I spent much too long at that kind of life before This House of Sky took me out of it. But I came out of college and into journalism as what I saw as a serious wordsmith and a serious journalist. Producing language and story to the best of my ability has always been what I see that I'm up to."

With The Eleventh Man, Doig demonstrates once again that his ability remains deep and wide.

Alden Mudge writes from San Francisco.

 

Since the publication of his beautiful memoir of growing up in Montana, The House of Sky (1979), Ivan Doig has been hailed as a great Western writer. That reputation was burnished by the publication of his marvelous Montana trilogy, English Creek (1984), Dancing at the…

Fiction

Jonathan Franzen

For the past 15 or so years, novelist Jonathan Franzen has been engaged in friendly literary competition with David Foster Wallace, whom Franzen describes as his "main rival and dear friend."

Five years ago, Wallace's magnificent novel Infinite Jest jolted Franzen like a kick in the pants. "Infinite Jest got me working, as competition will get you working," Franzen says during a call to his girlfriend's home in California's Santa Cruz Mountains, where he was visiting from New York.

At the same time that Wallace's novel was getting so much attention, Franzen was struggling to write a book called The Corrections—not, it turns out, the exhilarating masterpiece of one family falling apart that recently arrived on booksellers' shelves, but another book that was grander, or at least more grandiose, in conception. "The earlier book was much more about the stock market, insider trading and prisons. I finally found that the big social picture stuff wasn't working so well, whereas the little crises these characters were involved in interested me a lot."

Franzen had also recently published a lengthy, controversial essay in Harper's magazine lamenting the sorry state of contemporary literary fiction. For him, it signaled a departure from the high-concept, postmodern novels that had earned him wide critical acclaim (he was often called one of the four or five best American novelists under 40) but had appealed to a relatively small circle of readers.

"I found I was not so much turning away from but outgrowing or being done with writers like William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon who had so preoccupied me when I was young. And I was turning toward more conventional and accessible kinds of storytelling. For whatever reason there has come to be an increasing divide between a kind of highbrow, art fiction and really entertaining fiction that is accessible to a lot of people. I wanted to write a book that was both, that would satisfy the 'discerning avant-gardist' and would simply work at the level of story."

Franzen says the turning point, the moment when the old Corrections pointed toward the new, came when he wrote the "At Sea" section of the novel. "I wrote the cruise ship chapter to fit into the old version of the book. . . . I liked it so much more than anything else I'd written that I ended up throwing all the other stuff away and trying to build a different kind of book around it. Which I then, after a year of false starts, did."

In a novel in which every sentence counts, every page is alive and important, where the comic and tragic blend so seamlessly that they appear to be one and the same, and all five main characters—Alfred and Enid Lambert and their grown children Gary, Denise and Chip—embody the conflicting consciousnesses and the personal and social dramas of our era, it is impossible to choose a single section of the book as the most outstanding.

Yet the "At Sea" section is literally at the center of the book. In it, Alfred, a retired engineering department manager at a Midwestern railroad and a man of forbidding moral rectitude, reaches a critical point in his slow decline into Parkinson's-induced dementia. His wife Enid, a housewife who is a curious blend of virtuous self-sacrifice and steely control, has a crisis of her own. As the two interact with their fellow passengers and lurch toward private catastrophes, Franzen presents their lives in ways that are both chilling and hilarious.

"I don't trust a writer who is never funny," Franzen says, "and I take it as an unfailingly bad sign if a book I'm writing fails to achieve comedy early on. I think the comic is intimately connected with the tragic—both perspectives signal to me that the writer . . . can be trusted to put my interests as a reader ahead of the interests of the characters. I would no sooner fall in love with a humorless book than with a humorless woman."

"Much of what I throw away, as a writer, consists of uncomic scenes and passages. It's not until I laugh at what I'm writing that I know I'm on the right track. It doesn't always come easily, but I don't feel safe to be serious, either as a reader or as a writer, until I know there's going to be some lightness in the book."

But in The Corrections, at least, it is a particular, perhaps alternative kind of lightness that Franzen generates. "This is a personal growth-focused culture," Franzen says. "We're all constantly trying to correct ourselves, particularly my generation, which wants to correct a lot of mistakes we felt our parents made. For me, informing the book as a whole was a sense that, yes, that's a good thing to do, but you fix one thing and you break something else. You gain on one front and you lose on another. I don't think anybody wants a marriage like Alfred's and Enid's. At the same time, some of what Alfred stands for and some of what Enid stands for are things that the culture really feels the loss of."

This emotionally and morally nuanced response to American middle-class culture is part of what makes The Corrections such an exciting and deeply satisfying book to read. But Franzen still professes some surprise that so many early readers are responding so favorably to the book.

"When I was writing The Corrections, I was ashamed to be dealing with such mundane, emotionally exposed little things rather than some grand, 'important' story. We live in such a cool-conscious and hip-conscious culture that it's very hard to say any of those icky, shameful, personal things. I felt that I was putting down this weirdness in me and that I was going to be horribly exposed, that everybody was going to laugh and say, 'What's happened to Franzen? He used to do these interesting books about big themes and now he's given us this weird I don't know what.'"

Of course, just the opposite is happening. For very good reasons, The Corrections created a literary stir even before it arrived in bookstores. Franzen calls the acclaim "disorienting and weird." And also very gratifying. "It's been hard walking around for the last few years thinking, I know what kind of writer I am, but nobody else seems to know." Now, of course, the whole world will know.

 

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

For the past 15 or so years, novelist Jonathan Franzen has been engaged in friendly literary competition with David Foster Wallace, whom Franzen describes as his "main rival and dear friend."

Five years ago, Wallace's magnificent novel Infinite Jest jolted Franzen like a kick in…

Fiction

Doug Marlette

With the publication of his new novel, The Bridge, Doug Marlette joins the ranks of writers who also happen to be accomplished cartoonists including such luminaries as John Updike, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who also draws the popular comic strip Kudzu, Marlette has written a touching and funny first novel about a Southern family torn by conflicts but ultimately bound by love. In a fictional take on his own life story, The Bridge focuses on a newspaper cartoonist who returns to his roots and discovers startling secrets about the family matriarch, Mama Lucy.

"When I draw cartoons, I always say my goal is to stay awake through the drawing," says Marlette, who approached the challenge of writing a novel with the same goal in mind. "I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to tell the story and see if I could keep myself interested."

To make the process easier, Marlette used a fascinating family story as the basis of his novel. A military brat who was raised largely in North Carolina, he came of age during the 1960s and started to question his "reactionary" family values. When he began drawing political cartoons, "these populist, left-wing ideas started bubbling up that went against the grain of where I was from. I was out of step with my family."

After drawing acclaimed editorial cartoons for the Charlotte Observer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and New York Newsday, Marlette eventually returned to North Carolina to settle with his wife and son in Hillsborough, a small town in the Raleigh-Durham area.

Shortly after the move, Marlette learned that his grandmother had been born in the town, and he began to uncover surprising details about her early life. The bossy grandmother he tangled with during his youth turned out to have populist leanings of her own. A mill worker and union member, she had been bayoneted by the National Guard during a labor uprising in 1934.

"I was stunned," Marlette recalls of his discovery. "Part of what stunned me was to find that there were radicals among my own people. It’s almost as if genetic memory had been expressing itself in my art."

Determined to incorporate his grandmother’s story in a novel, Marlette managed to find time to write by getting up at 4:30 or 5:00 every morning. "You just find hours here and there," he says. "Sometimes I would try to double up on cartoons so I could get clear for the weekend and have a couple of days to write on Saturday and Sunday."

The real "Mama Lucy," (Marlette’s grandmother, Grace Pickard Marlette) had died by the time the book was written, but the first-time author says he is "braced" for the reaction of other family members to this autobiographical story.

One big fan of The Bridge is writer Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini), whom Marlette calls his "best friend." Conroy read an advance copy of the novel and described it, with just a hint of hyperbole, as "the finest first novel to come out of North Carolina since Look Homeward, Angel."

Conroy’s sister Kathy also read the novel, and Marlette laughs uproariously at her reaction. One of the funniest characters in the book is a flamboyantly gay writer, Ruffin Strudwick, who for a time is alienated from his dictatorial father. Marlette insists that Strudwick is strictly fictional, a composite based on many people. But when Kathy Conroy read The Bridge, she was certain that her brother Pat had been the model for the character. "She called Pat and said she loved the character based on him. And then she asked, ‘Did you mind that he made you gay?’ "

Marlette says there is strong interest from Hollywood in adapting the novel to film, but he’s not ready to buy movie tickets just yet. "I wrote a screenplay with Conroy years ago and I learned that you can’t count on anything until you sit down in the theater and the room goes dark."

 

With the publication of his new novel, The Bridge, Doug Marlette joins the ranks of writers who also happen to be accomplished cartoonists including such luminaries as John Updike, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who also draws the popular…

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Eve Bunting

Eve Bunting wants to spread an important message: picture books aren't just for tots anymore.

As the author of more than 150 books, Bunting has written something for every age group — everything from young adult novels to picture books, on subjects ranging from homelessness (Fly Away Home), a modern-day look at a Civil War battlefield (The Blue and the Gray), the Irish village of Maghera where she was born (Market Day), and Smoky Night, about the Los Angeles riots, illustrated by David Diaz and winner of a Caldecott Medal.

Plenty of Bunting's books are pure fun and joy, such as Sunflower House, Scary, Scary Halloween, Dog Detective, or the forthcoming Ducky, about a yellow plastic duck. Bunting notes, however, that titles addressing what she calls "tender topics" such as poverty and racial prejudice seem to get the most attention from reviewers and readers.

"Editors are brave," she says. "I may have had books turned down because they're not good, but I've never had one turned down because it was saying something some people might consider not suitable for children."

The roots of her social consciousness date back to her childhood in Ireland. "I was aware that there was discrimination," she recalls, "although I didn't know there was anything to be done about it." She remembers that Protestant children like herself weren't supposed to play with Catholics, although her parents encouraged her friendship with a Catholic girl. Later, political and religious "troubles" between the two denominations helped convince Bunting and her husband to emigrate to the United States in 1958 with their three young children.

"We had it pretty hard at the beginning," Bunting says of their move. "At least we spoke the same language. But I do feel I'm entitled to write about migrant workers and immigrants."

Success came to the young Irish mother a few years after the family settled in California, where she continues to live. Feeling homesick and in need of diversion, she enrolled in a community college course in creative writing.

Her first published books were retellings of Irish folk tales. Since then she's branched out in diverse directions, even writing a few nonfiction books about whales and sharks for Sea World in San Diego. The nonfiction work was an exception — Bunting's chief interest is "telling a good story." She begins to write after an idea hits her with a "jolt."

Despite her many interests and concerns, however, some subjects are too much for her. For instance, when one editor confided that she'd like to have a picture book about child abuse, Bunting replied, "I just couldn¹t because my stomach wouldn't allow me to do that." And when a parent asked her to write about the Oklahoma bombing, Bunting said she couldn't tackle the tragedy.

How, then, do ideas jolt her? Recently, inspiration struck in a San Jose museum, where Bunting's daughter had taken her to see a mummy collection, a subject that had long been of interest. "I remember looking at one mummy and thinking, 'Once you were beautiful.' That was the beginning of an idea."

The fruit of the extensive research that followed is I Am the Mummy HEB-NEFERT, illustrated by David Christiana. This picture book with spare, lyrical text is a prime example of one written for older children, ages 7-12. Heb-Nefert, whose name means "beautiful dancer," tells the story of a mummy¹s life and death, how the woman once was the adored wife of a pharaoh's brother and how she came to lie wrapped in ancient linen, under glass in a museum, for all to see.

"When I finished," Bunting recalls, "I asked my editor if we'd get into trouble for saying to young people that you too will die. She said, 'What's wrong with that?' "

Bunting tells Heb-Nefert's tale so convincingly that a Canadian publisher and Egyptologist told Bunting that she must have lived in Egypt in a previous life. "She was absolutely serious," Bunting says. "She said that book is written as though you were living there and you knew every detail. I told the publisher that while I was writing, I was.

"I've led a few lives in my time," Bunting adds, laughing. One was aboard a sinking ship, as evidenced by her novel SOS Titanic, inspired by a visit to the Belfast Museum of Transport. Her husband's father and uncle both worked in the shipyard where the ocean liner was built. At the museum, a commemorative exhibit helped Bunting and other visitors feel as though they were in lifeboats, gazing at the sinking ship.

"I stood there and watched that ship in its death throe," Bunting recalls. "I felt almost as if I had been there. It was breathtaking. I started writing the book while I was still visiting Ireland."

Although many such endeavors require meticulous research, surprisingly, Bunting calls herself "an unstructured person." "My files are a mess," she confesses. "I always have a moment's panic when someone asks me to find something. And I'm not structured about my working habits, not at all. . . . I don't have set hours for work. I don't really make myself work if I don't want to. Fortunately for me," she adds, "I usually want to."

Her favorite format is the picture book. "My daughter says that's because I like instant gratification," she says, "and maybe that's true. I love to be able to say what I want to say succinctly."

And say it she does, with such productivity that it's difficult to keep track of each book. Also new this spring is Bunting's On Call Back Mountain. A collaboration with National Book Award-winning painter Barry Moser, it is the story of two boys who live with their parents at the foot of a mountain with a fire tower and their friend Bosco, an old man who returns each summer to work as lookout in the tower. The story of their friendship, of looking for wolves that have disappeared after a forest fire a few years ago, and of Bosco's sudden death is both realistic and a beautiful credit to the human spirit. Bunting's words and Moser's art capture the emotional rhythm of the story in an unforgettable combination.

One of several forthcoming will be a Christmas story called December, published by Harcourt Brace and another collaboration with David Diaz, which Bunting says Diaz describes as "his best work yet."

As for her own achievements, the ever-modest Bunting says, "I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams," she says. "My success has been a constant surprise. I often think 'How can all these things happen to this little kid from Maghera?' "

Alice Cary writes from Groton, Massachusetts.

 

Eve Bunting wants to spread an important message: picture books aren't just for tots anymore.

As the author of more than 150 books, Bunting has written something for every age group -- everything from young adult novels to picture books, on subjects ranging from homelessness (Fly…

Memoir

Oliver Sacks

I reach Oliver Sacks at a hotel in Ithaca, New York. Normally, the celebrated neurologist and author of such marvelously readable science books as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat lives, writes and practices medicine in New York City. There he makes the occasional house call ("I like house calls. I think they're crucial.") and, time permitting, sees all comers as patients. ("I'm not snooty about seeing only certain exotic syndromes; I'm happy to see people with slipped disks, cricks in their necks or anything else.")

But for the next couple of weeks, until he sallies forth on what he calls "another neurological adventure," or until his publisher packs him off to San Francisco to promote his newest and most engagingly idiosyncratic book, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks is enjoying a sort of scholar's idyll at Cornell. "Yesterday I met with a botanist, a class of psychology students interested in color vision and a freshman writing class," he says. "Today I'm going to witness some high-pressure physics, and then there's a Greek mythology class."

With such a wide range of interests and the ability to write in interesting ways about any or all of them, it's no great surprise that Sacks succeeds in Uncle Tungsten at taking the seemingly dull topic of chemistry and turning it into a great adventure. In Uncle Tungsten it's Sacks' own boyhood enthusiasm for all things chemical that provides the narrative energy. Sacks writes with intelligence, passion and even humor about key personalities and turning points in the history of chemistry and topics ranging from metals and minerals to photography and spectroscopy. ("I've been investigating the campus with my pocket spectroscope!" Sacks exclaims at one point in our conversation. "I'm delighted to find that in my room here at Cornell there are four sorts of light.")

Sacks grew up in an exceptionally accomplished Anglo-Jewish family. His grandfather invented the Landau lamp, a crucial safety innovation in coal mining. Both of his parents were doctors. His Uncle Dave—the Uncle Tungsten of the title—was an inveterate experimenter with metals and lightbulbs (his nickname came from the tungsten his light bulb factory used for filaments). His first cousin was Abba Eban, former Israeli foreign minister.

While the chapters Sacks devotes to describing his family and homelife do not dwell on his inner life, he does reveal himself in bits and pieces: that almost from birth he was expected to become a doctor and that, eager to begin his training, his mother had him dissecting human fetuses by the age of 11, which horrified him; that his Uncle Tungsten and his more eccentric and intellectually forbidding Uncle Abe, rather than his parents, shaped and abetted his growth as a boy chemist; that he was sent as a child to a boarding school outside of London during World War II, and was abused by a tyrannical headmaster.

Overriding the darker moments is Sacks' unalloyed enthusiasm for the discoveries of science. Who else, for example, could rhapsodize so insightfully about the development of the periodic table? ("The feelings that all the elements could be elegantly and economically related to one another in terms of their physical and chemical properties and that they fell into natural groups and that there was also this mysterious periodicity as one went up in atomic weight was the most exciting thing I'd ever encountered," Sacks says. "It gave me strong feelings of cosmic order."

Sacks says he was a scribbler, a keeper of journals, from way back. Relying on the early journals and reconducting his old—often stinky and explosive—experiments, Sacks has sought to re-create here his boyhood adventures in chemistry. For him Uncle Tungsten is "a mixture of the reminiscent impulse and perhaps a pedagogic one. I would like to imagine that there are other 10 and 12 and 14-year-old boys and girls who find resonance and excitement in such discoveries. I want to retrace a journey into wonder."

 

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

I reach Oliver Sacks at a hotel in Ithaca, New York. Normally, the celebrated neurologist and author of such marvelously readable science books as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat lives, writes and practices medicine in New York City.…

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