All Interviews

It is 8 a.m. in Colorado, and Kent Haruf is out getting wood from the woodpile. Haruf (rhymes with "sheriff’) and his wife Cathy live in a log house at an elevation of 8,500 feet, not far from downtown Sedelia. They built the place four years ago after the success of Haruf’s beautiful novel Plainsong allowed him to retire after 30 years of teaching English and writing.

While we’re waiting for Haruf to come on the line, Cathy warns me that our conversation might be interrupted. She works for a local hospice and if calls come through, Kent will have to pass them along. "We always try to warn people because it’s such a rude thing to do to put them on hold," she says. When Haruf does pick up the phone he is as unaffected and polite as his wife has been.

It is hard to explain why this seems so remarkable. Other famous writers are also friendly and forthcoming. But with Haruf and his wife one senses – or projects – that the normal human scale on which they choose to live their lives has to do with deep-seated conviction and a good bit of self-discipline. You hear something of this in the way Haruf talks about a grueling upcoming 30-city promotional tour for his magnificent new novel, Eventide.

"Knopf was very generous in their advance, [even though] I told them that I wouldn’t tell them anything about the book or show them anything and that I would set my own deadline. They were fine with that, so I want to do my part and sell a few books for them. The other part of this is that the success of Plainsong was dependent upon the independent bookstores across this country – they hand-sold this book – so I feel a kind of debt and obligation to help them."

Readers make a critical mistake when they assume that the virtues – or vices – of a novel’s characters are the same as those of its creator. But on this particular morning, it is more than tempting to find in Haruf’s direct, thoughtful, and self-effacing conversation everything that is most uplifting in the characters who populate his fictional town of Holt, Colorado.

The High Plains of eastern Colorado has been the setting for all of Haruf’s novels (his acclaimed first novel, The Tie That Binds; National Book Award finalist Plainsong; and his new novel, Eventide). Holt’s geography is quite different from the Rockies, where Haruf now lives, but it’s a region Haruf is very familiar with. "The High Plains of eastern Colorado is where I grew up. I had such affection for it as a kid, and I later taught school and high school out there for about seven years. So I know it well, probably better than any place else in the world. It’s still the way I think the world should look."

That intimate knowledge of the place helps explain why Haruf is the author of some of the best fiction about American small-town and rural life being written today. As readers of Plainsong know, Haruf’s taut, unsentimental storytelling and spare, graceful prose are capable of transporting the imagination to a deeper understanding of human responsibility and connection. Plainsong‘s story of the bachelor farmers Harold and Raymond McPheron taking in the pregnant teenager Victoria Roubideaux has a redemptive radiance that readers will long to see repeated in the new novel, Eventide.

But this is exactly what worries Kent Haruf. "You don’t want to duplicate what you’ve already done," he says. "Even though there are similarities in structure and form and some characters who reappear, I hope I have not rewritten Plainsong."

Happily, neither Haruf nor his readers need worry. Eventide offers many of the pleasures of Plainsong: a strong storyline, Haruf’s wonderful, unadorned prose and several familiar characters.

Eventide opens about four years after the events of Plainsong, with Victoria Roubideaux and her daughter, Kate, about to set off for Fort Collins (where Victoria will begin college) while the sweetly clumsy McPheron brothers hover awkwardly, lovingly in the background. With Victoria gone, the McPherons settle into the almost-satisfying, bone-wearying routine of ranch life, until misfortune strikes. Then Eventide takes on a very different tonality and complexion from its predecessor. If Plainsong is morning or afternoon on the prairie, then Eventide is dusk; it is filled with a beautiful but somber light.

One reason for the somber feel of this book is Haruf’s heartrending portrayal of Holt’s emotionally abandoned children. Eleven-year old DJ Kephart, for example, is one of the most vivid characters in recent fiction.

"Childhood is such a vulnerable, tender time," Haruf says. "So many things happen to kids, things that the people around them are doing and are not conscious of but that have a lasting effect on the children. And they are so unprotected. DJ, for example, has no power over what happens to him. He’s born out of wedlock, his mother dies when he’s little, and the only recourse is for him to go to his grandfather, who is an old man and probably doesn’t want him to be there. But DJ is a boy who lives in an honorable way. He has enormous integrity and a clear moral code that he abides by. And yet he is powerless."

Even more remarkable is Haruf’s tone-perfect, clear-eyed presentation of Betty and Luther Wallace. The Wallaces love their young children deeply but have limited intellectual capacity and are simply not able to protect and care for them, with tragic consequences.

"I do not want to portray the Wallaces in some sentimental or condescending way," Haruf says. "Within their own lives they have done the best that they can do, but the best they can do, unfortunately, is not good enough." In fact, Haruf’s marvelous portrait of the Wallaces, with its capacity to inspire an unsentimental empathetic response, is proof of why great fiction always outshines even the very best sociology or psychology.

"You want to write books, on the most basic level, that people are so involved with that they turn the pages and need to find out how it ends," Haruf says reluctantly, after being pressed to talk about the meaning of his work. "My intention is to write clear, simple, direct sentences and to believe that if you write clearly and cleanly enough then the reader will get what you want him or her to get. Beyond that I want people to think that they have been in the presence of real people."

And in Eventide, we certainly do.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Two survivors of love catalogue the claws of attraction “Love is merely a madness,” says Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In her latest offering, humorist Merrill Markoe carries that sentiment to the extreme. Co-written with veteran singer/songwriter Andy Prieboy, The Psycho Ex Game is a mordant study in two-part disharmony, in which a pair of jaded Angelenos engages in a battle of online one-upsmanship to establish who has suffered more in the name of romance. Plumbing the depths of dark humor is nothing new for Markoe, author of six books, including the raucous It’s My F ing Birthday, and one of the creative forces behind “Late Night With David Letterman.” Both acerbic and sweet, the Los Angeles-based writer is wired to barb. “I think people figure out early in their lives what currency they can work in,” she says. “Some people know that they are so adorable looking, all they have to do is smile and dress up and they get plenty from that. Then there are some of us who, early on, see that that doesn’t work. So we joke about it.” In The Psycho Ex Game, successful screenwriter Lisa Roberty and indie rock musician Grant Repka meet after one of Grant’s shows, a comic operetta about the doomed romance between Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. While romantic sparks don’t fly, the two are interested enough in each other to exchange e-mail addresses. Inspired by Grant’s hit song, “My Psycho Ex,” they begin sharing excruciating details of romantic bliss gone bad.

Written in alternating “he said/she said” chapters by Prieboy and Markoe, The Psycho Ex Game delivers a deluge of narcissistic, sadistic, venom-drenched displays. The dysfunctional showdown pits tales of Grant Repka’s former lover, the multiple-personalitied “Junkie Queen of Darkness” against the bad behaviors of Lisa Roberty’s ex, a lobster-hurling actor and director widely known as “Mr. Summer Box Office Record-Holder.” Throughout the game, Repka and Roberty attribute numerical values to their suffering; the greater the trauma, the higher the number of points. The book was inspired by a real-life literary correspondence between Markoe and Prieboy, before the two became romantically involved. “It was so florid, not sexual in any way, but just detailed,” Markoe says. “At some point, Andy and I started playing a game: who had the more horrible previous love life?” She says The Psycho Ex Game is based both on actual experiences and observations: as a 25-year resident of Los Angeles, she’s gathered a wealth of material on the megalomaniacal. A veteran television writer, Markoe was earning laughs long before her prickly humor saw print. In the early ’80s, she teamed up with then-boyfriend David Letterman to create a morning show that would go on to become “Late Night with David Letterman.” The morning show won a couple of Emmys, says Markoe, but it was considered too deranged for the early A.M., when sweet housewives were watching TV. “It was live, and great, weird things happened,” she says. Markoe ended her relationship with “Late Night” and Letterman in 1987, but made amends seven years later when she appeared on the show to promote her second book, How To Be Hap-Hap-Happy Like Me. “It was a dark joke that appealed to my sense of humor,” says Markoe. “You would not speak to somebody for a very long time, then get all dressed up and put on tons of makeup and go see them on their show. It was a lot of fun.” Among Markoe’s “Late Night” legacies is “Stupid Pet Tricks,” an idea she and Letterman generated for the original morning show. (Though Markoe stays mum on the topic of Letterman himself, her kinship with canines is showcased in What the Dogs Have Taught Me, in which she describes her overly excitable pawed pal, Lewis, who suffers from a “greeting disorder.”) Enamored as she is of mutts, Markoe hasn’t written off humans. Not yet. In The Psycho Ex Game, amid remembrances of psychos past, Lisa and Grant discover truths about each other and themselves. Might the pair become romantically linked in their log-on, log-off-again lives? After documenting the demented, it seems only fitting that they should fall madly in love.

Eric Garcia’s anti-Bridget goes to extremes in her search for the perfect mate Ever since Helen Fielding unlocked Bridget Jones’s Diary, the sheer number of similar modern-day-Cinderella tales has all but bowed the bookshelves. Known collectively by the politically retro moniker chick lit, these Prada-wearing parables typically transform Cindi-with-an-i into a struggling junior executive, Prince Charming into her gruff but hunky boss, the pumpkin carriage into a stretch Benz and the various woodland creatures into leggy, man-hungry “Sex and the City” sirens.

Los Angeles mischief-maker Eric Garcia (Matchstick Men, the Anonymous Rex series) has been stalking the chick-lit phenomenon for several years from the fringes of Hollywood, waiting to pounce metaphorically speaking, of course.

“The theme of so many of these chick-lit books seems to be, I am this woman who deserves something great and here are these men who are . . . good, not great. They’re not what I want them to be but. . . . And they tend to spend the next 300 pages of the book or 90 minutes of the movie sort of whining about it. I’m like, that’s just not a strong character. Who wants to hear somebody whine for that long? So I thought, what would a stronger-willed character do?” The wickedly funny answer lies in Cassandra French’s Finishing School for Boys, Garcia’s darkly comic chick-lit parody that manages in its own twisted way to remain deadly true to the form, right down to the happy, albeit happily warped, ending.

Cassie French is a 29-year-old business lawyer for a Hollywood studio with the requisite wacky mom, lecherous boss and two beautiful best friends: a skeletally thin supermodel and a studio exec who is sleeping with her shrink. What they don’t know is that Cassie has three handsome young bachelors drugged and handcuffed to cots in her basement, where she instructs them in the finer things in life, and occasionally has sex with them.

“To some degree, it touches on every guy’s fear that women want to change us; ÔMan, if I get married, she’s going to want to change me,’ ” says Garcia. “And this certainly is a woman who wants to change her men. For the better. She’s just trying to help. She is an empowered woman, thanks to chloroform and heroin and whatever else she uses. It just makes them that much more receptive. And that’s how she sees it.” Garcia’s well-paced and trenchantly funny tale perfectly skewers the American makeover craze. “There is such a fascination in society today with the makeover, the idea that you can take something that is in a raw form and turn it into this little butterfly, this whole chrysalis thing going on. Just look at TV. “The Swan,” OK? It’s just interesting to me that there are people willing to go to these lengths for such a surface thing.” Cassie, to her credit, is trying to change her students from the inside, more along the lines of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

“That’s a perfect example of a show where they take someone’s life who doesn’t really get it and teach them to get it. Of course, the Queer Eye guys don’t go far enough because they only have three days and Cassie has months. That’s not their fault; they’re on a tight schedule. What they do to these guys in a few days Cassie just takes a little longer and really makes sure that the training is imbedded in them.” Garcia has always had a keen eye for a premise. His funny, twisted fiction noir series, which began with his 1999 debut Anonymous Rex, postulates that dinosaurs still live among us, genetically downsized and disguised in Latex suits to blend into society. His gumshoe hero, Vincent Rubio, is Sam Spade with a basil habit. You don’t posit something that outrageous unless, like Garcia, you have both a runaway fire hose of satirical observations and the chutzpa to use it irresponsibly.

“With the dinosaur books, after the first 20 pages you kind of forget they’re dinosaurs and just sort of go with the flow,” he says. “I’m getting similar responses to Cassie where, after the first little bit you start to forget that she’s doing these incredibly illegal and amoral things and you just go with it because you understand where she’s coming from.” Part of what makes Cassandra French so entertaining is that Garcia lures us to sympathize with Cassie despite ourselves. After all, isn’t a world with fewer mismatched plaids worth a little temporary incarceration? Garcia endured a checkout-line ordeal to bone up on scores of chick-lit titles. “I bought a few at stores and got a lot of looks: ÔLet’s see, The Nanny Diaries and Shopaholic and Apocalipstick suuuure these are for your wife.’ I resorted to ordering them online, like porn, because I was slightly embarrassed. I had to read all this stuff to get these conventions down straight. I couldn’t satirize something that I didn’t have down cold; it wouldn’t ring true.” Because Cassandra French hits bookstores just weeks after his third Vincent Rubio adventure, Hot and Sweaty Rex, Garcia finds himself in the odd position of reading from both during his upcoming book tour. That should be child’s play for Garcia, the king of fast-forward creativity; he’s got 14 projects under way, including the next Vincent Rubio (Cheap and Meaningless Rex), a dark sci-fi novel called The Repossession Mambo, and the upcoming Anonymous Rex TV series on the Sci Fi Channel starring newcomer Sam Trammel as Vincent and a supporting cast that includes Daniel Baldwin, Faye Dunaway and Isaac “Shaft” Hayes.

Still, even a promotional collision between his amateur dominatrix and his Jurassic P.I. is bound to fuel some wicked inventiveness from Garcia.

“Wouldn’t Vincent and Cassandra be a good couple?” he wonders. “Now there’s a crossover book; I’ll have Vincent and Cassandra date! It would be kind of odd. But I don’t want to start cannibalizing myself just yet; I’ve only got five books. Wait until I’m completely creatively bankrupt.” Jay MacDonald leavens his innate guyness with viewings of HGTV.

When Thisbe Nissen’s mother read an early draft of her daughter’s moody second novel about a disastrous summer at a dilapidated hotel in an island resort community, she called her daughter and wondered, "Am I going to have to sell the house? Am I going to get run off the island?"

The island in question is that little dot off the eastern end of Long Island called Shelter Island. That’s where Thisbe Nissen spent the happiest weekends and summers of her childhood, and it’s the emotional touchstone for her latest novel, Osprey Island.

"Place is important to me in life generally and it is really important to me in writing," the ebullient Nissen says during a call to her home in Iowa City, where she has lived since arriving ("with a sigh of relief!") in 1995 to attend graduate school at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. "I often write in order to write myself back into a place that I miss or feel inside me. So a lot of the impulse behind this book was about recreating the aura of the place where I had spent so much time as a kid. I don’t think the book is representative of the actual place. I’ve riffed off it. The idea of an island provides rich, fertile ground for a lot of stuff to happen and combust."

And combust things certainly do. Literally. A fatal fire in the laundry shack of Osprey Lodge in the first third of the novel turns what had appeared to be a sharp-eyed, satiric look at the boozy frolics of the staff at a run-down resort into a darker story of the mysteries and secrets that bind and separate members of the close-knit community of year-round Osprey Island residents.

Set in the early summer of 1988, during the frantic, preparatory weeks before Osprey Lodge opens for the season, Osprey Island at its most essential is about the return of two of the island’s prodigals. Suzy Chizek, a divorced schoolteacher on the mainland, returns to the island with her young daughter to help her parents run the Lodge for the summer. Twenty years after leaving the island – according to some to enlist and fight in Vietnam, and to others to flee to Canada and avoid the draft – Roddy Jacobs, son of the local environmentalist and women’s rights activist, returns to Osprey Island because he’s run out of places to go.

A kind of aching need draws Suzy and Roddy together. But the laundry shack fire sets off a downward spiral of events that complicates everything.

Most importantly, the fire leaves eight-year-old Squee Squire bereft of his doting mother and in the undependable hands of his hard-drinking father Lance, who is the complicated, malevolent force in this tale and, it turns out, was the high school nemesis of both Roddy and Suzy. Squee turns for comfort and guidance to the quiet, competent Roddy, and the depiction of the relationship that develops between these two characters is one of the great charms of Osprey Island.

"For a long time as a writer I shied away from male characters," Nissen says. "My fiction always had absent fathers and dead husbands, because I didn’t know what to do with men. But Roddy was the character I spent the most time on. He was the centerpiece of the book, and writing about him never felt hard. His relationship with Squee was so organic to me that I’m not sure where it really came from. A tenderness grew up between them. I just saw it all happening in my head. At the risk of sounding psychotic," Nissen adds, laughing, "Roddy and Squee were having a relationship, and I was scrambling to write it all down."

Nissen is also exceptionally good at social dissection, deftly portraying both the conflicts among year-rounders and their strangely unified front in the face of the summer people. Nissen attributes her slightly comic insider’s understanding to a "very brief!" stint working at a Shelter Island hotel.

With its darker storyline and its larger set of characters, Osprey Island marks a departure or evolution from the tender, humorous tone and two-person focus of Nissen’s well-regarded first novel, The Good People of New York. "I really wanted to do something narratively different," she says. "I had read John Irving’s Cider House Rules and was amazed by his ability to have this omniscient narrator hovering over the narrative then swooping down into close perspective on a lot of characters, and I really wanted to try something with a bigger cast of characters."

Nissen projects her characters against a backdrop of natural island life, particularly bird life, and mythology. "Sometimes I think I write solely in order to do research," Nissen jokes. "I really, really, like doing research! I read somewhere that the osprey had been misnamed in terms of the myths its genus and species names come from. So I got to go back and read all the myths that the names did come from and then the myths that the names should have come from. And I thought, oh my God, there are all these ties in these myths to the story in my head! So I started weaving them in."

Thus a characteristic, if hidden, playfulness laps along the shores of Nissen’s rather somber Osprey Island. "I have such an instinct for letting love prevail that I have to fight against sappiness and the novelistic desire to wrap things up too neatly," Nissen says. "I’m a lot more interested in life than in novelistic tie-ups. At the same time, I’m too hopeful, I have too much of a desire to put hope in the world to leave the ending entirely bleak."

Nissen adds, "Often you hear writers talking about how painful it is to write. If I felt that way, I wouldn’t do it, because I care too much about the day-to-day, moment-to-moment, quality of my life. I like the act of writing. Writing is how I make sense of the world."

So Thisbe Nissen told her mother not to worry about Osprey Island after all. "I think the locals will embrace you."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.