All Interviews

A surprising sidebar to the publication of Mark Spragg’s exceptional second novel, An Unfinished Life, is the fact that the movie version of the story will be in theaters at Christmas. That’s a breathtakingly short leap from print to screen, and the explanation is that Spragg and his wife, Virginia, began working on the screenplay before the book was finished.

During the long gestation of the novel – over six years and "hundreds of hours of road trips" that Mark and Virginia made from their home in Cody, Wyoming, to visit friends throughout the West – the pair talked ceaselessly about the characters and events that were inhabiting Spragg’s thoughts.

"It became a sort of wonderful puzzle to hit a point in the narrative and wonder how it could be satisfied in a novel and how it could be satisfied in a film," Spragg says during a call to the cabin he owns outside of Red Lodge in the Montana Rockies. Eventually Virginia, a therapist with no prior screenwriting experience, decided to take first crack at the film script. "It was utterly amazing," Spragg says. "She broke every rule I had in my mind about how writers develop." During pauses between drafts of the novels, Spragg worked on the script, too.

Spragg, who has wanted to write novels since his childhood on his parents’ dude ranch in the remote Wapiti valley at the far edge of Yellowstone Park, worked briefly and unhappily as a scriptwriter in the 1980s. "I used to snowshoe out from my little cabin on the North Fork of the Shoshone dragging a disk sled with my luggage out to the main highway where I had a three-quarter-ton pickup chained up. It would get me into Cody and then I’d take a little prop plane to Denver and then a jet into Los Angeles for a script conference at Disney. I remember walking down the boardwalk in Santa Monica. I hadn’t seen a human being out of wool and down for two or three months and there would be these young women skating by in their bikinis. It was like landing on another planet."

Collaboration with his wife on the film script of An Unfinished Life proved far less alien and far more fruitful than Spragg’s previous movie business experiences. Directed by Lasse Hallström, the film stars Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez. The movie’s imminent release is no reason to forgo the many pleasures of reading Spragg’s novel.

An Unfinished Life is, in the first place, the story of Einar Gilkyson’s bitterness. Spragg relates that for several years his daydreams and night dreams were frequented by "an older man sitting tightly in a chair on a porch, scowling, sort of screwed down tightly in his bitterness, with a mob of half-feral cats about him. So my wife and I started to talk about him, and inevitably the question arose: why is this old man so embittered?"

Einar’s bitterness, readers quickly learn, stems from the untimely death of his 21-year-old son Griffin in an automobile accident about a decade before the novel opens. Since then, Einar has retreated into isolation on his ranch outside of Ishawooa, Wyoming. His main reason for continuing to live at all is to care for his oldest friend, Mitch Bradley, a black cowboy who has lived and worked with Einar for about 50 years and who was grotesquely mauled by a bear some years before and is now confined to the ranch bunkhouse.

Spragg says he realized quite early that An Unfinished Life was "going to deal with forgiveness" and, with that theme in mind, he could "begin to populate the novel." Einar’s opportunity to practice forgiveness comes when his daughter-in-law Jean shows up uninvited and unwelcome at the ranch after running out of places to go. Jean was at the wheel when her husband was killed, and Einar blames her for the death of his son; quite frankly, he is not about to forgive her.

And Jean is not about to forgive herself either. She has spent the past decade working out her guilt over Griffin’s death in a series of abusive relationships. In fact when she arrives at the ranch, her most recent boyfriend, the malevolent Roy Winston, is tracking her across the country. Jean’s one saving grace is her nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter Griff.

This child, with her mixture of tentativeness and bravery, wisdom and innocence, is Spragg’s most shining creation. "I really like this kid a lot, as you can probably tell," he says. "She’s a very brave child, a child who’s required to act older than she is, but who has the same fears and dreams and hopes as other children of that age." The relationship that slowly and excruciatingly develops between Griff and her grandfather, both of whom are astonished by the existence of the other, is one of the marvels of An Unfinished Life.

But in fact, Spragg demonstrates throughout his novel that he is exceptionally good at portraying all sorts of human relationships. The relationship between Einar and Mitch, he says, is particularly important to him. "I hate the homophobic overreaction in our society [that says] if two men honestly love one another . . . that somehow must be sexual. Einar and Mitch are two men who honestly love one another, who have lived together and worked together and struggled together and who would literally – not figuratively – die for one another because their love is so profound. And they’re both heterosexual men."

Spragg writes his novel with direct, tangible, unadorned but somehow poetic language that will remind some readers of Kent Haruf’s writing. In fact, the two men and their wives have been close friends since the writers shared honors at the Mountain ∧ Plains Booksellers Awards some years ago (Haruf for Plainsong and Spragg for Where Rivers Change Direction, his marvelous memoir of growing up on his family’s isolated ranch).

By the end of his remarkable novel of grief, anger, bitterness and forgiveness, Spragg has taken readers into the sensibilities, thoughts and histories of his characters in a way that a movie simply cannot do. So see the movie if you like, but most definitely read the novel.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

Relationships are complex things—especially those of the familial sort. Defining yourself within and apart from parents and siblings can be a life's work, at turns painful and liberating. This is one of the themes that Nancy Reisman, an award-winning writer of short fiction, explores in her beautiful debut novel, The First Desire.

During a midday phone call from Ann Arbor, where Reisman teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan, the author discusses home, family and the ties that bind. Her manner is easy, and the voice that floats over the line sounds both soft-spoken and assured.

Though she currently resides in Ann Arbor, Reisman's home, and the setting of her novel, is upstate New York. Reisman is acutely aware of the pull of home the gravitational force that it exerts on our lives. "Isn't that true of places where you grow up? I think the mark they make on you seems so distinctive, even compared to other places where I've lived for long stretches of time," she says.

It is the tension, the paradox the longing for home, and the longing to leave that she writes about so eloquently, and with such keen insight. "It's a huge conflict, certainly for [the] characters, but I think it's something that a lot of people experience at one moment or another in their lives," she says.

The novel begins on a glorious summer morning in Buffalo. The year is 1929. Sadie Cohen, now the married Sadie Feldstein, is enjoying the quiet and solitude of the early hour until her brother Irving arrives with some disturbing news—their eldest sister, Goldie, has disappeared. With this event, we are drawn into the life of the Cohen family, and into the life of the changing city itself. Reisman brilliantly evokes another era as she takes us through the Great Depression, World War II and its aftermath. She tells the story through different perspectives—those of the Cohen sisters, their brother Irving and their father's mistress—and forms these into a seamless narrative. That she accomplishes this ambitious feat so successfully is a testament to her talent.

Reisman says she chose this period in which to set her novel, in part, because it's a moment when the family and the collective unit was very, very important. The family matriarch has already died when The First Desire opens, but her presence looms large over the novel and in the lives of those she left behind.

"I think the mothers are really the secret heart of the book," she says. Reisman is quick to add that, although men have an important role as fathers, she's interested in "how [the maternal bond] shapes peoples' lives."

Reisman has a strong relationship with her own mother, like her mother before her. Perhaps, then, this closeness is something inherited, passed down through generations. "Whatever the reason, it's something that has been really vital in my own life," says Reisman. She is interested in how women negotiate relationships "with their mothers, their relationships with their daughters, with their sons, all of these family relationships . . . and the daily tragedies of the lack of connection. In some ways the power of those relationships is mysterious, but it's undeniable."

The life of a city fascinates Reisman perhaps as much as her characters' lives. The Buffalo Reisman knew in the 1970s has suffered since its time of economic prosperity earlier in the 20th century. In order to create an accurate portrait of the era, Reisman spent time in the Buffalo area, visiting public libraries and historical societies, reading newspapers, menus and the city pages (phone directories of the day) and studying photographs. She also interviewed people who knew the city at that time.

"Though the novel takes place in another time, the themes are universal. The characters are in part bound by social mores of the time and the place, but they also transcend them. That mix of continuity and change is something that I'm really interested in exploring and I don't know that it can ever be definitively nailed down. I think it's something that shifts."

Which brings us to the title, The First Desire, and the implications it has for Reisman's characters. She illustrates desire in its many forms—the longing to be known and understood, sexual desire, the wish for a life not led. The title, says Reisman, "does have all these other resonances . . . I do have that association to a kind of maternal connection or familial connection and a kind of idyllic one. I think for Goldie, it's the sort of fantasy of being alone with her mother and the happiness of that and the peace of that. That's the one that's most powerful for me."

Reisman may be a first-time novelist, but she's an acclaimed author of short fiction; her collection House Fires won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including Best American Short Stories 2001. When we ask if writing a novel presents a unique challenge, Reisman laughs. "Yes. The simple answer is yes. The challenge was simply scale, working with so many characters, such a span of time."

Reisman says she joked with friends, "Okay, the next novel is going to be one point of view: My Summer Vacation." Whatever follows, readers will be clamoring for it after a taste of Reisman's remarkable first novel. In luminous, unsparing prose she allows us to inhabit the inner world of her characters, experiencing their moments of joy and the way old wounds can inhabit the current moment. She understands the effect of things gone unsaid and that we all are made of many selves, some secreted from view. Reisman knows that home, though often sweet, can be sorrowful, too, and that our family relationships inform who we are, are bound up in the process by which we come to know ourselves.

Katherine Wyrick lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

A third of the way into Russell Banks’ powerful new novel, The Darling, Hannah Musgrave travels to a remote tribal village in Liberia to meet the family of Woodrow Sundiata. This is in the mid-1970s, and Hannah, the daughter of a prominent, liberally active American doctor and writer, is hiding out in West Africa under an assumed name, fleeing authorities she believes are pursuing her for her radical activities in the Weather Underground. From almost the moment of Hannah’s arrival in Liberia, alone and fearful, Woodrow, whom Banks describes in conversation as "a village boy who made good," has been kind, solicitous and helpful to her in very practical ways. As the two are driven out to the village in the government car that Woodrow’s status as a midlevel bureaucrat affords, they each are considering the idea of marriage.

When they arrive at last at the village, Woodrow is swallowed up by the joyous reception for the favored son who has done so well in the nation’s capital. Hannah is abandoned to her own devices. When she finally finds her way into the family’s inner sanctum, she is offered with great ceremony the finest celebratory delicacy, "bush meat," which she suddenly realizes is roasted chimpanzee. Hannah refuses the meat and then flees the village, returning to the car in confusion and anger to wait overnight for Woodrow’s visit with his family to end.

In a novel that ranges over 30 years of Hannah’s life, from the 1970s to just after the September 11 terrorist attacks – including her doomed efforts to save endangered chimpanzees, her strained relationships with her parents, her seemingly cool relationship with Woodrow and their two sons, her experiences in the Weather Underground and her heartrending experiences of Liberia’s horrifying slide from an apparently stable, American-style democracy into the viciously brutal regimes of Presidents Doe and Taylor – this moment at the village and its chilly aftermath is a small one. Yet such is the brilliance, nuance and power of its scenes that readers will feel in their bones the confluence of the perhaps contradictory emotional, psychological, social and political forces at work here. They might wish to turn to the author to ask, what does all this mean?

But this is exactly the sort of question Russell Banks feels unable to answer. "I suppose I can interpret these scenes as a particularly well informed reader," he says, reluctantly, during a call to his writing studio in the northeastern corner of the Adirondack Mountains near the Vermont border. "When I got to writing that specific scene, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I knew she would end up being offered the most luxurious dish available, but I didn’t know how she would deal with it. Then her character took over and she refused it. I was being driven by her character and the situation and the personal and social histories that led up to it."

Banks, who has written such highly regarded works of fiction as Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone and, most recently, Cloudsplitter – his dazzling fictional portrait of abolitionist John Brown and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 – says he sees himself not so much as speaking through his characters as listening to them. "In Hannah’s case, from the very beginning, I decided that I was her very close trusted male friend. I imagined myself sitting on the porch with her day in and day out or at a table over beers or coffee listening to her tell me her story."

Which is not to say that Banks’ own opinions have nothing to do with his creation of Hannah Musgrave and the cast of characters who populate her story. "I have very strong opinions," Banks says. "And they naturally inform how I see the world and, then, how the world will end up being represented on the page. But I don’t sit down and write a story in order to make a point. That would be a lousy story."

Percolating unobtrusively beneath the surface of the novel, adding richness to The Darling’s powerful brew, is Banks’ longstanding interest in issues of race. "The more I see and understand American history and American consciousness, whether it’s white or black or Asian or Native American or Latino, the more strongly I believe race is the central story of America. If America has a single master narrative, it’s the history of race. I can’t think about American history without going there," he says.

But he quickly adds, "That’s kind of an intellectual process. Obviously there’s something more personal involved in it for me, and that’s a harder thing for me to nail down and articulate."

Banks grew up in a white, working-class family in northern New England but "traveled to the South very early on and lived in its cities and went to college in the South in the civil rights era." At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he was one of the founders of the local chapter of the activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). But he never followed the more radical path of his character Hannah Musgrave. Instead he became a one of the best fiction writers in America.

Musing on his own experiences in the antiwar and civil rights movements after completing the exhausting work on his longest novel Cloudsplitter, Banks began thinking about the fates of "women in the movement who had gone on to far more radical positions" than he had. Banks soon realized that "these women had been largely misrepresented . . . and that the psychology of a such a person and the idea of dedicating your life to certain ideals . . . hadn’t really been chronicled in a serious way in fiction."

Thus the powerful, perplexing, riveting, memorable character of Hannah Musgrave was born. Back in the U.S., in the post-9/11 present, she looks back on her experiences in Africa with a mixture of anger and regret. In the end, the reader is likely to agree with Banks, who declares that Hannah is "a person who has lived through tragic events and has been deeply marked by them, a person who has suffered a great deal. But not as a victim. She’s simply too powerful to think of as a victim."

Tom Wolfe has always had a seismologist's sixth sense for the subtle shifts in our cultural tectonic plates that signify major social tremors ahead. He wrote about Southern stock-car legend Junior Johnson and coined the phrase "good ol' boys" years before NASCAR became the nation's fastest growing sport. He hopped aboard the psychedelic Further bus with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters long before the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. He lifted the veil on NASA in The Right Stuff, modern art in The Painted Word, architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House and high-tech communications in Hooking Up, sensing their emerging significance on the American scene.

So what's the man in white doing back in school? College parents might well wonder after nervously thumbing through I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe's first novel in six years and his first expedition into the shadowy subculture of campus life.

Charlotte Simmons, a beautiful but sheltered genius from rural North Carolina, enrolls in Dupont University, a sports powerhouse where the coed dorms rock 24/7 with beer, bongs and recreational sex. She befriends a motley crew: Hoyt, scion of an old-money family; Beverly, a Groton grad with a lust for lacrosse players; Jojo, the lone Caucasian on the godlike basketball team; and Adam, a militant student journalist. As her classmates battle for self-knowledge amid the status, power and hype, Simmons remains true to herself in a way that shapes the lives of everyone around her.

In an interview from his home in New York, Wolfe says he sensed social shifts at work on campuses. "This is the way I love to start a project, from things that I've heard but I haven't seen in print," he says. "I gradually began hearing stories about the racial and sexual scene as a result of coed dorms, and I was surprised to find how little there was written about any of this."

Inspired by Coming of Age in New Jersey, anthropologist Michael Moffatt's account of an undercover stint in a Rutgers dorm, Wolfe spent weeks in the dorms, frat houses and student unions of college sports powers Stanford, Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill and Florida.

Of course, a 74-year-old freshman has to make some sartorial concessions. "I wore a necktie but I didn't wear a white suit. I usually wore a navy blazer, white pants and black shoes with white spats-effect built into them. I was very much undercover," he chuckles. "I went to many fraternity parties and hung around the dorms. Most of them had no idea who I was; all they knew was I was too old to be a member of the Drug Enforcement Administration."

To his surprise, the sexual freedom that his graduating class (Washington & Lee, 1951; Ph.D. Yale, 1957) could only dream about has become a nightmare for many college students today. What's more, Wolfe says most universities have abandoned the concept of in loco parentis (surrogate parenting) for fear of litigation.

Wolfe spent weeks in the dorms, frat houses and student unions of college sports powers Stanford, Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill and Florida.

"The pressure of coed dorms is not precisely what one would think; it's not boys in boxer shorts sprinting across the hallway to jump into bed with some girl. In fact, that's looked down upon; it's called dorm-cest. If you're accused of having sex, or hooking up with someone in your own dorm, you're considered a pretty bad case."

"What it does is create a terrible sexual pressure on the undergraduates, and it is hardest on women because they no longer have any automatic wall to step behind if they don't like the situation. Today, if a girl is a virgin, she hides it, which is another 180-degree turn."

Wolfe's new novel will likely rekindle his ongoing feud with Mssrs. John Irving, Norman Mailer and John Updike, who lit into his last novel, A Man in Full. Wolfe, who together with Hunter S. Thompson founded "new journalism" in the 1960s by applying fiction techniques to reportage, remains a staunch proponent of naturalism, of going out and hunting up content, something he maintains those literary lions can't or won't do today.

"I think there were two things at play. One, I think they were afraid that the success of A Man in Full on top of the success of The Bonfire of the Vanities would establish naturalism as the way out of the waning state of the novel. But on top of that, I think there may have been just a bit of old-fashioned jealousy. I have never before known of a situation in which any three well-known novelists attacked anything at the same time, anything."

"Writers like to think that genius is 95 percent your own imagination and just five percent of the necessary play, the material. But as you get older, you begin to realize genius is about 65 to 70 percent the material and about 30 to 35 percent talent or something inside of yourself. So many writers are not willing to face up to that today."

Jay MacDonald has interviewed hundreds of authors for BookPage.

Tom Wolfe on…

The writer Thomas Wolfe: "I always thought my first book would get reviews along the lines of, Tom Wolfe, certainly not to be confused with the great novelist from Asheville, North Carolina.' But fortunately for me, his stock had waned a bit by the time I appeared on the scene. I think it will rise again. He's one of my absolute favorite writers."

His feud with John Irving: "He told a German interviewer that he had won an Oscar for the script for The Cider House Rules and . . . he can sit at home and stroke his Oscar and he bet I wished I could do the same thing. I told her actually I don't; I think there's a name for that, sitting at home stroking your Oscar, and I'm not sure I want to be involved in it."

The birth of new journalism: "For 10 years, I was a newspaper reporter, and probably would have continued except that within the space of eight months, two newspapers sank beneath me, the New York Herald Tribune and its successor, the World Journal Tribune. When the second one went under, I figured it was just time to go out on my own."

The death of the novel: "I think the novel in this country is fast headed for extinction as a major medium. Young people in college begin to turn more and more to film if they want stories, and begin to look at film as the dominant art form. The total difference is not the popularity of the medium, but the fact that the best, most talented novelists have given up on the old idea of going out into the country and writing about what is really going on."