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John Updike, whose provocative 22nd novel, Terrorist, tells the story of an 18-year-old, New Jersey-born suicide bomber, attributes his remarkable productivity to the way he has arranged his life. "Out of habit as well as compulsion" he shows up at his office around 9 a.m. ("or a little before, actually, now that I'm getting older and wake up earlier"). He tries to write a thousand words a day. He "bolts through to the end of a draft" then "looks at it with a cool eye."

"I try to structure my life so it isn't too exciting in itself. It's not a big-city life," Updike says during a call to his home in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, a small industrial town across the river from Salem. Updike and his second wife have lived there for 24 years.

"I find small towns – maybe because I was born in one – handier. The bank, the post office, the fruit and vegetable store, the liquor store, all those things are within an easy walk in this village. That's not true in a city."

On September 11, 2001, however, Updike had a catastrophic big-city moment. On a visit to his wife's son in Brooklyn, he watched the burning and collapse of the World Trade Center towers. "It gave me a sense that I was in a very minor way a witness to whatever we're engaged in now. Bush calls it the war on terror, as if terror can ever be overcome. And as a novel like The Coup [1978] shows, I'm interested in Islam as a more fiery and absolutist and, some would say, fanatical brand of theistic faith. So it was not just my happening to have been there but my sensation that I was qualified to speak about why young men are willing to become suicide bombers. I can kind of understand it, and I'm not sure too many Americans can."

Updike's terrorist is Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who abandoned the family before Ahmad can remember. Ahmad grows up in the hopeless inner city of New Prospect, New Jersey, a wondrously described fictional town across the Hudson from New York. Seeking some connection with his father and some sense of stability, Ahmad begins attending a storefront mosque and falls under the sway of Shaikh Rashid, then becomes, in a way, a more perfect believer than his teacher. "To Ahmad the words of the Koran are sacred. They're alive. They're fire," Updike says. "I thought it was important to show how much Ahmad needed to make his own philosophy, as it were, because the environment wasn't coming up with any."

Ironically, in many ways Ahmad is an ideal kid. "He's what we're all trying to raise, this really nice, upright boy, full of faith and seriousness," Updike says wryly. "As Jack Levy keeps telling him, you're really the model kid except that you're trying to kill us all."

Jack Levy is the other central figure in Updike's narrative. A non-observant Jew and a world-weary high school guidance counselor on the brink of retirement, he takes an interest – a little too late as it turns out – in Ahmad. "There's a lot I don't know about how America conducts its business," Updike says, "but being a schoolteacher's son, I do have a feeling for high school teachers and that sort of weariness that comes from 30 years of counseling kids who don't seem to be any better for it while at the same time there's that do-good streak of somehow wanting to save somebody from a fall."

The climactic moment of Terrorist brings these two figures together in a desperate confrontation, which Updike says was the driving vision of the book. He is understandably reluctant to discuss this key scene for fear of spoiling the suspense.

One of the most honored writers of his generation and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Updike tells his story with the thrilling, gorgeous prose we have come to expect of him. There is, for example, a terrible beauty in his description of the lake of rubble in the hollowed-out core of downtown New Prospect. And there is a ravishing sermon at a Black Christian church that Ahmad attends at the invitation of his seductive classmate Joryleen. "You're working partly out of your subconscious," Updike says of this scene. "Any work of art, including a piece of fiction, that you're working on month after month is somewhat out of control. You're at the mercy of what turns you on, and obviously that Black sermon turned me on."

Updike has often explored themes of religious faith and disillusionment. In Terrorist, he links those themes to the legacy of fanatical violence. "It's about an America now in which you can't get into a federal building without being checked for a gun, where boarding a plane has become an ordeal in a way it never used to be. Every day we – especially people who try to move around – feel the tensions in what used to be our freedom. We feel all these very real effects that Mohamed Atta and his colleagues created."

And yet Updike portrays Ahmad with empathy. "I think there are enough people complaining about the Arab menace that I can be allowed to try to show this young man as sympathetically as I can," Updike says. "He's my hero. I tried to understand him and to dramatize his world. Besides it's not just young Muslims who are killing themselves. We have all these American high school students, steeped in Protestantism and Judaism, who bring guns to school and shoot up the cafeteria knowing they're going to die at the end of this rush. There are a lot of teenagers who are going to take big chances."

In novels like Terrorist, John Updike himself, now in his mid-70s, also takes big chances. "I've not become jaded about writing," he says. "That still seems somehow very worth doing. I don't quite know why it is worthy in an age that is groaning under the weight of unread or little-read books. But just to conjure up things out of your head and turn them into black marks on paper is a great privilege and remains very exciting to me."

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

"You didn’t ask the question everybody else seems to be asking," Monica Ali says at the end of our conversation about her second novel, Alentejo Blue. In less than a minute, Ali must leave her home outside London to fetch her son and daughter, ages seven and five, from school. Ali’s writing day is defined by her children’s school schedule, but today the school has agreed to keep them an hour longer so she can take a call from BookPage.

"Everybody wants to know after the big success of the first book, how I feel about the second book coming out," Ali continues. " I hate being asked that question."

Oh, the sophomore jinx question. "I’m anxious to see the reaction to the book," is all that Ali will say at the moment. And frankly? As far as Ali’s Alentejo Blue is concerned, the question is moot.

Monica Ali’s widely and deservedly praised first novel, Brick Lane (2003), told the story of a community of Bangladeshi immigrants living in public housing in London’s East End. Based on its almost Dickensian narrative energy, its graceful writing and its deep compassion for its characters, the novel became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Man Booker and Kiriyama prizes, among others. Ali, who was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and came to England with her Bangladeshi father and English mother in 1971 when she was three, was named as one of the 20 best young British novelists. She was hailed, along with such novelists as Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru, as one of an exciting group of young writers giving voice to the new multi-ethnic, multicultural Great Britain.

So the first big surprise of Ali’s beautifully written new tour de force is that it is set in Portugal. Alentejo (roughly pronounced: Al en TAY zha) is a farming region of Portugal. "The particular region I’m writing about is the poorest area, very rural, where the major industries are cork oak production and wheat. It’s a beautiful area of unspoiled countryside," she says. The "blue" of the book’s title refers to the vibrant blue paint residents use to outline the doors and windows of their whitewashed farmhouses.

"I’d planned to write a completely different book, set in London and in the north of England," Ali says. But for some time she and her husband, a management consultant, had visited friends who owned a house in Alentejo, and eventually they also bought a house there, where the family now spends summer holidays. "When I would sit down at my desk in London, I would still have all these images and thoughts of Portugal, and stories and characters kept inserting themselves into my mind. I resisted for a while. I was a bit annoyed because I’d planned something else. I never really bought the idea that the material chooses you rather than you choosing it, but it turns out that it does. This was presenting itself to me, and the obvious thing was to go ahead and write it."

The second big surprise of Alentejo Blue is the range of characters and points of view Ali is able to convincingly and movingly inhabit. In Brick Lane, Ali clearly demonstrated her great understanding of human nature, but here she takes that understanding to new heights. She writes from the perspective of young and old, women and men, tourists and old-time residents. It is an astonishing performance.

"I had a sense of quite deep satisfaction with what I was doing," Ali says of the composition of the novel. " I felt that I was flexing a sort of writing muscle. I was challenging myself, and I enjoyed the challenge of getting into all those different heads."

The social center of Ali’s fictional village of Mamarrosa is Vasco’s café. Vasco, a surprisingly graceful, extraordinarily fat man, who takes great pride in the fact that he learned his trade working in restaurant kitchens in Provincetown, Massachusetts, is the comic centerpiece of the novel. Vasco’s thematic counterweight is the aged farm laborer Joao, whose lonely presence casts the shadow of the region’s history throughout the rest of Ali’s narrative.

Into Vasco’s café traipse a host of dreamers and sojourners, each of them waiting or hoping for something. Among these are a young British couple, wandering through the countryside on holiday while they try to figure out if they love each other enough to get married; the wildly dysfunctional Potts family, who left England just ahead of the law and live in fetid squalor at the edge of town; a young, dutiful local girl, Teresa, who is planning her escape from the village; and Harry Stanton, a blocked writer trying to finish his book while managing to distract himself by drinking and chasing after the Pottses.

Ali says she first thought she would write the book entirely from Harry Stanton’s perspective. "But I realized that wasn’t the right thing to do, because that character wasn’t the driving impulse. The driving impulse of Alentejo Blue was the place itself. I soon realized that I would have to develop some kind of choral range in order to give voice to the character of that place."

And this is the real achievement of Alentejo Blue. While each character’s story or vignette is wonderfully wrought, enthralling or moving, comic or tragic by itself, as they overlap and interweave, the whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts. A reader gets an ever-deepening sense of the rhythm and the soul of a landscape and of the people who are rooted there or are just passing through.

"I’m not expecting this book to do for Alentejo what A Year in Provence did for that region," Ali says laughing. "I think this book shows a side of life that that book doesn’t. So I don’t expect a boom in property values as a result. Good thing for me. I’d have to move house again if that happened, ship out and find somewhere tranquil."

Ali says she doesn’t like to think of her work in terms of a career. She has begun writing a third novel and has done little bits of research on another idea that intrigues her, "but after that I don’t know," she says. "Maybe I don’t have any more books after that." Given the beauty of Alentejo Blue and its implicit declaration that Ali will not be limited by past achievements, let us hope for many more novels to come.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Sara Gruen keeps her cat's ashes in an urn behind her desk and donates a portion of her book royalties to animal charities. It's not terribly surprising, then, that one of the most memorable characters in this animal lover's new novel is a pachyderm named Rosie.

"I've always been a complete sucker for animals," says Gruen, whose novel Water for Elephants has garnered considerable buzz for its offbeat story of a Depression-era traveling circus. "I didn't realize that maybe other people weren't until recently. I've always been 'Feed the wild ones, tame the stray ones.' "

Gruen's own menagerie—which she shares with her husband and three young sons—includes four cats, a dog, a horse and goats. Gruen spoke with BookPage recently from her home in an environmental community north of Chicago, where the residents live in energy-efficient homes and share an organic farm and a charter school.

It was in this bucolic setting that Gruen started writing her third novel (following Riding Lessons and Flying Changes) after intensive research that included several family visits to circus shows. But Water for Elephants almost didn't happen: Distraction after distraction kept Gruen from finishing the book, including the usual family illnesses and a technical-writing project that dragged on for four months.

"I found it very difficult to get back into the characters," she recalls. "I almost gave it up."

Gruen laughs as she explains the sensory-deprivation method she finally employed to buckle down and finish the book—she moved her desk to a walk-in closet, covered the window, turned off the phones and wore earplugs.

"I hope to never have to do that again!" she says.

The result was worth the struggle. Water for Elephants is the remarkable, captivating story of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a 1930s traveling circus fighting to stay solvent during the Great Depression.

Gruen brings to life a fascinating, nearly forgotten world of big tops and bearded ladies, in a time when the circus coming to town was a rare treat for those suffering through one of the bleakest chapters in our nation's history.

The story is also a bittersweet statement on growing old in modern America. Jacob Jankowski, who is either 90 or 93 years old (he's not entirely sure anymore), whiles away his days in a nursing home, missing his wife and his life. His children and grandchildren come to visit, but he finds it increasingly difficult to keep them all straight. When a traveling circus sets up in the parking lot next to his residence, his shaky mind is transported back to his days as the Benzini circus veterinarian.

After young Jacob's parents die in a car accident, he abandons his veterinary studies at Cornell and hops a Benzini train. He is soon taking care of a host of big cats, monkeys and horses, and spending his nights with the circus crew drinking bottles of the foulest bootleg imaginable.

Jacob is quickly captivated by Marlena, the lovely but married star of the Benzini show. Her husband August is a dashing, vicious man who trains (and often beats) the circus animals. Rosie, the prized elephant that the Benzini show bought from a failed competitor, is often at the wrong end of August's wrath. Eventually, so is Jacob.

Gruen was one day away from starting a new novel on an entirely different topic when she read a newspaper feature about famed circus photographer Edward J. Kelty. In the years after World War I, Kelty followed circuses around the country, capturing mesmerizing images of sword swallowers, giants and midgets.

Gruen saw Kelty's work and thought, "Wow! I could put a novel in that." She set aside her other project and began researching the unique community of circus workers.

"I wanted to preserve a snapshot of that very extreme culture, because it's gone," she says.

The book is stuffed with authentic, largely forgotten details about life during the Depression. Gruen writes about a grizzled circus worker named Camel suffering from "Jake Leg." The condition afflicted tens of thousands of people who drank a Jamaican ginger extract during Prohibition, not knowing that it could cause paralysis.

Getting the historical details right was painstaking work, but Gruen found she had no trouble capturing the nuances of Jacob, a crotchety nonagenarian.

"He was the one who was just there," she says. "I think it scared my husband. I just turned on the tap and there's this cantankerous old man."

"It was much more difficult to write the historical chapters," she says. "You know, was there running water in a 1930s train car? I would finish those chapters with my tongue hanging out. Then I'd reach the safety of Jacob's nursing home."

Some of the history included in the book—such as Jake Leg and the rampant abuse of circus animals and workers—is haunting, but Gruen doesn't flinch from that reality.

In one of the book's many poignant moments, Jacob discovers why the elephant Rosie is so seemingly ill-suited for circus life, leading to her many beatings at the hands of August. In her author's note, Gruen makes clear that such abuse is historically accurate. A 1930s elephant named Topsy killed her trainer after he fed her a lit cigarette.

"Topsy's owners at Coney Island's Luna Park decided to turn her execution into a public spectacle," Gruen writes. "But the announcement that they were going to hang her met with uproar—after all, wasn't hanging a cruel and unusual punishment?"

The elephant was electrocuted in front of 1,500 spectators.

Sad? Absolutely. But if anything, discovering such stories while writing Water for Elephants only intensified Gruen's devotion to animals.

"I came into this project loving elephants, but now I'm absolutely besotted," Gruen laughs.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

If you reduced the novels, short stories and poetry of Elizabeth Cox to a bumper sticker, it would read: "Life is messy." It is the very untidiness of our ordinary lives, filled with unpredictable and uncontrollable acts of both cruelty and kindness, that consistently grabs her attention, worms its way into her subconscious and eventually springs to life in her work. This distillation process takes time; try as she might, this assured and patient Southern literary voice has managed to produce just three novels and a short story collection during the past two decades while teaching creative writing at Duke, MIT and elsewhere. A poem she recently published in the Atlantic took her 12 years to write. All of which makes the appearance of a new Cox novel a welcome surprise on the order of the Hale-Bopp comet.

In her new novel, The Slow Moon, Cox transports us to South Pittsburg, Tennessee, where the lives of teenage friends will change forever in a single night. When young lovers Crow and Sophie slip away from a late-night party to make love for the first time, the deep wood seems a perfectly romantic setting. But life is messy, and Crow has left his condom in the car. He leaves the disrobed Sophie to retrieve it, only to be delayed again by circumstances. When he returns 20 minutes later, he finds her unconscious, raped and badly battered.

Although most of the close-knit town folk doubt that Crow, the clean-cut scion of the wealthy sawmill owner, had any part in the brutal attack, the traumatized Sophie can’t recall and he’s charged with the crime. Cox uses the days leading up to the trial shrewdly by winding the narrative through the viewpoints of Sophie and Crow, Crow’s younger brother Johnny, Crow’s rock-band mates and their parents. In the process, she wins our empathy for all, even as we slowly realize that the guilty may be among them.

"It’s fascinating how one thing can open up so many different people’s lives, and in fact the life of a whole town. It opens vulnerability everywhere," Cox says from her home in Spartanburg, South Carolina. "It seems like if it’s not vulnerable, it’s pretending; we’re all pretending to be something in front of the world and then something happens and it shows us who we are, hopefully. The beautiful thing to me is when we take a hard look at it and then live with that. If we don’t, then it seems like we’re lost."

The mystery that drives The Slow Moon took seed in Cox’s subconscious seven years ago.

"I watched the Columbine school shootings and I wanted to write something about that and I didn’t because every time I tried to make those boys gothic it didn’t work for me. So I made them regular boys who did something horrendous," she says. "I know that very often motives are looked for, but I’m not sure if we ever really understand. I think what drives people to do something like that is so deep that to apply a motive feels a little bit pretentious. We look for it and want it, but if we really look at it, it’s the need for something from the father or mother or for some connection within the family that comes out in violent ways in the community. But boy, that is a tight wire to walk."

Cox has long taught her students to "listen to their story" and let it develop organically. She neither plots nor prods her own fiction, but instead lets it linger in her subconscious until it is ready to make its appearance on the page.

"I read a lot of Carl Jung, and as I move into this, I just trust the unconscious and the messiness of it," she explains. "I have to stay with it long enough to find the sense of it, but it’s always deep sense. It doesn’t always make sense intellectually, but it does gutturally, and that’s the sense I always trust, the sense of the gut. That’s the deep pleasure of writing. It takes me a long time so I don’t have as many books as other people, but that’s what I do."

When her narrative threatens to become prosaic, Cox will inject a passage of stream-of-consciousness free verse to jolt herself and her readers awake. Here’s one: "She got up and went to the closet, lifted one of Carl’s sports jackets, trying to imagine where she would go if she left him. The idea lay in her mind like an egg, broken, its yolk running through her body, making yellow the dreams that came with leaving."

Huh? Cox laughs at the mention of her sneaky passages.

"If it’s going along too smoothly, I like to ripple the water," she admits. "You know how a poem hits you in the same place a joke hits you, not quite the gut but the midriff? If I’m going along and haven’t been to that place recently, I don’t do it on purpose but I know the words come in from the side and I write those down and think, yeah, that’s right for here. It doesn’t make all that much sense but it’s right for here. It’s a sign to go deeper. I’ve always thought that my job in life is to tell people that it’s more complicated than that."

Cox’s frustration at her own snail’s-pace process may be coming to an end. In January, she and husband C. Michael Curtis, a senior editor at the Atlantic, moved to Spartanburg to become co-chairs of humanities at Wofford College, freeing up more time for writing. She now has not one but two new novels in progress for the first time in her life.

"They’re very different and I have no idea if it’s the same book or if one precedes the other or if in understanding one you will understand the other," she says.

In short, it’s another fine mess, and she wouldn’t have it otherwise.

Jay MacDonald lives to write and writes to live in Mississippi.

For a first-time novelist, tackling a book that traces the intertwined stories of several generations of Jewish immigrants is ambitious, to say the least. Wouldn’t it be simpler to ease in with a breezy novel about bad boyfriends or career troubles? But Jennifer Gilmore doesn’t shy away from a challenge. As publicity director for Harcourt, she knows just how much work is involved in transforming a good idea into a finished book, yet she went for it anyway.

Golden Country is the sweeping, luminous story of 20th-century New York City immigrants with pasts marred by tragedy and futures filled with promise. Traveling salesman Joseph Brodsky is sure he is on the verge of inventing a product that will revolutionize the way America cleans. Seymour Bloom yearns to trade in a life of organized crime for one as a Broadway producer. Frances Gold wants to be a star.

Gilmore recently answered some questions about the immigrant experience and her leap-of-faith in taking on a new role in the publishing industry.

You’ve said that your novel is inspired by your own family’s American experience. Who is the most colorful member of your real-life family?
The most colorful member of my family was probably my grandmother. She told dirty jokes, did crosswords while smoking on the toilet, and used to sneak Dove Bars from the deep freeze in her garage in Portland, Maine. My great-grandmother Grandma G was also quite something. She came from Montmartre in Paris, was a Lane Bryant model for a while, and used to shake me and tell me she loved me to pieces!

So many of the characters in Golden Country struggle to realize their American dreams. What’s one of your lifelong dreams? Have you achieved it yet?
I am interested a lot in failure, the flip side of the American Dream, and my dreams always felt suffused with this. It’s part of life, but our dreams get so curtailed. Mine, truly, was to write a book and have it published. I think it was my only dream. When I was a little girl, I had no idea how difficult that would be.

Your very vivid portrait of New York City from the 1920s to the 1960s reveals your affection for the city. What’s your favorite thing about New York?
There are so many lovely things about New York, it’s difficult to pick only one. I think the wonderful things about living here are small and everyday: Prospect Park before 9 a.m., walking down Fifth Avenue, rooftops. And then there is going to the theater, which I have been lucky enough to do since I was a kid visiting the city heading into Times Square, or Lincoln Center or BAM, waiting in the velvet seats for the curtain to swing open.

As Harcourt’s publicity director, you’ve spent much of your career on the business side of publishing. How is it being on the author side of the experience?
Being on both sides is actually quite difficult. You know everything that can go wrong, and you know all a publisher can do to help a book. The surprise is that everything is still so surprising to me: getting the cover, the first reviews, seeing it bound up in book form. And I’m also surprised by my disappointment. Sometimes it feels like: all this work six years! for this? A book is a very strange thing. . . .

You’ve read a lot of books in your line of work. Which authors inspire you?
The authors who inspire me are the same ones that have since before I even came to New York. Philip Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Grace Paley, Carson McCullers. I have since added Zadie Smith to my list. Through my job I have worked with some wonderful writers Umberto Eco, Michel Faber, Amos Oz, to name a few but the authors I read from the beginning are the ones my mind returns to time and again.

In Golden Country, Joseph Brodsky developed his cleaning product in the basement. Another character, Vladimir Zworykin, worked at the office late into the night on his invention. What was your process for writing this book?
I wish I wrote at night! My life would be a lot easier. But I am one of those people who needs to get up at the crack of dawn and write before work. I’m a morning writer the impurities of the day get to me.

So, are you treating the publicity folks for this book extra nicely?
Most people turn this question around and ask if I am being horrid to publicity! I am trying to treat my publicist with respect and be aware of her time, which sometimes authors forget to do. Publicity is the end of the line in the very long process in a book’s life and it causes incredible anxiety for authors. I admit, I feel that part too.

According to Janet Fitch, the overwhelming success of her previous novel White Oleander, an Oprah pick, was a mixed blessing. On the plus side, there was the fame, there was the fortune, there was the dinner with actress Michelle Pfeiffer, who picked Fitch’s brain about the character she would be playing in the movie version of the book.

On the downside, there was the internalized pressure to produce something bigger, better, even more ambitious in her next book. Fitch had been a history major at Reed College until her 21st birthday, the day she decided to become a novelist. So for a follow-up to White Oleander, she determined to write a historical novel. It grew and grew and grew without becoming quite anything, and in the end she had to write off three years of work as a demoralizing disaster.

"When I was finally able to say it was a massive traffic accident and walk away from it," Fitch says, " I started looking through old stories and found this three-person story called Love in the Asylum’ and thought I could do something with it."

The result of her expansion and alteration of that early story is Paint It Black, a passionate novel that Fitch likens to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher – not because it follows Poe’s storyline in any way but because it concerns itself, in part, with the internal corruption and destruction of a prominent musical family, and because the novel does cast a Poe-like shadowy spell.

Which is something of a surprise, given the fact that Paint It Black is set in the vividly described 1980s punk rock scene in Los Angeles and its heroine is Josie Tyrell, a runaway from Bakersfield, who earns a living as an artist’s model and actress in student films while orbiting at the edges of the scene.

"The punk era was such a good moment for me," Fitch says during a call to her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her 16-year-old daughter. "There was a philosophy in punk – DIY, do it yourself – the idea that things don’t have to be perfect, you just do them, you don’t need anybody’s seal of approval. And that was really good for me. At the time that I was writing this book it was something that I needed to remember. So it seemed very right that the setting should be the punk era. The feel of that period is very sharp for me."

The "persistently defiant" Josie falls in love with Michael Faraday, a well-bred, talented, idealistic art student and the son of an overly controlling mother, Meredith Loewy, who is a wealthy, world-class concert pianist. When Michael commits suicide near the beginning of the novel, Josie’s journey becomes a struggle to comprehend Michael’s torment and the meaning of her love and loss, which quickly places her in a psychologically fraught relationship with Michael’s powerful mother.

"There were a lot of things I was dealing with immediately and critically at the time I was writing Paint It Black," Fitch says, pointing to the emotional wellspring of the book. "Depression, perfectionism, maybe a way out of perfectionism. I like to work on things that are loaded. When you start a novel you want a situation that is really loaded, where there is enough tension in the initial situation that it will power your book. The most personal aspect of Paint It Black is the dialectic between Michael and Josie in terms of knowledge and perfectionism. There is a dance between your level of permissiveness in yourself and the demands your aspirations place on yourself. So Josie is my permissiveness and Michael is my perfectionism. And what happens to perfectionism? On a sliding scale, I think it’s better to go with permissiveness."

Fitch varies the mood of Paint It Black with some fine and funny satirical sketches of the student filmmakers who occasionally employ Josie in their productions. " I went to film school, briefly," Fitch says. "The level of self-importance is unbelievable. The harder you’re working, the less money you’re making, the more grandiose the fantasy. There’s definitely a comic element to it. But it is also another way to look at art and ambition, in opposition to Michael’s ambition. Michael is as serious as cancer, but other people have ambitions too, although their ambitions are not necessarily as serious or as well thought out."

Fitch also proves adept at exploring the nuances of the class divide that separates the untutored, working-class Josie Tyrell from the cultured, sophisticated Meredith Loewy. Maybe this is not so surprising, since in her long apprenticeship before the publication of White Oleander, Fitch supported herself for years as a typesetter, moving around the West and Northwest as the opportunities presented themselves. "Nobody sees the haves like the have-nots," she says. "Josie was brought up with the kind of people who never expected anything, which is why she is so defiant. She shapes her environment by making boundaries, whereas Michael and Meredith create their world directly. They know what they want from the world and the world just better deliver it."

But where Paint It Black is best is in the sensory detail of the place and time it describes. "One of tragedies of our times is that we’re cut off from our senses," Fitch says in what she calls one of her writerly rants. "We’re able to control our environment to the point that we don’t feel anything. We don’t feel, we don’t smell, we’re not rubbed the wrong way. But as animals we crave sensory stimulation. People work in windowless, air-conditioned environments in beige and gray, stare at the screen all day, go down in the elevator, get in their air-conditioned cars, and go home and watch a flat screen. I think when people read, they read to be reattached to a sensual world. So it’s really important for writers to remember to reawaken the reader to the experience of the senses, to put the reader physically in the character and in the story. That makes it vivid for the reader."

In Paint It Black, Fitch practices what she preaches.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.