All Interviews

Nine-year-old Skyler Rampike’s privileged life takes a triple Salchow into disaster when his beloved six-year-old sister Bliss, the darling of the tri-state ice skating world, is found brutally murdered one midwinter morning in the basement of the family’s Fair Hills, New Jersey, home. The ensuing breathless media coverage casts such a toxic cloud of suspicion over the family that even Skyler wonders, could he somehow have killed his own sister?

Corporate CEO Bix Rampike and stage mom Betsy, both prime suspects, quickly exile their surviving child to a series of boarding schools for the famous and notorious, for his own good of course. During the next decade, Skyler’s adolescence becomes both prescribed and proscribed by a host of acronymic disorders: PDD (Premature Depression Disorder), CAS (Chronic Anxiety Syndrome), OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), even the dreaded HSR (High Suicide Risk). Betsy, meanwhile, becomes a fixture on the talk-show circuit, where she shamelessly promotes the Christian cottage industry she has built around her daughter’s unsolved murder. At 19, drugged, unloved and with little left to lose, Skyler seeks redemption by writing a painstaking autobiography, My Sister, My Love.

Owing to the pervasiveness of that selfsame tabloid hell, readers will immediately recognize My Sister, My Love as the JonBenet Ramsey murder on ice, explored here in all its gothic creepiness with appropriate satiric flourishes by that prolific lioness of Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates. Long fascinated by the corrosiveness of fame, Oates has drawn from true-life events before, most notably in two of her numerous Pulitzer Prize nominees: Blonde (2000), an imagined autobiography of Marilyn Monroe, and Black Water (1992), a novella inspired by the Chappaquiddick incident.

Why riff on the Ramsey case? Chalk it up to the insidiousness of tabloid journalism today. "I was noticing how we’ve developed into a kind of tabloid culture where even the New York Times is reporting on things that, in the past, might have been left to the tabloids," she explains. "The Monica Lewinsky case is the most notorious, where something of an essentially trivial and private nature is elevated to prominent attention."

Oates briefly auditioned the O.J. Simpson case as a jumping-off point, having already written an O.J.-inspired young adult novel, Freaky Green Eyes, before deciding instead to turn the Ramseys into the Rampikes.

"My focus was always on what it would be like to dwell in tabloid hell, to have a name that, when you introduced yourself to anybody anywhere, the name would precede you with this sort of aura of scandal," she says.

Recognizing in the JonBenet case the opportunity to hijack the narrative drive of a whodunit, Oates playfully litters her novel and its talking-to-the-reader footnotes with enough red herrings to feed greater Oslo.

"The more you look, it has the teasing mystery of a locked-room case, where there are only a few suspects, unless you think that an intruder did it," she says of JonBenet’s murder. "This case doesn’t go away. It’s officially unsolved and remains out there, sort of like a vast riddle."

Although police quickly ruled out JonBenet’s nine-year-old brother Burke as a suspect in the 1996 murder, he remains one in cyberspace. "I don’t know anything about him, and I deliberately don’t know anything about him," Oates says.

To get in the mood for mischief, Oates vicariously immersed herself in a steady diet of Fox News.

"I had the whole Fox News syndrome," she says. "I was watching Fox News while I wrote the novel, watching Bill O’Reilly. I do come from a Christian background and the Christianity on Fox News is just used for political purposes, it’s so transparent. Bill O’Reilly always used to say ‘secular progressive’ for left wing. Secular progressive sounds pretty good to me! Fox News? I call it Hawk News. I don’t watch that anymore. I just can’t even look at it now." She detoxed with "The Daily Show." "He’s excellent," she says. "I get a lot of news from Jon Stewart."

Oates engages in considerable sleight-of-hand with Skyler’s narrative, which moves freely between the observations of the 19-year-old author and his nine-year-old self, both admittedly under the influence of prescription mood elevators. Skyler is not so much an unreliable narrator as an unsteady one whose highly intelligent digressions, including a rather desultory 55-page attempt at a novel, account for the narrative’s herky-jerky pace.

"The kind of writing Skyler is doing, this conscience-examining and going inward and remembering every little thing and going back over his past obsessively because he’s obsessive/compulsive isn’t really helping him understand what he needs to know, which he finally will be told at the end of the novel," Oates says.

The author herself received a surprise near the end of writing My Sister, My Love when police arrested John Mark Karr, a 41-year-old former schoolteacher who confessed to the JonBenet murder, though DNA evidence later cleared him.

"I was so shocked because I had already invented someone [neighborhood pedophile Gunther Ruscha], but [Karr] seems even more weird than my character," Oates says. "I said to my editor, I don’t know whether I can keep on with this novel because real life has overtaken it. It was so embarrassing that people would think that I was just following this when actually I had already invented him."

By the time Skyler receives a climactic deathbed letter from Betsy that answers his most fundamental questions, he’s already well on the road out of tabloid hell, thanks to kindly Pastor Bob, a born-again ex-con who practices what he preaches.

"Skyler is kind of going back to this very simple form of religion or Christianity where you do good if you can but you don’t have to do it on TV or have a huge ministry," says Oates. "I really like Pastor Bob. With all his flaws, he has no pretensions. He doesn’t even necessarily believe in God, he just feels, OK, here we are, we have to help one another, let’s make the best of it."

Jay MacDonald attended college in Boulder, Colorado, where JonBenet was murdered.

For 25 years Andre Dubus III has been trying to get one story off his chest. "Like so many writers, there is part of the canvas that wants to come from my life," Dubus says during a call to the incredible-sounding house he has been building in the woods outside of Newburyport, Massachusetts, for nearly five years. "I didn’t grow up a lost boy in Sudan and I didn’t grow up in the ghetto with a 9 mm pointed at my face. I was the son of a great writer of short stories. My mother was a social worker. But it was a poor childhood, as in no money, divorce, a lot of physical violence – just this long story of poverty and moving around and drinking and drugging, all before age 15."

In conversation, Dubus, who nine years ago published the acclaimed novel The House of Sand and Fog, is a kind of natural force. Words and ideas spill from him in a torrent. His anecdotes brim with passion. But there are eddies, too. He pauses to ask his interviewer many questions. He quotes writers who have influenced him. He is friendly, familiar, effusive, self-aware. Each of his assertions is followed by a reflective pause. Sometimes he reverses course. One senses the writer – or writing teacher or carpenter – at work as he shapes his material.

"I’ve been trying and trying to write this autobiographical novel," he says. "One of the attempts at this was called Lie Down and Make Angels. Terrible, man. It was just so bad. . . . So I think I’ve decided I’m not one of those fiction writers who can write from my life. It’s like calling a dog. Maybe the dog just doesn’t want to come. Maybe you’re whistling for that dog and instead a rooster walks in. I guess you’re writing a rooster story."

One of Dubus’ "rooster" stories was the wonderful The House of Sand and Fog. To Dubus’ surprise it became a bestseller, an Oprah pick and a movie starring Ben Kingsley. Until its phenomenal success, he had worked as a bartender, a carpenter and an occasional teacher of writing (he now has a permanent appointment teaching writing at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell), to support his wife and young family (his children are now 15, 12, and 11). Until then he had never owned a home. With the book’s earnings he bought his mother a truck and with his brother and friends, began to build a house.

"I went a little cuckoo. This is just one monster of a house. I built this beautiful in-law apartment for my wife’s parents. I built my wife a dance studio – she’s a dancer with a dance company. You know? I built a big house and quickly ran out of money. So for the last year the floor’s been painted plywood subfloor. I wrote the last part of the new book, The Garden of Last Days, in the future master bathroom on a plywood floor near a hole in the floor where the toilet will go. But I tell you, the whole thing was completely absorbing. It was one of the most beautiful experiences – one of the most beautiful ordeals – I’ve been through. It’s funny, I’m 48 and we moved in three years ago and I realized that this is the first time in 45 years that I didn’t have a landlord."

This is just one of the many ways in which Dubus makes a point that he repeats throughout the conversation: "There is a distinction between the writing and the career. As a provider for a family of seven, I’m very grateful for the career that I stumbled into, especially since The House of Sand and Fog. But writing should be looked at like the practice of yoga or praying. It’s a daily meditative practice where you learn over the years that if you just do it you’ll look back and there will be a story or novella or a novel. That’s got to sound disingenuous on one level because I did have a contract for The Garden of Last Days and I needed it financially. But I honestly believe I have to ignore the career and give the writing permission to completely fall apart and be a nine-page essay, a novella or a poem."

Luckily, Dubus’ new novel, The Garden of Last Days, did not fall apart and might be another career-making novel. It vividly portrays the lives of an unexpected set of characters who collide – to emotionally wrenching effect – in a Sarasota, Florida, strip club in September 2001.

"The novel began with this image of cash on the bureau," Dubus says. "I didn’t know where it came from but it soon became clear that it belonged to one of these women I had read about after the literal and figurative smoke cleared after 9/11. I remember reading a couple of brief references to the terrorists being seen in strip clubs and wondering what that was about. But what captured my curiosity even more is what it would be like to be a stripper and realize that some of the money on your bureau is from one of these guys who went on to kill 3,000 innocent people."

Dubus is a writer who is driven to take risks. "I talk to my students about the ‘n’ word," Dubus says. "I tell them writing takes a lot of nerve. A lot of nerve. Especially after you are two or three years into writing a novel." In The Garden of Last Days, Dubus exhibits a novelist’s steely nerve by making his young stripper, April, the terrorist Bassam and the hapless working stiff AJ – who form the novel’s central, desperate triangle – as humans deserving our empathy at least as much as they deserve our condemnation. He does this in part by revealing these characters’ elemental loneliness.

"Loneliness is a common theme in the books I’ve written. I don’t want to over-psychologize, because I think the roots of a writer’s characters are mysterious; their origins go beyond a writer’s experience and tap into something universal. But, you know, I was a new kid in school about 12 or 13 times growing up. I did eventually find my place and my friends. But who knows? That little boy could be working out a lot of demons in these stories."

Could be, too, that Dubus’ compelling new novel will have the same astonishing reception as did The House of Sand and Fog. If so, then one must surely wonder: what new edifice will Dubus build in his woods and how long will we wait until the next "rooster" wanders into his yard?

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Just before his 30th birthday back in 1999, Canadian Andrew Davidson realized with a start that he had not yet lived in another country. Living abroad was one of the 35 items Davidson had included on his "things to do before I die" list back in his 20s. So without much fanfare, he soon took off to Japan to teach English for a number of years.

This summer, Davidson will cross another item off his life list with the publication of his first novel, The Gargoyle. Publication, it seems, is both climax and anti-climax for Davidson. Climax because the manuscript of The Gargoyle set off a spirited bidding war that left Davidson the highest paid first-time novelist in Canada in decades. Anticlimax because Davidson has been writing seriously, "with consistency and discipline," since he was 16. The Gargoyle itself took seven years to complete, much of the work being done at night while Davidson was in Japan.

"I would work from 10 in the morning until 7 at night at my office job," Davidson says during a late-night call to, well, to his laptop in fact, located somewhere in Winnipeg, Manitoba, near where he grew up (Davidson does all his telephoning over the Internet, a holdover from working abroad). "I would walk home, which took me one hour and five minutes. That time was necessary to clear away the workday. I would spend maybe two hours watching television, answering emails, playing computer solitaire, and then I would work from 10 or 11 at night until 2 in the morning. It was the closest I could get to an overnight schedule. The natural rhythms of my body, strangely enough, are to be awake at night." Perhaps Davidson's nocturnal writing habits explain the dreamscape – or nightscape – feel of much of his first foray into long fiction. The Gargoyle tells the story of the unnamed narrator's gruesome car crash, his vividly described recovery in a hospital burn ward, and his meeting and developing relationship with Marianne Engel, a possibly insane sculptor of gargoyles who believes she has known and loved the narrator for more than 700 years.

"The book really began with the character of Marianne Engel," Davidson says. "She arrived first and she arrived with her name and with her look, which is the wild hair and the eyes that shift colors. She came in an image standing in front of a church saying things that could quite possibly sound insane. But I knew they weren't. She started intruding on my other writing until I couldn't ignore her any longer and had to give her a larger space to function in. I had worked through all the other forms – I started writing poetry and then stage plays and screenplays and short stories. I finally felt I was ready to try a novel, and Marianne Engel demanded it of me."

Fairly quickly, Davidson also realized he needed a narrator to encapsulate Marianne's story. And then, as so often happens, his narrator required a life of his own. "I get interested in the strangest things," Davidson says. "At the time I began the novel I was fascinated by the treatment of severe burn survivors. For years I've been thinking about the idea of people being 'burned by love' and I've wondered what if a romantic relationship didn't end with that feeling but began with it. So I just took it to the most literal level of having an actual burn survivor as the protagonist. I thought I just needed someone to tell the story of Marianne Engel and then I realized that the story was actually also about him."

To bring the threads of his story together, Davidson did an "an awful lot of research, from burn treatment to Dante and life in the Middle Ages to German mystic theology, from Viking times to Victorian times, from Japanese glassblowing to medieval book making."

The result is that Davidson infuses The Gargoyle with historical detail and with borrowings from earlier literary eras. With a nod to Dante, for example, Davidson's nameless narrator takes a harrowing journey through hell as he detoxes from the morphine he has subsisted on in the hospital. And, mining the Medieval tradition of stories within the story on the theme of love, Davidson offers four gem-like tales of love throughout the ages that illuminate the emotional dilemmas faced by Marianne and her beloved burn victim.

"I have a particular affection for the story of Sei, the Japanese glassblower," Davidson says of the fictional girl who filled the glass sculptures she made with the sighs of her forbidden love, sighs which burst hauntingly forth when each glass container was broken. "On one level it has to do with my affection for Japan. It's also a story that I think could go out into the world outside the context of the book."

In 2004, Davidson returned to Winnipeg to "concentrate on my writing and play old-timers hockey. I have a lot of family and friends in Manitoba. It's so cold in the winter you want to stay in, so you might as well stay in and write overnight. One of the things that I like very much about now being able to living as a professional writer is that it affords the opportunity to live anywhere. So why not Winnipeg, really?"

The move certainly didn't hurt his writing career. Last year the literary world buzzed with the news that the unknown Canadian author had landed a deal with Doubleday for more than $1.25 million for his first book.

"I understand why that's the story," Davidson says with a hint of resignation. "The book's not out there and reporters need something to write about. I'm really looking forward to publication, when the book is really out there for the public and that becomes the story. For any writer, and I'm no exception, it's about the story we want to tell."

To Davidson's apparent relief, that vivid story will finally reach readers' hands this month.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.