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Ambient city sounds—horns, sirens—provide a fitting soundtrack for a recent conversation with Cathleen Schine, a New Yorker who has written so astutely about the lives of other New Yorkers. She does it yet again in her new novel, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, a reimagining of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility that tells the story of three urbanites in exile, and the cast of characters in their orbit.

During the interview, Schine, also the author of The Love Letter and The New Yorkers, makes a frank confession: “This is very unfashionable to say, but I read for comfort a lot of times. That sounds very old-fashioned, but that’s my dirty little secret.” Her readers can take comfort in the fact that she’s created another ensemble novel that, though sad at times, is also entertaining and diverting.

Other facts one might be surprised to learn about this prolific author: She’s partial to terriers (and presently owns a Cairn); before becoming a writer, she studied to be a Medievalist; and she didn’t read Jane Austen until well into adulthood. “I’m very unusual among novelists in that I didn’t read Austen until I was an adult,” she says. But when she did, “It was an incredible revelation.”

Asked about being dubbed by critics as a modern-day Jewish Jane Austen, a moniker she’s flattered by but reluctant to claim, Schine responds, “I’ve been writing for 25 years. That was written about me when I was quite a bit younger, but I’ve noticed that any woman who writes a comedy of manners is always in some way compared to Jane Austen. She’s the gold standard.”

The Three Weissmanns of Westport will, of course, invite comparisons to Sense and Sensibility, but Schine insists, “It’s somewhere between a theft and an homage, but what it’s not is an appropriation or a comparison. That, I know better. Jane Austen is an inspiration to anybody who writes a comedy of manners because she practically invented it.”

Schine’s story begins when 78-year-old Joseph Weissmann decides to divorce Betty, his wife of 48 years, citing “irreconcilable differences” (read: another woman). The genuinely perplexed Betty replies, “Irreconcilable differences? . . . Of course there are irreconcilable differences. What on earth does that have to do with divorce?”

Approaching grave subjects with levity is Schine’s trademark. “For me, it’s just the way I experience the world. It’s a good survival mechanism,” she says. In the past, she’s leaned more heavily towards comedy, but feels that “this book is sadder, more serious, a bit emotionally darker than other things I’ve written.” Though that may be true, she strikes a balance between pathos and humor. Let’s just say that if The Three Weissmanns of Westport were a movie, Nora Ephron would direct it. Or if it were a food, it would be some kind of chocolate-covered pretzel concoction—a little salty, a little sweet.

Schine has said elsewhere, “Families are funny and adultery is funny; families are tragic and adultery is tragic. Love just complicates everything that much more.” In The Three Weissmanns of Westport, she explores love in its many forms—maternal, romantic and filial.

As the world she knows unravels, Betty’s daughters—the passionate Miranda, a famous literary agent, and the more subdued Annie, a sensible library director—rally around her in support. Forced out of her elegant New York apartment by her husband’s mistress, Betty, joined by her girls, takes refuge in her cousin Lou’s cramped, run-down beach cottage in Westport, Connecticut. As they mingle with suburban socialites, they discover love in unexpected places—and truths about themselves and each other.

Schine describes the process of writing this novel as a dynamic experience, a kind of call and response between her book and Austen’s. “It’s partly my being caught up by the narrative of Sense and Sensibility and partly my own story and characters, sometimes pushing toward that and sometimes pulling away from that. . . . It was kind of like a dialogue. For me, reading and writing have a lot in common. So there was a lot of communication with the characters,” she says, adding, “All apologies to Jane Austen, of course.”

What appeals most to Schine about Austen’s work is that, though written two centuries ago, it still resonates with readers today. “So much of it feels so alive,” she says. She found herself asking, what in modern-day society approximates that? What is the equivalent?

She also wanted to write about “women who’ve lived a certain way whose whole lives have been pulled out from under them.”

“I know women to whom that has happened,” she says. Schine, like Austen, is particularly interested in the ways in which, even today, women depend on marriage to ensure social standing and economic security.

In writing this novel, Schine found herself returning time and again to the relationship between Betty and her daughters. Schine, who’s very close to her own mother, says, “I love writing about mothers and daughters and mothers and sons. That’s one of the things I found when I was writing this, that the mother took on a much more important and central role in my story; that’s one way in which it really veered from Sense and Sensibility.” Most poignant, perhaps, is the way Schine describes the awakening of Miranda’s maternal instincts after she meets a winsome toddler named Henry (the son of her new lover). “It’s hard to write about kids without it being sentimental,” says Schine. But she does it, drawing on her own experience of raising two boys.

Asked if she would ever write a memoir, Schine says she finds she can come closer to the truth when writing fiction. “Also, it’s just more fun for me,” she adds. “Part of the fun of writing is finding out what’s going to happen next.” Her ultimate goal, she says, is to create recognizable characters and a story that rings true to life. She does both in The Three Weissmanns of Westport, her lambent wit flickering across each page like moonlight on the waters of Westport.

Katherine Wyrick writes from Little Rock.

“Any woman who writes a comedy of manners is compared to Jane Austen. She’s the gold standard.”

At the age of 62, Henning Mankell recently bought a pair of ice skates for the first time since he was a young boy growing up in northern Sweden. The occasion: a winter blizzard that virtually isolated his northern residence. The temporary loss of telephone service might concern others, but for Mankell, it was bliss to be suddenly transported back to the natural quietude of his youth.

In his latest mystery, The Man from Beijing, the best-selling author of Swedish crime fiction revisits his past in a different way. His heroine, Birgitta Roslin, is a college radical turned principled judge who finds herself swept up in worldwide intrigue. Mankell’s father had been a judge as well, in the tiny hamlet of Sveg. “It is the first time I have used a judge as a character in a book,” Mankell says by phone from Sweden.

The Man from Beijing
represents another first—it’s also Mankell’s first hardcover release from Random House’s Knopf imprint, after a string of successful paperbacks featuring Swedish detective Kurt Wallander.

“Mankell has become an iconic brand for Vintage Crime/Black Lizard with paperback sales in excess of half a million copies,” says Paul Bogaards, Knopf’s executive director of publicity. “The Man from Beijing was actually the first hardcover on offer to us at Knopf. Of course, we immediately leapt at the chance to publish Mankell here.”

Mankell’s new suspense novel must have been especially appealing to Knopf after the blockbuster success of Stieg Larsson, the late Swedish crime writer whose Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) has struck publishing gold in the U.S. But, as Bogaards notes, deconstructing the mania for Nordic crime fiction leads to a chicken-or-the-egg question about who launched the trend.

“I think it’s important to note that Mankell is very much a pioneer in the genre and that much of our fascination with Swedish crime fiction turns on his work,” Bogaards says. “Mankell preceded Larsson—indeed, he seeded interest for American readers—and Larsson’s success in the States and around the world is a tribute to Mankell’s iconic detective, Wallander.”

No matter who came first, it’s indisputable, as Bogaards notes, that Mankell “really is one of the best crime novelists at work today,” and this talent is on display in his new standalone suspense novel.

The Man from Beijing
opens in January 2006 with a gruesome discovery: 19 residents of the remote Swedish village of Hesjovallen, most of them members of the Andren family, have been brutally and inexplicably massacred. Judge Roslin, whose mother grew up in the village, finds a diary kept by Jan Andren, an ancestor who describes his immigration to America and his role as a foreman during the construction of the transcontinental railway.

Cut to 1863. Three Chinese brothers, San, Wu and Guo Si, flee their village for America, only to be forced into virtual slavery to build that selfsame railway. Ultimately, San repatriates to China, where he marries and bears children, including a son who would become a leader of the Communist Party.

Back in Hesjovallen, Roslin finds a single red ribbon at the crime scene that leads her to suspect that the killer was a lone Chinese man who passed through town on that deadly night. When she follows her suspicions to Beijing, the tables turn as Roslin is tracked and detained as a person of interest by the Chinese. Her amateur investigation leads her to Hong, a committed Maoist who acts as her escort in Beijing, and ultimately to Hong’s brother Ya Ru, an ultra-wealthy developer with big plans for Africa.

Mankell has lived “one foot in snow, one foot in sand” since 1986, when he became director of Teatro Avenida in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. He traces the novel’s origin to a news story 10 years ago about Chinese construction foremen mistreating African workers while building a new Chinese-funded government building in Maputo.

“When I heard about that, I started to really reflect on the idea of China in Africa,” Mankell says. The Man from Beijing explores the irony that China, once the victim of colonialism, now seems intent on colonial expansion.

“China has one enormous domestic problem, and that is what to do with all of the hundreds of millions of peasants that they really do not use. I read just the other day that China has rented land in Kenya to move some one million peasants to Africa. What I try to say in this book is, we have to be very careful about what is happening in Africa. There is a risk that something bad is happening now.”

Mankell, who has written many of his Swedish-set novels, including most of the Wallander series, while residing in Mozambique, likes the perspective that Africa affords his fiction.

“I believe in distance,” he says. “As a painter stands very close as he’s painting, occasionally he steps backward to have a look and then he goes closer and continues to paint. I believe this distance I have to Europe has made me a better European in a way. When you stand at a distance, you can see things more clearly than if you do not have that distance.”

He has watched with equal clarity the boom in Nordic mysteries, which extends beyond his work and the Larsson books to Karin Fossum’s award-winning The Indian Bride, Hakan Nesser’s Inspector Van Veeteren series and a host of others.

“You remember 30 years ago there was a Swedish tennis player named Bjorn Borg? We never had had a really good tennis player before that, but after him, there came a hell of a lot of really good tennis players: Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, etc.,” Mankell says. “I believe that nothing succeeds like success.”

Mankell’s publisher is betting he’s right on target with that assessment and plans to ride the wave as long as it lasts. A second Knopf hardcover, The Troubled Man, is already in the works, says Bogaards, who predicts significant readership gains for Mankell as the fascination with Nordic noir continues.

Jay MacDonald writes from snow-free Florida.

RELATED CONTENT
Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy
Karin Fossum’s Black Seconds
Henning Mankell’s The Man Who Smiled

At the age of 62, Henning Mankell recently bought a pair of ice skates for the first time since he was a young boy growing up in northern Sweden. The occasion: a winter blizzard that virtually isolated his northern residence. The temporary loss of telephone…

Although much of Chang-rae Lee’s fourth novel takes place during the Korean War and after the armistice in 1953, the author insists that The Surrendered is not a war story. “It’s a book about historical traumas and how those traumas exhibit themselves and find expression in individual people,” he tells BookPage from his home in Princeton, New Jersey.

Clocking in at nearly 500 pages and spanning six decades across four continents, this riveting and heart-wrenching narrative is alternately told from three points of view, shifting back and forth from past to present. The novel combines compelling character stories with devastating and timeless social commentary.

My conversation with Lee occurred shortly after a massive earthquake struck Haiti, and it was difficult not to dwell on the book’s relevance to this contemporary disaster. Lee agrees that the tragic stories from Haiti are related to the central theme of The Surrendered: “What happens to someone after an experience with mass conflict and traumatic violence?”

In his three previous novels, Native Speaker, A Gesture Life and Aloft, Lee has established himself as a storyteller of the immigrant experience in America—and the alienation that goes with it. The Surrendered, it seems, represents a departure. “My previous books have been focused on someone’s place in a society or culture,” he says. “I think this book is much more interested in the individual in a conditionality—and the conditionality being, of course, violence and war.”

Lee, who teaches creative writing at Princeton University and has two daughters (ages nine and 12), admits he’s glad that “this one is out and done.” He says, “This book certainly took a long time. That was frustrating to me . . . although my wife sometimes thinks I wouldn’t write any faster even if I didn’t have a teaching job.”

When the book opens, 11-year-old June Han is fleeing Korea with her younger brother and sister. Hector Brennan is an American GI who takes June to an orphanage after her siblings die in a tragic accident. The wife of a missionary, Sylvie Tanner helps run the orphanage, and she entrances June and Hector to the point of obsession. The novel moves between scenes at the orphanage in Korea and in later decades when Hector and June reunite in New Jersey. The two eventually make a pilgrimage to Solferino, Italy, the site of a battle that haunted Sylvie.

In one early passage in Korea, June’s brother is dismembered on the roof of a moving train. This scene was inspired by Lee’s father, who lost his younger brother in a similar accident during the Korean War. Lee, who came to the U.S. as a three-year-old and now considers his connection to Korea “more familial than personal,” was startled to learn of this event while writing a biographical paper about his father for a seminar in college.

“The story as he told it was just a few sentences,” Lee says. “But that story always haunted me and had always stayed with me.” In conceiving of The Surrendered, Lee never intended to incorporate the train scene, although he realized in the middle of writing that it would fit nicely into the events of June’s life.

“So I completely fictionalized all the details that you read there. It didn’t have any before. But the basic thrust of that chapter is wandering as a refugee and really traumatic loss of family. That’s something that I thought was absolutely right for June.”

With this scene, and with many others, Lee does not let the reader off easy; there are no neat, uplifting endings for June, Hector or Sylvie. However, one of the story’s most resounding motifs is mercy—not the typical kind of mercy, as light and hope and forgiveness, although there is some of that, but rather mercy as necessity or expedience. “It’s also the mercy of delusion and allusion,” Lee explains.

Although Lee did not consider mercy as a theme when he was writing The Surrendered, he agrees that it is a focal point of the book. “I think it’s just a natural outgrowth of what’s left after such intense and gratuitous heartbreak and misery,” he says. “One of the things that I was trying to answer for myself in this book is not just how people put their lives back together in the day-to-day [‘they don’t do it very well,’ Lee says as an aside], but also what can they morally hang on to? And emotionally hang on to? What kind of humane moment or act can lead them out of this very dark hole that they’re all in?”

Readers learn how mercy can arise in the midst of horror in one of the book’s most viscerally painful scenes, when Sylvie’s missionary parents are tortured by Japanese officers in Manchuria. “Mercy was the only true deliverance,” Lee writes. “There was nothing more exaltedly human, more beautiful to behold.”

As June, Hector and Sylvie journey through the trauma of war and its aftermath, it is natural to question Lee’s purpose in writing The Surrendered Is it a warning about the repercussions of mass violence? A meditation on the power of human resilience?

The author’s answer rings true to the reader’s experience. “It’s absolutely both,” Lee says. “Like an alternating current, it’s always alternating between the two. As a reader of this book and as a writer of this book, I can’t reside comfortably in either idea for very long. To switch metaphors, you’re constantly buffeted by these opposing winds.”

Lee pauses, then evokes the book’s final scene, at the end of June’s life. “It’s a book that ends in awe of life and all that life is,” he says. “Not really judging it one way or the other. Just agape. Saying: wow. Look at these people and how they’ve expressed themselves.”

If that answer is unsatisfying to readers who crave unequivocally happy endings, consider a line from Hector’s father: “They tell us stories not to live by but to change.” Epic and tragic, moving and lyrical, The Surrendered is not only literature that enthralls, it is a novel that will make you reflect on the world in which you live—and inspire dreams of peaceful change. As Lee says, “What a wonderful world it would be if a novel like mine could not be written, because there’s no reference. That would be amazing.”

RELATED CONTENT
Review of Chang-rae Lee's Aloft
Review of Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture LIfe

Although much of Chang-rae Lee’s fourth novel takes place during the Korean War and after the armistice in 1953, the author insists that The Surrendered is not a war story. “It’s a book about historical traumas and how those traumas exhibit themselves and find expression…

Just when you think you’ve read every possible take on World War II, along comes a story like The Postmistress. Though the effects of that worldwide conflict permeate every page of Sarah Blake’s second novel, she takes on the war from a different angle: the home front. Set in 1940, just before the U.S. entered the war, The Postmistress is a subtle, nuanced portrayal of the impact war has on three women: Frankie, a British journalist covering the Blitz; Emma, a newlywed whose doctor husband brings her back to his New England hometown; and Iris, aka the postmistress. These three very different women are ultimately connected by a letter that brings an unwelcome truth back to their small town—and by the shared hardships of a world forever changed by conflict.

Blake, a poet and essayist as well as a novelist, took some time to answer a few questions about the book, her favorite historical novels and the one secret she couldn’t wait to share.

The Postmistress is set during World War II, but there are no battlefield scenes. What inspired you to keep a WWII novel entirely on the home front?
Towards the middle of the book, Frankie Bard writes, “We think we know the story, because there’s a man and a woman sitting together in a funk hole in the dark. There are bombs. It’s a war. There was a war before, and we’ve read the stories; but every story—love or war—is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.” I wanted to try and write a story about women in war, and one that wasn’t about waiting for the men to come home, or about picking up a weapon and fighting, but about making it through the gauntlet of chance that war, it seems to me, thrusts upon human beings. When war is part of daily life, as it was in the Blitz, and as it was in Europe, what does the daily look like?

That daily life is often as harrowing as a battlefield scene would be, with Frankie dodging bombs and Harry looking for German U-boats off the coast of New England. It's a sharp contrast to today, where we are fighting wars but see little to no impact on our day-to-day lives. What do you think about this shift in attitudes?
Ironically, though we have access to almost instantaneous news, I do feel that so much information buffers us from what is happening. To a certain degree I think that hearing news over the radio—through the medium of someone’s voice—or reading the news in a newspaper—by its nature a slower means of apprehending information than merely seeing a visual image—may have been a more potent, more immediate means of getting the news. It’s hard to buffer yourself from the sound of fear, or of sorrow in a radio announcer’s voice as they describe what they saw, or as they record the sound of someone telling you what happened. As always, single human witnesses have a profound impact. I think, for instance, of all the cellphone dispatches that were sent out last spring during the Iranian protests, and how electrifying their impact. To a certain degree, those were a return to the kind of radio broadcasts you might have heard during WWII. I think of Edward R. Murrow’s nightly greeting, “This is London.”

Your novel follows a linear narrative, but the story is carried forward by different characters at different points. How did you approach writing a novel with multiple narrators? Was it a challenge to make sure each woman had her own distinct voice? When did you decide that this was a story about not just one woman, but many?
The novel began many years ago when I had a sudden picture in my head of a woman in a small post office looking down at a letter in her hand and thrusting it into her pocket rather than in one of the mailboxes she was clearly in charge of. Who was that? And what was she doing? And whose letter did she not deliver? That’s how Iris came to be. And then the town of Franklin, and Will and Emma grew out of answering those questions. The novel kept growing, sideways and backwards really, as I tried to get myself to the point at the boxes when Iris holds onto a letter for Emma. Then, about 100 pages into that early draft, Frankie Bard arrived on the bus. I had no idea what she was doing there, just that she was a reporter and had come from Europe. What happened to her in Europe? So, then I went back and wrote that. My challenge at this point was not in keeping the women distinct, but in keeping them together. In some senses I wrote three different novels all of them aiming at that moment of Iris’ at the mailboxes, but it wasn’t until I began to weave the stories together by moving back and forth on the radio broadcasts that I started to see how the three women’s stories could intertwine. And then at that point, I have to say that I had the benefit of a truly gifted editor. Amy Einhorn was able to see how the stories could combine and move in and out of each other, all the while moving forward.

What kind of research did you do for the book?
I spoke to a lot of people; and often their memories or information guided the novel in a new direction. Though I had been researching the presence of German U-boats along the coast at this time, it wasn’t until I spoke to a 90 year-old resident of Provincetown, Mass., that I understood the palpable danger people felt at the time. It was she who told me that there were some inhabitants who felt certain the Germans could land on the Back Shore and march up the Cape to Boston. And when a German bread-wrapper washed up on shore, clearly having fallen off a U-boat, the town grew a bit more unified. I tried as hard as I could, in many drafts, to use that bread-wrapper, but couldn’t in the end find a place for it!

For a couple of years I read as much as I could about the history of World War II, trying to understand the timeline of events as much as the cultural and social attitudes at the time. And I visited the Holocaust Museum, the National Postal Museum, and the Museum of Radio. At the same time, I watched movies made between 1939 and 1941—Bette Davis in The Letter, being a little-remembered but wonderful discovery—paying attention to clothing, hairstyles, and slang; and I read novels written during that period, trawling for diction and rhythms of speech. Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Robert Penn Warren’s All the President’s Men were favorites.

At the beginning of the novel, it’s acknowledged that a postmaster not delivering the mail was far more serious in the 1940s than it would be today. What are your views on social media in the 21st century (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.,)? Do you think letters will ever be replaced?
I have to confess to being a bit of a Luddite in terms of social media. I eddied out at email, not following in the rush forward into Facebook, or Twitter, though I do have a Facebook page now, which I approach gingerly. I do think it’s fantastic to be able to be in touch with people right in the very moment, it allows for a kind of global dailiness. But there is nothing like the physical presence of a handwritten letter. I think that being able to hold something in your hand that traveled to get to you, that holds the person writing it in his or her handwriting is very powerful, and for the time that it takes to read the letter, you are with that person who wrote you in a way that email or Facebook cannot replicate. I think, sadly, that this kind of connection will vanish, if it hasn’t already. With it goes too, the art of letter writing, a wonderful mix of personal essay and meditation, gossip and humor.

The Postmistress has already received some rave reviews from readers. As a reader yourself, what are some of your favorite historical novels?
Oh, there are so many! I just finished reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and remain slightly in a Tudor daze—it’s a wide, fantastically made tapestry, an incredible feat that wears its scholarship invisibly. I return repeatedly to Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, which, like the Mantel, utterly absorbs you in another place and time, though this time, improbably, through the sense of smell. And perhaps one of my favorite historical novels—though I’m not sure if it qualifies as such—is Colm Toibin’s The Master, about the inner life of Henry James. But then, I came to love reading through the novels of the 19th century. And I return there. I repeatedly read and reread the Brontes, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and Henry James.

There are a lot of secrets and information that is withheld in The Postmistress, but in the end, there is no stopping the truth. Do you have a secret you’d finally like to get off your chest?
Yes! That I’m so thankful to have this book out in the world. It has been the secret passion, obsession, joy and trial that I have been living with for the last 10 years. I have been tied to these three women, listening to them—as if I’ve had my ear against a safe waiting to hear the click that would pop the door to set them freely walking and talking, the sign that I had cracked the code on their story at last. It’s been a tremendous process writing this book, and I am so grateful that Iris and Frankie and Emma are out into the world, and no longer talking to me in my head!

What are you working on next?
I am in the very early stages of a novel about an old money WASP family that finds itself at the end of its old money. It takes place over the course of two summers, 1959 and 2009, and moves back and forth in the same old house in Maine, between those time periods and across three generations of women.

RELATED CONTENT

Review of The Postmistress

Review of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

Review of Colm Toibin's The Master

Just when you think you’ve read every possible take on World War II, along comes a story like The Postmistress. Though the effects of that worldwide conflict permeate every page of Sarah Blake’s second novel, she takes on the war from a different angle:…

In my office there's a woman who uses the word "wrap" as a universal replacement for the word "lunch." "Want to get a wrap?" she'll ask, daily, as if no other possible lunch existed. She can't conceive of a hoagie, a pasta salad. In the office, lunch equals wrap. On TV this might be played for laughs. But in Sam Lipsyte's new novel, The Ask, which is constantly hilarious, the wrap is a sad thing indeed. The turkey wrap, in particular, serves as both emblem of and paltry consolation for the enslavement of practically everyone to the imagination-starved regime of late capitalism.

Think about it. Wraps, as the author explains in a phone interview from his home in Manhattan, are "perfectly designed to keep you at work." They're foldable, sauceless, tidy: you can eat them at your desk. It would almost be weird to eat them anywhere but at your desk. You can type or hold the phone with one hand while eating the wrap with the other. They echo the shapes of various ethnic foods, but all the interesting parts of the cuisines they copy have been erased, leaving them free of startling variations, so you can concentrate on your spreadsheets.

"There's something really dispiriting about it," Lipsyte says. "And the turkey wrap, that was sort of the apex of that predictability and despair. There's not a lot of autobiography in the book, but my confronting what the turkey wrap means to me comes from experience." He pauses, chuckling but not entirely unserious about this turkey-wrap riff. "It's something we all feel."

Which isn't to say that the novel hinges on a turkey wrap. But if you had to pinpoint just what exactly has enraged Milo Burke, hero of The Ask, it would be a good start, or at least a telling example. After all, as Milo says near the end of the novel, "I believed in symbols and the wondrous ways they could wound." The benign turkey wrap, as a symbol, is far from harmless.

Milo works for the fundraising arm of the arts department of what he calls the Mediocre University at New York City. He's not very good at his job. He was an artist in college, a painter, "at least at parties." But somehow that idea faded, and now he's an office guy with a 4-year-old son he loves to pieces and a beautiful wife he hasn't touched in a long time.

When, inevitably, Milo is fired—for lashing out at an "arrogant, talentless, daddy-damaged waif" who visits his office—he finds himself adrift in the lousy job market, unable to find work. "The whole work thing was over," Milo concludes. "I'd grown morose, detached, faintly palsied. I stopped reading the job listings, just rode the trains each day, simmering, until dinnertime."

Fans of Lipsyte will recognize that simmering detachment from his previous novel Home Land, an underground hit written in the form of outrageous letters from a guy called Teabag to his alumni magazine in the months leading up to a class reunion. Lipsyte, who was born in 1968, says he started working on it around the time of his own 10-year reunion. "I think I wrote that book to deal with the fear of going," he says. "And I still didn't go."

The two novels are similar in tone, though Home Land tackles crises that tend to occur about 10 years earlier in the standard American timeline. Both books culminate in episodes of ill-advised but wildly satisfying violence, and both are hysterically funny. But The Ask is more expansive and varied, both in plot and in emotional tenor, with subtler and more sophisticated levels of sadness balancing out the humor on its surface.

"I didn't really mean for Milo to be like Teabag 10 years later," Lipsyte says. "They do share certain kinds of disillusionment. The real difference is that Teabag has this streak of romanticism that may have been beaten out of Milo a little more."

The novel makes reference to The Infortunate, a real-life narrative of an indentured servant, William Moraley, in Philadelphia during the Ben Franklin era. "He seemed a very contemporary character to me,” Lipsyte says. “He's not coming to the New World for religious or political reasons—he's just coming to the New World because he's in debt. It’s like he's run up his credit cards or something. It's a miserable story and he's kind of a miserable guy." The contrast between Moraley and Franklin, the ideal of American resourcefulness and ingenuity, parallels the relationship between Milo and his former college buddy, Purdy, now his big “ask.” Both, like Teabag, are American archetypes, adding weight and depth to these highly entertaining books.

When he's not writing, Lipsyte teaches creative writing at Columbia. "I really like teaching," he says. "I think it informs my writing a great deal. I get energized—I recognize patterns in my work and in other people's work. I get out of the workshops the same thing the other people get out of them, and hopefully give something, too. But it is hard to do both at the same time. Most of my writing happens in the summer. I love and need both, but they don't happen at the same time for me."

In my office there's a woman who uses the word "wrap" as a universal replacement for the word "lunch." "Want to get a wrap?" she'll ask, daily, as if no other possible lunch existed. She can't conceive of a hoagie, a pasta salad. In the…

Attitudes toward assisted suicide for the terminally ill are seldom lukewarm—people either believe strongly that this course of action should be sanctioned or, just as strongly, that no one has the right to end another’s life, even for medical reasons and at that person’s request. Zoe FitzGerald Carter firmly believed in an individual’s right to take this difficult step until her own mother decided it was time to die. The anguish Carter felt, her conflicting emotions and the upheaval it caused in her family are painstakingly chronicled in her first book, a memoir titled Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Tale of Life and Death.

“It really was an incredibly difficult year,” says Carter, speaking from the home in Berkeley, California, that she shares with her husband and their two daughters. “I felt like my life had been derailed, and it was death and dying 24 hours a day. I started feeling very isolated from my husband and children because I felt like the predominant emotional event in my life was not with them. It was with this maddening, endless, difficult discussion with my mother which at some point I realized was only going to end when she died.”

There was never any doubt about whether Carter’s mother was terminally ill. Twenty years earlier, she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and she was already dependent on around-the-clock assistance for the smallest of tasks. It was obvious that she would soon be unable to get out of bed at all. Her pain was increasingly resistant to drugs. So why did Carter refuse to go along with her mother’s decision?

“I live in Berkeley, and there are people who’ve read this book and they say, what was your problem? Why didn’t you just help her kill herself? You should have helped her go, it was what she wanted. And I don’t know if it’s because they haven’t experienced anything like this or it’s all about politics and assisted suicide should be legal, end of story. I think it’s probably because people have this idea—oh yeah, if I get sick, take me out back and shoot me. But I think when they get down to it, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

It certainly proved complicated for Carter and her two sisters. While none of them wanted their mother to cease to be a living, breathing part of their lives, their responses to her decision to end her life were quite different. Her sister Hannah became Carter’s lifeline, the only person who shared her conflicting emotions. Katherine, the oldest sister, basically checked out of the whole scenario, saying their mother’s decision to die, her constant shifting of her “death date,” her demands that her daughters be by her side when she died, were all a shameless bid for attention—which Katherine refused to give her. It was important to Carter that this division among the sisters be chronicled in Imperfect Endings.

“I do think when a parent dies that what happens among the siblings, if there are siblings, is a really big part of the story: who shows up, who doesn’t show up, the different ways that they show up. The whole histories that we have in our families oftentimes emerge and intensify, and alliances and animosities and old regrets get reactivated and ratcheted up in these situations.”

Part of the impact of Carter’s book comes from her juxtaposition of chapters; she weaves her past into her memoir, giving the reader a more satisfying context to use as a contrast with the present. It becomes a reminder that an imperfect childhood often becomes irrelevant when a parent is dying. Musing on why this was important for her to bring out in her book, Carter says a relationship with a dying family member differs from any that has preceded it.

“When you’re with somebody who’s dying, you really do love them in this very pure way. You just love them and you’re there for them. It’s very healing. A lot of my anger and pain around my mother’s decision really dropped away at the end.”

Despite the gravity of the subject matter, there are sections of Imperfect Endings that are quite funny. The visit from the “Exit Guide” from the Hemlock Society is one such example: Carter’s snobbish mother cannot bring herself to allow this man to orchestrate her demise, not because she is bothered by “getting gassed,” but because he’s a good ol’ boy from Tulsa named Bud. This is, as Carter writes, a serious social handicap: “My mother is a solid Washington Democrat, a liberal even, but she’s also a cultural and intellectual snob, and this man is definitely not a member of the tribe.”

In the end, Carter’s mother (at the suggestion of her doctor) decides to refuse all food and water until her body ceases to function. It is this action that sways Carter to accept her mother’s choice of death and brings her to her mother’s bedside for the final time.

“I mean she didn’t eat, day after day after day. This was not a ‘dark night of the soul’ kind of moment where she took a bunch of pills and killed herself. This was something she talked about and thought about for a year and then persisted in, day after day at the end. . . . I saw her absolute commitment and unblinking strength during that fasting time.”

One cannot help but wonder, with all Carter went through, whether she would ever put her own family through such an ordeal. She says yes, but only if her daughters agreed that it was the right thing to do and were comfortable with the decision.

“I do believe assisted suicide should be legal, but you have to recognize that nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to be in a place where they feel that is the best option. It’s not easy. And there is a price you pay for it. I do feel like there’s a price my sisters and I paid emotionally and psychologically by participating in my mother’s death. I think it’s a tricky issue.”

But, as Carter says, it was a privilege to be by her mother’s side when she ended her years of pain, although it’s not a topic she brings up at cocktail parties or the school’s PTO.

“People are uncomfortable talking about death. People think it’s all just a big downer, and it’s scary and awful. I don’t think it’s all just scary and awful. I think there’s something very life-affirming about going through a death with somebody. There’s nothing like death to remind you of one of the most profound things about life, which is that it doesn’t go on forever. That sense of gratitude for being alive and awareness of the gift of life is a wonderful thing to experience.”

Rebecca Bain is a writer in Nashville.

Attitudes toward assisted suicide for the terminally ill are seldom lukewarm—people either believe strongly that this course of action should be sanctioned or, just as strongly, that no one has the right to end another’s life, even for medical reasons and at that person’s request.…

Opening a new novel by Polly Horvath is a bit like going on an adventure—on each page something new and unexpected unfolds. And that’s part of the reason Horvath is one of the literary stars in the universe of children’s literature. The author of the National Book Award-winning The Canning Season (2003), Horvath also received a Newbery Honor for Everything on a Waffle (2001), while The Trolls (1999) was a National Book Award finalist. Horvath’s books have often been chosen as Best Books of the Year and Editors’ Choices, along with several other honors.

Horvath makes her home on Vancouver Island in British Columbia with her husband and two daughters. While her creative process includes a daily writing schedule, along with long walks in the rainforest and on nearby beaches, the inspiration for her recent books about the Fielding family came to her in an unusual place: the bathtub.

“I was reading a Country Living magazine in the tub,” Horvath explains with a laugh, “and an article by the poet Mary Oliver sucked me in. It led me to read her poems and some of her essays in which she talks about being a poor poet. And so the character of Jane’s mother, Felicity [also a poor poet], took off before Jane did.”

Jane Fielding is the eldest daughter in a quirky family that includes sister Maya and two little brothers, Max and Hershel. Jane’s mother comes into strong focus in the first book, My One Hundred Adventures, set during Jane’s 12th summer at the family’s home on a beach in Massachusetts.

But it is Jane’s relationship with her recently acquired stepfather, Ned, which Horvath explores more fully in her new novel, Northward to the Moon. As Jane sees it, she and Ned “have our own subset built on the understanding of adventures and the lure of outlaw life.”

“Writing is kind of interesting,” muses the author, who doesn’t outline her award-winning books, but rather discovers the story along with her characters. “The character that surfaced in this book was Ned.”

As Northward to the Moon begins, the family has lived in Saskatchewan almost a year. But things are about to change. Ned has just been fired from his job teaching French at the local school. The reason? Well, he doesn’t speak French.

Ned has been a wanderer almost all his life. When he gets a call about a dying friend from his past, he proposes that the family travel across country to visit her. Jane is delighted by this turn of events. “Finally, I think, an adventure. Ned had promised me nothing but adventures when we got to Canada, but this is the first whiff I’ve caught of them.”

They set off on a journey that, after some twists and turns, eventually lands them on a ranch in Nevada, with Ned’s aging mother, Dorothy. And it is here that the real journeys actually begin.

Northward to the Moon is a story about families that sometimes work well—and sometimes don’t. It’s also a book that explores the challenges different generations face. At Dorothy’s Nevada ranch, Jane develops a crush on a ranch hand, and her little sister Maya forms a deep bond with her step-grandmother. Ned and his siblings, and Dorothy herself, must grapple with difficult life decisions after Dorothy suffers a broken hip in a riding accident.

When things come to a head at dinner one night, Dorothy bursts out, “I’ll admit I may have to move somewhere where someone will assist me . . . but I don’t have to put up with you all planning it behind my back like I’m senile. . . . Sometimes I wish I’d had gerbils instead when the mothering instinct came over me.”

“What mothering instinct?” whispers one of her daughters.

Horvath believes the family issues in Northward to the Moon will be very familiar to children today. “Especially as people are living a lot longer, dealing with aging grandparents is a part of children’s lives,” she says.

Will there be another book about Jane Fielding’s adventures? Horvath, who has been writing since she was eight, is definitely planning on it.

“I began wanting to do to nine books about a character, from childhood to 90s. The voice that came to me was that of a 91-year-old lady looking back on her life, and I’m intrigued by the idea of taking someone through a life.”

Based on the first two books about Jane Fielding, readers will have a lot to look forward to from this original and talented writer in the years ahead.

In the meantime, Horvath is embarking on her own adventures this spring: a national book tour to meet her readers in person.

Deborah Hopkinson’s latest book is The Humblebee Hunter, inspired by the life of Charles Darwin.

Opening a new novel by Polly Horvath is a bit like going on an adventure—on each page something new and unexpected unfolds. And that’s part of the reason Horvath is one of the literary stars in the universe of children’s literature. The author of the…

Anne Lamott has never been shy about letting readers in on her struggles. A partial list of the trials she’s detailed in her writing includes alcoholism, drug abuse, bulimia, the death of loved ones, writer’s block, postpartum exhaustion and her furious opposition to the administration of George W. Bush.

Her engrossing new novel, Imperfect Birds, centers on one of the most harrowing challenges of all—raising a teenager. The third novel in a trilogy that also includes Rosie and Crooked Little Heart, the book begins four years after the latter title ends. Rosie, a precocious adolescent the last time we saw her, is now a volatile 17-year-old whose behavior thrusts her mother, Elizabeth, into a near-constant state of hurt and worry. It’s a poignant family story, at times heartbreaking, but ultimately uplifting.

Though Imperfect Birds is fiction and far from autobiographical, like all of Lamott’s work, it reflects the author’s real-life experiences. “There are definitely years that you don’t love when you’re the mother of a teenager, when they’re very mouthy and erratic,” the author says by phone from her home in California. Her son, Sam—an infant when Lamott introduced him to readers in Operating Instructions, her memoir about becoming a parent for the first time as a single 35-year-old—is now 20, with a son of his own. Though thrilled with how Sam has turned out (more on that later), Lamott refuses to take credit.

“You just kind of groan with the exhaustion of having made so many mistakes and just being aware of it and what you should have done or shouldn’t have done,” she says. “But Sam always had a very deep sweetness and I was always banking on that, that this would see us through.”

Which brings us to the paradox at the heart of Lamott’s appeal. Readers look to this author of six nonfiction books, six novels and numerous columns as a wise, funny and compassionate guide to exploring a variety of subjects (her 1994 title, Bird by Bird, is still one of the best books about writing). Devoutly Christian and ferociously liberal, she’s especially fearless when tackling those most touchy of issues, religion and politics, in books such as Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith and Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. But, as she constantly reminds us, she doesn’t have all the answers. She has questions. And fears. And faults. And an endless supply of ways to screw up. Yet somehow it all works out OK. Sometimes, it works out much, much better than OK.

It’s not surprising, then, that Lamott fills her latest novel with characters grasping for their own answers. Rosie is smart, beautiful, athletic and seriously into drugs. She’s not picky; pretty much any intoxicant will do: weed, cocaine, prescription pills—in a pinch, cough syrup. Elizabeth wavers between denial and increasingly desperate attempts to rescue her daughter.

Embedded in the poignant family story is a wake-up call for parents: “There are so many evils that pull on our children,” Lamott writes in the novel’s opening lines. “Even in the mellow town of Lansdale, where it is easy to see only beauty and decency, a teenager died nearly every year after a party and kids routinely went from high school to psych wards, halfway houses or jail.”

The book’s setting is a stand-in for Fairfax, the Marin County town where the author has lived for years (she grew up in nearby Tiburon). “We do lose kids pretty routinely to accidents and overdoses, way more than you’d think, and so that really weighs on my mind,” she says.

While the substance abuse in Imperfect Birds is scary, nearly as bad are Rosie’s constant lies and ever-changing personality. She’s affectionate one minute, then furious, then scornful, forcing her mother onto a harrowing emotional rollercoaster Lamott thinks many parents will recognize.

“The person you love most in the world, the sweet, consistent person that you love with a lot of love coming back for a lot of years is suddenly a stranger,” Lamott says.

With a narrative that alternates between Rosie’s and Elizabeth’s points of view, Lamott gives readers a fascinating peek into the inner contradictions driving the teenager’s outwardly baffling behavior—the anger, vulnerabilities and desires warring against a sincere wish to do the right thing.

Elizabeth battles her own demons—she has a history of alcoholism and depression—and wrestles with how honest to be with her husband, James, about his stepdaughter’s problems. Though Elizabeth deeply loves her daughter, Rosie can drive her to the edge, as in this passage where the teen lashes out at her mother.

“‘Stop spying on me! You’re the one going crazy—call your shrink.’ And it was the disgusted sneer more than the words that made Elizabeth erupt.

“‘How dare you! I’m not a liar, or cruel! You’re a spoiled little shit.’ She got to her feet, hating herself and her child. . . . [Elizabeth] locked herself in the bathroom and cried silently until she was raw.”

The scene is reminiscent of a column Lamott wrote for Salon in 2006, “My son, the stranger.” In it, she tells of slapping 16-year-old Sam during an argument and then driving around, sobbing heavily. The column ends on a hopeful note, though nothing is resolved. Lamott gives the characters in Imperfect Birds a similarly upbeat ending, as Elizabeth finds the strength to make the excruciating decision that will save her daughter.

As for Lamott, she gets to savor the fact that Sam is safely past his teen years. “He is just the most marvelous, amazing guy in the world,” she says. She also describes him as “brilliant” and “very spiritual.” Living in San Francisco with his girlfriend, Amy, and their baby, Jax, he is studying industrial design at the Academy of Art University. Lamott admits her heart sank when 19-year-old Sam told her he was becoming a father. But as it turns out, the young family is doing just great.

And Grandma?

“Grandparents really are very happy people,” Lamott says. “You get unbelievable love and wonder for three hours. And then they leave and you can lie back on the couch and read The New Yorker. It’s the best of both worlds.”

 

Karen Holt writes frequently about books and authors for O, The Oprah Magazine, Essence and other publications.

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Review of Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies
Review of the audio version of Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Anne Lamott has never been shy about letting readers in on her struggles. A partial list of the trials she’s detailed in her writing includes alcoholism, drug abuse, bulimia, the death of loved ones, writer’s block, postpartum exhaustion and her furious opposition to the administration…

Most people are satisfied to come back from a vacation with a few souvenirs, perhaps a tan and some fond memories. Award-winning author Pam Muñoz Ryan, on the other hand, returned from a recent trip to Chile with the idea for her next book. “Inspiration for books arrives in different ways,” she says in an interview from her home in Southern California. “In this case, it was like a confluence of rivers.”

In preparation for her trip, Ryan had brushed up on the biography and writings of several Chilean authors, including Pablo Neruda, the beloved poet whose work she had read as early as high school. While in Neruda’s native country, she visited two of his childhood homes and became fascinated by tales of his early life. Then, shortly after her return home, she met author and illustrator Jon Muth, who told her a story about Neruda that became, in many ways, the centerpiece of her beautiful new novel The Dreamer, which centers on the childhood of the budding poet.

In the story, the painfully shy young Neruda (known as Neftalí) finds the courage to exchange small gifts with another young child, a stranger, through a hole in the fence that separates their properties. Neftalí receives a beloved toy sheep, and offers up a remarkable pine cone that had already sparked his own imagination. The encounter, and the human connection and imaginative power it conveys, highlight the themes of Neruda’s early life as well as his later writings.

Stories like these inspired Ryan’s own imagination and sent her to the library, where she read biographies about Neruda and also became reacquainted with his writings. “Living with the poetry day in and day out,” Ryan says, “I became particularly fascinated with the Book of Questions and I became intrigued with the idea of integrating questions into my own book.”

Ryan’s novel does incorporate many questions—“Is fire born of words? Or are words born of fire?”—that will rouse young readers’ own inquisitive natures. She hopes that these questions will “allow readers’ imaginations to extend the text beyond the page.” As she wrote the novel, she imagined a reader, a daydreamer or “closet poet,” who might be inspired to jot down his or her own verses and images in the margins of her book.

As is fitting for a novel that relies so heavily on visual details and concrete images, The Dreamer is generously, almost magically illustrated by award-winning artist Peter Sís, whose delicate, pointillist drawings help enhance Ryan’s dreamlike, magical realist world. For Ryan, working with Sís was a true collaboration, a dream come true in many ways: “I’ve been a huge fan of his work for many, many years,” she says. “I remember many years ago going to a museum in Chicago and never even imagining that he would illustrate something of mine one day.”

Ryan, who has published numerous picture books, points out that writing an illustrated novel is a fundamentally different process than writing a picture book for younger readers. “A picture book is a marriage of art and words,” she observes. “When you write a picture book, you write with a more limited palette. In the case of the novel, the words were written first and his illustrations just added a whole new dimension.” Each chapter of Ryan’s novel opens with a Sís triptych that illustrates images, objects and moods that will play key roles in the chapter to follow. Larger-scale drawings also vividly illuminate the fanciful wanderings of young Neftalí’s wholly original imagination, accompanied by lyrical passages of text: “I am poetry, lurking in dappled shadow. I am the confusion of root and gnarled branch. I am the symmetry of insect, leaf, and a bird’s outstretched wings,” Ryan writes.

Young readers—and, in many cases, their parents and teachers—who come to Neruda’s work through Ryan’s fictional portrayal may wants to read more of Neruda’s original poetry. Ryan recommends that young readers start with his Odes, especially his “Ode to a Bicycle” and “Ode to a Lizard,” and, of course, with the Book of Questions. Several of Neruda’s own poems, as well as information about collections of his poetry, are gathered at the back of Ryan’s novel.

Poetry, too often, can be seen by middle-grade readers as opaque, abstract, difficult. In The Dreamer, Ryan expertly utilizes Neruda’s own excitement about nature, his enthusiasm for language and his unbounded imagination to inspire young readers’ inner poets. By giving them her own “book of questions,” Ryan prompts children to consider their own answers, and by doing so, perhaps write the world, as Neruda does, through their own unique perspectives.

Norah Piehl is a writer and editor who lives near Boston.

Most people are satisfied to come back from a vacation with a few souvenirs, perhaps a tan and some fond memories. Award-winning author Pam Muñoz Ryan, on the other hand, returned from a recent trip to Chile with the idea for her next book. “Inspiration…

Environmental scientist Bill McKibben has spent the last 20 years thinking about climate change. Since the release of his 1989 bestseller, The End of Nature, he has warned that without action, global warming would reshape our environment. Now, in Eaarth, McKibben argues that the window to change the future has closed. We have created a new planet (hence the new name, “Eaarth”). Preserving our current way of life will be impossible; to even survive we must alter our lifestyles drastically.

Presenting evidence from a wide range of sources, Eaarth is a manifesto without being a polemic. It puts many of the latest natural disasters in context (let’s just say McKibben asserts that the new Eaarth is even less stable than the old) and predicts a future that will give “act locally” a whole new meaning. Readers will walk away from McKibben’s latest with much food for thought, and a changed view of our changed planet.

You build a very strong case that our planet is already changed for the worse. At this point, is there anything people can do as individuals, or is a worldwide initiative our only hope?
There’s lots that people can do as individuals and communities—at 350.org, for instance, we’re organizing a huge planet-scale Work Party for Oct. 10 this fall—there will be solar panels going up, houses being insulated, community gardens dug. They’ll help—but they’ll mostly help because we’ll use all that activity to say to our leaders: Why aren’t you doing your job, which is passing the laws that would change the price of carbon and get us really moving on climate change. We work locally and globally at the same time—that’s the odd thing about 350.org, as I try to explain in the last pages of the book. It’s campaigning that looks like the architecture of the Internet

After 20-plus years of talking about it, why do you think it’s so difficult to convince people that climate change is happening?
Because of 1) the enormous vested interest of a few of the most profitable corporations on earth and 2) the enormous inertia in all our lives. Doing something about climate will require changing, and changing is hard. 

The book contains several favorable references to Obama’s environmental policies. Do you feel the changes he’s trying to make will have any effect on our current situation?
I think he very much needs to lead us in the changes I describe above. He’s the one guy with the platform to really make the case that climate and energy are the key issues for our time, and that we have to get to work. So far he hasn’t done it very powerfully, but we keep hoping!

The Internet, along with food and energy, is on your essentials list for the future, despite arguing that the world is going to have to get more local if we are to survive. Do you think sustaining the Internet is possible in the future you envision?
Sure—the Internet doesn’t use much in the way of energy—you can take a thousand trips on Google more efficiently than one mile in a car. I think it’s a crucial survival tool for the future—it’s what will let us live more local lives without feeling parochial and shut in.

What do you think is the biggest challenge we will face on the new Eaarth?
There are all kinds of practical challenges that I describe around food, energy and so on. But the biggest may be simply getting our heads around the idea that we can’t keep growing forever, that we need to mature quickly. (That’s for us. If you live in Bangladesh, the biggest challenges will be more . . . immediate).

The first part of the book describes a future that sounds quite dire—cities submerged, crops failing, dirty air, etc. Later on you say the new Eaarth will require a back-to-basics, local lifestyle that doesn’t sound all that bad and might even be appealing to the average overscheduled, overstimulated American. But will the changed planet be able to support these endeavors?
We’ve got some margin. We use most of our cropland growing corn to feed to cows—which is good, because it means we have good soil that we could grow food for ourselves on someday. We’ve got lots of wind and sun—we can’t use them as profligately as we’ve used coal and gas and oil. The real problem is that we’re going to need to be dealing with the ever-increasing effects of an unraveling climate, which will be costly and hard. But not impossible, not if we think clearly, calmly and as communities.

As conditions change on Earth, the effects of climate change often manifest in ways we haven’t been able to foresee (for example, the deforestation of the Amazon, in addition to the changes you would expect, also put the area at a higher risk of fire and disrupted the pattern of rainfall across the continent). Is there any way to predict what other complications might lie in our future?
The inability to predict everything is part of the problem—we’re gong from a world of very predictable stability, to one full of surprises. So far all the surprises (Arctic melting, say) have come faster and more violently than people imagined. And some things have appeared very unexpectedly: the acidification of seawater, say. Let’s hope we don’t have similar surprises with methane leaking from the Arctic, or monsoons shifting.

Climate change disproportionately affects poor people and people in third-world countries. How can those of us in better economic circumstances help alleviate their burden?
Two ways. We can send them the aid they need to leapfrog past fossil fuel and into the renewable future. (It’s money we essentially owe them, having filled the atmosphere and thus taken away their ability to burn coal and oil to get rich as we did). And we can cut our own emissions dramatically and quickly, which will help slow the progress of climate change that threatens them so badly.

When your first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989, could you have predicted that two decades later you would be writing a book about how the Earth has already changed into a fundamentally different planet? What do you expect to be writing about in another 20 years?
I understood the basic science in 1989, and it’s stayed much the same. But what no one knew was how quickly it would develop, or where the red lines would be. We didn’t know in 1989 that we’d have to cut back the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to 350 parts per million; we thought 550 ppm might be safe.

In 20 years? I have the feeling we won’t yet have solved this biggest of challenges. But hopefully I’ll be writing about some of the changes we’ve made, and how well they’re working.

What do you say to those who don’t agree with the conclusions you make in this book?
Boy I hope you’re right.

 

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Environmental scientist Bill McKibben has spent the last 20 years thinking about climate change. Since the release of his 1989 bestseller, The End of Nature, he has warned that without action, global warming would reshape our environment. Now, in Eaarth, McKibben argues that the window…

Novelist Pearl Abraham was brought up in a Hasidic family and raised in New York and Jerusalem. A thorough knowledge of spiritual and religious tradition informs all of her work, and in her three previous novels, she has depicted the tensions between the secular and the spiritual within observant Jewish communities. In American Taliban, however, Abraham turns her considerable gifts of observation to explore the attraction of militant Islam at the beginning of the 21st century.

Loosely inspired by real-life events, American Taliban follows the intellectual and divine quest of John Jude, an 18-year-old surfer dude with a penchant for Rumi and Walt Whitman. As John’s interest in Islam grows, he leaves his family, his girlfriend and all vestiges of secular life behind, traveling to New York, Pakistan and ultimately Afghanistan in a quest for total spiritual immersion.

Abraham recently took the time to answer some questions about religious extremism, the impact of the real-life story of John Walker Lindh on her novel and whether or not fiction can help us understand political or moral complexities. 

First off, I want thank you for writing such an astonishing and brave work of fiction. Astonishing, because of the trajectory of the novel, brave because of how sympathetically you portray a character whose model is still a pariah in our society.
Thanks so much. It’s good to know there are readers willing to go with me. This story still gets a rise out of people, nine years later!

American Taliban is obviously based in part on the experiences of John Walker Lindh. What appealed to you as a writer about his story and how did you alter it for your novel?
Lindh’s story haunted me long after the headlines ceased. I kept thinking about his unfortunate timing: In the ’60s and ’70s, his journey might have taken him to India and Buddhist life, and he would have come away with an alternative experience, but he would have been relatively safe. I worried that in the 21st century, these spiritual and intellectually formative journeys—the picaresque in literature—would become an endangered aspect of human experience.

These journeys of becoming are especially significant in the making of American individuality, and I wanted to place them in our historical context, with Whitman’s celebration of the self and Emerson’s Transcendentalism, to show how important these experiences are to the American story. That’s why John Jude’s story, unlike Lindh’s, is inspired by his experiences as a “soul surfer,” that peculiarly American form of spirituality that evolved alongside other 20th-century bohemian cultures, such as Beat and Hip. And it’s why philosophical ideas about the importance of becoming rather than mere being give shape to this novel, and finally become John Jude’s legacy.

In many ways, John’s path seems to be about surrender—spiritual, sexual or psychological. Do you think that surrender is a necessary part of religious experience?
Surrender or submission is an experience that’s part of nature, of life and not only religious life. Like it or not, we surrender and submit every day though we don’t always admit or understand that this is what we’re doing. Mothers, for example, sacrifice their personal needs and desires, even their physical bodies, for the sake of their children. Employees submit to the needs of the corporation. Soldiers submit to risk and dying for their countries, for the nonsensical “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” We submit to the pleasures and torments of love. When we dance, if we’re good at it, we surrender ourselves to the music and rhythm. Surrender makes certain athletic feats possible: for example riding a wave or riding a horse or tango dancing with a partner, though there’s a yin-yang complexity in the idea of surrendering while still holding onto your core of stability at the same time. Our lives are filled with the compromise of surrender. Really, finally, what choice do we have against nature and growing old, dying? Even if we refuse with Dylan Thomas to “go gentle into the night,” we still go.

Most of American Taliban follows John on his intellectual and spiritual journey, but there is a shift to his mother’s point of view at the end that is written very differently, much more emotionally. Why did you separate the two narratives and why did you choose to explore these characters using two different styles?
You’re perceptive to pick up on the emotional quality of the novel when it shifts view. Although Barbara presents herself as the secular skeptic, the rationalist psychotherapist, she is sentimental, while her son, who embraces spiritualism and religion, is not. This defies expectations, but it’s true to my experience. I grew up in a Hasidic family and didn’t come to know Jewish sentimentalism and nostalgia until I left the rigor of that world and encountered American Jewish literature and secular American Jews, which is packed with, as we say in Yiddish, schmaltz, meaning fat. Of course Barbara has good reason to be emotional: she’s a mother whose son is missing. John, on the other hand, at that age when one feels most invincible, can be coolly unconcerned.

But I’m very aware that this decision to end on Barbara and not with the happy return of John Jude or even his unhappy incarceration puts this book outside the mainstream traditional novel, with its Freudian masterplot that defines the trajectory of every story along the lines of the male experience—with a beginning or arousal, a middle or complication that moves toward crisis and climax or eruption, and on to the end which is satiety and repose. The female experience doesn’t have this strict pattern: women can stop, start, finish, restart or keep going for as long as they like. Susan Winnett, writing about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, makes the point that since a woman’s experience is nothing like the male one, she may consider alternative plots, ones without the, after William Empson, nonsense of an ending. And closed endings really aren’t true to life, especially American life. Think of Elliott Spitzer and soon Tiger Woods. The worst scandals end in a comeback, a restart.

Early in the novel, we see John surfing the net for information about Islam and using an Arabic name to chat with others in an Islamic chat room—both ways in which technology has changed the way we find out information about religion and politics. What do you think are the pros and cons of this way of communicating?
Just as the printing press changed the world—reading became a private, solitary act and oral storytelling in the town square became a thing of the past—so too the Internet. But though we lost the communal, oral aspects of storytelling, I wouldn’t want to go back to a time before books. And I also wouldn’t want to return to the days before the web put incredible amounts of information at our fingertips.

The Internet has been blamed for the long reach it provides terrorist recruiters, but it’s just an easy target. Those who are quick to shut down democracy in the face of fear begin with a bent in that direction already: they’re not comfortable with the transparency and freedom that our Constitution guarantees. These kids go looking for these sites, whether seeking adventure, or on behalf of Islam—they’re the ones who make the first contact. In the past year, 30 Americans have been arrested for these activities, so we have a problem. It’s easy to blame the Internet but it doesn’t help us figure out what’s really wrong with or missing in our world, in American life.

John’s sympathy for the underdog and interest in fairness is evident right from the start. How do you think this character trait affects his decision to pursue Islam?
You know, he’s at just the age when a kind of purity rules: things are either fair or not; true or false. Intelligent as he is, he accepts no ands/ors/buts, no nuance. Compromise and complacency are near crimes. I could argue that we need this kind of young purity to remind us of who we were, what we once believed in. This purity puts him on the side of the underdog; he’s for the victim of the powerful mainstream establishment, which does predispose him to taking the persecuted Islamic side against the historical imperialism of the west. The young age of many of these recruits, for example the recent five kids from the Virginia area, points to this [as a contributing factor], but I don’t want to simplify their motivations. It’s a mixed bag. They’re also seeking adventure, engaging in something bigger than American life has offered them, etc.

What do you think a fictionalized or imagined account of a real-life person or event can tell us that a book of nonfiction cannot?
If you believe, as I do, that imaginative empathy, which demands stretching yourself, is one of the most powerful ways to understand the other, then a fictionalized imagined account has greater access to that understanding. Facts often tell us very little, and sometimes, perhaps I should say often, they turn out not to be factual, as we know from our study of historical accounts. When the victor writes the story then that story will be shaped by the mythic triumphant heroism—propaganda in other words. This is a subject I’m interested in, and will probably engage with in my next novel.

You grew up in a Hasidic community and have your own experience with religious orthodoxy. Do you think your background makes it easier to understand people who shape their lives around their religion?
I do understand people who grow up with the intellectual rigor and ascetic disciplines of religion but I confess that I find it difficult to sympathize with newcomers who seem largely to be seeking community, a sense of belonging and safety, rather than knowledge. Perhaps the desire for safety seems to me infantile, because it’s a false notion that there’s safety in numbers. Have you seen the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, with its myth surrounding the inner sanctum of the innermost rabbi? It’s good.

Perhaps all this is based in personal experience: I grew up belonging and found it stifling. It seems difficult for people to understand my stand for individuality over community. I enjoy and have come to need solitude, though I’m not the hermit my friend Jonathan Freedman likes to call me.

Your previous three novels all have Jewish characters. This novel has none and though it’s about religion, is not specifically Jewish in any way. Can you still be a Jewish novelist without addressing Jewishness specifically?
You’ve turned the question that’s usually asked (Can a woman write a man’s novel, or a man a woman’s?) backward, which makes it more interesting. I think you’re talking about sensibility: Is my sensibility and point of view still Jewish even when I write about Muslims? Perhaps, but besides being Jewish, I’m American, a woman, a professor of literature, etc, and these aspects of who I am don’t cancel each other out. I’m teaching a class in women’s literature and halfway through the semester, we read As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and ask a similar question: does the work have to be written by a woman to qualify as women’s literature? So no, you don’t have to be a woman to write women’s literature, just as a woman can write a male novel. And we have examples of non-Jewish writers taking on Jewish subjects and Jewish characters, though Jewish writers may hate them for it. Henry James’ anecdote about the making of a novelist can inform us: All it took for a young, inexperienced woman to write about the military, he said, was seeing a soldier’s regiment as she walked past them in a hotel lobby. She had her “donnée” and could fabricate the rest.

You are from a family of nine children. Did that influence you as a writer? Has your family been encouraging of the work you do?
The smart teasing banter between siblings might be good training for sharp dialogue. And the Yiddish language with its particularly cuttingly precise turns of phrase may also have helped. Some of my siblings are supportive of me, if not of my work; perhaps on some days they’re even admiring. My dad, however, complains about my choice of topics and audience. I could accomplish more, he argues, if only I would limit myself to teaching Jewish children. The operative word here is limitation.

What other novelists do you think write well about religion or religious experience?
I’ve always loved the way Borges references the mysteries of the Kabbalah, and puts it to work in crime or murder stories. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is/was a miracle. Reading for American Taliban, I immersed myself in Arab Andalusian poetry, in Hafiz and Ibn Arabi and more. Treasures. So I see I’m not naming fiction that explores the religious experience. Perhaps I’m not interested in reading about religious experience so much as in the spiritually inclined one. My pet peeve in writing about the religious experience is the overdone, over-explained work, which is really clumsily addressed to the reader. The characters who live in the religious world wouldn’t tell each other about it. Borges, writing about translation, made the point that Hitti in his history of the Arabs doesn’t ever mention the camel because he doesn’t have to. He takes the presence of the camel for granted. It’s possible that you can only take for granted what you’ve truly lived.

Is it true that you do most of your writing in bed?
I’m in bed right now, typing on my laptop! I like working early mornings, with my brain still quiet, my thinking clear, but I don’t always want to get out of bed at 5 or 6 a.m., so working in bed (with coffee) helps. Really, it started one winter when my NYC apartment wasn’t getting heat and I did most of my reading and writing for The Seventh Beggar in bed. But I’ve always loved reading in bed, summers too, though it’s bad for my back.

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Read a review of American Taliban.

Novelist Pearl Abraham was brought up in a Hasidic family and raised in New York and Jerusalem. A thorough knowledge of spiritual and religious tradition informs all of her work, and in her three previous novels, she has depicted the tensions between the secular and…

To follow her highly praised first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov—which tells the story of a Surrealist artist who, in an act of artistic self-betrayal, becomes a Soviet art functionary, only to find his world upended years later under glasnost—Olga Grushin set out to write a novel about a Russian émigré living in America who then returns to Russia. But after struggling through about 100 pages, Grushin abandoned the project.

“Hopefully my second novel jinx was the one that didn’t work out,” Grushin quips during a call to her home outside Washington, D.C. Grushin was born in Moscow in 1971 and came to the U.S. to attend Emory University in 1989. Her Alabama-born husband is an attorney, and they have two children—a boy and a girl—whose births coincided with the completion of each of Grushin’s novels. “Are we going to see a third child for the third novel?” Grushin says, laughing. “No, this is not a literary trend.”

While struggling with her novel in progress, Grushin happened upon “this story of how Igor Stravinsky, who was 80 at the time, was invited to return to his homeland for the first time in 50 years. People, when they learned of it, lined up and waited to buy tickets literally for a whole year. I was amazed by that story. The line itself became this complex social world with its own rules, its own leaders and its own social networks. As I kept struggling with my novel, I kept returning to this story again and again. I kept asking myself what kind of lives these people would have outside the line to make this possible. What would make them stand in line for a year to hear a two-hour concert? I was haunted by this episode. I kept thinking about it and I started writing little notes to myself. Finally I realized that this was the book that I actually wanted to write.”

Thus Grushin’s extraordinary novel, The Line, was born. But it is a mistake to think of this as a historical novel in any way, shape or form. Grushin says she spent no more than a day or two reading about the historical episode that so intrigued her. Her invented famous composer, Igor Selinsky, is more an object of hopes and fantasies about life in a better place than a physical presence. Even her vividly rendered setting is as much Kafkaesque dreamscape as it is Soviet bloc housing. “I didn’t want to make it too Russian,” she says. “I wanted to go in a different direction. I set out to write a more universal tale about hoping and waiting and dreaming about changing your life.”

The Line centers on the lives of four family members, each with different hopes for the future and different, sometimes conflicting reasons for being in line for tickets. One of the marvels of the novel is how Grushin, a great descriptive writer and a masterful psychologist, gradually brings these family members—and the people in line around them—into sharp, resonant relief. “I thought of each character as being like a mirror, so that you get different reflections of the characters, in snippets from different points of view,” she says. “In the beginning of the book each character is in some ways completely alone, cut off. You get bits of the same story told from different points of view and it’s a completely different story. But the line is a sort of transformative presence. I didn’t conceive of some pat transformation. I wanted something deeper. The line is this sort of gift, people being transformed by their common weight, their hopes, their coming together.”

The novel’s success in providing a depth of experience about such an unlikely, even dreary subject as a ticket line is a testament not only to Grushin’s large talent but to her sustained control of her art. “I think it was E.L. Doctorow who said that when he writes a novel he knows the departure point and the destination point but the rest is like driving at night with your headlights lighting up just a small portion of the road,” Grushin says. “For me it’s not at all like that. I have to have an outline. I had a little more of a smudged outline in this case than with my first novel because I wanted to explore a different way of writing, also quite consciously. In the first novel I was maybe a little too logical and rigid in my approach. It was the first book and I was nervous about letting myself write more freely. With this book the concept was more fluid.”

Grushin says she now begins her work day writing in a notebook in a local café; when the piece begins to flow, she returns home, types what she has written into a computer and goes on from there. Since she arrived in the U.S. and became serious about publishing fiction, Grushin has written in English. “I do strive for a kind of merging of the Russian and the English in my use of language,” she says. “I do feel it’s important for me to preserve the Russian cadences and feel to my work. On the other hand I live here and I’ve been writing in English for 20 years, which has obviously changed me.

“I grew up reading every conceivable writer. I had this sense of entering this great ocean of literature within which there are maybe little bays—the bay of Russian literature, the sea of American literature—but basically it was this one water. I don’t see myself as either Russian or American, really. I see myself more as just a writer of the world.”

In The Line, Olga Grushin shows herself to be one extraordinarily capable swimmer in the world’s great ocean of literature.

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Review of Grushin’s The Dream Life of Sukhanov

To follow her highly praised first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov—which tells the story of a Surrealist artist who, in an act of artistic self-betrayal, becomes a Soviet art functionary, only to find his world upended years later under glasnost—Olga Grushin set out…

A good “what-if” is one of the most powerful tools in a fiction writer’s arsenal, and author Sue Miller has come up with a doozy. What if you’re planning on leaving your lover today, but haven’t told him yet? What if he’s on a plane that’s been hijacked? Add one more what-if—the date is 9/11/2001. Then throw in a few what-might-have-beens, and you have the rhyme and reason for The Lake Shore Limited, a beautifully crafted novel by a writer displaying the full range of her considerable talents.

In a recent phone interview from her Boston home on a beautiful but frigid day, Miller recalls that on 9/11, she was in Vermont, writing. “We had a place there, but we had no television. We listened to the radio all day, and I didn’t see any images until several days later. I was actually grateful not to have seen those images. So I was, in an odd way, removed from the way that most people experienced the attack because of not having that immediate visual experience.”

The fictional what-ifs of her new novel were sparked by a real-life connection to the events of that tragic day. “I had a friend who was staying with someone whose sister was killed on 9/11. Due to the circumstances, my friend felt it was necessary to stay longer than she would have otherwise, and to enact a role, something my main character ends up doing in the novel.”

The experiences of her friend set Miller thinking about the way we insist on one response from all those who lost someone on 9/11. She pondered the varieties of reactions that people might have had on that day. “Things could have been much more complicated for any number of people than what they appeared to be on the surface,” she says. With that dichotomy in mind, she chose to further explore the possibilities, although there would be a delay in bringing her ideas to the page.

At the time, she was working on other projects and finishing up The Story of My Father, a memoir about her father’s death, and still processing her loss. “With the passage of time, I’ve been able to think fondly, affectionately and with humor about people or even animals that I’ve lost, but I can also call up tears very quickly if I think in a certain way,” she says. “You gradually learn to live with less pain around the loss; it might ease over time, but I think there is always grief.”

Eventually, Miller began to think about the 9/11 story concept. “I started to see my way into it, fictionally, well enough that I was intrigued enough to pursue it,” she says.

In The Lake Shore Limited, four characters are brought together by a stage play that strikes a little too close to home for everyone involved. Three years after her younger brother Gus—the dearest person in her life—died in a 9/11 plane crash, Leslie is still trying to make sense of the senseless, including her marriage and her relationship with an architect friend, Sam, a man she was once strongly attracted to. Leslie has invited Sam to see The Lake Shore Limited, a play written by Gus’ girlfriend Billy, intending to set Sam up with her. Sam has his own backstory, but in the present moment, it is Billy’s gamine, enigmatic beauty that he is drawn to.

Although she was still living with Gus at the time of his death, Billy had already left him emotionally and had planned to tell him so on that fateful day. Now everything has changed, and Billy has attempted, as best she can, to mourn Gus and honor his memory in order to avoid hurting Leslie (who still thinks they were deeply in love) and possibly destroying a friendship she values. The play is Billy’s somewhat unconscious way of coming out of her emotional closet and healing some of her own wounds, self-inflicted and otherwise.

In her play, a story within a story, the main character learns that there has been a terrorist bombing on the Lake Shore Limited train, and that one of the passengers is his wife—the woman he was planning to leave for his mistress. Meanwhile, in what passes for real life, Miller’s characters continue to explore the intricate workings of their relationships.

Everyone in The Lake Shore Limited has plenty of baggage to sort out, and Miller is a master at volleying back and forth between the past and the present to reveal the rich inner and outer lives of her characters. Cutting through the chaos and confusion of daily living, she penetrates to the heart of the matter with great skill.

The author of nine previous novels, Miller is keenly aware of the redemptive power of art. “I believe that those who make art, and those who see it and participate in it, are changed by it,” she says. “There have been times when I’ve read something that triggered an incredible emotional response in me—an opportunity to re-experience a situation, but in a way that articulates it more clearly than I could have myself. I certainly intended that to be the case for some of the characters in the book.”

Although some may manage to rise above their challenges, there are no heroes in The Lake Shore Limited. “I don’t believe in heroes,” Miller says. “People do heroic things unexpectedly, but I think no one would ever choose them, and probably most people would wish them away, the very brave things they’ve done. I think they’re accidents that happen and people find something within themselves to respond to them.”

When asked what life experiences had most shaped her writing, Miller responds with one of her favorite quotes. “There’s this wonderful line from Flannery O’Connor that says, ‘Anyone who survives his infancy has enough material to last a lifetime.’ I do feel that to some degree.”

“I had an interesting growing up, an unusual one in some ways, and an interesting marital history. I’ve had the wonderful experience of being a parent and now a grandmother and worked for many years of my life with little children and their parents in day care. I’ve heard a lot of stories and imagined a lot of ways of proceeding through life and feeling things,” says Miller, who is currently the Elizabeth Drew Professor of English Language & Literature at nearby Smith College.
“But for the most part,” she says, “many of the specifics in my writing come to me as I’m working on a novel. It’s always part of the pleasure of having ideas come out of the blue—they seem like gifts.”

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Our interview with Miller for The Story of My Father
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A good “what-if” is one of the most powerful tools in a fiction writer’s arsenal, and author Sue Miller has come up with a doozy. What if you’re planning on leaving your lover today, but haven’t told him yet? What if he’s on a plane…

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