All Interviews

Can you describe the moment you learned that The Imperfectionists sold to Dial?
My agent phoned from New York with the news. I stood there in my small apartment in Paris, shifting from leg to leg as she drew out the story. Finally, there it was: I had sold my novel. I put down the receiver, took a deep breath and began darting from one side of my living room to the other (not a great distance; about three strides each way), punching the air, shouting, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” until remembering that I had neighbors. Next, I ordered champagne to be sent to my agent, and popped a bottle myself, sending the cork flying from the living room, into the kitchen, out the open window.

Did you expect that you would draw from your career and write about journalists in your first novel?
I had intended to use my experiences abroad as inspiration for fiction—amassing interesting tales was the reason I entered international journalism. But I had never planned for journalists themselves to be the subject. However, the period I had witnessed was too fascinating not to write about: the press, after a history of reporting on collapse and chaos, was now the victim of collapse and chaos, as technology wiped out the foundations of traditional media.

Are you a full-time fiction writer now? If so, do you miss working in a newsroom? Do you have plans to contribute nonfiction pieces to newspapers or magazines in the future?
I do write fiction full-time now and don't particularly miss the newsroom. It's not always a congenial place to toil—often, its appeal depends on how far or near you are to headquarters. The nearer you are, the worse it typically is. Too many opinions, too many ambitions. I'm happier at a distance, reading the news rather than writing it. That said, I do intend to write nonfiction in the future—not breaking news anymore, but more deeply researched pieces. I hope that fiction remains my principal occupation, but that nonfiction makes intermittent appearances, too.

What news sources do you read every day? Do you still read print, or do you access everything online?
Most weeks, I read articles online from the New York Times/International Herald Tribune, Yahoo! News, Sporting Life, the Guardian, the Times of London, the Financial Times, the New Yorker. I still read a few print newspapers, depending on how the mood and circumstances strike me. And I always read the New York Review of Books on paper.

What’s up next? Are you working on another novel?
I'm making excellent progress on my new novel. I'm secretive about works in progress, so I apologize for not detailing its subject—even my closest companions have no idea what I'm writing until I have a finalized draft, and that is still a distance away. I can say, however, that this novel has nothing to do with journalists! 

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Review of The Imperfectionists.

The vampire craze sweeping literature is not unlike the virus that decimates the world in Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Sure, there are isolated enclaves of holdouts, defending literature as they know it from the onslaught of supernatural beings, but most of the reading public seems to have developed an insatiable thirst for stories featuring the undead, from writers like Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer.

A note to those who thought they were immune: I dare you to crack open The Passage and read page one. From the first sentence, Cronin’s epic establishes itself as something both equal to and greater than the supernatural suspense novels that have been eating up more and more bookshelf real estate since Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian became a surprise bestseller in 2005. As Cronin says during a call to his home on the outskirts of Houston, “these are not your teenage daughter’s vampires.”

He’s right. Cronin’s vampires—which are more often called “virals,” “flyers,” “slims” or “smokes”—inspire fear, hate and confusion, but never love. Spawned from a virus in a failed government effort to engineer a supersoldier, these undead share a hive-mind mentality, an aversion to sunlight and a hunger for human blood. The virus is tested on 12 felons—and one abandoned 6-year-old girl, Amy Harper Bellafonte. She alone survives the testing with her humanity intact (albeit with added strength, healing ability and longevity); the others escape and alternately hunt and infect the rest of the world.

“Most vampire stories are essentially stories of magic. The magic of my lifetime is science. So I decided to ground it in a scientific reality and see what would follow from that,” Cronin says. “The experiment that produces the great viral cataclysm is essentially an act of human greed—it’s trying to steal the future from your kids. The scientists who are seeking to engineer a virus that makes human beings so long-lived that they are essentially immortal have missed the true immortality that we possess, which is that the future we will not live to see is the future our children will live in.”

This act of hubris, and its devastating consequences, are meticulously detailed. The Passage takes its time setting up the characters and story to create a solid foundation for the strange future readers enter when, 93 years later, Amy—who now looks about 16—stumbles into one of the last human settlements after a viral attack. Her arrival comes at a bad time. Vampires are getting bolder, coming near the settlement’s walls even during the daylight hours. The aging batteries powering the city’s 24-hour lights—their best defense—have little juice left. Some of the citizens are having violent nightmares and coming down with a strange illness that causes them to go insane. A silent, mysterious girl makes a convenient scapegoat.

But Peter senses that Amy’s otherness is a good thing. When they discover a transmitter in her neck with GPS coordinates for a place in Colorado that is broadcasting the message “If you find her, bring her here,” Peter and a group of loyal friends set off on an incredible journey.

Suspenseful and surprising, The Passage is something of a departure for Cronin, a Harvard grad and English professor at Rice University whose previous works—The Summer Guest and Mary and O’Neil—were quiet literary successes.

The reception of The Passage, however, has been anything but quiet. Cronin’s agent submitted the partial manuscript and an outline for auction in 2007 under the pen name Jordan Ainsley, an intentionally gender-neutral name. “I didn’t want anybody to read this book and categorize it in any way in advance. And indeed what happened is people came to it with an open mind, which I think every book deserves,” Cronin says.

He got more than open minds: Ballantine bought the trilogy for a reported $3.75 million, and a movie deal with Ridley Scott followed. Pre-publication buzz has been tremendous, and Cronin has already met with booksellers and librarians like Nancy Pearl, something the “extremely social” author has enjoyed, though he says his life has not otherwise changed. “You write any book with the hope that it will do well enough that you are able to write more, and The Passage has done that for me—spectacularly. Still, you’ve got to write for love, and I wrote this book for love.”

He also wrote it for his daughter, Iris, now 13. When she was about to turn 9, she asked if she could ride her bike along with her dad when he went on his evening runs. Cronin agreed, but “it’s hot in Texas and you’ve gotta do something to pass the time.” So he suggested they come up with an idea for a novel, “with no expectations whatsoever. Maybe I was sort of introducing my kid to the family business.”

Iris had a stipulation: She wanted to plot a story about a girl who saves the world, “which seemed a little ambitious,” Cronin says with a laugh, “but OK. So for a period of weeks we went through the streets of my suburban Houston neighborhood tossing ideas back and forth, building a story, building characters. It was really just for fun, and it was tremendous fun.”

But it soon became more than that. “By the time the cold weather came and the bike went into the garage, I thought maybe I was on to something. I wrote an outline and was amazed at how much was there. And so I thought, OK, what the hell, let’s write the first chapter, give the book a voice, see how it feels. And it felt terrific.”

Which brings us back to the book’s incredible opening, which was the first part of The Passage that Cronin wrote. “That sentence told me it was going to have this global overview, this very large canvas, which is what I wanted, but it was always going to be an intimate story of people. Once I hammered that one into place, my fate was sealed: I was going to write it.”

Though Iris’ participation ended in 2006, she has now read the book. “It took her a day and a half, that’s the kind of kid she is—she probably read it faster than anyone in America. And she blessed it, which is what I wanted. Everything a man does in his life he does in some ways to impress a girl, and she was the girl I wanted to impress.”

Brimming with memorable characters, action and adventure, the book brings to mind classics like The Stand and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and shows the deep understanding of humanity and literary skill that is also present in Cronin’s earlier works. Cronin says he dared himself to write “a book that rules out no reader,” and The Passage is definitely that.

“One of the things I wanted to do with this book, and the two that will follow, is to write every kind of story I ever loved,” he says. In addition to the post-apocalyptic setting and vampire element, The Passage is a road novel, a coming-of-age story, a thriller and even something of a romance. Last but not least, “it has a runaway train! Everything I think is great in a story, that nails me to my chair, it’s going to find its way into these three books,” promises Cronin, who has plotted out the entire series and is already deep into writing Volume Two, to be published in 2012.

What also finds its way into the story, and what perhaps draws readers to post-apocalyptic fiction, is the hope that humanity can survive even the worst trials. As Cronin explains, the characters in The Passage “live in constant and overwhelming danger, but they have a job, they have families, they form relationships, they have a sense of clan and kin. So the world as we know it has in some way continued. It’s at the brink, and there’s not much left, but it’s there.

“I wanted the reader to know that not all is lost. And then show, within the story, what was worth saving.”

Author photo © Gasper Tringale

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An excerpt from The Passage:
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Before she became The Girl from Nowhere—the One Who Walked In, The First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years—she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

The day Amy was born, her mother, Jeanette, was nineteen years old. Jeanette named her baby Amy for her own mother, who’d died when Jeanette was little, and gave her the middle name Harper for Harper Lee, the lady who’d written To Kill a Mockingbird, Jeanette’s favorite book—truth be told, the only book she’d made it all the way through in high school. She might have named her Scout, after the little girl in the story, because she wanted her little girl to grow up like that, tough and funny and wise, in a way that she, Jeannette, had never managed to be. But Scout was a name for a boy, and she didn’t want her daughter to have to go around her whole life explaining something like that.

Amy’s father was a man who came in one day to the restaurant where Jeanette had waited tables since she turned sixteen, a diner that everyone called the Box, because it looked like one: like a big chrome shoe-box sitting off the county road, backed by fields of corn and beans, nothing else around for miles except a self-serve car wash, the kind where you had to put coins into the machine and do all the work yourself. The man, whose name was Bill Reynolds, sold combines and harvesters, big things like that, and he was a sweet talker who told Jeanette as she poured his coffee and then later, again and again, how pretty she was, how he liked her coal-black hair and hazel eyes and slender wrists, said it all in a way that sounded like he meant it, not the way boys in school had, as if the words were just something that needed to get said along the way to her letting them do as they liked. He had a big car, a new Pontiac, with a dashboard that glowed like a spaceship and leather seats creamy as butter. She could have loved that man, she thought, really and truly loved him. But he stayed in town only a few days, and then went on his way.

Excerpted from The Passage by Justin Cronin
Copyright © 2010 by Justin Cronin. Excerpted by ­permission of Ballantine Group, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

A boy with keys for fingers. A woman who gives birth to her own mother. Imps and mermaids falling in love. If all of this sounds too strange—even for fiction—then you’ve obviously never read anything by Aimee Bender. 

But now, with the publication of her second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, it’s clearly time that you should.

In her latest literary confection, Bender introduces readers to perhaps her most dazzling creation to date: a girl named Rose who can taste the deepest feelings of others, just by taking a single bite of the food they prepare. As the flavors of the food flow over her tongue, Rose is inundated with the underlying emotions of the person who cooked the meal, even if it’s something as simple as a peanut butter sandwich. All of a sudden, Rose is privy to an onslaught of sensations that aren’t her own, and she realizes that nothing will ever be truly simple again.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake focuses on Rose’s formative years, from the age of nine through her early 20s, as she struggles to form meaningful connections with her family and her peers. Intimidated by her austere and deeply intellectual brother, Joseph, Rose tries to understand what makes him tick. It is only with George, Joseph’s best friend, that Rose feels she can truly express herself without fear of misunderstanding or judgment: the two share great tenderness, their relationship tinged with the poignant melancholy that pervades most of the novel.

Unable to stop the feelings that stem from the food she eats, it is up to Rose to discover a means of coping with her unwanted ability. Through much trial and error, Rose discovers there are alternatives to simply cutting herself off from others. With time she comes to see that her “curse” might actually have the potential to set her free, but first she must make peace with herself.

Speaking from her home in Los Angeles, Bender recalls where the ingenious idea for the story originated. “I think I was primarily interested in the food at first,” she says. “I kept going back to the idea of ‘what if food was carrying more than just food?’ [So] the idea was sort of floating in my mind for years, and then when I hit on that character [Rose] it was all about developing her.”

Although Rose’s story plays center stage, if readers dig deeper, they will see that her brother Joseph’s extreme reclusiveness, her father’s intense aversion to hospitals and her mother’s newfound obsession with carpentry all tell their own stories, each filled with pain and longing. The family is like a concert of tops, spinning together, but each ultimately orbiting its own axis. And yet, Bender balks at the idea that she has depicted a dysfunctional family. “I can see how some would think about this as a dysfunctional family,” she allows, “but it’s not a term I would pick because it can be a kind of catchall. My hope is that the family is experiencing a unique unhappiness.”

When it comes to the author’s own family, however, nary a storm cloud is in sight. Bender credits her mother, a modern dance instructor, as a critical influence on her willingness to defy convention. She recalls, “[My mother] would always take me to these concerts, and modern dance can be so bizarre! She also pointed me toward theater of the absurd writers when I was in junior high and high school; I loved that they were funny and weird and this was literature, and there was some feeling of permission in all of it that felt very good to me.”

Perhaps her mother’s gift of promoting the bizarre is something Bender is passing on to her readers. The wild and fanciful worlds of her imagination have been showcased in two short story collections, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures, and in her acclaimed first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own. Asked about her ability to ground the outlandish in a place that is real, Bender says that writing this way is the only way she knows how. “My impulse is always to take an idea that is a little off-center, which means I can kind of get my hands in it, and then I can use that to climb into the character,” she says.

Although The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is liberally frosted with the foreign and the fantastic, the emotions at its center are undeniably real. Readers who like to give their imaginations a workout are in for a satisfying treat that is both bitter and sweet.
 

Self-published in 2003, Hilary Thayer Hamann’s re-released Anthropology of an American Girl is a coming-of-age story rich with visual descriptions and commentary on life in the 1980s. Through high school in East Hampton and early adulthood in New York City, protagonist Eveline Auerbach confronts the cultural expectations of an “American girl”—along with death, love and the nature of friendship.

Readers have compared Hamann to Henry James and J.D. Salinger, and those evocations are fitting. But ultimately, Anthropology of an American Girl feels entirely fresh, as Hamann addresses—with lovely, intimate language—the contradictions we all face: obsessive love versus a desire for independence, or skepticism of an institution alongside pleasure in our daily participation.

At more than 600 pages, Hamann’s debut is no quick read, but it’s well worth the investment of time. To give you an idea of the themes and plot of the novel, BookPage asked the author to elaborate on her writing, from the choice to include song lyrics in the text, to whether her narrator is a feminist.

Anthropology of an American Girl was self-published in 2003, then sold to Spiegel & Grau in 2007 and “significantly re-edited.” How did the novel change from the original version? Are there significant differences in plot? New characters? A different tone?
There were no changes to the characters or to the plot, but it feels like a different book. It feels lighter, cleaner, and as a result, stronger. Since Anthropology has a legacy—the self-published version got strong reviews and it developed a significant fan base—there was an effort to preserve the essence of the original. Cindy Spiegel, my editor, combed through the novel carefully and cleared away the extraneous material so that the characters and their motivations became more vivid. The revised edition has a freshness and a vitality that the former lacked.

Music and song lyrics factor prominently in the story. How did you choose which songs to excerpt? Is your musical taste the same as Evie’s?
The music that figures into the book doesn’t refer to Evie’s taste or mine, though there are songs in there that I love—and ones that she loves, too! Since the premise of the book is an “anthropology,” I tried to document the music of the time, noting the songs she might have heard or been influenced by. You know, if Evie walks into a deli, for instance, what might have been playing on the radio? Or, if she is standing on the streets in Brooklyn, what might have been playing on someone’s car stereo? There are selections from funk, pop, rock, R&B, classic blues, bossa nova and even opera in there. I realize that some of the songs might be obscure to readers of different generations, which is why simply naming them was not an option. The inclusion of the lyrics allows readers to get a sense of the songwriters’ poetry. And it’s interesting, because even if you are familiar with the music, it looks entirely new to see it written out in the midst of text like that.

In one scene in the novel—during a eulogy—a priest speaks about the necessity and struggle of seeing “the essence of what we admire.” Of all your characters, whom do you most admire? How would you describe the “essence” of that character?
In the eulogy, the speaker is referring predominantly to the problem of viewing friendship as an all or nothing state of affairs. Between wholesale acceptance and wholesale rejection of a friend there should be a sustainable place of responsible engagement. Friendships with high standards and long-term commitments demand more work than the casual, disposal kind, but the rewards are great. When we forsake a friend in need, or when we are forsaken, it’s a terrible thing. There may be nothing worse.

There are some people who would never, who could never forsake a friend. Many of the characters in Anthropology possess this quality to varying degrees, but no one so much as Rob Cirillo. Rob is loving, but beyond that, his love is authentic. As he himself might say, it gets through. It reads as honest because he is fearless, and by that I mean, transparent in expressing affection. He is not secretive or self-protective; he doesn’t hide anything or have anything over on anyone. He is unafraid of being hurt by rejection, because in his mind, his love is enough. It’s a matter of confidence.

What is the essence of a character? There are myriad ways to reply, but to continue on this theme, let’s say confidence. I don’t just mean confidence as a character living out his or her life in the text, but as he or she relates to the writer outside the text. The characters I like best are the ones I have confidence in, the reliable ones, the ones that can help me do my job of conveying meaning, moving the story. Ironically, if they can remain true to the convictions you have assigned, they become less predictable, more interesting. They write themselves. In my novel, I would say Evie, Jack and Rob wrote themselves.

Are you skeptical of the American high school experience? Evie describes how school spirit, sports spirit and America spirit “got totally mixed up.” While participating in high school programs, she sometimes feels like “part of a giant out-of-control science experiment.” Was this true for you in high school? Is it the same for kids in high school today?
High school is a necessity for individuals, families and the nation, and receiving an education is a right and a privilege that American citizens deserve. But at the same time, these constructs I just named—individual, family, nation, education, right, privilege, America and citizenship—are not hollow. They need to be as meaningful in practice as in theory. The “out-of-control science experiment” phrase relates in part to the institutional lip service that gets paid to these concepts, whereas very little of it trickles down to the kids. It’s no secret to say that high school experiences are mixed at best. Many young people feel desperation, shame, anxiety, etc. while attending school. One main reason for this is that definitions of “success” in high school are too narrow. Typically, they relate to academics, sports or beauty. I was very fortunate to have had serious and meaningful experiences in the arts while in high school. Through the arts, my friends and I were able to cultivate, maintain and share the dignity, pride, faith, hope and political mindfulness that came naturally to us, and that come naturally to most teenagers. Unfortunately, such alternatives are not always available.

Who do you see as the audience for your book? Is it overwhelmingly female? Do you think men will be interested in this story?
I see Anthropology as a literary novel, and as such, accessible to both men and women. However, I am aware of the fact that more women will read it than men. Having said that, many of the book’s strongest fans have been men, so I believe that if they give it a try, they’ll love it. It contains an examination of men in this culture as well as one of women, and I tried to be sensitive in my approach to the social pressures placed upon men. The male characters in the book—Jack, Denny, Rob, Rourke, even Mark—are not two-dimensional devices. They are fully-realized. Of course male readers might feel self-conscious about carrying around a book with the title Anthropology of an American Girl, but I think it’s a great way to impress women!

Evie frequently considers the unique experience of being female. For example, “Every woman knows the feeling of being a stack of roving flesh.” Or, an “American girl” should possess “independence and blind courage.” Is Evie’s love for—even obsession with—certain men at odds with her social commentary? Is Evie a feminist?
Well, the book is not so polemical as that, and Evie is a very democratic protagonist. Through her, I was able to write around issues, more or less, rather than travel from one position to another. Perhaps I’d say she is a “feminist in training,” or to be more accurate, a “good citizen in training”—which incorporates feminism. She matures from that “stack of roving flesh” competing with the girls around her to a young woman who is genuinely concerned with others, and with women in particular. As the story progresses, Evie becomes mindful of the abuses women sometimes suffer, but she also comes to understand the abuses they level against themselves. She does this by living, observing, asking questions. She uses her internal time well. Thinking things through is a skill, I believe, that many of the best people cultivate.

And I think her love for men is accurate. I think the number and range of men she connects with is accurate. I think the vacillating negligence, absence, allegiance, cruelty, adoration, etc. of the men, and her willingness to love them despite it all, is accurate. There would have been no way for me to comment on the slippery slope women experience without demanding that Evie pass through it. Many girls waste their time on men. I certainly did!

In Anthropology of an American Girl, I was struck by your frequent use of italics to give certain phrases emphasis. What do italics add to the tone of your book? When you were writing, were you conscious of this technique?
This is very much a story about voice. It felt right to me that the words would be “heard” by the reader in a certain way. How Eveline hears, processes and speaks, are expressive of intention, direction and state of mind. It aided authenticity.

A notable characteristic of your writing is the use of simile: “The sun set . . . returning to us slow, like honey from an overturned jar.” “Some people exist quite well in injury. It’s like having gills to breathe underwater.” “The first time I saw you . . . it was like seeing a river.” How do these analogies serve your descriptions? Why do you so often describe what something is like?
First of all, I was writing from the point of view of a 17-year-old artist. I wrote as I thought she would see. If, instead, I’d written, “We watched the sunset,” or “Some people refuse to get over their own pain,” the words would have been stripped of her softness. They would have seemed too absolute. She does not know things so absolutely. Also, the similes make for a scenic space inside her head. I feel Eveline comes across as self-contained—unusual and content with that. Her inner vision is her defense. It’s like whistling or singing or breathing deeply when you are upset. She “paints” a place. At times, her interior image is at odds with her surroundings, and that interests me.

Secondly, I do happen to think and write visually, and I often see things before I can say them. So, I see the sunset like spilling honey. I see people existing well in injury as having special survival tools for their own special environment. Just this morning I was thinking of people who are oppressively cheerful as being secretly depressed. You know, those sorts who are happy to the point of evading the practical and emotional reality of others, themselves, the world at large. But before being able to articulate what I meant, I could see a sheer drinking glass full to the brim, lapping over its own edge. My impression was of something fragile, fluid and full to its own capacity. Something that had no room to let anything else in.

Why did you set Anthropology of an American Girl in the 1970s and 1980s? I couldn’t help but think of placing blame for our current financial crisis when Evie thinks: “blaming groups shows that you yourself are not involved but that you are intellectually connected.” Do you think your book has contemporary relevance?
I set it in the time I came of age because it felt more authentic to follow my own path. But I also believe the transformations of that time require exploration, and that they hold lessons for the present. One underlying question was: What happened to the idealism of the 1960s? Obviously, it was replaced by neo-conservatism, but why? I wanted to look at both the left and the right and try to understand the ways in which individual Americans are manipulated.

As teenagers who had been children in the 1960s, we were all too aware in the early and mid 1970s of corporate, political and environmental inequities. We were outspoken, and our conversations were deep and free. We were concerned about excessive deregulation of corporations (of the sort that has almost certainly led to the oil spill in the Gulf), environmental destruction, human rights. We had lived through the gas crisis. We were ready for solar power. It would have been a good time for increased sacrifice. But instead, the opposite happened. By the early 1980s, personal pleasure became the mode. Topics of consequence vanished; it became unpopular to be anti-establishment. It got to the point where you were mocked for thinking or speaking too seriously. Remember the old television show “Family Ties” with Michael J. Fox? The liberal, hippie parents were nice but irrelevant fodder for jokes, and the conservative son was the lead, the center, the star, the protagonist. It was a strange and depressing transition, and certainly, the “art” of the time bears this out. It reflects the pervasive selfishness, inwardness, markets—television, film, popular music. It all dated badly. It didn’t think beyond itself.

What is your next book about? Will you continue to work with a major publishing house?
I am currently writing a story about an extended family set in the Bronx in the 1960s. My idea is to write about a Vietnam veteran who returns home emotionally and physically ruined by his experience, but is eventually reconstituted through his relationship with a strange and extraordinary woman. It’s going to be another romance set over another cultural exploration. I think it will have something for everyone. And, I would love to continue working with Speigel & Grau. I feel as though I have found home.

Author photo by Doug Young.