Alden Mudge

Thomas Sanchez is convinced that the type of novel he spends years and years writing has fallen out of fashion. "We’re in a very cynical time in America," he says. "Everybody wants to be famous for their five-and-a-half minutes. They want to go out and get rich dot com by the time they’re 22. They’re not going to spend ten years writing a novel that may never be published, may never make any money."

We’re sitting in Francis Ford Coppola’s cafe in San Francisco’s North Beach. Sanchez has just returned from Paris, where an intense auction for the rights to his new novel, Day of the Bees, is underway. Instead of seeming jet-lagged, however, Sanchez is passionate, energized. Words spill from him.

He’s delighted that the two main contenders for the French rights to the book have strong family ties to the French Resistance. The activities of the Resistance during World War II are an essential part of the emotional and narrative background in Day of the Bees. "I had to know the price of kerosene on the black market and on the white market," he says. "I had to know how many ration books it would take to make an apple pie, or if that was even possible. Most of these details weren’t directly used in the book. Instead, they are what shape how Louise and the other characters in the book respond in a given situation." Sanchez believes that the bids of these particular publishers validate the exacting historical research he conducted. He also believes he can hear the cynics sharpening their knives, getting ready to carve up Day of the Bees.

Maybe he’s right.

Since the publication in 1973 of his magisterial first novel, Rabbit Boss, Thomas Sanchez has shown himself to be a writer of towering ambition, a writer who is intent on exploring personal and historical landscapes that are alien to most contemporary American writers. "The obligation of a writer," Sanchez says, "is not simply to write evermore diminutive domestic dramas about himself. Rather it is to state, to elucidate, how we are all part of something larger, something grander."

Despite the fact that Day of the Bees is in many ways Sanchez’s most intimate work, like Mile Zero (1990) and his other highly regarded novels this one strives for something larger and grander. At its most essential, Day of the Bees explores the mysterious love between Francisco Zermano, a great Spanish painter in the mold of Picasso, and his French muse, Louise Collard. After the Nazi invasion of France, Zermano takes Louise to Provence in the south of France for her own protection. Zermano returns to Paris, and the two lovers never meet again. After the war, while Zermano’s fame grows, Louise becomes merely a footnote to history. Then 50 years later, after Louise’s death and quite by accident, a scholar happens upon Louise’s unsent letters to Zermano, and a powerful counter-history unfolds.

According to Sanchez, three emotional strands inspired the book. The first was the story he heard about a famous artist’s mistress, who had been abandoned by her lover during the war and then lived a life of almost total isolation in Provence until her death. The second was the story of a woman who had been active in the French Resistance during the war; when her group was betrayed, the men were shot and she was nailed by the hands to the door of the village church. The third emotional strand was a personal one: Sanchez’s father was killed during World War II before Sanchez himself was born. On his 50th birthday, Sanchez’s mother gave him his father’s love letters to her, some of which she received after she learned of her husband’s death. Little wonder, then, that Day of the Bees has a dense emotional and metaphorical weave.

The story unfolds largely through Louise’s letters, which are by turns, beautiful, plaintive, courageous, combative, and embarrassingly carnal. "People do two things in letters," Sanchez says. "They express themselves in ways that they would not normally do when they are speaking. And they withhold information. The information that people withhold, especially emotional information, is every bit as important as what they expose."

Among the most moving and mysterious letters in the book are those in a section called "Night Letters," which reveal Louise’s harrowing activities on behalf of the Resistance. Reflecting on the art and psychology of these letters, Sanchez says, "When people go through a profound trauma, like a near-fatal accident or a smash-up in their emotional life, they often have a sense of otherness, where they are suddenly looking down on themselves being themselves. It’s a strange sort of paranormal state where we have a sense of being transported outside of our own skin. I think that state gets very close to the origins of existence. And I wanted to design the language of these letters to show that kind of fragmentation of Louise’s consciousness."

Also astonishing are the descriptions of nature and the French region of Provence. In the pivotal moment of the book, the moment that lends the book its title, Louise is enveloped by a swarm of bees. It’s surely one of the most amazing emotional and metaphorical scenes in recent fiction. Sanchez seems to have found a particular inspiration for this scene and for the book in the landscape of Provence: "Living deep in the country of Provence, you are so connected to the earth, to the life force of the place, to the movement of the place, that the real tick of time is the flick of a wing of a bee or the song of a cicada. It is nature overwhelming you with sound and energy. That became important to me, because we so easily lose sight of nature and become disconnected from it."

Returning to his passionate concern about our current era, Sanchez says, "We’re living in a very dangerous time. We’re being told that our emotions aren’t real unless television tells us they’re real. We’re being told to deny our emotions or not to have emotions. In literature we’re being told to write from the gut and not from the heart. If you write from your gut, you write from instinctive reflex. A dog has a reflex. But if you’re writing from your heart, interacting with your intellect, then you are making a statement as an individual, not as an animal. In Day of the Bees, I’ve tried to write directly from the heart, to find a language that is simple on the page and that goes directly to the heart."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Early 20th century detective novels served as the inspiration for the masterful new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author best known for his portrait of a loyal butler in The Remains of the Day.

"There's a certain kind of detective fiction that was enormously popular here in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s," Ishiguro says during a recent interview from his home near London. "These days it's a genre that's really looked down upon. It is thought to be kind of facile escapism, and to some extent that's justified. But reading these novels over the distance of time, I found them very poignant, because they were actually written and read immediately after the Great War, by a generation trying to recover from the trauma of that war. That was a generation that knew better than we do today what the real nature of evil and suffering was.

"These detective stories portray a very cozy functioning community where just one thing has gone wrong—somebody has murdered somebody. And all it takes is for this detective to come from outside and unmask the murderer and everything goes back to being rosy again," Ishiguro says. "It occurred to me that it would be interesting to take a detective who seems to come from that world, carrying the tools that would be adequate in that fictional world, and to actually hurl him into the 20th century as it moved toward the second cataclysm."

From this thread of inspiration, Kazuo Ishiguro has created Christopher Banks, the English detective of the 1930s who narrates the new novel, When We Were Orphans. Banks's parents disappeared in Shanghai when he was nine years old, and he is obsessed with solving the riddle of their disappearance. He eventually returns to Shanghai on the eve of World War II and hunts through a nightmarish war-torn city for his parents, whom he believes have been held captive for more than 20 years.

In previous novels, Ishiguro has often explored the intersection of personal and historical events, looking at how, as he says, "The luck of the draw you had historically had profound implications on how your small private life went." In the Booker prize-winning The Remains of the Day, for instance, the butler aspires to serve greatness but instead facilitates his employer's efforts to promote Nazi appeasement.

In When We Were Orphans, however, Ishiguro's uses his historical backdrop in a more psychologically resonant manner. "Here the turbulence of Shanghai is almost like an externalized version of Christopher's sense of the whole world crumbling," Ishiguro says. "Christopher's world as a child collapsed when his parents disappeared. He thinks if he can only go back in time and solve that mystery, the whole world will be put together again. I suppose it's a crazy equation, but Christopher does equate his subjective world crumbling with the world around him hurtling toward the Second World War. He thinks he'll be able to stop that war from happening if he can solve this case. It's difficult to explain, but I think large areas of what we do in the world often come from exactly such a crazy bit of logic, an emotional logic."

And it is the unfolding of this weird logic that makes When We Were Orphans sometimes challenging, and, ultimately, very rewarding. Much of the novel's challenge has to do with the fact that Christopher Banks's account of himself is unreliable. His memory is faulty and ignores, denies, or distorts painful reminders from his past. For a great detective intent on turning up clues, Banks is sometimes clueless, particularly about his own emotional life.

"In each section Banks narrates," Ishiguro says, "Christopher's mind has gone further away from what we call reality. When he goes back to Shanghai, we're really not quite sure if it's the real Shanghai or some mixture of memory and speculation."

Ishiguro often uses an unreliable narrator in his novels; he says he is simply drawn to this kind of writing. "I don't think in any technical sense about an unreliable narrator. Where my writing is pitched is in that realm where you're not quite sure what reality is. Because to some extent, I think that's where we all live—in a bit of a fog. When I write, I do like to narrate from that fairly murky inner point, not from some kind of external camera's eye point."

For a writer so fascinated with the exploration of the inward experience of consciousness, Ishiguro is relatively untroubled by public demands of his growing fame. "Writing is a very introverted activity," he admits. "But these days, in the professional life of a writer, at least a writer who is being marketed to any degree, there is this very extroverted side. You have to tour around doing these public performances, sometimes in front of sizable audiences. I know a lot of my colleagues find that aspect of things difficult. But I never find it very difficult."

Ishiguro says he does occasionally wonder if the growing demand for public literary events presents a kind of threat to literary culture and to the subjective pleasures of reading. "I don't know if this fear is justified," he says. "There needs to be a balance, I suppose. But I sometimes worry that these events where an author reads from his work and answers questions become [all there is to] literary culture. So that when people are interested in Philip Roth's new book, what they think isn't, 'Oh I must go to the bookstore and buy the book and read it;' they think, 'Oh, I wonder if he's coming to our town to do an event, because I'll go and do that.' And that becomes the main excitement about Philip Roth bringing out a new book."

Of course, a lack of actual readers is not a likely fate for When We Were Orphans. After all, Ishiguro's previous novels have each been widely read, reviewed, and discussed, and this is his most accomplished novel yet. And this from someone who had no ambitions to write fiction until he was in his mid-20s.

"Until I was 24," Ishiguro says, "I wanted to be a singer-songwriter. I did the whole thing of sending songs and demo tapes around, and after years of being rejected, I moved from writing songs to writing short stories. When I started to write stories, they started to get published almost immediately. So it was like a lot of things—you do what life allows you to do."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

During a telephone conversation from his office in New York, Louis Begley quickly rattles through an impressive list of other writers who began publishing late in life. Then, with characteristic understated humor Begley adds, "I think it would be highly unlikely that one would successfully begin writing poetry at the age of 56. But novels are different."

No doubt. Begley proved this in 1991 when he became a first-time novelist at 56. The accomplishment is even more remarkable, considering that he wrote the novel while on a four-month sabbatical from his law firm, where he is senior partner and still practices full-time, Based partly on his experiences as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Poland, Wartime Lies won the Hemingway/ PEN award and the Prix Médicis Étranger, France’s highest award for fiction in translation.

Begley followed that with The Man Who Was Late (1992) and As Max Saw It (1994). Both were critical and popular successes. Then in About Schmidt (1996), Begley delivered what a Toronto Sun critic called his most surprising book, and created his most compelling, perplexing, even controversial protagonist, Albert Schmidt.

A tough, WASP establishment lawyer who is unmoored by the death of his wife and a deepening rift with his only child, Charlotte, Albert Schmidt at first seems to be merely an embodiment of the stiff prejudices of his class. But Begley lifts the veil and creates an intelligent, sympathetic portrait of an increasingly self-aware man in pursuit of unvarnished emotional truth.

Schmidt is a character who lingers in a reader’s mind. He has apparently also lingered in Louis Begley’s mind. Hence Begley’s newest novel, Schmidt Delivered.

"My interest in Schmidt has to do with questions of heredity versus nurture in his relations with his daughter Charlotte," Begley says. "It may be my time of life, it may be the time in which we live, but I am riveted to the relationship between Schmidt and Charlotte. For instance, why is it that it turns out badly between parents and children? And why is it that we ourselves turn out the way we are? Why is it that we find traces—the least lovable traces—of our parents in ourselves? How is it that we do not manage to stop ourselves from transmitting those very traces to our own children?"

Begley notes that Schmidt "is clearly not a choir boy." But he expresses surprise at the level of contempt directed at his protagonist by some critics of the earlier novel, who focused on Schmidt’s anti-Semitism, evidenced mainly in Schmidt’s reaction to his daughter’s plan to marry Jon Riker, a young lawyer in Schmidt’s firm. "This crowd of people thinks that characters in novels are supposed to be nice," Begley says. "If one sets aside Victorian novels, where are the nice protagonists of good novels? I don’t know any."

In Begley’s view, Schmidt is essentially a very decent man, struggling with his limitations. "He’s not your card-carrying anti-Semite. He is a man who is full of prejudices, some of them comical, some of them less comical. He is quite conscious of the undesirability of his prejudices but he also knows that they are a part of him. We all have dirty little secrets. . . . One of the things a decent man or woman must do is keep these things under control. Schmidt is not someone who would ever harm a Jew, by word or action. It’s just part of his variegated soul."

In fact, Schmidt’s saving grace is that over the course of these two novels, he grows in empathy and self-awareness. Begley attributes much of that growth to Schmidt’s increasing love for the magical Carrie, a young Puerto Rican waitress Schmidt meets in a local restaurant.

"My interest in writing this book is really a double interest," Begley says. "An interest in Schmidt and an interest in Carrie. I think of Carrie in a way as a noble savage. But it goes much beyond that because she is a very complex young woman—extremely tough, gifted, shrewd, courageous and wildly beautiful. She humanizes Schmidt. And I’m simply not willing to let her go, anymore than I’m willing to let Schmidt go."

Which leads Begley to muse on the limitations that Schmidt must ultimately face. "I’m generally interested in that perception that one has, at a certain point, of one’s own limitations and the limitations of others. People start out in life thinking that anything is possible, for them and for others. As they go along, if they have their eyes open, they see that there isn’t just an unlimited potentiality. There is a point beyond which one cannot go, however much one tries. And a point beyond which people one loves intensely and for whom one would have one’s right hand cut off will never progress. How does one come to terms with that?"

Begley explores the serious questions of this novel with a deft, often playful touch. He offers, for example, a marvelous comic portrait of Mr. Mansour, a billionaire who takes the reluctant Schmidt under his wing.

"Mr. Mansour and his circus!" Begley exclaims with evident delight. "He’s a sort of godlike figure, a pagan god, who can bestow great benefactions. He’ll screw things up in the most extraordinary ways. He’s also full of himself. Absolutely certain that he can fix everything. One of the funny things about very rich men is that they think they will have life eternal—because money is eternal. . . . I have an interest in what you might call the darkly humorous side of society. I mean I have fun with that."

Both the seriousness and the fun of Schmidt Delivered are carried by prose that is astonishingly clear and precise. Begley is a masterful stylist, which is also remarkable, given that he is not a native speaker of English. "Obviously I speak English well," he says, "but you’d be surprised how one’s language falls apart when one is trying to write. I don’t think this is true of native writers: suddenly you are unsure of the construction of any sentence. So I am a compulsive reviser; to get a paragraph written is like working on a chain gang breaking stones. At the same time I must say that after I’ve written a page or two, I realize it is also the happiest of occupations because it leaves me with a great sense of happiness, a happiness that I don’t experience in other contexts.

"For me," Begley continues, "the real goal is to write something that is not boring. That may sound very simple, stupid really, but it is true. My wife reads everything I write as I write it, and I say to her, ‘Don’t tell me whether it’s good or bad. Just tell me whether or not it is boring.’"

Schmidt Delivered is not boring.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

When Louise Erdrich finished writing The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, she went back and read through the works of William Faulkner. "I do that every so often," Erdrich says during a call to her home in Minnesota. "And I always dip into Proust. And then I dip out of Proust."

This makes sense, in a literary sort of way. To immerse oneself in the most luminous of the novels in Erdrich’s Dakota cycle—Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988) and, now, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse—is, in some ways, to plunge into a Proustian stream, where time flows backward as easily as it flows forward. Even more to the point, over the years, any number of reviewers have seen parallels between Erdrich’s creation in novel after novel of a mythical Ojibwe Indian reservation and its environs near the Minnesota-North Dakota border, and Faulkner’s creation of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

"I’ve finally figured out that I’m just working on one long novel," Erdrich says in response to a question about the layers of legend and meaning that accumulate with each new novel. "I think it is useful to have read the other books. But I try very hard to make each book its own book. It is its own book. But they all connect in some way."

Those connections are strong in The Last Report. Ostensibly, the action of the novel revolves around the investigation of the possible sainthood of Sister Leopolda, who had been a nun at the reservation mission. Leopolda has been credited with a host of miracles and the Vatican has sent a priest to conduct the inquiry into these claims. Among the skeptics is ancient Father Damien Modeste, who has quietly ministered to the spiritual needs of the reservation’s inhabitants for more than 80 years. Through this priest’s memories, we see a number of the familiar events and characters from prior books, but in a new light. More importantly, we see Father Damien, who has been more or less part of the background in the previous books. In fact, The Last Report becomes the story of Father Damien, and Erdrich tells this story with the same immensely satisfying mix of humor and pathos, legend and dream, wisdom and poetry that typifies the best of her novels.

According to Erdrich, The Last Report was one of the hardest novels she has ever written. First, it presented the usual problem of keeping characters and events consistent with the earlier novels ("I have a wonderful editor named Trent Duffy. When the manuscript first goes to him, I’ve always made some major error, usually having to do with who was around when and what they were doing. He keeps a file on every character and he’s got a very sharp eye."). Second, her ambitions for the book were large. "I wanted it to be written at the level of a poem. And yet I wanted it to be coherent and have the complexity that it needed. It was hard for me to get there. I threw out huge amounts of paper. I kept the recyclers in business. I think coming to terms with the subject was difficult. And finding out how to end it was hard, too."

Despite difficulties with the composition of this novel, little seems to keep Erdrich from tapping into an incredibly rich river of story. After growing up in North Dakota where her German-American father and Ojibwe mother taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school, Erdrich went east to attend Dartmouth. She was just 28 when Love Medicine was published; the book became a surprise bestseller and captured the National Book Critics Circle Award as best work of fiction. Not even the devastating suicide in 1997 of her former husband and long-time collaborator, Michael Dorris, seems to have dammed her creative flow. Since then she has published two novels, a children’s book, short stories and poems. She has also rebuilt her life and opened a bookstore with her sister. As we converse by phone, she coddles the newest addition to her family, a four-month-old baby.

But Erdrich’s concern at the moment is how The Last Report is understood. In the novel’s first chapter a young woman named Agnes DeWitt encounters Father Damien, a Catholic priest en route to an Indian mission. When he drowns in a flood, Agnes has a direct experience of God and decides to assume the priest’s identity. The fact that Father Damien is actually a woman in disguise will surprise readers of Erdrich’s earlier work.

"I didn’t want [the book] just to be about this revelation that this priest was a woman," Erdrich says. "That really wasn’t the point of it. That’s why from the first chapter, this is not a secret from the reader. I don’t want the book to be about gender politics or even about church politics. That’s in there, of course. It’s implicit in choosing what the book would be about. But I most wanted it to be about this very human choice that she made and how that choice shaped a life. I also wanted it to be about a priest who is in many ways converted by those who he/she has come to convert."

The character thinks and behaves as Father Damien during the day and in public and as Agnes in private and at night. Erdrich says she developed a set of rules to determine when the character would react as Agnes and when he would react as Father Damien, not merely as a mechanical exercise but to further her exploration of the complexity of human identity. "That is a consistent question for me," she says. "I like addressing the mystery of identity, probably because I have a variety of identities of my own."

Erdrich says the question of Father Damien’s identity evolved as she wrote the book. "I wrote the first chapter and I really didn’t know until writing the very end of the chapter that this priest was a woman," she says. "It was one of those situations where a character surprises you. When I went back to look at the description of Father Damien in Tracks, I realized that I had really written a rather gender neutral person and that this was somehow there all along. These books have really always come up with surprises for me, yet when I have found out something new about a character, it has almost always been consistent with previous descriptions. So it seems to me there is some unity that underlies it all that I am capable of somehow tapping into."

Agnes/Father Damien eventually abandons rigid church dogma and dispenses love and forgiveness to all comers. In a mysterious and moving scene near the end of the novel, Agnes/ Father Damien at least temporarily defeats Death, who comes to her in her sleep, by recalling all the people she/he has been able to forgive since coming to the reservation.

"Most of my books are about revenge," Erdrich says. "So it’s interesting to write forgiveness into a book. I think forgiveness is a lot tougher than I’ve had the grace to understand."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.