Alden Mudge

Fiction

Rick Bass

Interview by Alden Mudge

From the cabin where he wrote the 10 remarkable short stories collected in The Hermit's Story, Rick Bass has a view of "a vibrant, bug-and-bird-seething marsh." The cabin "is cluttered," he admits. "I can write or I can file. I choose to write." Bass writes his stories in notebooks in longhand and hires a typist to prepare his manuscripts for publication. So it's not a problem that his cabin has no modern conveniences, only a woodstove.

From the house nearby where he takes my phone call, Bass sees "soft unbroken hills of mixed conifers—larch, fir, cedar, spruce, pine, hemlock." This is Bass' piece of the remote Yaak Valley of Montana, "a wild place, where nothing has gone extinct since the Ice Age," he says. Bass lives here with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes, and his two young daughters. His nearest neighbor is about a mile away. He must drive an hour to reach a town of any significant size. His daughters go to a two-room schoolhouse 15 minutes away. Bass, who was trained in geology and wildlife sciences, volunteers at the school, giving lessons in geology and writing and leading field trips. He comes home and writes to citizens and senators, urging them to help preserve these last roadless, wild places in America.

The physical distance between Bass' writing cabin and his house is not great, but the psychological distance can sometimes be huge. There is his Art. And then there is his Activism.

For example, later in the morning after this interview, Bass plans to lead a field trip in the Yaak Valley for the Forest Service. This is just one of the many fronts in the battle he and his preservation colleagues are waging this year. "Our contention," he says with unwavering intensity, "is that we just have these little crumbs of gardens where roads haven't yet been built now, so let's don't build into those last little places." He adds, "I can promise as a scientist and an activist that if we are not successful, we will be losing great American species that are part of our culture. In addition to being ecological treasures, these wilderness areas are also pretty much the anchors for much of the West's water supply and for the maintenance of the quality of that water supply."

For much of the last decade, Bass has used his art—his great skills and talents as a writer—to help his activism. His essays on natural history and the environment are some of the most eloquent pieces of nonfiction writing in recent memory. For most of that period, Bass convinced himself that his art and his activism were complementary. Now he's not so sure.

"Activism is war," he says, "and you can make some fine stories and even a fine novel out of war. But you can't do that for life. Instead of nurturing and developing the empathetic worldview necessary for good fiction, you train yourself in the other direction. And then there is the element of time. I'm putting in eight hours a day easy on the computer or in lobbying, educating and running different organizations. And then there's family time that's just so precious that I'm not going to let anything get in the way of it. That means that fiction takes a back seat to family and activism. The good news is that I've got a chance to effect change, permanent change on a landscape. I'd be a fool to complain."

Still, the conflicting claims on Bass' life make the current collection of short stories all the more remarkable. According to Bass, good fiction must have an almost physical impact on the senses. "Writers are guilty of overanalyzing or delighting in the technical part of a great story in the same way that a chef eating a great meal delights in knowing all the flavors and marveling at the way they all work together. But ultimately what makes a great story for the reader is the physical and emotional reactions it produces. It's that simple and that complex."

By that measure, the narratives in The Hermit's Story make for a very satisfying meal. Bass writes movingly and entertainingly about the spontaneous processes of life. In the story "The Cave," for example, in which a young man and woman enter a narrow abandoned mine shaft and eventually emerge naked into a new world, the delight is not just in the mystery and metaphor of the story but in the detailed, claustrophobia-inducing description of the dark mine shaft and the exhilarating, fully imagined ride the couple takes on an old, rust-locked pumpjack boxcar.

In the story "The Distance," Bass' protagonist both celebrates and tellingly critiques the sensibility behind Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. In the shrewd, Poe-like story, "The Prisoners," three men setting out on an early morning fishing trip discover the boundaries of the emotional prisons they've constructed for themselves. And in the marvelous title story, a woman, an old man and his dogs, lost in a snowstorm, fall through the ice into a dry lakebed and travel through a magical landscape of worldly wonders.

Linking almost all these stories is the abiding presence of wilderness. Bass, who says he's "someone who cherishes time alone and is not that excited about spending time amongst people," is most assuredly not an urban writer. Yet he seems almost nonplussed by how powerful and evocative his descriptions of the natural world can be. "The rural settings are important to mood, to the canvas, to color and pigment of the story," he says matter-of-factly, "but they are unavoidably the background to the characters' lives, just accurate rural white noise."

About balance, or stability, however, Bass is more specific. It's a central concern in his personal life and a recurring motif in his writing. "What many people mean by balance is safety or security," he says, "but they are not the same thing." What Bass means by balance has to do with "amplitude"—space—and movement. "The left and right, response and counter-response of movement and desire, of focus and unknowingness, is a pattern I've seen in humans and animals and even the sheer physical patterns of meandering rivers," he says. "What's required for balance or stability is space to have those amplitudes of left and right. It's a requisite of most threatened and endangered species, it's a requisite of humans' emotional lives, and that left-right motion, that movement, is the precise thing that gives a story life."

 

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

From the cabin where he wrote the 10 remarkable short stories collected in The Hermit's Story, Rick Bass has a view of "a vibrant, bug-and-bird-seething marsh." The cabin "is cluttered," he admits. "I can write or I can file. I choose to write." Bass writes…

David Ebershoff

Interview by Alden Mudge

Since well before the Gold Rush, restless people have traveled west—to California—to escape friends, families, even history itself so that they could reinvent themselves in keeping with their own imaginations. For just as long, artists and writers have traveled east—to New York, Paris and Rome—to test their imaginations in the creative centers of Western culture. Somewhere in the roil of these contrasting movements is David Ebershoff and his lush second novel, Pasadena.

Ebershoff was born in Pasadena in 1969 and knew by his early teens that he wanted to write fiction. After high school he headed east, to Brown University, to major in English and Asian studies, then bounced west again to the University of Chicago for an M.B.A. before returning to New York to work in publishing.

"I wasn't sure what I wanted to do," Ebershoff says during a call to his office in New York, "so I thought I'd try to work in publishing, try to bring some business knowledge from my schooling and some editorial knowledge from my reading and writing. . . . It's what we all do here; we have to know how to respond to books as readers, editorially, and we also have responsibilities to the business."

In 1998, after several years in the sales and marketing department at Random House, Ebershoff was appointed publishing director of the Modern Library, one of the publisher's most prestigious imprints. "The imprint has been around since 1917 publishing contemporary and classic classics, releasing new books and new editions of the classics, bringing great writers to readers," Ebershoff says. "So I'm reading books for this list that are really helpful to me as a writer. In that way, my work feeds my writing. But there's very little other overlap. I don't learn any publishing tricks that really matter in terms of writing a novel."

Apparently, Ebershoff learned to write novels through wide reading and plain hard work. In 2000, he published a widely praised first novel, The Danish Girl. Inspired by a true story, it traces the slow physical and psychological metamorphosis of a Danish artist named Einar Wegner into a woman named Lili Elbe. The novel was a New York Times Notable Book, and Ebershoff was hailed as "one of America's finest young writers."

Like The Danish Girl, Ebershoff's new novel, Pasadena, explores the nature of personal identity as one of its central concerns. But Ebershoff wraps this exploration in a compelling love story and an almost old-fashioned, grandly conceived narrative firmly embedded in a deep appreciation of history.

Set mainly in southern California between the two world wars, Pasadena centers around the life of Linda Stamp (formerly Sieglinde Stumpf), the daughter of a Mexican mother and a German-born father. The novel tells the story of her rise from a poor fishergirl who lives on a small farm on the coast north of San Diego, through a lingering, emotionally complicated relationship with Bruder, a strong-willed, taciturn orphan her father brings home after fighting in the First World War, to her unhappy marriage to a wealthy Pasadena fruit grower named Willis Poore.

Ebershoff draws his chapter's epigraphs from poems by Emily Bront, and he freely, if coyly, acknowledges her influence on his own characters and story. "A free-spirited woman who can never quite know her own heart but who is taken by a man who knows his so well that he isn't quite prepared to share it certainly describes Emily Brontë's two most famous characters," Ebershoff says. "And her emotional insight and the way she used landscape and the natural world to reveal character has always interested me."

It's an interest Ebershoff uses to great effect. His verbal virtuosity in re-creating the unsettled southern California coastline and the lush, sunlit rural farms and orchards that comprised California not so long ago is astonishing and delightful.

"Somewhere I read the fact that 75 years ago, Los Angeles County was the largest agricultural county in America," Ebershoff says. "If you think about New York City now and 75 years ago, while there are lots of changes, you can still see close to what you would have seen then. But in only 75 years, Los Angeles has seen a phenomenal transformation of topography, of economy, of the way people live their lives, and that really, really interests me. I wanted to re-create a world that had just disappeared and yet was still in place not that long ago."

Readers of Ebershoff's two novels will understand that his interest in history, particularly California history, is not simply a passing interest. "I think writers often write the books they want to read," he says. "At some point when I was growing up, I became fascinated with what California had been. I wanted to read about another era in Southern California, about the dramatic lives of people who thrived there, and did not thrive there."

Ebershoff adds, "There's a certain sense of the uselessness of history in American society that we're now beginning to pay for. But the great value of history is to tell you what's going to happen next." Unfortunately, many of the characters in Pasadena leave their personal and family histories behind as they try to fashion new identities. And they do so at great risk.

In Ebershoff's fiction, history can also illuminate the borderlines where character aligns with fate. "I'm obsessed with this idea of fate versus free will," Ebershoff says, "the balance between the two. You can do some things to change the course of your life, but at some level you can't do anything at all."

In terms of the novel Pasadena, Ebershoff sees this struggle played out to tragic effect between Linda and Bruder: "Linda is convinced she can control her own fate without understanding the dangers of what it means to try to control that. And Bruder is resigned to fate without knowing the danger of such resignation."

In terms of his own life, however, Ebershoff seems to have achieved a kind of balance that, at least at the moment, makes him master of his own fate. He works with "a great set of colleagues," and writes, he says wryly, "in a very regular manner, on an almost daily basis, just steadily pushing the book along, breaking the book down into manageable problems, dealing with the task at hand. There's no real mystery to it. Just a kind of regular devotion. A steady amount of progress, with a few cycles of insane fervor."

Alden Mudge is on the staff of the California Humanities Council.

Author photo © Miriam Berkley.

Since well before the Gold Rush, restless people have traveled west—to California—to escape friends, families, even history itself so that they could reinvent themselves in keeping with their own imaginations. For just as long, artists and writers have traveled east—to New York, Paris and…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Thomas L. Friedman

Interview by Alden Mudge

During the dog days of last summer, as the national press corps went baying after the elusive Gary Condit, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a piece called "A Memo from Osama." Entertaining, ironic and caustic in the same instant, the "memo" warned of the consequences of a U.S. failure to respond to "the threat that already exists." The name of that threat, unfamiliar to most Americans at the time, would become a household word in a few short months.

After the horrific attacks of Sept. 11, this and several other pre-9/11 columns included in Friedman’s new book, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After Sept. 11, seem shockingly clear-sighted and prescient. They offer glimpses into the future that seem to surprise even Friedman himself. "Man," he says, sounding bemused, "there are lines in those columns that are prophetic. In terms of what happened, I was paying attention."

Since Sept. 11, as regular readers of his twice-weekly column know, Friedman has, if anything, been paying even closer attention. "I’ve been on a really unique journey," he says. "I’ve been to Pakistan twice, to Afghanistan, Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Israel."

Probably no one else—journalist or diplomat—has pursued the complex threads of this story as relentlessly as Friedman. In fact, when we speak by phone, Friedman has just returned from Tehran, Iran, where he was exploring one of the recurring themes of this collection—the need to wage and support a war of ideas in the Arab Muslim world.

"I really try to get the point across that when we start calling people the ‘Axis of Evil,’ we miss the complexity of these societies and the number of potential partners we have inside these societies who share our world view," he says."We have to make sure we’re inviting these people into our future. Ideas matter. We can kill bin Laden, but somebody’s got to kill bin Ladenism. Somebody’s got to kill the ideas that not only nurture him, but create an environment in which so many people tacitly support him. We can help, but ultimately the Arab Muslim world has to do that itself."

As a result of such views—as well as his years of experience in the Middle East, first as a reporter for UPI and then for The New York Times—Friedman "gets a huge amount of email from the Arab Muslim world." Parts of those messages he reprints in the third section of Longitudes and Attitudes. That section is comprised of a series of diaries he kept between September 2001 and June 2002. The diaries make for fascinating reading because they contain anecdotes and analysis Friedman was unable to include in his regular columns, offering a behind-the-scenes look at issues Friedman is writing about and personalities he meets.

One of the surprises in these diaries is how many of Friedman’s contacts and correspondents are Muslim women. Another is the pointed description of a little power play by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that very nearly leaves Democratic Sen. Joe Biden and Friedman stranded at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Still another is an eye-opening portrait of the new Russia.

But most interesting of all—in the diaries and in the collected post-Sept. 11 columns that form the bulk of this book—is Friedman’s probing examination of Saudi Arabia. Probably the most important question motivating Friedman’s unique journey during the last nine months has been why 15 young Saudis were involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

"The Arab Muslim world is going through a hard time," he says, "and I have a lot of sympathy for them. They’re struggling with, and in some cases failing at, modernization. That’s because of three deficits that have been building up there for more than 50 years. I’m quoting here from a U.N. study that’s just come out that says it’s a deficit of freedom, it’s a deficit of education and it’s a deficit of women’s empowerment. Thanks to these three deficits they’ve dug themselves a really deep hole."

The dark side of all this, Friedman writes in his diaries, is that it leads to what he calls the "Circle of bin Ladenism, which is made up of three components: antidemocratic leaders, who empower antimodernist Moslem religious educators to gain legitimacy, who then produce a generation of young people who have not been educated in ways that enable them to flourish in the modern world."

Opinions like this—and equally direct criticism of actions by President Bush, Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat—have earned Friedman some powerful detractors. About this, Friedman is philosophical: "Being a columnist is not a friend growth industry. If you’re going to do this job, you have to pull the trigger on people, sometimes on people you like. If you’re not ready to do that, readers can smell it at a hundred paces. . . . A column is like currency, and you can really debase your own currency. I guard zealously the integrity and quality of the column every bit as much as the secretary of treasury does the integrity and quality of the U.S. dollar."

So while his critics may have grown more vociferous, Friedman’s popularity has also grown and changed since Sept. 11. "Before 9/11 the CEO read me; now his secretary reads me, too," he says. "Twice I’ve had bicycle delivery boys stop me on the street in Washington and comment on something they’ve read in my column. . . . This is not in any way exclusive to me. After 9/11, Americans understand that foreign policy is now a real life-or-death matter. It’s about the world their kids are going to grow up in, and as a result, they want to know what’s going on."

And, according to Friedman, what’s going on remains pretty dark. In his first column after Sept. 11, 2001, Friedman called the attacks the beginning of World War III. Although personally an "innate optimist who is constantly looking for solutions," Friedman stands by his initial assessment.

"Some big events, over time, end up being smaller than they first seem," he says. "My view is that 9/11 will turn out to have been bigger than it first seemed and it seemed—pretty big to begin with. It is a huge event in terms of the degree to which it will change our habits, our politics, international relations and the long-term internal discussion in the Arab Muslim world. As I say in the diaries, on 9/11 a wall of civilization was breached that we could not imagine would ever be breached. And the long-term implications of that are just enormous."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

During the dog days of last summer, as the national press corps went baying after the elusive Gary Condit, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a piece called "A Memo from Osama." Entertaining, ironic and caustic in the same instant, the "memo"…

Fiction

Mark Dunn

Interview by Alden Mudge

Although novelist Mark Dunn considers himself "an inveterate New Yorker," he’s lost none of his soft Tennessee accent during the 15 years he has lived and worked in the Big Apple. The author, who got his start writing plays, not novels, has been writing since he was a child in Memphis, where he grew up just a block from Graceland. "So I do have Elvis stories," he says.

After the surprise popularity of last year’s Ella Minnow Pea, his critically acclaimed and remarkably clever debut novel about an island whose residents must contend with a shrinking alphabet, Dunn decided he needed "to shift some major gears in terms of what I want to spend the rest of my life writing." During a phone call on a muggy morning to the small West Village apartment he shares with his wife, he explains, "I’m on a mission that every new novel I write is going to bend or tweak narrative as much as I can. I think writers need to be a little more daring. There are a lot of ways to tell stories and construct narratives that writers shy away from because they want to be either traditional or safe. I decided that’s not going to be my mission."

Dunn’s first ambition as an author was to write movies. He majored in film at Memphis State University and did post-graduate work in screenwriting at the University of Texas. But it turned out that a young writer could more easily see his work realized on stage than on screen. So, when he moved with his wife Mary to New York, Dunn began a modestly successful career as a playwright, while working as "a sort of administrative assistant" for the Rare Books and Manuscript division of the New York Public Library— "an incredible place for a writer to work" and the perfect day job for supporting his playwriting fix.

"I fell into theater and found that I really loved it," he says. "I loved telling stories through dialogue. I enjoyed all the restrictions that writing for the theater puts on a writer. I welcomed the challenge of telling stories in two hours with a handful of characters on a minimalist stage, incorporating the audience’s imagination in the storytelling."

In turn, college and community theater audiences seemed to love Dunn’s crisp dialogue, deft comic touch and his willingness to experiment with dramatic form. Of the 25 plays he has written, nine have been published in catalogs of acting editions for theaters to license and produce. Royalties from those productions never provided an actual living, but the attractions of writing for the theater were strong enough that even now, despite newfound success as a novelist, Dunn remains a playwright-in-residence with the New Jersey Repertory Company.

In New York during the early 1990s, working in the tiny second bedroom he and his wife had converted into an office, Dunn began writing the novel that would become his new book, Welcome to Higby,. The narrative is a more wide-ranging effort to fully employ his gift for comedy and dialogue, as well as his willingness to experiment—gifts he developed in playwriting.

Welcome to Higby is a funny, thoroughly charming story of what happens in a small town in northern Mississippi over Labor Day weekend 1993. In the grand scale of things, nothing momentous happens: 15-year-old Clint Cullen falls from a water tower and, by happy chance, lands in a neighbor’s swimming pool; shy, clumsy Carmen Valentine has her eye on a handsome lumberyard Don Juan but meets Euless Ludlam instead; Talitha Leigh is kidnapped by a hapless religio-vegetarian cult; Clint’s widowed father, the Reverend Oren Cullen worries about his grieving son and his own attraction to the owner of the Far East House of Massage out at the edge of town.

On the less grand scale of regular human life, however, Dunn’s novel manages to touch on what troubles and enlivens most of us. His characters, he says, "want to be able to love someone and be loved back. They want to get some kind of handle on God, which troubles us all. . . . I like to say these people are looking for love and faith in all the wrong places." So, in what is the understated masterstroke and great experiment of the novel, Dunn weaves together five separate stories lines, 25 main characters and 60 or 70 supporting characters—and somehow brings them all together for a satisfying conclusion.

Dunn’s inclination to be a little more daring in his storytelling was given a big boost by the unexpected success of Ella Minnow Pea, which has just been released in paperback. Even though its publication a year ago was overshadowed by the events of September 11, this playful first novel about the pleasures of language and the importance of freedom of expression caught the attention of booksellers everywhere, who recommended it widely.

"I was prepared to get a very small reception for the book," says Dunn, who spent a couple of years just trying to getting editors to understand "what in the world I was trying to do in the novel."

Not only has the book’s success made him re-evaluate his writing career, it’s also made him shift some major gears in the way he thinks about himself. As a result of having a twin brother, he says, "I never grew up saying ‘I.’ From an early age it was hard for me to think of the world in terms of just my own place in it, singularly, all by myself." Which may explain part of the attraction of playwriting, the most collaborative of art forms.

"For years and years," Dunn says, "writing a play was one step in a process that involved a lot of people. At some point I would let go of the idea that the play was mine and it became ours. I’m not experiencing that with writing novels. All of a sudden it’s about me and my book, and I’m having a little trouble dealing with that sort of singular attention. I’ve stopped saying ‘we’ and had to learn how to say ‘I.’ "

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Although novelist Mark Dunn considers himself "an inveterate New Yorker," he's lost none of his soft Tennessee accent during the 15 years he has lived and worked in the Big Apple. The author, who got his start writing plays, not novels, has been writing…

Biography

Jim Harrison

Interview by Alden Mudge

Among the recurrent refrains that lend power and poignancy to writer Jim Harrison’s magnificent literary memoir, Off to the Side, is the phrase "it could have been otherwise." More a question, really, than an assertion, the phrase is sometimes colored by regret and other times by amazement.

"I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was," Harrison says from his home in Montana, where he has recently moved after living some 60 years in northern Michigan. "I once wrote in a poem about reaching the point in life when I would have the courage to admit my life. There were some rough spots, as you probably sensed reading the memoir, especially in my early married years, when I simply had no idea what I was doing or how to support myself. During that most difficult period of 10 years, our house payment was $99 a month, but quite often that was hard to muster."

Harrison’s financial picture changed dramatically with the publication in 1978 of his brilliant novella Legends of the Fall. David Lean wanted to film the title story and John Huston wanted to film another narrative in the collection. Harrison went from barely supporting his wife Linda and their two daughters to making "well over a million bucks in contemporary terms." He was utterly unprepared. "My life quickly evolved [into] a kind of hysteria that I attempted to pacify with alcohol and cocaine," Harrison writes in the memoir.

Harrison believes it was the devotion to his calling as a poet and fiction writer that kept him from going over the edge. When asked about this, he quotes his long-time friend, writer Thomas McGuane, who told him, "you can’t quit or control anything until it gets in your way. But when it gets in your way, you control it or remove it. You don’t really have the freedom to continue because it is getting in the way of the main trust of your life."

The intensity of Harrison’s devotion to the main trust of his life—his writing—is evident in both the memoir and in conversation. "It’s a religious calling in a sense," he says. "The trajectory started when I was on the roof of our house looking out at a swamp when I was 19. I had written for several years, starting at about 15, but that day on the roof I took my vows and acknowledged my calling."

For Harrison, part of what his calling demands is an intense curiosity about both the internal and the external lives of people. "I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that," Harrison says, and then adds, "I read a lot of memoirs to see how people did it a couple of years ago. A lot of them are too full of whining and they pretend they didn’t have a philosophical, mental or spiritual life and just describe what happened. I couldn’t do that."

Lucky for us. What emerges in Off to the Side, is about as complete a portrait of the inner and outer Jim Harrison as one could hope for. He writes about the lasting influence of his parents and grandparents and their hard-nosed Scandinavian values (despite some years of hard living, his "essential Calvinism made it unthinkable to be late for work, miss a plane, fail to finish an assignment, fail to pay a debt or be late for an appointment"). He describes losing the vision in his left eye at age 7 when a neighbor girl shoved a broken bottle in his face. He writes about the liberation of striking out on his own during the summer between his sophomore and junior years in high school; about the confusion of a short-lived academic career; about the deaths of his father and sister in a car crash and his mistake of peeking at the coroner’s photos. "When my father and sister died I figured if those you love can die like that, what’s the point of ever holding back anything," he says.

With insight and a dash of humor, Harrison catalogs his seven obsessions: alcohol; stripping; hunting, fishing (and dogs); religion; France; the road; and nature and Native Americans. And he describes his experiences writing for the movies, a sometime profession that supported his fiction and poetry and led to friendships with Jimmy Buffet, Harrison Ford and Jack Nicholson, among others.

Harrison says Jack Nicholson, who remains a friend, "was a good teacher on how to handle that reality. There’s simply no other actor or actress that I know who handled it better and kept control. He would just simply never be on television. He thought of it as the enemy. It uses you up. The sad thing you see over and over again is how people who suddenly become famous’ get used up so fast and discarded."

At this point in his life, Harrison has no fear of being used up himself. "I’ve retreated so far from that kind of life," he says. "And," he adds, referring to a new novel he has begun working on, "I have something to write."

Harrison says he decided to call his memoir Off to the Side "because that is a designated and comfortable position for a writer." Throughout the memoir he mentions his lifelong need to hide out, at least metaphorically, in thickets, to be where he can look out and see but not be seen. He also notes that "nothing is less interesting . . . than the writer in a productive period."

But in conversation Harrison asks, "Do you ever read Rilke? He says only in the rat race can the heart learn to beat. So I guess I just vary between the antipodes of hiding out in my cabin and being anywhere—New York, Paris or Hollywood." He laughs, then adds, "A writer friend who has read the memoir asked, How did you manage to do all that?’ And I told him it was inadvertent. I was just leading with my chin."

Among the recurrent refrains that lend power and poignancy to writer Jim Harrison's magnificent literary memoir, Off to the Side, is the phrase "it could have been otherwise." More a question, really, than an assertion, the phrase is sometimes colored by regret and other…

Fiction

Annie Proulx

Interview by Alden Mudge

No contemporary American writer is better at conveying the complex personality of a place than Annie Proulx. Readers of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Shipping News, need only remember the startling authenticity of both her evocation of dreary upstate New York towns and her portrayal of a more soulful but not much less dreary Newfoundland village to appreciate her great abilities.

In the 1990s Proulx, who lived much of her life in New England, moved to Wyoming. With the 1999 publication of her magnificent collection of short stories, Close Range, set in an unforgiving Wyoming landscape, Proulx appeared to be setting a new course for her career. The publication of her latest novel, That Old Ace in the Hole, confirms that direction. Proulx (whose name rhymes with "shoe") seems bent on nothing less than uncovering, layer by layer, the heart and soul of the rural American West.

That Old Ace in the Hole is set in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. The novel’s main protagonist is Bob Dollar, a likeable, somewhat purposeless young man who takes a job as a hog farm scout for an international conglomerate. Of course, the real central character of the novel is the region itself. And Bob Dollar’s undercover and altogether too good-hearted efforts to trick locals into selling their land for the development of malodorous industrial hog farms allows Proulx to range over the largely ignored panhandles and unveil what is both hard and remarkable about the place.

"For years I had been driving through the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, and always found panhandle places interesting, especially the northeast corner of the Texas handle with its long, long views, windmills, abandoned houses, acres of antique farm machinery, shady groves of trees and nodding pumpjacks," Proulx tells me via e-mail. (In years past, Proulx has been emphatic about avoiding the trappings of the literary life; determined to protect her time and her privacy, she prefers to conduct this interview by e-mail.) "But other people I encountered, particularly Texans, said The panhandle? God, I just drive through there as fast as I can,’ in dismissive tones. Of course this made me more interested in panhandles, and I finally decided to write a novel set in the Oklahoma and Texas handles," Proulx says.

"I intended the story to revolve around a windmill repairman, but was unable to gain the expertise in the craft needed to create a convincing character. So the windmill man, Ace Crouch, though central to the story, is not the major protagonist. Moreover, the day of the windmill as the prime source of water has passed. I focused instead on a current problem, the proliferation of noisome hog farms in the Texas panhandle with a young hog farm site scout as protagonist." For Proulx, a place like the panhandle area is not simply the sum of its geography, history and people, but some alchemical recombination of all of these, a formula she arrives at only after a significant amount of research.

"Yes, I like research," Proulx admits. "For this book I did too much, really, and have boxes and boxes of material I could not use. A great deal has happened in the region," she notes, adding an exhaustive list of historic trends from ancient buffalo hunts to the rise of the small cattleman "and the current generation’s flight from the ranches and farms of the panhandles." Proulx manages to embody a good bit of this history and lore in a rambunctious cast of characters who come into contact with Bob Dollar. In other hands, these characters might at best populate a television sitcom (with, perhaps, a slight political edge). But Proulx has an extraordinary, unfailing ear for the language of the region (an odd combination of both the exaggeration of tall tales and the reticence of the stoic), and this lends her characters depth and humanity.

"The attention to local patois and regional turns of phrase is second nature at this point," Proulx writes. "When I hear a vigorous and lively phrase, I write it down or try very hard to remember it. I do keep notebooks of phrases and expressions. When I am working on the text of the novel, I go through these lists and try and incorporate words and phrases one might hear."

Proulx’s sensitivity to the language of the region also means That Old Ace in the Hole is often very funny. Proulx herself has a sly sense of humor, which percolates just beneath the surface of her story. "Do you remember how Graham Greene used to call some of his books entertainments’?" she asks. "I’ve always thought that meant that those novels were entertaining, not so much to readers, but to Greene in the writing. In a way this book was an entertainment for me, and the use of humor made difficult subjects, such as feedlots and hog arms, easier to write about."

One subject that has never seemed difficult for Proulx to write about is men. In That Old Ace in the Hole Proulx once again surprises a reader by how fluently she writes about the physical and emotional lives of her male characters. "Men?" she asks. "Well, I do like men, perhaps related to growing up in an all-girl family. Also, because I write almost exclusively about rural places, where the heaviest physical work is done by men, and where that work is the basis of a local economy, men naturally stand in the forefront of the story. Really, it’s all about place."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

No contemporary American writer is better at conveying the complex personality of a place than Annie Proulx. Readers of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Shipping News, need only remember the startling authenticity of both her evocation of dreary upstate New York towns and her…

History

Erik Larson

Interview by Alden Mudge

Some years ago, while following one of the blind alleys that writers so often encounter when hunting anxiously for their next "big book idea," Erik Larson stumbled across the gruesome particulars of Chicago serial killer Herman W. Mudgett, alias Dr. H. H. Holmes.

"I was suitably horrified," Larson recalls from the comfort and safety of his home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife, Christine Gleason, M.D., head of the neonatology department at the University of Washington medical school, and their three daughters. "I actually read a little more about Holmes," Larson says, "and then decided that he was a kind of slasher and that I wasn't that interested."

Instead, Larson tracked another small detail that played a bit part in another Gilded Age murder mystery. Which led him to begin reading about the big Galveston hurricane of 1900. Which resulted in Larson's thrilling 1999 best-selling narrative of that catastrophe, Isaac's Storm. Which proved to be a turning point.

According to Larson, although he had always known he wanted to write books, he approached a book-writing career obliquely. After college he got a job as a gofer in a publishing house and "convinced myself that I was actually kind of writing because I was working in publishing." Next he made the mistake of seeing the movie All the President's Men and "decided that's what I want to do: bring down a president." Unsure of his exact course toward that end, he determined to let fate rule, so he applied to only one journalism school. He got in. Eventually, he took a job with the Wall Street Journal, reluctantly accepted a transfer to San Francisco, where he met the woman who would become his wife, then a day after marrying her, moved with her to Baltimore where she had been hired by Johns Hopkins University. "I was going to write novels," Larson says, "but once again I took the oblique path and freelanced."

Larson says that in Baltimore he finally grew desperate to escape "the grind of doing periodic pieces" and wrote his first book, The Naked Consumer, which was barely noticed. His second book, Lethal Passage, was a critically acclaimed book about gun control that had a political impact "but didn't sell at all." By the time Larson published his third book, Isaac's Storm, in 1999 to critical and popular acclaim, he and his wife and their growing family were living happily in Seattle. And Larson himself had finally "hit upon something that I really enjoy doing—narrative historical nonfiction."

The pleasure Larson takes in the genre is evident in the vibrant detail of his newest book, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. The devil in question is Dr. Holmes, the figure Larson rejected as a book subject some years before. "The White City" is the extraordinary Chicago's World's Fair of 1893, officially known as the World's Columbian Exposition because it was designed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America, but unofficially called "The White City," because of its enchanting and trend-setting architecture.

According to Larson, even while working on Isaac's Storm he continued to be tantalized not so much by Holmes himself but by the fact that Holmes lured young women to their deaths at his macabre World's Fair Hotel almost under the very lights of this great international attraction. "Interestingly," Larson says, "other people have written about Holmes but, to my surprise, the fair has always been almost parenthetical. And I kept thinking, here's this marvelous magical fair and as counterpoint to that was this dark, dark creature sort of feeding off the fair. I couldn't really tell one story without telling the other." He decided to tell both.

It was, frankly, a brilliant decision. Larson contrasts the story of Holmes with that of Daniel Hudson Burnham, the chief architect of the fair. Burnham cajoled and directed the nation's greatest architects and designers—Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan—to transform a swampy park on the shores of Lake Michigan into an astonishing wonder that logged more than 27 million visits during its brief existence, 700,000 of those visits coming in a single day. Burnham inspired George Ferris to design and build a 25-story circular amusement ride that eclipsed in size the tower Alexandre Eiffel had recently built in Paris and was capable of carrying nearly 2,000 people at a time, the first Ferris Wheel. Burnham's fair introduced to the world "a new snack called Cracker Jack and a new breakfast food called Shredded Wheat." It was visited by the likes of Buffalo Bill, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand and George Westinghouse.

"One guy built this marvelous fair," Larson quips. "The other guy built this twisted hotel. They were both architects in a way." Taken together, the two stories allow Larson to paint a colorful and resonant portrait of the Gilded Age. "The thing I find so compelling in that period is that what defines it is sheer attitude. There was this overwhelming sense of unlimited possibility," he says.

Larson fleshes out his portrait of the age with lively stories about the competition between Westinghouse and Edison for dominance in the electricity market, the construction of the world's first skyscrapers, the practice of grave robbing among medical students. He describes the chilling effect of chloroform. He discovers that Chicago was called "The Windy City," not because of the fierce winds coming off Lake Michigan but because of the loud boasts issuing from local business leaders.

"I do all my own research," Larson says. "If I bring anything to the party, it's a knack for finding the telling details. What I love is the stuff that never makes it into professional history, because it belongs in the footnotes, because it's not appropriate. That's the stuff I live for."

And indeed, of its numerous pleasures, the greatest pleasure of The Devil and the White City is in its details.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Some years ago, while following one of the blind alleys that writers so often encounter when hunting anxiously for their next "big book idea," Erik Larson stumbled across the gruesome particulars of Chicago serial killer Herman W. Mudgett, alias Dr. H. H. Holmes.
…

Memoir

Sue Miller

Interview by Alden Mudge

Novelist Sue Miller’s beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer’s disease is such a unique achievement that it is impossible to adequately praise it. Or accurately describe it.

But for starters, in fewer than 200 pages, Miller offers a moving, emotionally complex portrait of her father—and mother—and their contrasting influences on her life. She provides a fascinating, if disturbing, description of Alzheimer’s manifestations in the brain and body. And, almost as an aside, she writes interestingly about how she transmutes and transforms observed experiences drawn from her life into events and characters in her fine, luminous novels.

What Miller does not offer in The Story of My Father is anything resembling a step-by-step guide for the perplexed. "I wanted to write a book that talked about what it felt like to live through the illness with someone whom you love," Miller says during a call to her home in Boston. "I wanted to write in a clear way about what was going on in the illness but also about the sense of confusion and loss one experiences in trying to respond reasonably to an unreasonable person who was once a very reasonable person."

And this Miller certainly does. The course of her father’s Alzheimer’s disease is central to this narrative. But it is also oddly peripheral to the heart of the memoir. The real story in this quietly amazing book is Miller’s effort to understand and even sustain her emotional bond with her father.

Miller’s father, James Nichols, was a respected church historian at the University of Chicago and, nearing the end of his career, at Princeton. A deeply religious man, Nichols was, says Miller, "incredibly considerate of other people, in almost an abstract way. As I write in the book, in a certain sense he considered everyone equally, and that was a problem being a child of his."

Miller remembers when she was a child sometimes doing things with her father and "feeling his shyness and my shyness and this sense of great effort and work being together, that he was working very hard and I was working very hard. I think that’s unusual for a little girl to feel about her father."

By contrast, Miller’s mother, a poet, "was excessive in all she did." She seemed to demand and absorb all the family’s emotional energy. Yet it is clear from Miller’s memoir that her mother and father were, improbably, very much in love throughout their marriage.

"My mother was very difficult and demanding," Miller says, "but my father loved her through all that. Once or twice he spoke a little sharply to her, but that was it. Those were memorable occasions because that was all, ever. I’m sure there were times when things were hard for him, but he understood life as a series of loving obligations. That’s what being as deeply Christian as he was can do for you—it makes burdens feel light. [He believed] there are few things which can give as much joy, as much meaning to life as doing something for someone else that you know no one else can do. I think my parents had a very intensely loving relationship."

Miller herself seems to have remained somewhat distant from her father until after her mother’s death. Ironically, she and her father began growing closer as Alzheimer’s disease slowly destroyed him. Since she was the sibling who lived nearest to him, Miller saw him most frequently and seems to have been the primary decision-maker overseeing his care. She describes his decline and her reactions to this decline with directness, intelligence, even humor, which lends an unexpected poignancy to the book.

Miller’s father died in 1991. For 10 years she struggled to write about who he was and what his life and death meant to her. In the meantime, she also wrote three novels that she believes were affected to some degree by her work on this memoir. The novel The Distinguished Guest, for instance, is "very much about the death of a parent," she says. And in The World Below "there is sense of the lives of the people we love who have gone before us running underneath our own lives" that derives in part from thinking and writing about her father.

Miller says writing the memoir seemed to prolong her grief. "I felt when I finally finished the book that I had finished something in myself too, that some way of being with him in my grieving was done and my sense of inadequacy as a caregiver was done. This is sort of an apologia for myself as a caregiver. I was still enmeshed in what I hadn’t done right while I was writing this book, and that was hard.

"I was so bitter and angry for a long time—on his behalf," Miller says near the end of our conversation. "The disease was just so cruel, particularly to someone who had lived by his intellect. What I slowly came to terms with, by really thinking about my father as I wrote the book, was that that was not a bitterness he would have shared. That helped me let go and be less furious at the illness. There was a kind of softening of my very dark anger. That is something I learned from my father, and from writing about him."

 

Novelist Sue Miller's beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer's disease is such a unique achievement that it is impossible to adequately praise it. Or accurately describe it.

But for starters, in…

Fiction

Francisco Goldman

Interview by Alden Mudge

Until very recently, Francisco Goldman’s Brooklyn apartment was as he describes it in his deeply moving novel, Say Her Name.

His late wife’s wedding dress hung from a clothes hanger and butcher’s twine in front of the bedroom mirror. Below that was an altar composed of her belongings. And at the foot of the altar, Goldman writes, were “her shiny mod black-and-white-striped rubber rain boots with hot pink soles.”

Goldman’s wife, Aura Estrada, died in a body-surfing accident in Mexico on July 25, 2007. A talented writer and literary scholar, she was 20 years younger than Goldman and had just turned 30. The couple had been married “26 days shy of two years.” Say Her Name is Goldman’s expression of his love for Aura and his devastating guilt and grief over her death.

“Grief is very trippy,” Goldman says. “I say trippy, but I don’t mean it’s fun. You can’t believe the dreams you have. You’ll never dream like that ever again in your life. You hallucinate. You’re out of your mind. You know what’s happening and you try to understand it. And you can’t believe how bad you feel. It is not fun, but it is riveting.”

“Riveting” is also a very good description of Goldman’s book. The narrative opens a year and a half after Aura’s death. “That’s when I really did have what the shrinks call complicated grief and post-traumatic stress and minor psychotic episodes,” Goldman says. In writing about this period, he says he “didn’t mind saying shocking things. I wanted to be brutally honest in this book and not pretty anything up.”

But if Say Her Name were merely an account of Goldman’s grief and his occasional grief-induced bad behavior, the book would not be as large-hearted as it turns out to be. Drawing on Aura’s childhood diaries, Goldman sets out to explore how she became who she was—and how he became who he was.

“Those diaries awoke another kind of love in me, almost a parent’s love,” Goldman says. “In part I was trying to understand what drew us together. How did I get to be this way and how did she get to be that way? We both had difficult childhoods in different ways. I was sort of a hard-shelled boy and didn’t take it as much to heart. She was just so enmeshed with her mother, and she struggled against it.” 

After Aura’s death, her mother blamed Goldman for the accident. She withheld Aura’s ashes. She kicked him out of the apartment Aura owned in Mexico City. She hinted at prosecution. Goldman relates all this yet still remains respectful of Aura’s mother.

“Because I love Aura, I have to love this part of her,” Goldman explains. “It was a dangerous thing for me, that whole conflict. There were times, as I say in the book, when I felt angry at all the room it took up in my mourning. But in order to make my peace with Aura’s death—not that there will ever be full peace, but to integrate it into myself in the right way—I had to be able to honor her love for her mother, because that was such a central narrative in her life.”

“It was easy for me to write about how much I loved Aura, but it was a real leap to see how Aura saw her mom. One of the most important elements of fiction writing—or even nonfiction writing—is the ability to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and see the world from a perspective unlike yours.”

So is this fiction or nonfiction? “We don’t ask a poem whether it’s a fictional poem or a nonfictional poem,” Goldman says. “And I think this book works like a poem. There are many reasons it’s a novel, the most basic being that some things are made up. I always had the idea that at the end my book would kind of merge and disappear into the novel [Aura was working on]. That’s not quite what happens, but it makes that gesture in a big way.”

And in giving Aura’s imagination—as well as her impish humor, her anxieties, her academic and creative struggles, her writing, her love—room to play, Goldman, remarkably, vividly, brings her to life. “She was the funniest person I ever met,” Goldman says. “She had such a quick mind, a quick wit. You could not win an argument with her. This book was most of all a way of keeping close to Aura.”

Goldman says he was meditating on her death one day when it struck him that “the biggest fear of the dying is to be forgotten. And the biggest fear of someone who has loved a dead person is to forget that person. Time erases everything but it can’t erase a person’s name. Your name is always your name.”

With Say Her Name, Goldman ensures that readers will always remember Aura Estrada’s name.

Until very recently, Francisco Goldman’s Brooklyn apartment was as he describes it in his deeply moving novel, Say Her Name.

His late wife’s wedding dress hung from a clothes hanger and butcher’s twine in front of the bedroom mirror. Below that was an altar composed of…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Robert Hough

Interview by Alden Mudge

First-time novelist Robert Hough was not the kind of boy who dreamed of running away with the circus. But later in life, after he read a brief biographical sketch of Mabel Stark, the greatest female tiger trainer of the 1910s and 1920s, the circus more or less ran away with him.

"I became a sort of circus aficionado," Hough says during a call to his home in Toronto. In fact, during his research for his fictionalized autobiography of Stark, he traveled with a modern-day circus throughout rural Texas. And even now, two years after The Final Confession of Mabel Stark was published to critical acclaim in Canada, and with his next novel nearing completion, Hough still eagerly anticipates his next trip to the Ringling Brothers Museum in Sarasota, Florida.

"The circus was a wild environment back in Mabel’s day," Hough says, noting that today’s circuses are far tamer than circuses of that bygone Golden Age. Those earlier circuses thrilled locals with their well-deserved reputation for the forbidden. They drew much of their itinerant labor force from local drunk wards and insane asylums. Their infamous "cooch" shows were designed to lure ogling townsmen away from their women and then separate these hapless husbands from their wallets during the gambling, or "grift," that almost always preceded the girly shows. Before reforms required that lions and tigers be castrated, declawed and defanged, the "big cat" acts, which were wildly popular with audiences, often proved fatal to trainers.

"In Mabel’s day, trainers got killed all the time," Hough says. "In fact, Mabel’s big break with the Al G. Barnes Circus came because the woman who had the tiger act before her got killed."

What leads a petite girl from a rural farm in Kentucky to become a big cat trainer? It’s one of the questions that drives Hough’s exuberant and sometimes sorrowful novel. And Hough’s fictional exploration of this and similar questions is so compelling that actress Kate Winslet is eager to play Mabel Stark in the movie version of the novel that is currently under development.

"I think she’d be great," Hough says. "If she’s not the best screen actress out there, she’s certainly in the top three. And it would be a demanding role to play Mabel, because so much of what she’s about is internalized."

Hough reveals Mabel’s inner self by giving her a voice and a way of telling her story that is unique and idiosyncratic. Mabel’s voice, her perspective, her attitude is one of the great pleasures and great achievements of the novel. "I spent a lot of time working on Mabel’s voice, on the way she sounds," Hough says. "And then I just kind of let ‘er rip and wrote the vast majority of the book in one eight-month frenzy of creativity."

The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is set in 1968 with Mabel Stark now approaching 80 and about to be canned by Jungleland, a California amusement park where she had performed with her cats since leaving the circus in the 1930s. She reflects on her life with a mixture of passion and sadness, trying to understand what her life has meant, and particularly how responsible she has been for the accidents, failed marriages and tragedies that have followed her.

Around Mabel’s inner quest, Hough weaves an incredibly energetic story of circus life in its heyday. Mabel knew, but did not always like, the greats of the circus world—John Ringling, Clyde Beatty, Al G. Barnes, lion trainer Louis Roth. They appear here in all their strange and many-colored glory. It’s an exciting and entrancing portrait of life in what was then the most popular public entertainment in the land.

One of the most difficult elements for Hough to write about was the sexual nature of part of Mabel Stark’s tiger act. During research for the book, Hough found a letter from Stark describing in colorful detail her act with Rajah, her most famous tiger. "One of the scenes in the book that I knew I was going to have the hardest time trying to sell was the sex with tigers stuff," Hough says. "I wouldn’t have put that stuff in except that I was duty bound to do so. The book would have been a cheat had I not acknowledged that facet of her personality, and it’s a pretty big thing. Unresolved sexual conflicts are the sort of things that can groom a person’s entire life. And in her case, I’m sure it did."

Hough, who studied psychology at university before undertaking "a less than stellar seven-month advertising career" and then moving on to magazine and story writing, says he is surprised at how Freudian his story of Mabel Stark has turned out to be.

"It was her subconscious that motivated all these problems in her life and caused her to pick a profession where she knew she was going to get hurt. This is a book about a woman whose self-destructive quality gets mixed up with her sexuality, and that’s the tension that informs everything that happens in the book."

Despite all that, Hough regards Mabel Stark as courageous, perhaps even heroic, and he hopes the American publication of The Final Confession of Mabel Stark will bring her the fame she deserves.

"I’m hoping this book gets popular and people discover Mabel Stark so that she’ll go down as one of the best big cat trainers in history."

Alden Mudge, who writes from Oakland, is a member of the California Book Awards jury.

 

First-time novelist Robert Hough was not the kind of boy who dreamed of running away with the circus. But later in life, after he read a brief biographical sketch of Mabel Stark, the greatest female tiger trainer of the 1910s and 1920s, the circus…

Fiction

Meghan Daum

Interview by Alden Mudge

Four years ago, Gen X journalist and essayist Meghan Daum surprised just about everyone by abandoning New York for the "less literary pastures" of Lincoln, Nebraska. Lucinda Trout, winsome heroine of Daum’s sparkling, comic first novel, The Quality of Life Report, surprises her friends and employer by abandoning New York for a place in the heartland called Prairie City. Daum first arrived in Nebraska to report on methamphetamine labs in the Midwest. Trout arrives in Prairie City on a similar assignment for an over-the-top TV show called New York Up Early, where she is the lifestyle reporter. You begin to wonder: Is Lucinda Trout just Meghan Daum in hoop earrings and a new kind of attitude?

"I take it as a compliment that people think that the book is autobiographical, because that’s the job of a first-person narrator, to make you believe it’s real," Daum says during an early-morning phone call to Los Angeles. Daum is in L.A. working on a film adaptation of the novel. She is cheerful and unguarded, despite the hour. She flew in from New York the previous day, and in another day or two she’ll drive back to Nebraska, where she’s made an offer on a farmhouse. "All writers take things from their lives and use them in various ways," she continues. "The aspects of The Quality of Life Report that are autobiographical are the things Lucinda thinks about, her ideas, her theories."

Meghan Daum, however, is neither as naïve nor as theatrical as Lucinda Trout. In fact, Daum is a good bit more reticent about her own recent literary successes than Lucinda Trout would likely be. "When I was growing up," Daum says, "my family somehow instilled the notion that you never talked about anything potentially good until it had already happened. It came not out of superstition but perhaps out of pride or modesty or maybe just the tightly wound neuroses of German ancestry. Of course, you can take it too far. When I sold this novel, I was so stunned that for three days I was afraid to tell anyone because I was afraid I might have hallucinated the good news."

Daum also believes she’s not as "malleable" as her protagonist. "I’m more set in my ways, which I guess is both a good thing and a bad thing." In other words, Daum is not likely to find herself in quite the predicaments—usually comic predicaments—that Lucinda finds herself in.

Fed up with the spiraling rent on her tiny New York apartment, and thinking that "for the first time like it might be possible to become a good person"—and that it might also be possible to find a place next door to "a veterinarian who looked like Sam Shepherd, a younger Sam Shepherd"—Lucinda proposes to her Up Early producers that they send her to Prairie City to do a year-long series, The Quality of Life Report, that will allow New Yorkers "to live out the fantasy of escaping New York . . . without having to actually do it themselves."

With this as the set-up, Daum writes an often brilliant comedy of overturned expectations. She takes a broad and satisfying swipe at lifestyle entertainment shows and, more pointedly, explores and pokes fun at the stereotypes New Yorkers and Midwesterners hold about one another. When, for example, Up Early producers learn that Lucinda has rented a farmhouse outside Prairie City, they ask her to host a barn dance as part of their Party Week series. Lucinda’s Prairie City friends gamely try to accommodate her despite the fact that they’re NPR listeners and have never square-danced in their lives. And Lucinda’s Sam Shepherd look-alike love interest? He’s a 40-year-old artist, grain-silo worker and father of three, who turns out to be a good deal more complicated than Lucinda had ever imagined.

"Everyone has a mythology about themselves," Daum says. "Lucinda clearly has a mythology about what she wants to become. I wanted to show that no matter where you are and no matter how you’ve been brought up, there’s always a gulf between what kind of trappings you want your life to have and what life really is. Lucinda wants to grow up and lead an authentic life. But what she thinks is authentic is actually the opposite of authentic."

Daum is a wonderful observer of human behavior and a compelling prose stylist. As readers of My Misspent Youth, her critically acclaimed 2001 collection of personal essays, know, Daum can also be a provocative theorist about issues large and small. In The Quality of Life Report, her most arresting theory of life is what she calls the "wide margin of error."

"People in big cities are so cautious about doing the wrong thing because the stakes are very, very high," Daum explains. "So they weigh everything very, very carefully: Whether or not they’re going to move, whether or not they’re going to marry this person, whether or not they’re going to have a child. As a result, a sort of paralysis sets in. In a place like Prairie City, in large part because of the geographical space, the stakes are lower. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. It’s like you have room to make mistakes. People will take risks in a way that they don’t feel free to in the city. If you want to have a child, you don’t have to think about private school tuition. Or a house that’s going to cost you $600,000. The result is that people actually have the freedom to take chances and to make mistakes. And that really gives them a richer life."

Daum has apparently found that richer life, and her own wide margin of error, in Nebraska. "It is easier to write in Nebraska than in New York," she says. "Just the physical space around me is liberating. Certainly I did a lot of writing in New York, but I was able to write a first novel in Nebraska. And that was not by accident."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Four years ago, Gen X journalist and essayist Meghan Daum surprised just about everyone by abandoning New York for the "less literary pastures" of Lincoln, Nebraska. Lucinda Trout, winsome heroine of Daum's sparkling, comic first novel, The Quality of Life Report, surprises her friends…

Travel

Isabel Allende

Interview by Alden Mudge

Like many writers, novelist Isabel Allende thinks of herself as an outsider. "I have always been by temperament a dissident and a rebel," she says during a call to her home in Marin County, California. "This has been my struggle all my life."

But it’s one thing to be somewhat alienated from family and social class, as Allende was in her youth, and quite another to be sent into exile from your homeland. Allende fled her native Chile shortly after a CIA-assisted coup on Tuesday, September 11, 1973, led to the overthrow and death of her uncle Salvador Allende Gossens, the democratically elected president of Chile. The coup resulted in a brutal military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. From exile in Venezuela, on January 8, 1981, Allende began writing a letter to her grandfather, an old-school Chilean who was nearing his 100th birthday and in failing health. The letter soon developed into Allende’s mesmerizing first novel, The House of the Spirits, which marked the beginning of her extraordinary literary career.

Outsiders almost always have an intense and ambivalent longing for the inside. This is certainly true of Allende. While her marvelous new memoir, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, offers stinging criticism of her native land – its machismo, its religious and political oppression, its shameful treatment of native populations – Allende’s love for Chile is so evident and eloquent that many readers will consider packing their bags and booking the next flight to Santiago.

"When you are born in a place, especially a small place that feels like a village, you put up with the bad things and love the good things," Allende says. "There is a strong sense of community, of family, or extended family that still exists there. People in Chile will tell you, No, that’s over, it’s gone, it’s not like it was before.’ But coming from the United States, it’s the first thing that you see."

Allende has lived in the San Francisco Bay area since she met and married an American attorney, whose life and adventures were the basis for her novel The Infinite Plan. "California resembles Chile more than any other place in the United States," she says. "Not only the landscape and the vegetation and the weather, but the fact that some sense of Hispanic culture is very present here. My husband says that Chile looks like California looked 40 years ago."

Since Pinochet stepped down in 1994 and democratic institutions have slowly returned to Chile, Allende has been making annual visits home to see her mother, stepfather and members of her large extended family. Some of her family members read the manuscript for My Invented Country and, she says, "everyone had a different opinion." "I thought the book was going to be terribly criticized in Chile. But, actually, it was pirated immediately, it was sold in the streets, it became number one on the bestseller list, and the reviews have been great."

This is a surprise, and Allende explains it this way: "Many years ago when I was young, I used to write feminist articles, humorous articles, making fun of men and the things that men do because they are so macho. I would get loads of fan letters from men who enjoyed the articles and said they had a friend just like the man I described. It was always a friend. It was never them. I think that is what happened with this book. Readers think this is how the other Chileans are."

Allende’s sense of humor in conversation and on the page is enthralling. And as readers of her novels and previous memoir, Paula, know, she is a gifted storyteller who forges an enchanting amalgam of memory and imagination. "Memory and imagination are so closely intertwined that I can hardly separate them," Allende says. "If you and I see the same event, we will perceive it differently and we will remember it differently. When I wrote my very first memoir, which was Paula, I was in an altered state. My daughter Paula was dying. But even so, in the process of writing the book, I was perfectly conscious of the fact that I would choose what I was going to write and what I was going to omit, what adjectives I was selecting to describe a situation. That is an exercise in imagination; that’s a choice. Because if we were to remember without imagination, we would use no adjectives. It would be just nouns. But in life we remember the color, the flavor, the emotion. Not the facts."

According to Allende, the facts of life are mixed. "The world is a horrible place but also a wonderful place. For every horrible person out there doing evil, a thousand people are doing good. But good is silent, discrete, unassuming, whereas evil is so noisy. We only hear about the evil in the world."

In the Chile of Allende’s youth and, in a more menacing way under the dictatorship, "life was supposed to be uncomfortable and unsafe. . . . Even if you broke your neck tripping on the sidewalk there was no one to blame. It was your own fate."

This perspective made it very difficult for Allende to feel at home in the United States. "When I came here I had the feeling that this country was invulnerable, invincible, that the people had the arrogance of the winners, and that I could never belong here. The idea that you could go through life without fear, that you could go through life always feeling safe, that you are insured against every hazard of life, was just so foreign to me."

Exactly 28 years after her uncle’s violent demise led to her exile from Chile, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Allende discovered a suddenly vulnerable America and felt she "had gained a country." In conversation, Allende says My Invented Country "was born out of a crazy idea when my grandson Alejandro said ‘I think you are going to live at least three more years,’ and I wondered, well, where do I want to live them." That is no doubt true. But it is also true that the two September 11s mark the metaphorical beginning and end of Allende’s nostalgic journey. The path she follows between these two points vividly illustrates the good humor, humane spirit, tough mind and open heart we will all require to create a viable home in our new world.

 

Like many writers, novelist Isabel Allende thinks of herself as an outsider. "I have always been by temperament a dissident and a rebel," she says during a call to her home in Marin County, California. "This has been my struggle all my life."

But…

Michael Sims

Interview by Alden Mudge

Michael Sims promised his friends that writing Adam’s Navel would put an end to his frequent and, shall we say, enthusiastic communications about the latest set of whizzbang facts and oddities he had discovered in his wide and voracious reading.

Unfortunately, the completion of his second book, a fascinating, witty and startlingly original head-to-toe tour of the human body, has not had the desired effect. "No," Sims admits during a phone interview from Nashville, "I haven’t actually stopped." Sims does not sound particularly contrite.

And why should he? Sims is the sort of gifted storyteller who can turn the unexpected arrival of roofers into a mini-adventure (the workmen’s loud hammering sent him scurrying from his own apartment to his girlfriend’s quieter abode for our phone conversation). Surely friends and loved ones would notice the gaping, if silent, hole in their lives were Sims actually to follow through on his promise and confine his considerable talents to the pages of books.

Those talents as writer, observer, reader and interpreter are on full display in Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form. Sims guides the reader on a spellbinding journey through the physical characteristics and evolution of hair, eyes, ears, nose, lips, hands, breasts, navel, "privy members," legs, and toes, while at the same time ranging knowledgeably through thousands of years of cultural beliefs and artifacts that we humans have developed in response to these parts of our bodies.

In the 40-page section on the hand, for example, Sims discusses the evolution of the handshake, Carpal tunnel syndrome, finger gestures as insults, the history of fingerprinting, the mechanics of gripping, bias against left-handers and the importance of handedness in nature. He reports Marcel Proust’s oddly inverted defense of the limp handshake. He explains the importance of Dr. Wilder Penfield’s neurological diagrams, which "portray the body not as it looks to us but with each area in proportion to the amount of the brain’s cerebral cortex devoted to it." These diagrams provide Sims with a subtle organizing principal for his book and lead him to discover how "the brain’s budget is allocated to each part of the body and how culture responds proportionally."

He manages to mention in a single paragraph: a baby’s tenacious grip on its mother’s finger, the dexterity of violinists and magicians, Frisbees, heart surgery and Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons. And this summary doesn’t begin to encompass the range of topics Sims covers or the diverse cast of characters who figure in his relatively brief narrative about the all-important human hand.

This is, frankly, exhilarating stuff, the product of a lively, learned and delightfully idiosyncratic mind. Sims is eloquent in his conviction that "an acquaintance with a wide variety of cultural and scientific topics enriches my experience of walking through the day." Yet for a good many years he worried that his brain was "too cross-indexing and too undisciplined to work as a writer’s brain, and I was going to have to come up with something else to do to support myself."

Such nagging self-doubts aren’t all that surprising in someone who is largely self-taught. Sims grew up outside the small town of Crossville, Tennessee. For a while, his family had no car and no indoor plumbing. At 13 he was stricken by a mysterious illness which he now believes was a combination of rheumatic arthritis, brought on by a bout of rheumatic fever, and tachycardia.

"I was confined to a wheelchair for about five years, but was able to get out now and then with the help of my mother and two brothers. Most days I didn’t leave the yard or, many days, the house itself. I read steadily, of course, first science fiction and mysteries. Then science fiction led me to science-related nonfiction."

Sims had only a passing relationship with college – he didn’t leave home for Nashville and go to work in a bookstore there until about 18 years ago, when he was 27 – but his insatiable appetite for reading, first in science and then more broadly in nonfiction, fiction and poetry, led him into what he calls "the border habitat where science, nature and culture meet." He began exploring that borderland in his first book, Darwin’s Orchestra, which was well received but nevertheless soon went out of print.

Completion of Adam’s Navel has given Sims a new sense of himself as a writer. "I’m beginning to trust myself," he says, "and to trust my instinct for what I think of as resonate juxtaposition. It’s as if I’m making a mosaic out of lots of different facts. Every piece of the mosaic is an aspect of nature or of culture, but it’s how I put them together that will determine if I’ve created an original picture and whether or not that picture will come alive."

Sims’ lively mosaic in Adam’s Navel is also energized by his underlying belief in reason and his comic appreciation for human culture’s often ludicrous betrayals of reason, an interest that is evident in his choice of title for the book. "For me the navel is a very resonate symbol of biology and evolution; it’s the scar that records the single physical links between generations. The cultural response to the navel nowadays is that it’s a fashion accessory. But the age-old theological debate over whether or not Adam and Eve, created in God’s image, had navels is a perfect symbol of how nature and culture interact."

Sims adds: "I get very impatient with the notion that our divine, unlimited consciousness is trapped in this poor limited mortal body, when, really, the body brings everything in the world to the brain. Bodily experience creates consciousness and culture. We perceive everything through the body; we express everything through the body; therefore culture seems to be an emanation from the body."

Readers who take the trip will be captivated by Sims’ tour of their bodies and themselves.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

Michael Sims promised his friends that writing Adam's Navel would put an end to his frequent and, shall we say, enthusiastic communications about the latest set of whizzbang facts and oddities he had discovered in his wide and voracious reading.

Unfortunately, the…

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