Alden Mudge

Fiction

Peter Carey

Interview by Alden Mudge

You would think that a novelist who has twice won the prestigious Booker Prize (and seems a reasonable candidate for a third, given the breathtaking accomplishment of his newest novel, My Life as a Fake) would be set for life. Especially when one of those novels – Oscar & Lucinda – was adapted into a popular movie. And when the remaining novels in his exceptional body of work have been published to critical acclaim here in the U.S., in Great Britain and in Australia, where he was born and lived most of his life before moving to the U.S.

But such are the vagaries of literary fortune that Peter Carey found himself driving over the George Washington Bridge some time ago telling his wife, theater director Alison Summers, that they faced a situation in which they had half as much money coming in as they had expected. Not a brilliant prospect when you live in New York’s Greenwich Village and have two growing boys to raise and educate.

"A prize really does do something," Carey says during a call to his office in the Village, "and guarantees nothing." Carey retains his Australian accent and speaks with energy and good humor. "Nothing is guaranteed if you do this sort of writing. You have a silly idea and you spend three years pursuing it and you can’t guess whether people will like it or hate it or whether it will sell or not sell."

Of course Carey’s newest "silly idea" – inspired by the events of the Ern Malley hoax (a literary scandal in Australia in the 1940s), pursued into a devastating dead end, then revived in a burst of creative ventriloquism – turns out to be his riskiest and most pleasurable bit of storytelling to date. But more on that in a moment.

To smooth out the economic rough spots, Carey began teaching writing classes in New York, first at New York University and then at other schools in the city. This fall, he became director of the writing program at Hunter College. "It’s a serious job," he says, "full time in a way that still permits me to write every day."

It also permits him to run things – Hunter’s literary reading series, for example – his own way. "I’m the most easily bored man on Earth," he says, "and, frankly, if I’m going to run a reading series I want to have things I want to listen to."

In his own writing, Carey is not only an accomplished stylist but a keen observer of life. There is, for example, the remarkable letter he wrote to the literary editor of The Observer shortly after the September 11 terrorist attack. In it he describes hearing the first plane fly overhead, his subsequent anxiety about the fate of his wife, who was at the World Trade Center when the attack occurred (and his relief at her lucky escape and return), and a remarkable nighttime walk through the city with his 15-year-old son that leaves him filled with a sense of pride and belonging.

"I’m one of those people that feels he has two homes," says Carey, who has lived in New York for 13 years, and returns frequently to Australia. "I have a lot of friends here who I would sorely miss if I went back to Australia. And at the same time, I miss Australia. I think I’ve created a little problem for myself that really can’t be solved."

Maybe that is why Australia – particularly its complicated moral and cultural history – has so often been the subject of Carey’s novels. My Life as a Fake, too, has Australia as a starting point. That is, the story within the story of this beautifully labyrinthine tale is an imaginative recasting of the real-life Ern Malley hoax.

But, Carey cautions, "This book is not about the Ern Malley hoax. It uses the Ern Malley hoax, I don’t mean to sound too grandiose, like Miles Davis uses Bye Bye Blackbird’ – to make something new. If the book has to be about anything, it’s about the power of imagination and the sort of magical thinking that novelists often have that if they write something, then maybe it will come true."

In Carey’s riff on the hoax story, a minor poet named Christopher Chubb is offended by the trendy experimentation in an Australian poetry journal. He invents a 24-year-old poet named Bob McCorkle and submits McCorkle’s tricked-up modernist poems for publication. When the fraud is exposed, the editor is humiliated, as Chubb has intended. And Bob McCorkle comes to life.

"When I started writing the book," Carey says, "my intention was to write in the first person from McCorkle’s point of view beginning with him being born in the backyard of a suburban house at the age of 24. I really love the beginning I wrote, but after six months I realized that no matter how much I sandpapered it or fixed sentences, I couldn’t make it work. So I had probably the worst day and night of my writing life. The next morning I woke up and thought, there is a story here and if it can’t work this way, then there must be another way."

Carey eventually discovered the voice of Sarah Wode-Douglass, the conflicted, spinsterish, middle-aged editor of London’s pre-eminent poetry magazine. It’s her voice that tells the story within which the other stories of the novel – "the Chinese boxes," as Carey calls them – unfold. On a trip to Malaysia in the 1970s, Wode-Douglass meets an aging Chubb, who teases her with new poems by Bob McCorkle, poems that seemed marked by genius. Obsessed with finding and publishing the remaining poems, Wode-Douglass begins a quest that takes her deeper into the mysteries of the imagination and the identity of the invented Bob McCorkle.

Carey says My Life as a Fake is "a weird book to talk about." And he’s right. No brief summary can do justice to the haunting beauty, the playfulness, the humor and the riveting storytelling of this masterful novel. In My Life as a Fake Carey brilliantly writes in accord with his belief that writers should be "people whose job it is to find a way to imagine something that they don’t know and make it real."

According to Carey, "When people ask that staggering, unnerving question, ‘Why do you write?’ I remember that when I started to write, I wanted to make something very beautiful that had never existed before. That’s the ambition. And the pleasure comes when one thinks one’s getting close to achieving that."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

You would think that a novelist who has twice won the prestigious Booker Prize (and seems a reasonable candidate for a third, given the breathtaking accomplishment of his newest novel, My Life as a Fake) would be set for life. Especially when one of…

Fiction

Anne Tyler

Interview by Alden Mudge

It's not as if Anne Tyler's life is a closed book. Curious readers can find 25-year-old interviews with her on the Internet. They can learn that she was born in Minneapolis in 1941, that writer Reynolds Price helped launch her career as a novelist while she was studying Russian at Duke University, that she married Iranian-born psychiatrist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi and raised a family, that her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, that after all these years she still lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Readers can discover all these details and still be left wondering what this actually reveals about Tyler's deeply satisfying, deceptively simple novels or the woman who writes them.

The problem with knowing Anne Tyler is that she seems determined to resist our desire to make her a star, a personality. She doesn't publicly opine and pronounce. In fact, she rarely even appears in public. Anne Tyler actually seems to want her novels—her avowedly non-autobiographical novels—to speak for themselves.

"I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward," Tyler tells BookPage via e-mail. Tyler asks that I emphasize that we have corresponded rather than spoken; she doesn't want to seem inconsistent when she turns down others who ask for personal interviews. "Thank goodness the people at Alfred A. Knopf have always been understanding about that. I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they'd be good at."

What Tyler herself has always been particularly good at is depicting the fullness of life lived on a human scale. Her characters are not—and do not aspire to become—members of the glitterati or the literati. They rarely stray far from their Baltimore roots. Their dramas are the commonplace dramas of family and community life. Tyler's great art has been to illuminate her characters' lives with wry wit and insight, not to exalt them to some larger, brighter stage.

Tyler's remarkable abilities are on full display in her 16th book, The Amateur Marriage. Quite simply, this new novel ranks among Tyler's best to date. It tells the story of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, who meet by accident in a Baltimore neighborhood at the outbreak of World War II, marry hastily, raise a family and live with the consequences of an unhappy marriage. The novel follows their lives into old age, ending shortly after another national cataclysm, the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest," Tyler writes. "I didn't want a good-person-bad-person marriage, but a marriage in which solely the two styles of character provide the friction."

That we continue to like and care about both the flighty, emotional Pauline and the stolid, cautious Michael while their marriage falters and stalls is further proof of Tyler's uncommon talent for understanding and representing the interior lives of her characters.

Asked to comment more generally on her understanding of successful marriages, however, Tyler writes that she'd "feel presumptuous making any general pronouncements on the subject." Still, Tyler affirms that the mismatch in her fictional marriage is not due simply to Michael's and Pauline's opposite temperaments. "I think most marriages are made up of any number of opposites," she writes, "spenders marrying savers and cool-natured people marrying warm and so forth. (Maybe we are all trying to atone for deficiencies in our own characters.) Why Michael and Pauline had so much trouble with their own differences seems to me a very individual matter related specifically to those two people and to no one else in the world. That's what makes human beings so mysterious, and such endlessly entrancing material for novelists."

Tyler's account of Pauline's and Michael's unhappy marriage is not without additional family dramas. Oldest daughter, Lindy, for example, who is independent and assertive from birth, leaves – simply disappears – creating, according to her brother, George, "the central mystery of their lives." Part of that mystery is how much responsibility Pauline and Michael bear for Lindy's flight. And part of Tyler's deeply satisfying artistry lies in the fact that she refuses to resolve the question with too-easy psychological analysis. "It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away," she writes.

In The Amateur Marriage, Tyler achieves her ends with astonishing economy. The novel carries readers through 60 years of the family's history in just 10 chapters. Dramatic events that would be central to other novelists' narratives – births, deaths, disappearances – happen offstage here, in the space between chapters. The novel gains much of its emotional power precisely from what is left unsaid and undescribed. Tyler, apparently at the height of her creative powers, knows exactly what to leave to her readers' imaginations.

"I had worried it would make me unhappy to write about such an unhappy subject," Tyler recalls, "but I hadn't counted on the sheer pleasure of the time trip it took me on, all the way back to the 1940s. What it felt like, really, was stepping inside an old photograph. Have you ever studied one of those black-and-white photos from the '40s – say a crowd scene where all the men wear hats and the women look so innocent – and wished to be there yourself? If you stare long enough at the details, you almost think you are there. That was my experience in writing the first chapter. At first it felt forced, a matter of cold research (what items would be sold in a drugstore back then? What cars would be driving past?), but gradually, as the characters became animated, I could imagine I was there with them – that the picture wasn't black-and-white anymore, but living color."

And isn't that all we really need to know? That Anne Tyler wants to present her characters in living color in all their rich emotional hues? And in The Amateur Marriage, that is exactly what she does.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California book awards.

 

It's not as if Anne Tyler's life is a closed book. Curious readers can find 25-year-old interviews with her on the Internet. They can learn that she was born in Minneapolis in 1941, that writer Reynolds Price helped launch her career as a novelist…

Memoir

David Denby

Interview by Alden Mudge

On October 15, 2002, Sam Waksal, disgraced founder of ImClone, pal of Martha Stewart and the poster boy of corporate fraud, pleaded guilty to six federal charges. Sitting in the back of the New York courtroom, wondering why he had come, was Waksal’s onetime friend and admirer David Denby, movie critic for The New Yorker. In the end, Denby decided to step from the crowd and shake the hand of the man he calls "an American fool for the ages."

Denby’s handshake is the near-final act in a three-year drama that began when Denby’s wife, novelist Cathleen Schine, asked for a divorce and he set out to make a million dollars in the high-tech stock boom. Denby’s stated goal was to gain enough money to hold onto the New York apartment where the couple had raised their two sons. But as Denby makes abundantly clear in American Sucker, his month-by-month account of this period, he was also seized by the stock market mania that gripped much of the nation at that time. "When Cathy left, I became irrationally exuberant so as not to be dead," he writes, deftly borrowing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s memorable cautionary phrase.

Denby is essentially a moralist, and his tone is often a sadder-but-wiser one. He argues with himself about the nature of greed, about values and materialism, about the new economy and what it might mean. He quotes St. Augustine and Thorstein Veblen as easily as Internet analyst Henry Blodgett (an acquaintance he cultivates), former SEC chair Arthur Levitt or the financial press. In between, he has a little to say about fatherhood, the life of a movie critic and, yes, even sex. There are moments when Denby overplays his narrative hand, but these are the forgivable lapses of a good and perceptive writer. Denby writes that his is a "commonplace American journey." To which I must respectfully say . . . balderdash. I mean, when was the last time you lost $900,000 in the stock market? No, we read American Sucker because it is a brighter, more dramatic story than our own. And we weep, probably with relief, perhaps with glee.

 

On October 15, 2002, Sam Waksal, disgraced founder of ImClone, pal of Martha Stewart and the poster boy of corporate fraud, pleaded guilty to six federal charges. Sitting in the back of the New York courtroom, wondering why he had come, was Waksal's onetime…

Memoir

Neely Tucker

Interview by Alden Mudge

African orphan transforms the life of a foreign correspondent Neely Tucker, a foreign correspondent for The Detroit Free Press and Knight Ridder, was transferred in 1997 from his post as a roving reporter in Eastern Europe to Zimbabwe. When he wasn’t traveling on assignment in war-ravaged sub-Saharan Africa, Tucker and his wife, Vita, volunteered at an orphanage in the capital city of Harare.

The orphanage, probably the best in the country, was woefully underfunded. A shocking number of infants fell sick and died. Tucker and his wife began to care for one of the most gravely ill of these children, an infant girl named Chipo (which means "gift" to the Shona-speaking majority of Zimbabweans) who had been abandoned in a field just moments after she was born. Very quickly, the childless couple decided to adopt Chipo.

Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir is Tucker’s completely absorbing account of the couple’s efforts to overcome both a maddening social service bureaucracy and a deep cultural prejudice against foreign adoptions and gain Chipo as their daughter. Good writer that he is, Tucker also tells a story of larger and deeper human transformations.

"To say that this is an adoption book or a book about Africa is like saying The English Patient is about Egypt and World War II," Tucker says during a call to his desk at The Washington Post, where he has been a staff writer since returning from Zimbabwe in 2000. "Egypt and the war frame the experiences of the characters in that novel, just as the adoption and Africa framed my experiences. But what I hope people will understand this book to be about is a time in your life when you put everything on the table, when you just risk everything."

One of the most important things Tucker risked for Chipo and Vita was his career as a journalist. Being a reporter, Tucker says, "was not just a job I showed up to do. It was my life." And Tucker was not merely a journalist, but one of those rare journalists who sought the toughest assignments, who "had the working idea that there was a higher form of truth to be found in the world’s most impoverished and violent places, a rough-hewn honesty that could not be found elsewhere." As a result, some of the most horrifying and exalted moments in Love in the Driest Season are Tucker’s brief narratives about people and events he witnessed in war zones in Eastern Europe and Africa.

The decision to adopt Chipo complicated Tucker’s dedication to his work as a foreign correspondent. "I just didn’t think it was the responsible thing to do to spend my time that way anymore. The third time you’re in Bujumbura staying in the same crappy hotel doing another story that will run on page A15 while your only child in this life learns to smile or walk or has her first day in school, you start asking yourself why you’re doing this."

At the same time, the political situation in Zimbabwe was becoming darker. According to Tucker, Zimbabwe has long been considered "Africa 101. That is, it was as easy as Africa gets. The country worked pretty well, the literacy rate was pretty high, the hospitals were OK, you could go to the grocery store, pay with your credit card and get just about everything off the shelf there that you can get here." Beneath the social veneer, however, unnoticed by the casual tourist, AIDS was decimating extended families, which more or less functioned as the country’s social support network; families, hospitals and orphanages were overwhelmed. New and popular political parties challenged the corrupt regime of Robert Mugabe and Mugabe reacted by going after the messengers. Foreign journalists were intimidated. Tucker’s phone was tapped and his family was threatened. Not wanting to jeopardize the adoption, Tucker began to avoid reporting about Zimbabwe. "I think I’m harsher on myself than anybody at Knight Ridder would be," he says, "but from my standpoint, my career went down the tubes. Not in something I did but in something I didn’t do. I didn’t write untrue stories, but I just didn’t do my job." Tucker eventually took a leave of absence to complete the adoption.

The adoption transformed Tucker, but that is not the only transformation in this story. Tucker was born in the poorest county in Mississippi and as a child attended an all-white private academy. When, as a reporter, he was hired by the Free Press and moved to Detroit, he met and eventually married Vita, an African-American widow who remembered Mississippi from childhood trips as a place so "bad that as a black person from Detroit, you were actually grateful to get to Alabama." Neither family was thrilled with the marriage, but Tucker’s was the more resistant. "I told Vita when we got married that I never expected to be reunited with my family, and Vita said, well, you might just be surprised,’ " Tucker remembers. Because of her religious conviction, his mother eventually got a passport and flew for 14 hours to Poland, where the couple was living while Tucker covered Eastern Europe, and apologized to Vita. His father changed with the arrival of Chipo.

"My father had been abandoned by his old man when he was two days old, and he just identified immediately with Chipo," Tucker says. "He’s not a touchy-feely guy. He doesn’t talk about his emotions. He was a guy who had been abandoned by his father and had mentioned it only once to my mother. And he just took to Chipo."

Tucker writes in Love in the Driest Season that "race has been the defining issue of my life." In conversation, he says, "It would be silly not to be optimistic. From when and where I was raised and from when and where Vita was raised, it’s much better today, it’s insanely better, it’s ridiculously better."

And Chipo? She’s better too. "She knows absolutely everything about where she came from," Tucker says. "She’ll tell you she’s from Zimbabwe. She’ll tell you she’s a pretty girl from Africa. That’s how she’ll introduce herself." And that’s a happy ending to a pretty amazing story.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

African orphan transforms the life of a foreign correspondent Neely Tucker, a foreign correspondent for The Detroit Free Press and Knight Ridder, was transferred in 1997 from his post as a roving reporter in Eastern Europe to Zimbabwe. When he wasn't traveling on assignment…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Samantha Gillison

Interview by Alden Mudge

In the wave of praise that will soon greet Samantha Gillison's near-perfect novel, The King of America, much will be made of Gillison's debt to the story of Michael Rockefeller's life and disappearance. It's a debt Gillison freely acknowledges, both in the novel's back-matter and in conversation.

"I used a lot of the road posts of Michael Rockefeller's life," Gillison says during a phone call to her home about the new novel. Gillison and her husband, a book editor, and their six-year-old son live in Brooklyn Heights, not terribly far from Gillison's good friend and fellow-novelist Jhumpa Lahiri. In conversation Gillison is open, perceptive, enthusiastic and funny. "I sound like such a dingbat," she exclaims happily just after explaining that she chose ancient Greek, her major at Brown University, because she found the material "really really cool."

About Michael Rockefeller, Gillison is also enthusiastic and perceptive. "He was a really interesting guy, a visionary in terms of his ambition and the art he wanted to collect and why he wanted to collect it," she says. "I really do admire him. Of course in a person like him there can also be an arrogance, a sense of I am God-like.' "

Michael Rockefeller, the son of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and a member of one of the wealthiest families in America, disappeared in the Arafura Sea off the coast of New Guinea in 1961 at the age of 22. The young Rockefeller was part of an anthropological expedition doing field work among the tribal societies of New Guinea. He was also collecting local artwork, particularly Bisj poles, elaborately carved poles that had been banned by the governing Dutch and Indonesian authorities because the carvings were associated with headhunting and ritual cannibalism.

Dangerous waters

Rockefeller's disappearance set off an intensive and heartbreaking search. That he was never found has fueled rumors and "confessions" ever since. Not long ago, several aging New Guineans claimed to have killed and eaten him. Gillison does not believe them. "There was certainly headhunting and cannibalism going on when Michael Rockefeller was in New Guinea. But I have been on the sea where he was, and it is a treacherous sea. He was there right at monsoon season. He was a wonderful swimmer, but he had been out all night without food or water. He wasn't jumping in on a clear Maine morning to swim across the bay after breakfast. It would have been shocking if he'd made it to shore. It's much more likely that he drowned or was eaten by a shark."

Gillsion herself was moved by the Rockefeller story as a child living in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s. "I still think it's one of the saddest stories I've ever heard," she says in comments at the end of the book. From the age of six to eight, Gillison lived in a remote New Guinea village while her mother did field work for a doctorate in anthropology and her father worked as a wildlife photographer.

"We were very far from any kind of town, and the only people who spoke English were my parents," Gillison recalls. "I didn't spend much time with them, so by the time I left I was arguably better at speaking the local language than English. I couldn't really read or write until I was about eight-and-a-half. It was a beautiful, amazing place to be, and I really liked the people there. The experience has given me a weird, split idea about home, people, life. Here things seem very much constructed; I see the materiality of things. Sometimes I feel alienated from this view. Sometimes my childhood can come flying back in my face and it can be very hard to negotiate."

Perhaps it is this acute sense of dislocation that is the source of Gillison's beautiful use of language, her extraordinary ability to evoke a place and a people, and her wide-ranging empathy for people unlike herself. Gillison, the author of an acclaimed collection of stories, The Undiscovered Country, and a recipient of the prestigious Whiting prize, first tried to write a nonfiction account of Rockefeller. "I spent almost a year researching and writing it, and it was just bad. Really heavy and really dull. It read like a book report." Writer Peter Carey, who was working his own magnificent transformation of fact into fiction (True History of the Kelly Gang), suggested she turn the book into a novel. Thus Michael Rockefeller transmorgified into the character Stephen Hesse, son of Governor Nicholas Hesse and his first wife Marguerite. And The King of America became an exceptional work of fiction.

Inventive details

Given the history of its development, it is tempting to read The King of America as a roman à clef, a slightly altered biography that uses imagination to fill the gaps in the historical record. But that approach ignores the daring brilliance of Gillison's storytelling, and it does not explain the novel's elemental emotional power. Sure, the outline of this tale is provided by Rockefeller, but the substance, the living details – the family structure, the personal conflicts, the love interests – are all Gillison's invention. Gillison's story is about Stephen Hesse – with his loneliness, his longing to know his distant father, his desire to escape his overbearing mother, his impulsiveness and appetite for life, his unexpected sense of belonging among the Asmat villagers – chasing after his own sad fate. In fact, The King of America is a novel more deeply rooted in mythology than biography.

"One of my models for the character of Marguerite was Medea, who was brought far away from her homeland to be the queen in a strange land and then dumped for someone more suitable' to be her husband's queen," Gillison says, illustrating how her enthusiasm for classical literature works itself into her fiction. "I have Stephen reading Medea at boarding school because I couldn't help myself (I was re-reading that play a lot while I was writing) and also because it was when I first read Medea in Greek that I fell in love with ancient Greek literature." Gillison adds that her love of ancient Greek, particularly Homer, has something to do with similarities between "the way people live in Homer and the way people lived in New Guinea when I was growing up. Everything from fires to the art of war, it all felt very familiar to me."

Luckily, a reader need not be a classics scholar to be greatly moved by the story of Stephen Hesse. Gillison more than succeeds in her wish for "a reader of my work to feel very intimate with my characters – to feel their flaws and sensual awareness and excitement." She does so with remarkable economy – the book is just over 200 pages long – and with prose that is beautiful and clear and so reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald that it is a shock to hear Gillison say, "Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald is the reason I wanted to start writing."

Near the end of our conversation, Gillison talks about her admiration for Michael Rockefeller's openness to a culture very different from his own. "I wanted Stephen Hesse to have a similar openness and connection to the world. I wanted him to have a sense that he was part of something bigger than himself, rather than being someone looking down on someone else," Gillison says. "I do think humans can transcend fear and open themselves up to understanding other people. It's what makes you realize how big life is. It can be so thrilling. You have this short time, but life is so big, it's so wide, it's such a huge experience."

To borrow Gillison's words, The King of America is big and wide, and it is also thrilling.

Alden Mudge, a juror for the California Book Awards and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, writes from Oakland.

 

In the wave of praise that will soon greet Samantha Gillison's near-perfect novel, The King of America, much will be made of Gillison's debt to the story of Michael Rockefeller's life and disappearance. It's a debt Gillison freely acknowledges, both in the novel's back-matter…

Memoir

Charles Siebert

Interview by Alden Mudge

I had forgotten what a rushing torrent of words spills from Charles Siebert’s mouth when his passions are up. I had forgotten how casually he drops arresting metaphors into normal conversation. I had forgotten how humorously, obsessively he tracks a thought through the circuitous digressions of life’s hum and drum to arrive at an unexpected observation. I had forgotten just how frighteningly articulate he can be.

It’s been – what? – more than 20 years since Chuck and I last ran into each other on New York’s Upper West Side, several years after we had graduated from college. Memories fade. In the long in-between, Siebert has produced a steady stream of poems, essays and articles that have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. He had a role in John Sayles’ movie Eight Men Out. In late 1984, he moved to Brooklyn, where every writer in the world now seems to reside, and has lived in the same building ever since. He shares his sixth-floor apartment’s "glorious view of Manhattan" with his wife, novelist Bex Brian. He has published two well-regarded books, an "autobiography" of his Jack Russell Terrier, Angus, and a remarkable memoir/prose rhapsody called Wickerby. Despite writing frequently about medical research, especially on matters related to the heart, he still doesn’t have health insurance.

Siebert relates most of this during the early, catch-me-up part of our conversation about his superb new book A Man After His Own Heart. It’s gratifying how easily we settle into familiar conversation. But it’s only when Siebert refers to youth as an unselfconscious time when "you’re in the porch-swing of your own bones, you’re settled into yourself and are just staring out at the world with a kind of awe," that I think, oh now this, this is the wordsmithing poet I palled around with on the Binghamton campus.

But of course that is not true. Siebert is a far different and far better writer than I knew or could even have imagined 25 years ago. In Wickerby and even more so in A Man After His Own Heart, Siebert has forged a unique sort of nonfiction work, something he doesn’t quite know how to characterize: "It’s so many different things at once – memoir, prose poem, rhapsody, I don’t know," he says. But no matter what you ultimately call this particular type of literary work, it informs and it sings, and if the talent gods are just, A Man After His Own Heart will be Siebert’s breakthrough book.

Viewed from a wide angle, A Man After His Own Heart is an account of the night in December 1998 when Siebert participated in a "heart harvest," traveling to New Jersey with a team of surgeons to remove the heart from the body of a recently deceased young woman, and then returning to New York to deliver the heart to a waiting transplant recipient. From this angle you read about: the technicalities of heart transplants; new scientific discoveries about the biology of the heart and the genetic disorders that influence heart disease; the emotional and biological interplay of the brain and the heart; the fascinating history of diminutive, feisty William Harvey’s trip to Padua in the 16th century to view the dissection of human corpses (which would lead to the discovery of the body’s "ever recurring circulation of the blood").

You read, too, about: the patients who wait desperately for donor hearts; the distressing experiences of people who have lived with mechanical hearts; and of the political-sociological hierarchy of a heart harvest and the drama that hierarchy engenders. All of which Siebert portrays magnificently.

To present the book’s unbelievably varied subjects as this sort of laundry list, however, is to miss the beauty and drive of Siebert’s narrative approach. "I go off on all these tangents," he says. "I have the most indulgent, digressive of first-person voices." Which is the closest Charles Siebert may ever come to understatement. In fact, Siebert’s mind wanders like a relaxed fisherman, following the lure of his thoughts and meditations out among the currents, pools and eddies of fact and metaphor until the anxious reader may want to tap him gently on the shoulder and remind him that there is, after all, a heart harvest going on and he might want to attend to it. But such digressions brim with insight and provocation and are narrated in language that is simply marvelous.

One of Siebert’s purposes in writing this book is to make visible what he calls in conversation "these vast invisible inscapes of ourselves." Hence his fascination with such recent science as the discovery that "humans borrow the same muscle fiber mechanism that allows a fly’s wing to beat at 150 beats a second. It’s as if Nature is this great artificer that finds it needs to make a heart and suddenly remembers the fly wing design and pulls it off the shelf to serve the heart design. That kind of thing blows my mind."

Another of Siebert’s overriding purposes is to explore the heart as metaphor, as the traditional location of human feeling. Thus Siebert writes movingly and with surprising directness about his relationship with his father, who suffered from heart disease throughout Siebert’s adolescence and early adulthood, and who may have passed on the faulty gene responsible for that disease to his son. "In the early drafts I found myself shying away from going far into my father, but then I found that once I’d opened that Pandora’s Box the only way to go was to go as far into it as possible, make a whole character of him, otherwise I’d be cheating the readers. And to my joy, people have told me the book gets stronger as it gets more personal."

Siebert doesn’t see the science of the heart and the poetics of the heart as being in conflict. Quite the contrary. "This is not a time for poets to be throwing up their hands and saying, Ahh, science has taken away all our wonder,’ " he exclaims. "There’s a tendency in human thought to dismiss ourselves from our own biology and live up in the ether that our very biology creates. What I’m saying is wait a minute, look what the new science is showing us. It is in a way bearing out all the intuitive myths of the past."

Alden Mudge, of Oakland, California, is a juror for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.

 

I had forgotten what a rushing torrent of words spills from Charles Siebert's mouth when his passions are up. I had forgotten how casually he drops arresting metaphors into normal conversation. I had forgotten how humorously, obsessively he tracks a thought through the circuitous…

Fiction

Kent Haruf

Interview by Alden Mudge

It is 8 a.m. in Colorado, and Kent Haruf is out getting wood from the woodpile. Haruf (rhymes with "sheriff’) and his wife Cathy live in a log house at an elevation of 8,500 feet, not far from downtown Sedelia. They built the place four years ago after the success of Haruf’s beautiful novel Plainsong allowed him to retire after 30 years of teaching English and writing.

While we’re waiting for Haruf to come on the line, Cathy warns me that our conversation might be interrupted. She works for a local hospice and if calls come through, Kent will have to pass them along. "We always try to warn people because it’s such a rude thing to do to put them on hold," she says. When Haruf does pick up the phone he is as unaffected and polite as his wife has been.

It is hard to explain why this seems so remarkable. Other famous writers are also friendly and forthcoming. But with Haruf and his wife one senses – or projects – that the normal human scale on which they choose to live their lives has to do with deep-seated conviction and a good bit of self-discipline. You hear something of this in the way Haruf talks about a grueling upcoming 30-city promotional tour for his magnificent new novel, Eventide.

"Knopf was very generous in their advance, [even though] I told them that I wouldn’t tell them anything about the book or show them anything and that I would set my own deadline. They were fine with that, so I want to do my part and sell a few books for them. The other part of this is that the success of Plainsong was dependent upon the independent bookstores across this country – they hand-sold this book – so I feel a kind of debt and obligation to help them."

Readers make a critical mistake when they assume that the virtues – or vices – of a novel’s characters are the same as those of its creator. But on this particular morning, it is more than tempting to find in Haruf’s direct, thoughtful, and self-effacing conversation everything that is most uplifting in the characters who populate his fictional town of Holt, Colorado.

The High Plains of eastern Colorado has been the setting for all of Haruf’s novels (his acclaimed first novel, The Tie That Binds; National Book Award finalist Plainsong; and his new novel, Eventide). Holt’s geography is quite different from the Rockies, where Haruf now lives, but it’s a region Haruf is very familiar with. "The High Plains of eastern Colorado is where I grew up. I had such affection for it as a kid, and I later taught school and high school out there for about seven years. So I know it well, probably better than any place else in the world. It’s still the way I think the world should look."

That intimate knowledge of the place helps explain why Haruf is the author of some of the best fiction about American small-town and rural life being written today. As readers of Plainsong know, Haruf’s taut, unsentimental storytelling and spare, graceful prose are capable of transporting the imagination to a deeper understanding of human responsibility and connection. Plainsong‘s story of the bachelor farmers Harold and Raymond McPheron taking in the pregnant teenager Victoria Roubideaux has a redemptive radiance that readers will long to see repeated in the new novel, Eventide.

But this is exactly what worries Kent Haruf. "You don’t want to duplicate what you’ve already done," he says. "Even though there are similarities in structure and form and some characters who reappear, I hope I have not rewritten Plainsong."

Happily, neither Haruf nor his readers need worry. Eventide offers many of the pleasures of Plainsong: a strong storyline, Haruf’s wonderful, unadorned prose and several familiar characters.

Eventide opens about four years after the events of Plainsong, with Victoria Roubideaux and her daughter, Kate, about to set off for Fort Collins (where Victoria will begin college) while the sweetly clumsy McPheron brothers hover awkwardly, lovingly in the background. With Victoria gone, the McPherons settle into the almost-satisfying, bone-wearying routine of ranch life, until misfortune strikes. Then Eventide takes on a very different tonality and complexion from its predecessor. If Plainsong is morning or afternoon on the prairie, then Eventide is dusk; it is filled with a beautiful but somber light.

One reason for the somber feel of this book is Haruf’s heartrending portrayal of Holt’s emotionally abandoned children. Eleven-year old DJ Kephart, for example, is one of the most vivid characters in recent fiction.

"Childhood is such a vulnerable, tender time," Haruf says. "So many things happen to kids, things that the people around them are doing and are not conscious of but that have a lasting effect on the children. And they are so unprotected. DJ, for example, has no power over what happens to him. He’s born out of wedlock, his mother dies when he’s little, and the only recourse is for him to go to his grandfather, who is an old man and probably doesn’t want him to be there. But DJ is a boy who lives in an honorable way. He has enormous integrity and a clear moral code that he abides by. And yet he is powerless."

Even more remarkable is Haruf’s tone-perfect, clear-eyed presentation of Betty and Luther Wallace. The Wallaces love their young children deeply but have limited intellectual capacity and are simply not able to protect and care for them, with tragic consequences.

"I do not want to portray the Wallaces in some sentimental or condescending way," Haruf says. "Within their own lives they have done the best that they can do, but the best they can do, unfortunately, is not good enough." In fact, Haruf’s marvelous portrait of the Wallaces, with its capacity to inspire an unsentimental empathetic response, is proof of why great fiction always outshines even the very best sociology or psychology.

"You want to write books, on the most basic level, that people are so involved with that they turn the pages and need to find out how it ends," Haruf says reluctantly, after being pressed to talk about the meaning of his work. "My intention is to write clear, simple, direct sentences and to believe that if you write clearly and cleanly enough then the reader will get what you want him or her to get. Beyond that I want people to think that they have been in the presence of real people."

And in Eventide, we certainly do.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

It is 8 a.m. in Colorado, and Kent Haruf is out getting wood from the woodpile. Haruf (rhymes with "sheriff') and his wife Cathy live in a log house at an elevation of 8,500 feet, not far from downtown Sedelia. They built the place…

FictionDebut Fiction

Dan Chaon

Interview by Alden Mudge

After publishing two unforgettable collections of short stories (Fitting Ends and National Book Award finalist Among the Missing), Dan Chaon decided several years ago that it was time to attempt a novel.

"I was very interested in the issue of adoption," he says from his home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, "and for a long time I had been thinking of writing this Hitchcock-like stranger-comes-to-town novel." Chaon (pronounced "shawn") struggled to find the best structure for the novel, but the book he eventually created, You Remind Me of Me, is a work that brims with insight and packs an extraordinary emotional punch.

When we talk about the novel on a late spring morning, the pollen faeries have whisked low over Ohio during the night, and Chaon is deep in the grip of miserable springtime allergies. He coughs and sniffles and sneezes through the conversation, gamely persevering, pausing occasionally when a sneezing fit overcomes him. Chaon's wry, croupy laugh has a sonority that seems pitch perfect for the Alfred Hitchcock reference in his conversation – as well as for the darkish humor that suffuses much of his fiction.

Chaon doesn't invoke Hitchcock at random. At Northwestern he majored in both film and English. Early on he had ideas of working in the movies, but he notes, laughing, that the film part "didn't actually work out very well. I discovered that I wasn't very good at collaboration, or at least I didn't like collaboration, because I wanted all the power myself. The nice thing about writing is that you get to do all the acting, directing, writing and, you know, even the music all by yourself."

Of course even total power doesn't ensure a smooth transition from the short story form to the novel. Chaon, who has taught in the creative writing department of Oberlin College since 1999, flailed through a scene-less first draft of what would eventually become You Remind Me of Me.

Of that initial struggle, he says, "You can go into a short story not knowing what the ending is. It's like going into a dark room and feeling around, finding the walls, and then finding the switch to turn on the lights. But with a novel, you're not going into a dark room. You're going into a dark gymnasium. Or a desert. It's much harder to just feel your way around."

Chaon finally hit upon a non-chronological structure for telling his story. You Remind Me of Me moves back and forth from the 1960s and 1970s to 1996 and 1997, with most of its action taking place in June of 1997. The result of this brilliant decision is a novel that shows just how extraordinarily strange ordinary life can be. But Chaon's narrative approach is also one that makes it difficult to talk in any depth about the story without ruining a reader's pleasure of discovery.

"With this novel I've got myself into a kind of corner because so much of the plot is withheld for the first part of the novel," Chaon says. "I think part of the pleasure of the book is figuring out what is going on and how things connect, so I really worried about how they wrote the book jacket description. I didn't want them to give away things that are more interesting if you don't know them to begin with."

So let's just say You Remind Me of Me is set mostly in the small town of St. Bonaventure, Nebraska, and concerns the intertwined lives of Jonah Doyle, a line cook who was severely mauled by his mother's dog when he was a child, and Troy Timmens, a local bartender who teeters on the brink of a life as a small-time drug dealer. Around these two orbit a constellation of sharply drawn and deeply felt characters that show Chaon to be one of the best writers of American fiction today.

"I'm interested in writing about the lives of people in their 20s and 30s who don't go to college and who find their opportunities and options limited not only by a lack of education but also by the lack of anything to do in their communities," he says. "A lot of contemporary portrayals of working class people show them as TV-watching, Twinkie-eating hicks. Part of what I wanted to show is that there is a searching intellectual and emotional life in people who aren't educated and who aren't rich."

Of his lead character, Chaon says, "Jonah in particular is somebody who really is intellectually curious and wants to better himself without necessarily bettering himself financially. He doesn't want to go to college to get a good job. He wants to go to college to learn about the world."

"Troy," Chaon continues, "is a character that doesn't appear very often in American fiction – somebody who screws up but really does have good intentions. I wanted to write about somebody who screwed up in many ways but was still a good father. Without getting too autobiographical, my own father had a very hard life in a lot of ways, but he was a really good father. He really loved being a dad. And I wanted Troy to be somebody who represented that kind of pure family love."

Like his character Troy, Chaon was adopted as an infant. "That is something that has always been in my writing – the sense of other identities or other possibilities out there. Then about eight years ago, I had a meeting with my birth father and have gotten to know him a little. As it turned out, he had felt a lot of anguish over the decision to relinquish the baby, had always sort of hoped to meet up, and had been fairly active in trying to track my whereabouts down. The meeting was a very intense and life-changing experience for me. I wanted to figure out a way to get some of the emotion of that into a novel without actually writing an autobiographical novel."

"Besides," Chaon says, laughing, "I'm aware that whenever I use something or a version of someone that could be interpreted as autobiography, then I'm in trouble because people will get offended. I'm very careful about that. As a writer you learn how to find corollaries, how to channel real life into pretend life, how to transform the real impetus into fiction. For me that's a big part of the pleasure."

After publishing two unforgettable collections of short stories (Fitting Ends and National Book Award finalist Among the Missing), Dan Chaon decided several years ago that it was time to attempt a novel.

"I was very interested in the issue of adoption," he says from his…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Michael Simon

Interview by Alden Mudge

Tucked away in the closet of Michael Simon’s New York apartment is a roll of butcher paper that measures roughly three feet wide and 16 feet long. Unfurl it and you’ll discover a detailed roadmap of the intricately woven plot of his totally absorbing first novel, Dirty Sally, a detective thriller set in Austin, Texas, during the late 1980s.

"The plot was the biggest challenge," Simon says during a call to his home. "There are so many things going on in this book. They have to interact, and they have to be real and dramatic and develop in a compelling way."

Compelling, Dirty Sally certainly is. As the novel opens, detective Dan Reles, a native New Yorker and a Jew transplanted to Austin, is coming apart at the seams after the recent death of his partner, Joey Velez, the first non-white officer to make the city’s homicide squad. Reles’ weird, angry behavior after his partner’s fatal car crash makes him the subject of an internal affairs investigation. The highly publicized case of a young prostitute killed and dismembered in an Austin crack house offers Reles a way to salvage his career. So with the clock ticking, he sets out to identify the victim – whom the squad nicknames "Dirty Sally" – and find her murderer. The problem is that his investigation leads him to a series of shady real estate development deals that involve the city’s most powerful citizens. And, as it turns out, not all of Reles’ homicide department colleagues are eager to see him redeem himself.

Simon says it took something like five years and 15 drafts to engineer the dramatic intersections of scenes and storylines that make his first Dan Reles detective novel (he is now at work on the second book in the series) so difficult to put down. To support himself during his long construction project, Simon taught writing and acting in New York for a number of years and then took a job as a proofreader for an advertising agency. For three years he wrote every morning, went to work in the afternoon, came home late at night, went to bed, then got up and did the same thing all over again. "From the night I decided to write the book, I was never half-hearted about it," he says.

As Simon tells it, he was inspired to write Dirty Sally by a conversation with his brother, who was intent on writing a military thriller and thereby achieve fame, fortune and immortality in the process. "I thought, well, there must be a way I can get a piece of this," he says, laughing. In fact, six or seven other friends also boarded the thriller-writing bandwagon. But absolutely everybody else dropped out except Simon.

Part of what sustained him was the memory of the searing experiences he’d had as a probation officer in Austin, a job he took to support himself after his graduate fellowship at the University of Texas ran out. At that time Texas, which Simon says has a long history of imposing "ridiculously long prison sentences," had explosively overcrowded prisons and, as a result, had begun undersentencing dangerous felons, churning hard cases out into the parole system. "It’s not that I particularly believe in the prison system," Simon says, "but there are some people who shouldn’t be on the street."

The effect on Simon and his coworkers was profoundly demoralizing. "I think that was the core of me wanting to write this book about law enforcement, because the work itself can be so damaging. You develop this really dark humor and you eat a lot," he says.

Simon’s main character, detective Dan Reles, doesn’t overeat but he has the dark humor of a moral hero in an immoral situation. "When Dan makes a joke it’s a dark joke," Simon says. "There are things he finds disturbing and wrong, things that fill him with contempt. So he makes a joke about it and the joke lets off some tension, but it doesn’t make him happy."

An inverted moral universe suffused with a hard dark humor is the essence of a noir thriller, and in Dirty Sally, Simon offers his own unique contribution to the genre. "The structure of a regular mystery is politically conservative," Simon says. "You have an orderly world, then one utterly extreme crime takes place and the world is totally messed up, and then a detective comes in and solves the crime and the world is fine again." Simons says the masters of noir fiction writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler – turned this convention on its head: after the crime is solved, the world is "still awful."

Thus, one of the things that’s most surprising and daring about Simon’s version of the noir thriller is that he’s decided to locate its action in sunny, optimistic Austin. "I moved to Austin in the late 1980s," Simon says. "It was this incredibly beautiful town, clean, friendly. Then I got this funny job and suddenly I was looking at the other part of town, the poor part of town. I was seeing who was living by working really, really hard and who was living by doing something illegal or illicit: dealing drugs, working as a prostitute or as a pimp. And it shook up my perspective."

So Simon paints a gritty portrait of a police department divided by racial tensions, neighborhoods decimated by drugs, and a city whose financial and political power structure promotes privatization of public resources for personal gain. Through the murk of this moral and political corruption the emotionally wounded Dan Reles tries to get his man.

For all the background he manages to weave so adroitly into his tale, Simon says he "doesn’t mean Dirty Sally to be an issue-driven drama; this isn’t a political diatribe or a bumper sticker. What I really want is for the reader to enjoy the ride."

With its intricate weave of plotlines, authentic detail and strong, no-nonsense writing, Dirty Sally does indeed offer a good ride. A very good ride.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

 

Tucked away in the closet of Michael Simon's New York apartment is a roll of butcher paper that measures roughly three feet wide and 16 feet long. Unfurl it and you'll discover a detailed roadmap of the intricately woven plot of his totally absorbing first…

Fiction

Thisbe Nissen

Interview by Alden Mudge

When Thisbe Nissen’s mother read an early draft of her daughter’s moody second novel about a disastrous summer at a dilapidated hotel in an island resort community, she called her daughter and wondered, "Am I going to have to sell the house? Am I going to get run off the island?"

The island in question is that little dot off the eastern end of Long Island called Shelter Island. That’s where Thisbe Nissen spent the happiest weekends and summers of her childhood, and it’s the emotional touchstone for her latest novel, Osprey Island.

"Place is important to me in life generally and it is really important to me in writing," the ebullient Nissen says during a call to her home in Iowa City, where she has lived since arriving ("with a sigh of relief!") in 1995 to attend graduate school at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. "I often write in order to write myself back into a place that I miss or feel inside me. So a lot of the impulse behind this book was about recreating the aura of the place where I had spent so much time as a kid. I don’t think the book is representative of the actual place. I’ve riffed off it. The idea of an island provides rich, fertile ground for a lot of stuff to happen and combust."

And combust things certainly do. Literally. A fatal fire in the laundry shack of Osprey Lodge in the first third of the novel turns what had appeared to be a sharp-eyed, satiric look at the boozy frolics of the staff at a run-down resort into a darker story of the mysteries and secrets that bind and separate members of the close-knit community of year-round Osprey Island residents.

Set in the early summer of 1988, during the frantic, preparatory weeks before Osprey Lodge opens for the season, Osprey Island at its most essential is about the return of two of the island’s prodigals. Suzy Chizek, a divorced schoolteacher on the mainland, returns to the island with her young daughter to help her parents run the Lodge for the summer. Twenty years after leaving the island – according to some to enlist and fight in Vietnam, and to others to flee to Canada and avoid the draft – Roddy Jacobs, son of the local environmentalist and women’s rights activist, returns to Osprey Island because he’s run out of places to go.

A kind of aching need draws Suzy and Roddy together. But the laundry shack fire sets off a downward spiral of events that complicates everything.

Most importantly, the fire leaves eight-year-old Squee Squire bereft of his doting mother and in the undependable hands of his hard-drinking father Lance, who is the complicated, malevolent force in this tale and, it turns out, was the high school nemesis of both Roddy and Suzy. Squee turns for comfort and guidance to the quiet, competent Roddy, and the depiction of the relationship that develops between these two characters is one of the great charms of Osprey Island.

"For a long time as a writer I shied away from male characters," Nissen says. "My fiction always had absent fathers and dead husbands, because I didn’t know what to do with men. But Roddy was the character I spent the most time on. He was the centerpiece of the book, and writing about him never felt hard. His relationship with Squee was so organic to me that I’m not sure where it really came from. A tenderness grew up between them. I just saw it all happening in my head. At the risk of sounding psychotic," Nissen adds, laughing, "Roddy and Squee were having a relationship, and I was scrambling to write it all down."

Nissen is also exceptionally good at social dissection, deftly portraying both the conflicts among year-rounders and their strangely unified front in the face of the summer people. Nissen attributes her slightly comic insider’s understanding to a "very brief!" stint working at a Shelter Island hotel.

With its darker storyline and its larger set of characters, Osprey Island marks a departure or evolution from the tender, humorous tone and two-person focus of Nissen’s well-regarded first novel, The Good People of New York. "I really wanted to do something narratively different," she says. "I had read John Irving’s Cider House Rules and was amazed by his ability to have this omniscient narrator hovering over the narrative then swooping down into close perspective on a lot of characters, and I really wanted to try something with a bigger cast of characters."

Nissen projects her characters against a backdrop of natural island life, particularly bird life, and mythology. "Sometimes I think I write solely in order to do research," Nissen jokes. "I really, really, like doing research! I read somewhere that the osprey had been misnamed in terms of the myths its genus and species names come from. So I got to go back and read all the myths that the names did come from and then the myths that the names should have come from. And I thought, oh my God, there are all these ties in these myths to the story in my head! So I started weaving them in."

Thus a characteristic, if hidden, playfulness laps along the shores of Nissen’s rather somber Osprey Island. "I have such an instinct for letting love prevail that I have to fight against sappiness and the novelistic desire to wrap things up too neatly," Nissen says. "I’m a lot more interested in life than in novelistic tie-ups. At the same time, I’m too hopeful, I have too much of a desire to put hope in the world to leave the ending entirely bleak."

Nissen adds, "Often you hear writers talking about how painful it is to write. If I felt that way, I wouldn’t do it, because I care too much about the day-to-day, moment-to-moment, quality of my life. I like the act of writing. Writing is how I make sense of the world."

So Thisbe Nissen told her mother not to worry about Osprey Island after all. "I think the locals will embrace you."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

When Thisbe Nissen's mother read an early draft of her daughter's moody second novel about a disastrous summer at a dilapidated hotel in an island resort community, she called her daughter and wondered, "Am I going to have to sell the house? Am I going…

Fiction

Mark Spragg

Interview by Alden Mudge

A surprising sidebar to the publication of Mark Spragg’s exceptional second novel, An Unfinished Life, is the fact that the movie version of the story will be in theaters at Christmas. That’s a breathtakingly short leap from print to screen, and the explanation is that Spragg and his wife, Virginia, began working on the screenplay before the book was finished.

During the long gestation of the novel – over six years and "hundreds of hours of road trips" that Mark and Virginia made from their home in Cody, Wyoming, to visit friends throughout the West – the pair talked ceaselessly about the characters and events that were inhabiting Spragg’s thoughts.

"It became a sort of wonderful puzzle to hit a point in the narrative and wonder how it could be satisfied in a novel and how it could be satisfied in a film," Spragg says during a call to the cabin he owns outside of Red Lodge in the Montana Rockies. Eventually Virginia, a therapist with no prior screenwriting experience, decided to take first crack at the film script. "It was utterly amazing," Spragg says. "She broke every rule I had in my mind about how writers develop." During pauses between drafts of the novels, Spragg worked on the script, too.

Spragg, who has wanted to write novels since his childhood on his parents’ dude ranch in the remote Wapiti valley at the far edge of Yellowstone Park, worked briefly and unhappily as a scriptwriter in the 1980s. "I used to snowshoe out from my little cabin on the North Fork of the Shoshone dragging a disk sled with my luggage out to the main highway where I had a three-quarter-ton pickup chained up. It would get me into Cody and then I’d take a little prop plane to Denver and then a jet into Los Angeles for a script conference at Disney. I remember walking down the boardwalk in Santa Monica. I hadn’t seen a human being out of wool and down for two or three months and there would be these young women skating by in their bikinis. It was like landing on another planet."

Collaboration with his wife on the film script of An Unfinished Life proved far less alien and far more fruitful than Spragg’s previous movie business experiences. Directed by Lasse Hallström, the film stars Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez. The movie’s imminent release is no reason to forgo the many pleasures of reading Spragg’s novel.

An Unfinished Life is, in the first place, the story of Einar Gilkyson’s bitterness. Spragg relates that for several years his daydreams and night dreams were frequented by "an older man sitting tightly in a chair on a porch, scowling, sort of screwed down tightly in his bitterness, with a mob of half-feral cats about him. So my wife and I started to talk about him, and inevitably the question arose: why is this old man so embittered?"

Einar’s bitterness, readers quickly learn, stems from the untimely death of his 21-year-old son Griffin in an automobile accident about a decade before the novel opens. Since then, Einar has retreated into isolation on his ranch outside of Ishawooa, Wyoming. His main reason for continuing to live at all is to care for his oldest friend, Mitch Bradley, a black cowboy who has lived and worked with Einar for about 50 years and who was grotesquely mauled by a bear some years before and is now confined to the ranch bunkhouse.

Spragg says he realized quite early that An Unfinished Life was "going to deal with forgiveness" and, with that theme in mind, he could "begin to populate the novel." Einar’s opportunity to practice forgiveness comes when his daughter-in-law Jean shows up uninvited and unwelcome at the ranch after running out of places to go. Jean was at the wheel when her husband was killed, and Einar blames her for the death of his son; quite frankly, he is not about to forgive her.

And Jean is not about to forgive herself either. She has spent the past decade working out her guilt over Griffin’s death in a series of abusive relationships. In fact when she arrives at the ranch, her most recent boyfriend, the malevolent Roy Winston, is tracking her across the country. Jean’s one saving grace is her nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter Griff.

This child, with her mixture of tentativeness and bravery, wisdom and innocence, is Spragg’s most shining creation. "I really like this kid a lot, as you can probably tell," he says. "She’s a very brave child, a child who’s required to act older than she is, but who has the same fears and dreams and hopes as other children of that age." The relationship that slowly and excruciatingly develops between Griff and her grandfather, both of whom are astonished by the existence of the other, is one of the marvels of An Unfinished Life.

But in fact, Spragg demonstrates throughout his novel that he is exceptionally good at portraying all sorts of human relationships. The relationship between Einar and Mitch, he says, is particularly important to him. "I hate the homophobic overreaction in our society [that says] if two men honestly love one another . . . that somehow must be sexual. Einar and Mitch are two men who honestly love one another, who have lived together and worked together and struggled together and who would literally – not figuratively – die for one another because their love is so profound. And they’re both heterosexual men."

Spragg writes his novel with direct, tangible, unadorned but somehow poetic language that will remind some readers of Kent Haruf’s writing. In fact, the two men and their wives have been close friends since the writers shared honors at the Mountain ∧ Plains Booksellers Awards some years ago (Haruf for Plainsong and Spragg for Where Rivers Change Direction, his marvelous memoir of growing up on his family’s isolated ranch).

By the end of his remarkable novel of grief, anger, bitterness and forgiveness, Spragg has taken readers into the sensibilities, thoughts and histories of his characters in a way that a movie simply cannot do. So see the movie if you like, but most definitely read the novel.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

 

A surprising sidebar to the publication of Mark Spragg's exceptional second novel, An Unfinished Life, is the fact that the movie version of the story will be in theaters at Christmas. That's a breathtakingly short leap from print to screen, and the explanation is…

Fiction

Russell Banks

Interview by Alden Mudge

A third of the way into Russell Banks’ powerful new novel, The Darling, Hannah Musgrave travels to a remote tribal village in Liberia to meet the family of Woodrow Sundiata. This is in the mid-1970s, and Hannah, the daughter of a prominent, liberally active American doctor and writer, is hiding out in West Africa under an assumed name, fleeing authorities she believes are pursuing her for her radical activities in the Weather Underground. From almost the moment of Hannah’s arrival in Liberia, alone and fearful, Woodrow, whom Banks describes in conversation as "a village boy who made good," has been kind, solicitous and helpful to her in very practical ways. As the two are driven out to the village in the government car that Woodrow’s status as a midlevel bureaucrat affords, they each are considering the idea of marriage.

When they arrive at last at the village, Woodrow is swallowed up by the joyous reception for the favored son who has done so well in the nation’s capital. Hannah is abandoned to her own devices. When she finally finds her way into the family’s inner sanctum, she is offered with great ceremony the finest celebratory delicacy, "bush meat," which she suddenly realizes is roasted chimpanzee. Hannah refuses the meat and then flees the village, returning to the car in confusion and anger to wait overnight for Woodrow’s visit with his family to end.

In a novel that ranges over 30 years of Hannah’s life, from the 1970s to just after the September 11 terrorist attacks – including her doomed efforts to save endangered chimpanzees, her strained relationships with her parents, her seemingly cool relationship with Woodrow and their two sons, her experiences in the Weather Underground and her heartrending experiences of Liberia’s horrifying slide from an apparently stable, American-style democracy into the viciously brutal regimes of Presidents Doe and Taylor – this moment at the village and its chilly aftermath is a small one. Yet such is the brilliance, nuance and power of its scenes that readers will feel in their bones the confluence of the perhaps contradictory emotional, psychological, social and political forces at work here. They might wish to turn to the author to ask, what does all this mean?

But this is exactly the sort of question Russell Banks feels unable to answer. "I suppose I can interpret these scenes as a particularly well informed reader," he says, reluctantly, during a call to his writing studio in the northeastern corner of the Adirondack Mountains near the Vermont border. "When I got to writing that specific scene, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I knew she would end up being offered the most luxurious dish available, but I didn’t know how she would deal with it. Then her character took over and she refused it. I was being driven by her character and the situation and the personal and social histories that led up to it."

Banks, who has written such highly regarded works of fiction as Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone and, most recently, Cloudsplitter – his dazzling fictional portrait of abolitionist John Brown and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 – says he sees himself not so much as speaking through his characters as listening to them. "In Hannah’s case, from the very beginning, I decided that I was her very close trusted male friend. I imagined myself sitting on the porch with her day in and day out or at a table over beers or coffee listening to her tell me her story."

Which is not to say that Banks’ own opinions have nothing to do with his creation of Hannah Musgrave and the cast of characters who populate her story. "I have very strong opinions," Banks says. "And they naturally inform how I see the world and, then, how the world will end up being represented on the page. But I don’t sit down and write a story in order to make a point. That would be a lousy story."

Percolating unobtrusively beneath the surface of the novel, adding richness to The Darling’s powerful brew, is Banks’ longstanding interest in issues of race. "The more I see and understand American history and American consciousness, whether it’s white or black or Asian or Native American or Latino, the more strongly I believe race is the central story of America. If America has a single master narrative, it’s the history of race. I can’t think about American history without going there," he says.

But he quickly adds, "That’s kind of an intellectual process. Obviously there’s something more personal involved in it for me, and that’s a harder thing for me to nail down and articulate."

Banks grew up in a white, working-class family in northern New England but "traveled to the South very early on and lived in its cities and went to college in the South in the civil rights era." At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he was one of the founders of the local chapter of the activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). But he never followed the more radical path of his character Hannah Musgrave. Instead he became a one of the best fiction writers in America.

Musing on his own experiences in the antiwar and civil rights movements after completing the exhausting work on his longest novel Cloudsplitter, Banks began thinking about the fates of "women in the movement who had gone on to far more radical positions" than he had. Banks soon realized that "these women had been largely misrepresented . . . and that the psychology of a such a person and the idea of dedicating your life to certain ideals . . . hadn’t really been chronicled in a serious way in fiction."

Thus the powerful, perplexing, riveting, memorable character of Hannah Musgrave was born. Back in the U.S., in the post-9/11 present, she looks back on her experiences in Africa with a mixture of anger and regret. In the end, the reader is likely to agree with Banks, who declares that Hannah is "a person who has lived through tragic events and has been deeply marked by them, a person who has suffered a great deal. But not as a victim. She’s simply too powerful to think of as a victim."

 

A third of the way into Russell Banks' powerful new novel, The Darling, Hannah Musgrave travels to a remote tribal village in Liberia to meet the family of Woodrow Sundiata. This is in the mid-1970s, and Hannah, the daughter of a prominent, liberally active…

Biography

Joseph J. Ellis

Interview by Alden Mudge

Like many of us, historian Joseph Ellis long considered George Washington a distant, almost unapproachable icon, "aloof and silent, like the man in the moon." Then Ellis began research for a chapter about Washington's farewell address in Founding Brothers, his brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller about America's revolutionary generation. And he discovered sides of Washington—the man, not the monument we've made of him—that surprised him.

"There's a fundamentally different sensibility at work here," Ellis says, comparing Washington to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson during a call to his home in Amherst, Massachusetts. "It's harder to write about because Adams and Jefferson give you the words themselves, whereas Washington's basic convictions were shaped by experience and action. He is less introspective. He doesn't give you the same language."

What Washington does pass down to us is voluminous, mostly official correspondence, not especially revealing daily diaries and documents from his life as a self-made member of the Virginia gentry, leader in the fight for American independence and first president of the United States. Alas, Martha Washington ordered their personal correspondence destroyed, closing off the main avenue to a more intimate look at Washington the man. The Washington Papers, as the remaining the assemblage is called, are now nearly completely edited and annotated, and Ellis uses these papers to extraordinarily good effect as the backbone of his highly readable, often provocative, human-scale book that is intended to be, he writes in his preface, "a fresh portrait focused tightly on Washington's character."

Ellis fleshes out His Excellency by dipping judiciously into an ocean of new scholarship on the American Revolution, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, slavery and colonial and early American history in general. The resulting portrait seems to surprise even Ellis himself.

"I was most surprised with how ambitious Washington was," Ellis says, sounding almost bemused. "I didn't expect him to be as gargantuan an ego. We think of Benjamin Franklin as the ultimate self-made man in early American history, but Washington was equivalently self-made. That gave him incredible drive. He came from virtually nowhere and made himself into something, often on the basis of sheer physical presence and physicality. Adams said later that whenever they met to decide who was going to lead them, they always picked Washington because he was always the tallest man in the room. Well, he was not just the tallest man in the room; he was the most ambitious man in the room. And amongst a crew of people like Jefferson and Adams and Madison and especially Hamilton, to say that Washington was the most ambitious is to say something."

Washington also had his eye on how history would judge him, which helped make him the precedent-setting master of restraint that we hail even today. "Power makes us uncomfortable," Ellis notes. "But in the end, Washington is the one person you can trust with it, and he proves that he is worthy of that trust by surrendering power."

Part of Ellis' art in His Excellency lies in his ability to dramatize for the reader how the outcomes of historical events that now seem fated in fact teetered precariously on the edge of disaster: the Revolutionary War, for example, could easily have been lost had Washington not been able to learn hard lessons from the mistakes of his early, instinctively aggressive strategy; the very idea of an American nation could have vanished with the wind had Washington not thrown his presence and prestige behind the Constitutional Convention. Even the book's title makes a nodding reference to the fact that some revolutionaries expected Washington to be ruler for life. It was all new ground, and Washington's unique character—molded essentially, Ellis argues, by experiences in the Revolutionary War – set the precedents that shape our hopes and expectations for America to this day.

The other part of Ellis' art is, quite simply, that he writes extraordinarily well, and by hand. "I'm an old-fashioned writer in the sense that I'm technologically incompetent," Ellis says. "To me there's a connection between the muscular movement of the hand and the cognitive process itself."

Ellis partly credits teaching history to undergraduates at Mount Holyoke College with helping "purge my writing of scholarly jargon . . . and making me find ways to articulate complicated ideas in accessible language. I think for most historians the research is two-thirds of the work and the writing another third; for me it's the opposite."

Ellis works at home in a large upstairs office, usually surrounded by his Jack Russell terrier, a cat and a golden retriever. Obviously, his office has no computer, and Ellis says he's never figured out how to use research assistants, so he does all his own research. Sometimes his 13-year-old son Alex (Ellis also has two grown sons from a previous marriage) will slip into the quiet of his office to do homework and leave behind notes for his father, reading "Dad, go to it! My college depends on your success."

"In the same way that there's got to be a seamless connection between the way you write and what you're trying to express," Ellis says, "there needs to be an interconnection between the writing, the teaching, the family, the dogs, the kids—the rhythms of life."

Then, reflecting on the book he has so recently completed, Ellis says, "I hope His Excellency gives you a sense of the character of this person both as a public figure and as a human being. Washington's was an elemental personality. It was not Jeffersonian in its intricacies and contradictions, but the judgments he made in several key decisions—about the war, about the Constitution, about the presidency—all ended up being right. That's impressive. And it was not an accident."

 

Like many of us, historian Joseph Ellis long considered George Washington a distant, almost unapproachable icon, "aloof and silent, like the man in the moon." Then Ellis began research for a chapter about Washington's farewell address in Founding Brothers, his brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller…

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