Alden Mudge

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…

HistoryBlack History

Adam Hochschild

Interview by Alden Mudge

Adam Hochschild has the rare ability to take seemingly dull, dry or depressing events of history and turn them into a riveting narrative that both deepens a reader's understanding of the past and directly connects that past to the present. Hochschild did this in his critically acclaimed 1998 bestseller, King Leopold's Ghost, an astonishing account of King Leopold II of the Belgians' reign of terror in Africa at the beginning of the 20th century and the efforts to stop it. He does so again in his absorbing chronicle of the 50-year campaign to end the British slave trade, Bury the Chains.

"This story is really a writer's dream," Hochschild says during a call to his home in San Francisco. Hochshild was cofounder of the progressive Mother Jones magazine and now teaches writing in the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives with his wife of many years, the sociologist and writer Arlie Russell Hochschild. "It actually surprises me that there have not been more books for a popular audience on what is such an extraordinary drama."

Bury the Chains begins on May 22, 1787, when a group of men gathered in a London printing shop and launched "the first grassroots human rights campaign," which had the then-impossible goal of eliminating slavery. Why impossible? As Hochschild points out, "at the end of the eighteenth century, well over three quarters of the people alive were in bondage of one kind or another." Not only that, slave labor was absolutely essential to the global trade in sugar, and sugar was to the British Empire then what oil is to the American economic empire now. A world without slavery was unthinkable to almost everyone. And yet on March 27, 1807, King George III signed a bill banning the entire British slave trade. And on August 1, 1838, "nearly 800,000 black men, women and children throughout the British Empire officially became free."

The long effort to ban slavery was not one steady upward climb to victory. There were frustrating periods of stasis or backsliding, when the movement seemed derailed, if not dead. The war with Napolean's France entirely stalled efforts year after year as the two global superpowers of the day battled for economic advantage ("war fever is always the enemy of social reform," Hochschild notes).

Hochschild uses these pauses in the course of events to great dramatic effect. He draws on the "fine, fine scholarly writing" of historians like David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher and biographer Ellen Gibson Wilson to move his narrative along the slave trade circuit – to Sierra Leone, for example, which was a central shipping point of the slave trade, and, strangely enough, the site of a visionary attempt to build a homeland for escaped American slaves promised their freedom by the British during the American Revolution (included among their numbers was one of George Washington's former slaves). Or to Haiti, site of a brutal, successful slave rebellion that helped loosen the grip of slavery in the British Empire and has had repercussions that resound to this day. All of this makes for fascinating, provocative reading.

But it is Hochschild's portraits of the persistent, sometimes eccentric, and no doubt frequently annoying activists who led this movement – or were arrayed against it – that makes Bury the Chains such a fascinating read. Hochschild says he originally intended to write a biography of John Newton, author of the song, "Amazing Grace," a former slave-ship captain turned preacher who, legend says, had a change of heart and became a champion of the antislavery movement. "I'm always intrigued by people who change sides," Hochschild says, "in either direction."

The problem was, the legend was not quite true. It wasn't until Newton was approached by a man named Thomas Clarkson that he lent his considerable prestige to the antislavery movement. The little-known Clarkson is in fact the singular hero of this account, and one of the great contributions of Bury the Chains is that it brings the achievements of the courageous, indefatigable and remarkably media-savvy Clarkson to a popular audience.

Other central figures were Olaudah Equiano, a former slave whose influential memoir was a bestseller of the day; the eccentric gadfly Granville Sharp, who invented a harp with a double row of strings, played in a family orchestra that sailed around England on a barge and brought a host of not-so-frivolous lawsuits against miscreant slave owners and slave-ship captains; and William Wilberforce, the era's most famous orator, a conservative member of Parliament who was persuaded to adopt the progressive antislavery cause, and through the purposeful re-editing of history by his two powerful sons was for years considered the most important personality in the movement. But perhaps the most fascinating portrait of all is of the profligate Duke of Clarence, an intemperate, boorish womanizer and a foe of the antislavery movement, who to the movement's consternation, became King William IV in 1830.

Throughout Bury the Chains, Hochschild maintains an awareness of how history is written and rewritten. " All countries have their comforting national myths," he says. That Wilberforce rather than Clarkson was for so long thought to be the central figure of the movement "fitted what most people in England wanted to think: that ending slavery was the work of noble, very religious and respectable people."

Hochschild, himself a veteran of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, strongly believes there are lessons to be learned from reading history. For today's activists, he points to three particular lessons from the experiences of the British antislavery movement: first is the importance of coalitions; the antislavery movement ultimately succeeded because it built an effective religious coalition of Quakers and Anglicans, he says. Second is the need to "ceaselessly search for different kinds of media to get a message across." Clarkson and others "placed a diagram of the close quarters of a slave ship in pubs all over England, and people were shocked and moved by this." And "the third, and most important thing I learned is to never give up. They were always facing very discouraging moments. But they never gave up."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Adam Hochschild has the rare ability to take seemingly dull, dry or depressing events of history and turn them into a riveting narrative that both deepens a reader's understanding of the past and directly connects that past to the present. Hochschild did this in his…

Fiction

Jonathan Safran Foer

Interview by Alden Mudge

Not long after the publication of his brilliant and widely acclaimed first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer was named one of the 50 most loathsome New Yorkers by a local literary weekly. That's a stunning mound of abuse to be piled on a writer who was barely a whisker past 25. And it leads one to wonder what further such plaudits lie in wait for an older (he's now 28!), wiser and far more accomplished Foer now that he has published an even more beautiful and brilliant second novel called Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Most loathsome man in the nation? In the hemisphere? The universe? The stinging arrow of literary envy will have to arc extremely high and incredibly long to bring to earth the soaring flight of Foer's very sad and very funny story of nine-year-old Oskar Schell and his grief for his father, a victim of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Fortunately for BookPage, if an Ogre Foer exists, he is nowhere in evidence during a call to the author's home in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Instead there is merely the polite, charmingly elusive Jonathan Safran Foer, a novelist more likely to answer questions with anecdotes about the lives of poets and painters than with bold, self-regarding statements about his own life and work. Foer is married to the writer Nicole Krauss, who will publish her own second novel later in the spring. They have a dog, whose sudden barking a few minutes into the conversation alerts Foer to the arrival of the meter reader.

"A glimpse behind the scenes," Foer gasps as he struggles to cradle the phone, hold the dog and buzz the gas man in.

Ironically, Foer has just been talking about how important random events are to his work. He has invoked the poets Joseph Brodsky and W.H. Auden and confessed that he likes to write on the move. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, he has noted, was mostly composed in the New York Public Library, at coffee shops and in the homes of friends. "There's something about being out in public and open to the accidents of the world that can be very useful in writing," he continues after the gas man leaves. "I like keeping the environments fresh; it somehow keeps the imagination fresh."

"Fresh." It's an excellent word for Foer's new novel. It describes the language he uses. It suggests a reason for the unreasoning elation a reader feels reaching the fulfilling end of young Oskar's great quest and adventure through the streets of New York. It even describes the look and feel of the book itself.

"A book is a little sculpture," Foer says. "The choice of fonts, the size of the margins, the typography all influence the way the book is read. I consciously wanted to think about that, wanted to have the book really be something you hold in your hands, not just a vehicle for words. So I was involved in every step of the design, right down to how the book is stamped underneath the dust jacket."

Foer, the casual browser will quickly notice, also makes unusual use of photographs and graphics in the text of his novel. Why? "One answer is: why not?" Foer says. "Why don't novels have these things? Why is literature less accepting of the full spectrum of the arts than, say, painting or music? It's not at all strange to see writing within a painting? Why is it so strange to see painting within writing?"

Foer quickly adds, "I also think using images makes sense for this particular book. First because the way children see the world is that they sort of take these mental snapshots; they hoard all these images that they remember 20 or 40 years later. And also because September 11 was the most visually documented event in human history. When we think of those events, we remember certain images planes going into the buildings, people falling, the towers collapsing. That's how we experience it; that's how we remember it. And I want to be true to that experience. One of the important things a novelist does is choose what to look at, what to examine, because the more time you spend looking at something the more sensitive you are to it. . . . I think it's very dangerous to avoid looking at war, at violence. So I really wanted to explicitly look at those things in this book, not only through the writing, which I tried to make as visual and direct as I could, but also through these images."

Foer entices a reader to gaze intently at these troubling issues by projecting the story of Oskar's quest to unlock the secret of his father's life and death against the story of Oskar's grandparents' struggles to create their own lives after surviving the horrific Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II. The brilliance of Foer's storytelling lies in its poignant, wide-hearted, utterly seductive humor. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close brings a reader to that high level of seriousness that only the very best comedy can achieve.

Still, the singular thrill of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is, quite frankly, the utterly engaging and utterly vulnerable character of Oskar Schell. "I felt very, very, very strongly sympathetic with Oskar," Foer says. "There's a way in which he has no skin. I don't mean that he's thin-skinned. There are just no boundaries between himself and the world. Everything is personal and everything that is personal is universal. That's how kids experience the world, and that's how this kid in particular experiences the world." Through the force of his own compassion, Oskar eventually grows up.

And beyond that, Foer will not—or cannot—go. "I'm not at all sure I have the most interesting interpretation of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," he says almost shyly. "One of the nice things about sending a book into the world is that there are so many smart readers who see things in the book that maybe I didn't intend but that now become part of its meaning. For me, the shortest description I could possibly give of my book is the book. If I could have thought of another way to say it or to describe it, I would have done that instead of what I wrote. "

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

RELATED CONTENT
Interview with Nicole Krauss (Foer's wife) for The History of Love
 
Eating Animals trailer 

 

Not long after the publication of his brilliant and widely acclaimed first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer was named one of the 50 most loathsome New Yorkers by a local literary weekly. That's a stunning mound of abuse to be piled on a…

Fiction

Nicole Krauss

Interview by Alden Mudge

For her inventive second novel, The History of Love, Nicole Krauss set herself "two small personal rules." The first was that she wouldn't do any research for the book. "I just didn't want to," Krauss says firmly in a soft, lilting voice during a call to her home in Brooklyn's Park Slope, where she lives with her husband, the writer Jonathan Safran Foer. In her well-regarded first novel, Man Walks into a Room, Krauss had written of the experiences of Samson Greene, a man whose memory is erased after removal of a tumor. It was a book that had a whiff of research but nary a hint of autobiography within its pages. "The second time around," Krauss says, "I felt very thoughtful about what kind of writer I want to be. I didn't want to write a novel just to write a novel or just to be a writer. I decided to write something for myself. I wanted to really use the things that I know."

Krauss' second rule was that she would never let herself be bored. "Writing the first novel, I thought it was sometimes necessary to write though a boring moment just to move the characters from point A to B. This time I felt that if I was bored, the reader would be bored. So I decided that as soon as something felt a little dull I would invent a new story, vignette or character."

In the hands of a less skillful writer, Krauss' rules might have blended about as well as oil and water. But in The History of Love, Krauss achieves an uplifting alchemy of surprise and recognition. The result is a haunting novel that has generated considerable excitement even before its publication. The New Yorker ran a much talked-about excerpt in 2004, and movie rights have been sold to Warner Bros., with Alfonso Cuar—n (best known for Y Tu Mamá También) set to direct. Foreign rights have also been sold in nearly 20 countries.

Krauss, 30, a Stanford graduate who also studied at Oxford, achieved acclaim as a poet before turning to fiction in 2002 with the publication of her first novel. Though her marriage to Foer (author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) is the source of considerable curiosity in literary circles, she prefers not to discuss it obviously reluctant to be seen as capitalizing on her husband's renown.

With The History of Love, however, Krauss proves that her literary reputation can stand on its own. The novel focuses mainly on the slowly converging stories of Leo Gursky and Alma Singer. Gursky is an 80-year-old retired locksmith in New York, a lonely survivor of a Nazi massacre in the Polish village where he grew up 60 years before the novel opens. Alma is a 14-year-old girl whose father has recently died, whose mother shields herself from loneliness by working without stop as a literary translator, and whose nine-year-old brother, Bird (over whom she vigilantly watches), thinks he might be the Messiah.

Leo and Alma—and all the many other characters in this slender, densely woven novel—are connected across time and space by the impact on their lives of an almost-forgotten novel called The History of Love.

"In the beginning," Krauss says, "this book was very much about writing. I was thinking, well, how many readers does one really need? If it reaches one person and changes her life, is that enough? Or two people? The idea that there is a book that has a print run of under 2,000 and that nobody reads but in the end a single copy of it connects and changes all these lives was very moving to me," she says. "I write because I want to reach people and have the kind of conversation with them that can happen only through a book. It's one of the most beautiful conversations there is, I think. So as the book progressed, I realized that I was writing as much about reading and being a reader as about writing. And I became unabashed about occasionally putting in lines from all the writers I love."

This undercurrent of reference and allusion, even when unannounced, buoys and intensifies the story Krauss tells. Yes, The History of Love is about writing and reading. But more importantly and more essentially, it is about love and loss. As Krauss says, "It's what we know and have experienced of love that give depth and shape to our solitude. The book is about the necessity of imagining in the space of loss and of filling silence with made-up things: thoughts, feelings, images. Everyone in the book invents things to survive."

Interestingly, Krauss found it easier to invent Leo than Alma, whose life experiences were closer to – but not the same as – her own. "I struggled with Alma's voice, I think, because I remember very well what it was like to be 14 years old and someone not unlike her," Krauss says. "It took me a long time to feel I could abandon the sometimes dull circumstances of my own experiences and freely imagine this character. With Leo, conversely, I felt immediately and totally at home in his voice. There was never a question of wondering what would an old man from Poland do here. I always felt with him that I was writing about myself, as strange as that may seem."

Krauss dedicates her novel to her grandparents, "who taught me the opposite of disappearing," and includes photographs of them in the book. Like her character Leo Gursky, Krauss' grandparents fled Europe before the start of World War II. "I put in the photographs and the dedication line because of the scene in the book where Leo . . . realizes that he has lost the ability to be seen by other people. He is a person who thinks a lot about his invisibility. And for that reason I wanted to use passport photographs of my grandparents," she says.

"In my mind the opposite of disappearing is survival. The book is shot through with odes to survival, to the strength it takes to survive, and to the joy of those who have survived," Krauss says. "My grandparents are people who love life. Every conversation I remember having with them as a child was about life—not about tragedy, not about history, not about what had happened to their families—but simply about living."

At the end of the novel, Leo's and Alma's lives unexpectedly converge. And The History of Love becomes not simply a story of love and loss but also a moving history of survival, visibility and the joy of living.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

For her inventive second novel, The History of Love, Nicole Krauss set herself "two small personal rules." The first was that she wouldn't do any research for the book. "I just didn't want to," Krauss says firmly in a soft, lilting voice during a call…

Memoir

James Frey

Interview by Alden Mudge

James Frey has never been shy about his towering literary ambition. Since he burst onto the scene in 2003 with A Million Little Pieces, the best-selling, highly charged memoir dissecting his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, Frey has ruffled feathers and raised temperatures by saying things like:

"When I decided I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t get into it to be a guy who sold 15 books and got a review in the local paper. I’m in this to be one of the great writers of my time."

What is often left out of the accounts of Frey’s supposed overreaching is what he usually says next: "I don’t say that I am one of the great writers, which I think is an important distinction. But that’s the ambition, for sure. I want to be read in 75 years."

Whether Frey’s new book, My Friend Leonard, will be read in 75 years is, of course, impossible to say. But it will certainly be read – widely read – this year. While somewhat different in tone from Pieces (there is more humor and less rage, for example) My Friend Leonard is just as compelling as the first book, with the same electrifying narrative energy, stylistic daring and atmosphere of emotional risk.

My Friend Leonard takes up about where Pieces left off. Out of recovery, Frey does a stint in jail for a past drug conviction, then sets out to rebuild his life. He is advised and assisted at critical junctures by his friend Leonard, a larger-than-life Las Vegas gangster 30 years his senior whom he met in rehab and who has decided to treat Frey like the son he never had. Leonard helps Frey financially by employing him occasionally as a bagman for some of his enterprises. He guides Frey through the purchase of his first Picasso. He uses a little unfriendly persuasion when Frey’s neighbor seems about to turn murderous after an incident between their dogs. Skeptical readers might wonder if Leonard is a sort of idealized, if hard-bitten, fairy godfather. But Frey says otherwise.

"Did the stuff in the book really happen? Yeah, it did. My girlfriend killed herself the way I wrote it. Leonard helped me the way I said he helped me, died the way he died. The events in the book are the events of my life. But that’s not to say that I didn’t pick and choose what to use and how to use it. The goal was to write a great book, to create something that somebody will feel good about having read. It’s a sort of juggling act, where I have to be true to the events and the people, but where I also know that I am writing a book and that I have to be true to what the book should be," Frey says in a gravelly voice during a telephone interview.

The 35-year-old Frey and his wife, Maya, a creative director at a New York advertising agency, had their first child, a daughter, in December and are in the midst of moving to an apartment "that is a bit more baby-friendly" in New York’s Tribeca district. Frey takes the call at the home of friends, and as he talks, he moves from room to room ahead of his friends’ noisy family life.

"One thing that’s always been important to me is that nobody who has ever been in one of my books has ever had a problem with anything I’ve written," Frey continues. "They’ve never disputed my version of events or felt offended by it, even when I didn’t write about them in a positive way. Which means something."

At the very least it means that Frey is exceptionally good at conveying the emotional truths behind the events he relates. His portrait of his friendship with Leonard is deeply resonant and offers a fuller human portrait of a gangster than you’re likely to find anywhere else.

What is most striking – and most difficult to describe – is Frey’s manner of telling his tale. Here, as in A Million Little Pieces, Frey’s style is raw, visceral and emotionally electric. Frey says that when he set out to be a writer he studied writers like Hemingway, Henry Miller and Baudelaire and noted that each had a voice, a signature style that sounded like no one else’s. He deliberately set out to develop a recognizable style all his own.

"People read my books and think because they flow very easily and very simply that it must just come out that way," Frey says. "It doesn’t. I work very hard and I’m very, very deliberate and methodical in how I work."

In fact, Frey says one of the things that sets him apart from "smarter or more naturally gifted" aspiring writers of his generation is his "ability to sit there for 10 hours and get done what I need to get done, without ever losing confidence that I can do it. And to do that day after day after day after day after day."

So it’s no real surprise to learn that since completing the manuscript of My Friend Leonard, Frey has finished the screenplay for A Million Little Pieces, which will be filmed later this year, and written the script for a TV pilot for Fox. He is currently working on a screenplay for Paramount. Earlier this year, he wrote introductions for British reissues of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.

Miller’s bold presentation of his life in his books had a powerful philosophical influence on Frey’s development as a writer, just as his friend Leonard had a powerful influence on his development as a human being. "I’ve learned a lot of things from a lot of people." Frey says. "And they all boil down to similar things: you have to be willing to hurt for what you want. You have to risk, to gain. You have to be willing to feel pain and deal with pain. You have to decide what you want out of life and be willing to pay the consequences if you want to have a great life. It’s worth it. And you’re a sucker if you don’t."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

James Frey has never been shy about his towering literary ambition. Since he burst onto the scene in 2003 with A Million Little Pieces, the best-selling, highly charged memoir dissecting his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, Frey has ruffled feathers and raised temperatures…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Jeff Lindsay

Interview by Alden Mudge

Back in the late 1970s, when Jeff Lindsay was in graduate school in theater at Carnegie Mellon, he had a directing teacher from Romania who had a concept called "illegal laughter." "Ve are making the audience to laugh," the funny, theatrical Lindsay says, imitating the accent of his former professor, "and then ve are making them to feel they haff broken the law for doing it."

That, essentially, is the effect Lindsay strives for in Dearly Devoted Dexter, his second detective thriller featuring Dexter Morgan, who assumes the guise of a "mild-mannered forensic lab rat," working by day as a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police department, but by night as a serial killer, albeit one who only goes after bad guys. Here, as in his well-regarded first novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Lindsay achieves his ends with a pleasing mix of grisly description, devious wit and clever wordplay.

"I want somebody to laugh, then feel the goose bumps on the back of their neck," Lindsay says, elaborating on his premise during a call to his home near Sarasota, Florida. "To go: that’s funny – who’s behind me?"

It takes a great deal of skill to provoke simultaneously such divergent responses in a reader. One reason Lindsay is able to pull it off is that he makes the monstrous Dexter understandable, even appealing. Dexter tells his story from his own inimitable perspective. And part of that perspective is his frequent assertion that he is not actually a human being. Of course Dexter only gets involved in the hunt for the murderous Dr. Danco, a veteran of the United States’ covert operations in El Salvador now bent on revenge against those he thinks have betrayed him, because Dexter’s sister, Deb, a Miami police officer, begs him to help her rescue her boyfriend from Danco’s clutches. And then there is the darkly farcical scene – Lindsay’s favorite – in which Dexter stumbles into becoming engaged to his girlfriend Rita. But why ruin a reader’s shocked laughter by saying too much about Lindsay’s deft storytelling?

Of his main character’s belief that he is not human, Lindsay says, "There has to have been a time when instead of saying, thank God I’m not human, Dexter was saying, why can’t I be like everyone else? Nobody is born a villain. You know that about people. That understanding is part of basic acting."

Lindsay’s reference to acting is typical. He spent much of his life pursuing an acting career, including almost 15 years in Hollywood. "One of the reasons that I didn’t really rocket to the top in Hollywood is that I was trying to do a little bit of everything," Lindsay says. "I was running a theater company with some friends, and I was writing plays, and acting and directing and doing comedy. I was in the ABC and Paramount new talent development program for comedy. And, oh yeah, there was my rock and roll band."

Eventually his wife, Hilary Hemingway, a writer and documentary filmmaker herself (and, yes, the niece of that Hemingway), suggested he concentrate on one thing. "All along it seems like I’ve been getting gentle hints about writing," Lindsay says. "When I was an actor, somebody came up to me and said, the guy who was writing our new play got sick. Want to do it? And suddenly I was a playwright. And when I was doing comedy, friends would ask me to help write their routines. So suddenly I was a comedy writer. In everything I tried to do, I ended up writing. So finally I said, okay, I get the message."

After the couple moved back to Florida, where both had been born and raised, Lindsay developed a routine of getting up at 4 a.m. and writing until it was time to get his kids ready for school. Lindsay and Hemingway have three daughters, ages 16, 9 and almost 2. Hemingway worked as a television news producer and Lindsay taught a bit at New University, hosted a couple of PBS shows and wrote what he calls "a semi-syndicated newspaper column" on fatherhood. "It started one year when Hilary was producing the evening news and I was home writing," Lindsay says. "Since she left for work before the kids came home from school and got home after they’d gone to bed, I was the only parent around. So it was about the adventures of a tough, super-macho intellectual with two daughters buying the first bra and so on. I think it ran in four papers."

Lindsay’s bright moment of inspiration for the first Dexter Morgan novel came at a Kiwanis Club luncheon, where he was the guest speaker. "I was vice president of the Key Club in high school," Lindsay assures BookPage readers, "so I don’t have anything against the Kiwanis. But I was sitting there at the head table looking out at the audience getting ready to speak, and the idea just popped into my head that sometimes serial murder isn’t a bad thing. I sort of blew off the talk and started scribbling on napkins."

The success of the first book in the series, Lindsay says, allowed the family to stop living week-to-week. "We’re now going in six-month chunks," he says wryly. "And that’s a big improvement."

But that success also complicated work on his second book, Dearly Devoted Dexter. "Writing at any time is difficult. Because in order to do it you have to leave yourself wide open, which lets in a lot of stuff you don’t want to deal with. That’s always problematic, dealing with the other stuff and still maintaining focus. I am a total neurotic, so there were times when I was thinking, the first book wasn’t very good; why don’t I just die? And there were times when I was thinking, how can I write a book as good as the first book? It went back and forth like that."

But now Dearly Devoted Dexter is finished. It’s a darn good read. And Jeff Lindsay is hard at work on a third book in the Dexter Morgan series.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Back in the late 1970s, when Jeff Lindsay was in graduate school in theater at Carnegie Mellon, he had a directing teacher from Romania who had a concept called "illegal laughter." "Ve are making the audience to laugh," the funny, theatrical Lindsay says, imitating…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Jane Smiley

Interview by Alden Mudge

On September 11, 2001, Jane Smiley was roughly 280 pages into a first draft of what would eventually become her 11th novel, Good Faith. In the aftermath of that day’s horrific events, the book she was working on "suddenly came to seem trivial," Smiley says during a call to her home outside of Monterey, California, where she has lived since moving from the Midwest in 1996 with her then husband and her children. My response was to take some time off and read novels that had come before. She started with The Tale of Genji, a novel written in 11th-century Japan by a woman of the Heian court, Murasaki Shikibu.

"I did it as a form of escape," Smiley says. "But serious novels don’t allow you to escape; instead they ask you to reconsider what you were thinking about in a new way. I found it incredibly efficacious to read The Tale of Genji within a few weeks of the World Trade Center attacks." Indeed, Smiley found the exercise so helpful that she decided to keep going. "By the time I had read a couple more novels, I thought, boy, I should keep track of this and start thinking about this as a project."

Smiley’s project became to read 100 novels that more or less spanned the history of novel writing. "I immediately realized that I was not qualified and also didn’t care to compile a One Hundred Best Novels list. What I really wanted to see was what a given 100 novels some of them famous, some of them obscure, some of them congenial, some of them uncongenial would teach me about the nature of the novel, so I let the list be constructed in a serendipitous way."

The result of Smiley’s reading and thinking is the astonishing Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a book that is interesting, provocative and insightful in so many ways that it is impossible to name or catalog them all. But, at the very least, even the most casual novel-reader is certain to find pleasure in dipping at random into Smiley’s 13th and final chapter in which she writes brief, knowledgeable, sometimes funny, often surprising essays on each of the 100 books she read.

"Certain books on the list really were revelations to me," Smiley says. "I loved them in every way and they were books that I hadn’t known of before. One of them was The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett, which was a great favorite of Charles Dickens. Another was Justine by the Marquis de Sade. It’s so much more interesting than you think it’s going to be. Yes, it’s pornographic but it’s also a political treatise. It’s fascinating politically; it’s fascinating artistically. I really enjoyed it, though I was shocked by it. And I thought The Once and Future King by T.H. White was a wonderful, wonderful book that ought to be revived."

In the other chapters of the book, Smiley explores with compelling energy what a novel is (answer, in brief: a lengthy, written, prose narrative with a protagonist) and who a novelist is (to begin with, a reader). She examines the history, psychology, morality and art of the novel; its blend of narrative forms and its relationship to human history. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel also includes two brilliant chapters of advice for novel writers, three if you include her case history of the composition, publication and public reception of Good Faith, which she began working on again as her novel-reading project progressed.

Smiley, who is best-known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres and for Moo, her send-up of life at a large Midwestern university, is remarkably perceptive and generous in her views of other writers’ work. She doesn’t, for example, write about good and bad writers, but instead about congenial and uncongenial writers.

"All relationships that you have with authors are essentially instinctive," Smiley says in conversation. "They are forms of friendship or kinship that are based on something not quite conscious, some instinctive response to some quality of that person’s sensibility. Since reading a novel is essentially a private experience, who am I to say that while I love The Once and Future King and you love Ulysses, you’re wrong and I’m right?"

Which is not to say that Smiley avoids offering opinions on who she finds congenial (surprisingly, Daniel Defoe) and why (to oversimplify, because he was so adept at going from the practical to the spiritual and entering the consciousness of so many different types of characters) and who she finds less than congenial (Henry James, because "he thought he was the boss of his characters and his job was to control and dominate them.").

And while the book is in no way autobiographical, Smiley infuses it with the full range of her sensibilities -her concern for the craftsmanship of the novel, her politics, psychological insight and moral vision, and her aesthetic concerns, for example – the core values, so to speak, of who she is as a writer.

Ultimately the views that Smiley expresses in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel offer readers and writers alike a path to liberation, primarily because Smiley believes there is no such thing as the perfect novel. "Every artistic form tends in one direction or another," Smiley says, "and the novel tends toward excess, toward compendiousness, toward being about everything. And excess and perfection don’t mix." Which of course means there’s room in the world for all kinds of novels.

More importantly, Smiley thinks that the novel remains central to democratic Western society. "You cannot read a novel and have an opinion about it without feeling yourself free and also as having a right to your own opinion," she says. "So I feel that the novel has radically democratized Western consciousness simply by giving us the opportunity in our own bedroom to say, oh, I agree with this. And I don’t agree with that." Remember that the next time someone asks you why you’re wasting your time with a novel.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

 

On September 11, 2001, Jane Smiley was roughly 280 pages into a first draft of what would eventually become her 11th novel, Good Faith. In the aftermath of that day's horrific events, the book she was working on "suddenly came to seem trivial," Smiley…

Social Science

Barbara Ehrenreich

Interview by Alden Mudge

Urged on by pleas from middle-class readers of her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich launched a new book project that she hoped would do for white-collar work what Nickel and Dimed had done for low-wage work. In Nickel and Dimed, which has remained a bestseller since its publication four years ago, Ehrenreich posed as an unskilled, recently divorced homemaker, took a series of minimum-wage jobs, and then wrote an insightful, morally outraged portrait of the lives of low-wage workers.

For Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, her second foray into "immersion journalism," Ehrenreich sought a job in the corporate world as a public relations professional – not a huge stretch for someone who has published thousands of articles and a dozen nonfiction books. Her plan was to find a job that paid $50,000 a year and offered health benefits and then write about her experiences as a white-collar worker in corporate America. A problem soon developed, however: Ehrenreich had an almost impossible time finding a job.

"I was shocked," Ehrenreich says during a call to her home in Charlottesville, Virginia. "I expected to go to work somewhere and I really thought that would be the most interesting part of the project. Now I realize that that was unrealistic, because I was meeting so many people who had been out of work for more than a year."

Bait and Switch soon morphed into a book about white-collar unemployment and the peculiar "transition industry" that has emerged to assist the job searches of employees cast off by American corporations in the growing trend toward "delayering" (getting rid of middle management). With the same rueful wit, passion and skepticism she brought to Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich here relates her sometimes-comic, often exasperating experiences with career coaches, résumé consultants, networking events, personality tests and job fairs.

Among the most amusing and chilling of these is an account of her makeover. "Oh, my makeover," Ehrenreich says with a laugh that quickly turns into a sigh. "I had naively imagined at the beginning that the way I dressed to give a lecture at a college would be all right for an interview. But, no, there’s an entirely different way of dressing for success. So I decided to pay for a face-to-face encounter. I was wearing a very conservative brooch. It was silver and circular. But I was told by my makeover guy that it shouldn’t have been circular; it should have been a swoosh. But I have to wonder, when you’re judging whether to hire a person on the basis of . . . a detail like that, are you really picking the best person for the job?"

This, in fact, is the challenging question that surfaces throughout Bait and Switch, whether Ehrenreich is exploring the so-called Christianization of the workplace through evangelical job-search networks or the inordinate reliance of human resource departments on the pseudo-science of personality tests. What does any of this have to do with finding the most skilled person for the job?

In that regard, Ehrenreich says she was most surprised by the sort of mystical mumbo-jumbo that permeates the corporate world. "Because I am a journalist and was educated as a scientist," she says, "I operate in the fact-based world. I expected that the world of the corporation would be like that. To make money you’ve got to look at facts, at the bottom line. You can’t be deluding yourself. So it’s appalling to find what I can only call the delusional idea that your thoughts can go out there and alter the world. I just read a dozen business bestsellers and I found it over and over this idea that if you just think about money and success they will come to you."

The same sort of thinking pervades the transition industry. "All my coaches emphasized the importance of being positive and upbeat at all times," Ehrenreich says. "All right, you don’t want to be surly when you go into an interview. But the advice extends to mean that you cannot have any negative thoughts . . . because negative thoughts will poison you and will be visible to whoever encounters you."

The result, Ehrenreich says, is a group of cowed, isolated middle-class workers who are unable to get together and make changes that would enhance their work lives and cushion the blow when they are unemployed. With the publication of Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich says, "I hope to stir something up."

 

Urged on by pleas from middle-class readers of her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich launched a new book project that she hoped would do for white-collar work what Nickel and Dimed had done for low-wage work. In Nickel and Dimed, which has…

Arts & CultureArt

Jonathan Harr

Interview by Alden Mudge

Months before he completed what would become his 1995 award-winning bestseller A Civil Action (and years before it was turned into the hit movie starring John Travolta), Jonathan Harr ran out of money.

So when an editor from the New York Times magazine called and asked him to write a piece for the magazine, Harr leapt at the chance. The story he ended up pursuing was about the improbable discovery in Ireland of a painting by the great Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio that had been missing for 200 years. Harr sensed there was a bigger story to be told and proposed writing a book about it to his agent. Alas, A Civil Action had not yet been published to critical and popular acclaim, and Harr was not famous. His agent told him nobody would give him the money he needed to do the research for the book.

"I just let it go," Harr says during a call to Perugia, Italy, where he has recently completed a course in Italian literature and is now writing short fiction. Harr and his wife live most of the year in Northampton, Massachusetts, but they also have an apartment in Rome. "Rome is noisy and chaotic," Harr says. "It was wonderful when I first got there, but I’m getting a little tired of it. I needed to get out. Perugia is very quiet, very peaceful, very beautiful." After the rebuff from his agent, Harr spent a few years exploring other book ideas another legal book along the lines of A Civil Action, then an archaeological dig on the Syrian-Turkish border. For any number of reasons these projects didn’t pan out, and he eventually returned to his interest in the subject of The Lost Painting.

Lucky for us.

The Lost Painting is an engrossing and exhilarating weave of art history, detective work and human drama. In conversation, Harr says he struggled to bring the threads of this story together. But his struggles will be invisible to most readers. Here, as in A Civil Action, Harr is able to find the right measure of technical detail and emotional conflict to make his intersecting narratives come alive. This is all the more remarkable because the story shifts between modern-day Rome and Dublin, where scholars and art restorers vie to find and authenticate Caravaggio’s painting, and late 16th-century Rome, when Caravaggio walked its streets.

Caravaggio was a violent, temperamental artist who left a vivid trail in police and court records in Rome, died young and somewhat mysteriously in exile, and created some of the most sublimely beautiful paintings of the era. Harr agrees with editors of the British art journal Burlington who assert that Caravaggio is the first realist painter. "A lot of his paintings are religious paintings, although there’s a big debate about how religious he was," Harr says. "I think he wasn’t religious at all. But he painted these religious scenes using everyday people, the clothing that people were dressed in at the time, and he painted them with dramatic intensity, all of which was new. He really invented that dark background with a single source of light outside of the painting. His paintings have a drama and a vividness that nobody before had."

As interesting as Caravaggio’s story is, it actually pales in comparison to the story Harr tells of Francesca Cappelletti, a young Italian art researcher who with her colleague, Laura Testa, made a seemingly small discovery in the dank, poorly kept archives of the once-grand Antici-Mattei family that would prove invaluable to the authentication of Caravaggio’s lost painting called "The Taking of Christ." Francesca was "wonderfully cooperative and open," Harr says. "If she hadn’t been, I simply would have gone on to something else." Harr deploys Francesca’s truly astonishing openness about all aspects of her life to great effect. Through her story, he is able to convey both the intellectual and the emotional importance of what might otherwise seem dry and dusty research.

Far less cooperative was the other main protagonist in Harr’s narrative, an Italian art restorer working at the Irish national gallery named Sergio Benedetti. "A difficult and complicated man," Sergio was the first to suspect that a painting he was asked to examine by Irish Jesuits was an original Caravaggio.

"It was Sergio’s absolute burning desire to climb out of the basement of restoration into something more exalted, into being an art historian, which in Italy is the equivalent of being a doctor or a lawyer," Harr says. Along the way Sergio apparently made some critical misjudgments while restoring the Caravaggio painting. "He’s committed no crime," Harr hastens to add. "He made a mistake due to his own ardor and anxiety, his own desire to see this painting [acknowledged]."

Harr frets that Sergio’s unwillingness to talk openly about his mistake weakens his story. "He’s litigious, too," Harr says, "so I anticipate problems." But in fact, Sergio’s prickly reticence makes for an illuminating contrast with Francesca’s openness. And it allows or forces Harr to write in some detail about the technology and techniques of art restoration, something he does exceptionally well.

"I love the research, love putting things together. It’s like solving a puzzle," Harr says near the end of our conversation. And in The Lost Painting, he delivers an enthralling solution to the 200-year-old puzzle of what happened to Caravaggio’s lost painting.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Months before he completed what would become his 1995 award-winning bestseller A Civil Action (and years before it was turned into the hit movie starring John Travolta), Jonathan Harr ran out of money.

So when an editor from the New York Times…

Fiction

Lisa Fugard

Interview by Alden Mudge

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and the experience of writer Lisa Fugard seems to prove the adage. Fugard, daughter of the great South African playwright Athol Fugard, has just published a remarkably accomplished first novel about a deeply troubled white family living on a remote farm along the increasingly dangerous South African border with Botswana at the end of the apartheid era. In its unsparing but empathetic portrayal of its characters, both blacks and whites, and in its sensitivity to the complicated loyalties that divide and unite South African society, Skinner’s Drift is sure to be likened to some of the better-known works of Fugard’s father.

"My mother [novelist Sheilah Fugard] is also a writer," Fugard reminds us during a call to her home in southern California. Fugard and her husband have lived in California since early 2002. They and their two-year-old son now divide their time between the desert community of Borrego Springs and Encinitas, on the coast north of San Diego, not far from where her parents now live. "It had been a long time since I had lived near my parents," Fugard, an only child, says, "and I just found myself wanting to do that, particularly now that I have a child."

Fugard moved from South Africa to New York in 1980 to study acting. " I was a good actress," she says, "but I never thought I was a really fine actress. It didn’t feel like the most natural thing for me to be doing." She adds, "I was always terribly insecure because I felt when I was working in the theater that I had entered my father’s domain. But something happened when I started to write fiction. I just felt I had something to say and it had nothing to do with him, so his shadow didn’t dog me into my writing life. Maybe it was because I waited to start writing until I was in my 30s and was more secure within myself."

Fugard says witnessing her father’s extraordinary dedication to his craft and her mother’s persistence "even when there was no fuss about her work," made it clear to her that "writing was a good, important thing to do with one’s life if that’s what you felt compelled to do. Because I had parents who were writers, I never doubted the validity of life as a writer. And that was hugely beneficial to me."

According to Fugard, the seed for Skinner’s Drift was planted when she read an article in a local newspaper about white farmers poaching in the Limpopo Valley while she was back in South Africa on assignment for Outside magazine. "For some reason," she says, "the article seized me. They’d found all these hyena carcasses in the Limpopo riverbed, and it just seemed so brutal and savage that I asked myself if somebody shoots all these animals, what else do they shoot. And that just sent me off."

A visit to a whites-only community in the heartland of South Africa where she interviewed an ostrich farmer furthered her conception of the novel’s most haunting and haunted character, Martin van Rensberg. That ostrich farmer – his name was Freddy – had the most amazing blue eyes, and a terrible stutter. He spoke with such passion and with such love for his land, and seconds later the most awful racial slurs were coming from his mouth. It was just so shocking. I thought, how can somebody have such love, such intense passion and generosity of spirit for his land and yet feel exactly the opposite toward so many of the people of the land?"

If Martin van Rensberg is the novel’s dark propulsive inspiration, then Ezekial, van Rensberg’s African hired hand, is the moral center of Skinner’s Drift. Struggling to maintain balance, to protect both van Rensberg’s daughter Eva and his own family as van Rensberg spins out of control in one direction and young black farmworkers spin out of control in another, Ezekial (whose African name is Lefu) offers a portrait of dignity, reason and hope.

"Ezekial’s voice came first," Fugard says, "and his was the first chapter I wrote." Challenged at a writing workshop by a black writer who did not believe the character, however, Fugard went back and rethought her manuscript. "All the black characters have an African name and a white name. When I would sit down to work on this chapter, I always thought of my character as Ezekial. The turning point for me came when I started thinking about him as Lefu. I felt I had acknowledged the complexity and dignity of his life, and that opened a door for me."

The plot’s powerful central triangle is completed by Eva van Rensburg, Martin’s only child. Her reluctant return to South Africa to visit her dying father after 10 years in the U.S. launches a painful familial search for truth and forgiveness that mirrors the pain and tumult of the national Truth And Reconciliation effort South Africa underwent in the late 1990s.

"Eva was the hardest to write," Fugard says. "As a writer, I like to have a lot of distance from my characters. Because she is close to my age, curiously enough, she was the hardest. Particularly in the last chapter, where she has to face what she’s done and how complicit she is – it was so hard to write that at one point I had to change her name from Eva to Evan. I had to make her a male character, because I felt otherwise I was writing about myself. Then, with the computer, I just changed all the Evans back to Eva. And I found that I had reached something authentic, that I had reached some kind of truth that I just couldn’t have reached when her name was Eva."

Of course the struggles and changes Fugard went through in her manuscript won’t be visible to readers of the completed work. The authenticity and insight of Skinner’s Drift, however, will be obvious.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

They say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and the experience of writer Lisa Fugard seems to prove the adage. Fugard, daughter of the great South African playwright Athol Fugard, has just published a remarkably accomplished first novel about a deeply troubled…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Ayelet Waldman

Interview by Alden Mudge

Ayelet Waldman is a wicked, wicked girl. Just ask the thousands of e-mailers who hurled bolts of vitriol her way after she dared to declare in a New York Times opinion piece last year that she loved her husband more than she loved her children. Or ask the "Oprah" audience that came to a studio in Chicago to bury Waldman, not to praise her for the self-same transgression.

"It sounds very naïve to say I had no idea, but the real truth is I had no idea," Waldman says of the heated reaction to her op-ed during a call to her home in Berkeley, California. It is 7 a.m. and Waldman, a multi-tasker par excellence, and her husband, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, are getting their four hungry, rambunctious-sounding kids ready for school.

"I knew what I was saying was controversial and I constructed the piece in a way that I knew would grab the reader," Waldman says between side conversations with Chabon about butter and oatmeal, "but I really hadn't processed the fact that appearing in the Times meant that five million people would be sending me hate mail."

What most surprises the not-very-repentant Waldman about the stir she created is that she had previously expressed similar views in her humorous and popular Mommy Track mystery books, in her Salon.com columns, and, in a way, in her first serious, literary novel, Daughter's Keeper. "And I would get feedback from women who all said, oh my God, finally someone is saying this!"

Waldman's sharply observed, completely absorbing and sometimes wickedly humorous new novel might just provoke the same intensely polarized reaction among readers as did her op-ed piece. Set in contemporary New York, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits tells the story of Emilia Greenleaf, a mother devastated by the loss of her newborn daughter, and struggling – not very successfully, it seems – to relate to her sensitive, annoyingly precocious stepson William, do battle with the boy's neurotic, controlling and bitterly contemptuous mother and preserve her marriage to the boy's father, Jack Wolff, a wealthy corporate attorney and extraordinarily compassionate man she believes to be her soul mate.

"If you had asked me a few months ago [if the op-ed piece and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits were related], I would have said, of course not," Waldman says, "because I never know on anything but a subconscious level what a book is about until I start discussing it in interviews. Now I realize that the book is linked to the op-ed piece in the way that all of my work is linked: I began writing because I had something to say about maternal ambivalence, and I have been writing about maternal ambivalence in a million different ways ever since."

Later, Waldman adds, "I wanted to write about this feeling that you have when you just don't like a kid. It happens all the time. And I thought, what if that kid is yours and you don't have that maternal bond? Step-parenting seems to be this quintessential dilemma. You're supposed to assume all the affection and devotion of a parent but at the same time this is someone who quite often hates you and who stands between you and your spouse. And if your spouse is a decent person, he or she generally feels an intense amount of ambivalence because even if your relationship wasn't the cause of the divorce [as it is in the case of Emilia and Jack, who begin an affair while working together as attorneys], there is still guilt for having replaced one relationship with the other."

Waldman's exploration of Emilia's plight draws emotional power from her own experience of losing a baby late in pregnancy. It is an experience she had written about in columns on Salon.com and "written around" in a previous novel and a short story. But, Waldman says, she found herself "needing to write about it closer and closer. . . . And then, when it came time to write this book, I was ready to write really directly about the feelings of grief."

And that is not all Waldman drew from the well of personal experiences to create her character Emilia Greenleaf. Like her protagonist, Waldman was born in northern New Jersey ("Glenrock instead of Ridgewood," Waldman quips. "That was my one big cloaking device!"), has a father with children from a previous marriage, loves Central Park (which looms so large that it is essentially a character in the novel), graduated from Harvard Law School and possesses an acerbic sense of humor, to name just a few.

But to surmise that Emilia is simply a stand-in for the author is to diminish Waldman's remarkable achievement in creating the compelling, complex, sometimes likeable, sometimes not-so-likeable character of Emilia. Besides, Emilia is neither as disarmingly candid as Waldman nor as funny. And the deeply conflicted Emilia could never have invented the novel's most luminous character, William, the precocious, overly sensitive preschooler, who in the end becomes Emilia's sweet agent of grace.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits tumbled forth, Waldman says, "in what was the most amazing writing experience of my life. I felt I couldn't type fast enough to keep up with my head. I wasn't even conscious of constructing the book in my mind. I felt like it was being read to me."

According to Waldman, William tumbled forth right alongside Emilia. And the wonderfully rendered character of William along with the joyous hubbub in the background of the call (at one point Waldman shouts over the din, "I have very normal children, like right now they're sitting around the table shrieking booger! at one another.") makes one wonder what the op-ed/"Oprah" controversy is really all about.

"There was this funny moment on Oprah's show," Waldman says, "where one of the women looked at me with surprise and said, but you're not evil! and I said, nooooo, I'm really not."

Wicked maybe. But evil? Definitely not.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Ayelet Waldman is a wicked, wicked girl. Just ask the thousands of e-mailers who hurled bolts of vitriol her way after she dared to declare in a New York Times opinion piece last year that she loved her husband more than she loved her children.…

Fiction

David Mitchell

Interview by Alden Mudge

For his marvelous fourth novel, Black Swan Green, David Mitchell decided—in a way—to write a first novel. "First novels are both justly and unjustly maligned," Mitchell says. "Justly, because first novels are written by beginners, by definition. Unjustly because they have a lot of potential for inner archaeology and because they are a chance to do youth through a lens relatively untinted by age."

By turns a very funny and very moving novel about a 13-year-old boy growing up in a village in Worcestershire in 1982, Black Swan Green is clearly not the work of a beginner. In fact, Mitchell is one of the best young novelists writing today. Two of his novels—Number9Dream and Cloud Atlas —were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Cloud Atlas was also a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is clearly a writer with great emotional and technical range.

We reached Mitchell at his office in the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, where "at the furthest end of the furthest wing where we can do the least damage, they have a room for a writer in residence." He has come to Holland, along with his wife and their two young children, to research his next novel, which will have a Dutch theme. For the last few years his family has lived in Ireland, where they own a house near the sea in west Cork. Before that Mitchell was a schoolteacher in Japan, where he met his wife, a linguist.

Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that even after three previous novels to tint his lens, Mitchell manages to create such a fresh and refreshing portrait of youth in Black Swan Green. But Jason Taylor, the 13-year-old narrator, is a surprise—and a delight—as he relates in his own inimitable way his adventures and misadventures in the backyards of the village of Black Swan Green, his observations about the growing discord in his family, his feuds with local bullies, his war with a stammer that makes him a magnet for classmates' mockery, his secretive attempts at poetry, his encounter with gypsies at the edge of town and his growing sense of himself and the wider world as he approaches his teenage years.

"I wanted Jason to be unformed enough to be plausible—I didn't want him to speak like a child genius—but interesting enough to be readable," Mitchell says. "That's tough, but there's one thing on your side. Kids that age don't have the linguistic formulas in place that adults do—what linguists call collocation—the way certain words go with certain other words. That means you can smuggle in accidental poetry, and, with luck, wisdom and insight too."

In creating the character of Jason, Mitchell also drew heavily from his own inner archaeology. He says Black Swan Green is his most personal book. "I make the distinction that autobiographical is when you and everybody around you is represented in the book. Personal is when you are represented in the book, but the rest of the book is peopled by relatively fictional creations."

Like Jason, Mitchell turned 13 in 1982. Like his fictional hero, the writer has a stammer and a capacious sense of verbal play. Both kept scrapbooks about the Falklands War, which broke out in 1982.

"The war was one of the formative memories of my youth," Mitchell says. "The patriotism, the flags, the jubilation, as if it were a sporting event. It was the last time that any young English boy could feel that he lived in a country that kicked ass. The consequences of it and the truth of it— the stunning expense, the miserable expense in terms of human life—didn't come for months or years. I also remember being surprised by how quickly it disappeared. So soon afterward this thing that had been so momentous was no longer in the newspapers. That was my first lesson in the shortness of the memories of newspapers. How quickly the loudest mouths forget. Something that is a world event on Monday can be not even a memory on Friday. I learned that from the Falklands."

According to Mitchell, 1982 was a gloomy time in England, with the economy in deep recession. Some of that darkness seeps in at the edges of the story, as the clouds of adult concerns filter in among Jason's own adolescent concerns about fitting in.

Mitchell says 1982 "was also about the last year I felt I could get away with writing an English pastoral novel where the rhythm of life is set by the land, when the one-thousand-year-old rhythm of the countryside was still just about alive." In a chapter called Bridle Path, the English landscape becomes, essentially, the protagonist and Jason in his wanderings along the bridle path perceives the tensions between the older ways of English life and the encroaching American-style suburbs. It is the novel's most beautiful chapter, one in which all of the book's themes are brought seamlessly together and Mitchell's ample talents are on full display.

"Writing a novel is a great excuse to think as deeply as you can about a particular plot of existence, of the world and of being alive," Mitchell says. "When I read a book I certainly don't want to spend 300 pages in the presence of someone I don't care about. I think it comes down to the answer to two key questions that all the books I love have in common: are there people who you care about in it? Are you made to ask throughout the course of the narrative, will they be OK? If the answer is yes, then the book just doesn't let you go. At some level, that's what good writing is. It's as simple as that."

Simple to say. Difficult to do. Unless you're David Mitchell. And the book is Black Swan Green.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

For his marvelous fourth novel, Black Swan Green, David Mitchell decided—in a way—to write a first novel. "First novels are both justly and unjustly maligned," Mitchell says. "Justly, because first novels are written by beginners, by definition. Unjustly because they have a lot of…

Fiction

Elizabeth Strout

Interview by Alden Mudge

On most mornings when she is not teaching or "church hopping," Elizabeth Strout is at the kitchen table writing by hand.

"I try to get in three or four hours, and I put off having lunch for as long as I can because having lunch seems to change the energy flow," Strout says during a phone call to the Park Slope, Brooklyn, home she shares with her husband, a legal aid lawyer. Strout herself studied law at Syracuse University and practiced briefly and unhappily before pursuing her calling as a fiction writer. The couple's 22-year-old daughter recently left for South Africa, where she now works in AIDS education. "If I'm lucky," Strout continues cheerfully, " I'll get through till one o'clock. And then I throw everything out. And that's a morning's work."

Which is why it took Strout six or seven years to complete her critically acclaimed, best-selling first novel Amy and Isabelle, and another seven to publish her deeply moving and satisfying new book, Abide with Me.

Set in a small town in Maine in the late 1950s, Abide with Me tells the story of Reverend Tyler Caskey, the popular local Congregational minister, who is struggling to care for his two young daughters and to maintain some semblance of himself after the shocking loss of his wife, Lauren.

"I was interested in writing about a religious man who is genuine in his religiosity and who gets confronted with such sadness so abruptly that he loses himself. Not his faith, but his faith in himself," Strout says.

In his sorrow and confusion Tyler increasingly measures his actions against those of his hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German theologian jailed and later killed by the Nazis during World War II, whose writings became immensely influential in the 1950s. It is an impossible standard to live up to, and Tyler's sense of spiritual inadequacy contributes to his growing alienation from his flock. Strout's deft, knowledgeable and unobtrusive use of Bonhoeffer's writings and other religious texts ("I have four different versions of the Bible," she says at one point) adds immensely to our feeling for the texture of Tyler's inner turmoil.

"But I don't see this as a book of theology or religion," Strout hastily adds. "It is the story of a minister. And I needed to know what it would be like to be a minister so I read what Tyler would have read to acquaint myself with the sorts of perceptions he would have had." Nevertheless, Strout confesses a longstanding interest in theology. And she jokes that instead of being a churchgoer, she is a church hopper. "I came up with that name one night a long time ago when friends were talking about being bar hoppers. I thought, oh, I should probably be called a church hopper because I like to go to different churches and observe what they do. I'm really interested in churches and I go to them a lot."

A similar sort of wry, self-deprecating humor pervades much of Abide with Me, especially in Strout's portrayal of the interactions among Tyler's parishioners and the other townspeople of West Annett, Maine. In fact, Strout's shrewdly observed and deadly accurate picture of small-town life in Cold War America – by turns snarky and supportive – is one of the great charms of the book.

"I come from Maine," Strout says, "and both my parents come from eight or nine generations of Maine people. Even though I've been in New York for so many years, there's something deeply familiar to me about that kind of small town. There is a way of life up there that's disappearing. I did not set out to do it. Not at all. But the pressure inside of me was asking me to write about these people, and it occurs to me that I am sort of documenting the end of an era."

The central drama of Abide with Me arises from Tyler's inability to perceive how traumatized his kindergarten-aged daughter, Katherine, has been by the unfathomable loss of her mother. A sweet, vulnerable child now almost totally withdrawn – except when she throws screaming fits in school – Katherine is the novel's most emotionally wrenching character. Her misinterpretation of her father's relationship with his housekeeper sets off the final chain of events that leads Tyler to the brink of emotional and spiritual ruin.

"Katherine's point of view came rather naturally to me," Strout says. "Who knows where these things come from? My grandmother died when I was five and maybe without knowing it I was drawing on feelings of bafflement I had about that loss."

Tapping into such feelings is an essential part of Strout's approach to writing. "I sometimes think it's a bad idea to have ideas about what you want to do," Strout says. "Because the minute you think you know what you want to do, you're forcing a story in a certain direction when you really should pay more attention to just going where it seems to want to go itself. For me ideas aren't worth a whole lot. What is worth something is the emotion – attached to a vision of a character –  just pressing up inside my chest in the morning after I finish my coffee."

But, Strout says, this approach sometimes "feels like my hand is in a cardboard box and I can't see anything in there but I just keep feeling around and get hold of a shape and think, yep, this is the right shape. And if that shape happens to be Katherine, well, all of a sudden I can see her."

"I wish tremendously that I was faster about all this," Strout adds. "But, you know, it didn't turn out to be that way."

Perhaps it doesn't matter. The perceptive, resonant, beautifully written Abide with Me was certainly worth the wait.

 

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

On most mornings when she is not teaching or "church hopping," Elizabeth Strout is at the kitchen table writing by hand.

"I try to get in three or four hours, and I put off having lunch for as long as I can because…

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