Alden Mudge

Social Science

Geoff Nicholson

Interview by Alden Mudge

The bio on the cover of this frequently provocative, usually informative, and always entertaining saunter through the history, culture, and strange obsessions that have evolved right along with our species’ most elemental form of locomotion, announces that Geoff Nicholson divides his time between London and Los Angeles. To an apprehensive Northern California interviewer, the description suggests not a bi-continental but a bipolar life. London after all seems to be a sensible city of walkers and public-transit-takers; Los Angeles is, well, a city overwhelmed by cars and people driven to road rage.

Not to worry, Nicholson assures during a call to his home in what he calls “the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills.” First of all, since his American wife took a job as an editor in L.A. for Taschen Books, he is now basically an undivided self in Los Angeles. “When we met she was in New York,” the England-born Nicholson, who is the author of some 20 previous works of fiction and non-fiction, says. “I could just about manage the commute between London and New York. But I couldn’t manage the commute between L.A. and London. I’m pretty much here full time now.”

Second, according to Nicholson, there actually are people who walk in Los Angeles. Maybe even a lot of people. These include the actress Christina Ricci, with whom Nicholson took an unintended, socially-awkward, parallel stroll, humorously recounted in the early pages of  The Lost Art of Walking. “Walkers in Los Angeles are the politest people in the world,” Nicholson claims, sounding surprised himself. “They step aside for you. In London, people will push you aside if they’re going somewhere. And in New York the pleasure for walkers comes from your displeasure, from your inconvenience.” Or, as he puckishly writes in the book: “New York is a city where the people not only enjoy getting in your way as you’re walking down the street, they’ll actually go out of their way to obstruct your progress. They’ll inconvenience themselves for the greater pleasure of inconveniencing you.”

Hmm. Nicholson is nothing if not opinionated. But his knowledge of the practice and lore of walking is both deep and wide, and it ambles, struts and occasionally tramps or trudges through nearly every sentence of the book. “At one point I did imagine this as a kind of encyclopedic book containing every possible source and every possible mention of walking in the world,” Nicholson says. “But in the end that would have been a book of almost infinite length.”

The pared down version of The Lost Art of Walking is still suggestively capacious. Nicholson examines, briefly, the evolution and physiology of bipedalism. He writes with flare about representations of walking in sculpture, performance art, popular music, photography, movies and books. He casts an amusingly skeptical eye on both the politics and the spirituality of walking. He tells stories from the history of competitive walking. He strolls easily from, say, a tale of being lost in the desert to an account of the first moonwalk to an argument that Buster Keaton is a far better walker on screen than Charlie Chaplin. Holding it all together are Nicholson’s often-debatable opinions and the fact that he is a delightful storyteller.

Nicholson says that his book on walking was inspired by his move to Los Angeles. “I actually quite like driving and I quite like cars. I don’t necessarily see driving and walking in some terrible opposition. But I do like to be a bit of a contrarian, and the idea of moving to L.A. and lighting out for the territory on foot seemed to be a way of stating my independence. It seemed more interesting, in a perverse kind of way, to explore the city that way.  For me walking has always been that; whenever I get to a place, I set out on foot and try and find highways and byways and alleyways.”

Thus Nicholson writes frequently here of walks and walkers in Los Angeles, Manhattan and London, places where he has spent a lot of time on foot. “I am mildly obsessed about walking and of course the book is about people who are thoroughly, insanely obsessed with walking,” he says. So, emulating or perhaps competing with Iain Sinclair, whose obsessive walking projects in London are well documented, Nicholson sets himself the task of walking back and forth on Oxford Street for a day. “I asked people ‘what’s the place that you most hate to walk in London?’ And Oxford Street came up. I used to have a job near there and my bank was there, so I had actually spent an awful lot of time walking on Oxford Street, but I shared everybody else’s distaste for it. Despite the fact that everybody hated it, everybody was there. There were millions of people in Oxford Street, all of them hating it, partly because everybody else was there. I believed then that I’d found a project that nobody had ever done.”

In Manhattan, partly inspired by novelist Paul Auster’s New York trilogy, Nicholson’s project became The Martini Glass Walk. “I’m a person who does spend a certain amount of time looking at maps,” he says. “I like looking at the shapes and imagining how to walk from there to there. I was looking for the project that had my name on it. I had learned to drink martinis in Manhattan and looking at the Manhattan map, this shape of a martini glass appeared. You’ve got to use a bit of imagination but it is there. Who is the person who said a map is not the territory? If you were a god or a bird you could look down and see me walking out that shape of the martini glass, but on the ground it doesn’t have that feel at all. That was when the scales fell from my eyes about project walks. They somehow spoil the pleasure of walking.”

Nicholson believes that the activity of walking “ties in with the way my brain works. The rhythm of walking and the rhythm of thinking seem to just go perfectly together. People have told me they feel very vulnerable when they’re on foot. But I feel more comfortable, more at home when I’m walking in a strange place than when I’m driving in a strange place. I’m more a city walker than a bucolic walker, I’m very fond of industrial ruin, as you’ll gather from this book. I don’t live in an area of industrial ruin so I’ll drive there and park and wander around. Wander not walk; there’s a kind of aimlessness about it. And I always find I’m more worried about the car – will it be there when I head back, will it start, will the tires be punctured – than about anything I might meet while on foot. I feel I can deal with anything I meet up with on foot. But a couple of slashed tires? Then I have a problem.”

Continuing, Nicholson says, “The last nonfiction book I wrote was called Sex Collectors. It was about people who collect erotica, for lack of a better word. Quite a few of my novels are about people with obsessions, often obsessions with things – cars, guitars, material things. To be alive in the West in the 21st century is to be concerned with materialism. We’re always thinking about why we have what we have and why we have to have more. We all have an intense relationship with the stuff we buy. But walking is one of those activities that really doesn’t have an end product. You can have a swimmer’s body or a body-builder’s body but nobody wants a walker’s body or even knows what that is. Walkers come in all shapes and sizes. You can do things around walking, including writing a book about it, keeping a walking log or taking pictures. But in the end you have to walk – at least I have to walk – just for the sake of walking.”

May The Lost Art of Walking inspire you to rise from the armchair and light out for the territories of your own mild obsessions. On foot.

 

The bio on the cover of this frequently provocative, usually informative, and always entertaining saunter through the history, culture, and strange obsessions that have evolved right along with our species’ most elemental form of locomotion, announces that Geoff Nicholson divides his time between London and…

History

Nathaniel Philbrick

Interview by Alden Mudge

Contrary to what grade-school legends would have us believe, the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated in late November; most likely it occurred at the end of September or in very early October. And, with the arrival of the Indian leader Massasoit and hundreds of his followers "bearing five freshly killed deer," the event "soon became an overwhelming Native celebration," rather than the pious English festival we commemorate today.

This is one of many choice tidbits in Nathaniel Philbrick's absorbing and exceedingly well researched history of the Plymouth Colony. In fact, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War is so interesting in so many ways that readers will come away from it with a profoundly different understanding – and deeper appreciation – of the people (Native Americans and colonists, alike) and events that have been flattened over the course of almost three centuries into a lifeless national mythology.

"I think it's really important that we see the past as a lived past rather than something that was fated to be," Philbrick says during a call to Providence, Rhode Island. Philbrick is on his way home to Nantucket Island, where he and his wife, a third-generation Cape Codder, and their two children have lived for almost 20 years. "We look at this story as if the outcome had been determined from the very beginning, but that is not how they saw it. So with this book I was really trying to recreate the sense of how precarious it was."

Philbrick won the National Book Award in 2000 for In the Heart of the Sea, his harrowing account of the 1820 sinking of the whaling ship Essex and the struggle of its crew to survive. Ever since, he says, he has "been writing survival stories in one way another. What fascinated me about this story was that this was a survival story in three layers."

After many delays and a horrible sea journey, the Pilgrims arrived at the wrong time of year on a coast where three years before a thriving, populous Native community had been decimated by a plague brought to the Americas by European fisherman. The first year after the Mayflower landed was a physical and psychological struggle for survival for both Natives and Pilgrims alike, as Philbrick shows in riveting detail. The shrewd political calculations of Chief Massasoit and his remarkable relationship with Edward Winslow eventually laid the groundwork for a half-century of amazing – if hard-won – accommodation between settlers and Natives, the second layer of Philbrick's survival tale. But the succeeding generations of Pilgrims and Natives, grown greedy and comfortable on one side and resentful and hard-pressed on the other, moved inexorably toward the largely forgotten and incredibly brutal "King Philip's War," which, Philbrick argues convincingly, announced the tragic, archetypal pattern of conflict that continental expansion would follow for the next two centuries.

As guides through this lesser-known but fascinating era, Philbrick follows two dominant, articulate personalities: William Bradford, the leader of the first generation of Pilgrims, and William Church, a prescient and "gleefully impious" representative of the third generation of colonists. Philbrick is equally good at illuminating the character of the other major players in this history – Miles Standish, Edward and Josiah Winslow, Mary Rowlandson, Squanto, Chief Massasoit and his son, King Philip – none of whom is quite the paragon or villain portrayed in the standard national mythologies.

"My education as an elementary and high school student was that the Pilgrims were the example of everything that was good about America. Then I went to college and the story was that the evil Europeans annihilated the innocent Native Americans," Philbrick says. "But as I delved into this on my own, I saw that this was a tragedy in terms of the overarching dynamic. They all were people who were struggling heroically (or in a cowardly fashion) and who had a lot to say about what was happening to them, rather than being powerless victims."

Philbrick developed his informative, eminently readable, person-centered approach to writing history in several earlier books about the history of Nantucket and of seafaring. An English major at Brown, Philbrick learned to write during a stint at the magazine Sailing World. He had been a competitive sailboat racer as a teenager and in college, a passion he says he developed on a manmade lake near "that most nautical of places, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," where his father was a university professor. Philbrick met his wife when both were teaching sailing on Cape Cod.

While it took him three years to compose Mayflower, Philbrick says he actually worked on the book for almost 13 years. "When I was writing my first history of Nantucket, I realized that if I was going to understand its origins as an English settlement I would have to go back to the Pilgrims and the Indians," he says. He found that the English side was well documented. But to understand the Native side he had to "look at oral traditions, archeology, folklore. I realized that exploring the Native American past requires a whole different side of the brain almost, a whole different discipline. I took a couple of years just coming up to speed in that way."

The result of this lengthy inquiry is a history that reads like tragedy, that is populated by fallible humans on all sides and that resounds with what-if moments. Philbrick does not see as inevitable this first major war between Indians and the English (in which the English lost eight percent of their male population and Native Americans of southern New England lost 60 to 80 percent of its people, including those sold into slavery by the Puritans). But once it did happen, King Philip's War set the pattern of conflict for centuries to come.

"If Josiah Winslow and Philip had only decided to just talk, as their fathers had, we would have had a profoundly different New England history. But it didn't happen," Philbrick says. "The Pilgrims didn't come here on the Mayflower to empire build or to remove a population, but in the wake of that war, that's exactly what they did."

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War is one of the best histories of unintended consequences you're ever likely to read.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Contrary to what grade-school legends would have us believe, the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated in late November; most likely it occurred at the end of September or in very early October. And, with the arrival of the Indian leader Massasoit and hundreds of…

Fiction

John Updike

Interview by Alden Mudge

John Updike, whose provocative 22nd novel, Terrorist, tells the story of an 18-year-old, New Jersey-born suicide bomber, attributes his remarkable productivity to the way he has arranged his life. "Out of habit as well as compulsion" he shows up at his office around 9 a.m. ("or a little before, actually, now that I'm getting older and wake up earlier"). He tries to write a thousand words a day. He "bolts through to the end of a draft" then "looks at it with a cool eye."

"I try to structure my life so it isn't too exciting in itself. It's not a big-city life," Updike says during a call to his home in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, a small industrial town across the river from Salem. Updike and his second wife have lived there for 24 years.

"I find small towns – maybe because I was born in one – handier. The bank, the post office, the fruit and vegetable store, the liquor store, all those things are within an easy walk in this village. That's not true in a city."

On September 11, 2001, however, Updike had a catastrophic big-city moment. On a visit to his wife's son in Brooklyn, he watched the burning and collapse of the World Trade Center towers. "It gave me a sense that I was in a very minor way a witness to whatever we're engaged in now. Bush calls it the war on terror, as if terror can ever be overcome. And as a novel like The Coup [1978] shows, I'm interested in Islam as a more fiery and absolutist and, some would say, fanatical brand of theistic faith. So it was not just my happening to have been there but my sensation that I was qualified to speak about why young men are willing to become suicide bombers. I can kind of understand it, and I'm not sure too many Americans can."

Updike's terrorist is Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who abandoned the family before Ahmad can remember. Ahmad grows up in the hopeless inner city of New Prospect, New Jersey, a wondrously described fictional town across the Hudson from New York. Seeking some connection with his father and some sense of stability, Ahmad begins attending a storefront mosque and falls under the sway of Shaikh Rashid, then becomes, in a way, a more perfect believer than his teacher. "To Ahmad the words of the Koran are sacred. They're alive. They're fire," Updike says. "I thought it was important to show how much Ahmad needed to make his own philosophy, as it were, because the environment wasn't coming up with any."

Ironically, in many ways Ahmad is an ideal kid. "He's what we're all trying to raise, this really nice, upright boy, full of faith and seriousness," Updike says wryly. "As Jack Levy keeps telling him, you're really the model kid except that you're trying to kill us all."

Jack Levy is the other central figure in Updike's narrative. A non-observant Jew and a world-weary high school guidance counselor on the brink of retirement, he takes an interest – a little too late as it turns out – in Ahmad. "There's a lot I don't know about how America conducts its business," Updike says, "but being a schoolteacher's son, I do have a feeling for high school teachers and that sort of weariness that comes from 30 years of counseling kids who don't seem to be any better for it while at the same time there's that do-good streak of somehow wanting to save somebody from a fall."

The climactic moment of Terrorist brings these two figures together in a desperate confrontation, which Updike says was the driving vision of the book. He is understandably reluctant to discuss this key scene for fear of spoiling the suspense.

One of the most honored writers of his generation and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Updike tells his story with the thrilling, gorgeous prose we have come to expect of him. There is, for example, a terrible beauty in his description of the lake of rubble in the hollowed-out core of downtown New Prospect. And there is a ravishing sermon at a Black Christian church that Ahmad attends at the invitation of his seductive classmate Joryleen. "You're working partly out of your subconscious," Updike says of this scene. "Any work of art, including a piece of fiction, that you're working on month after month is somewhat out of control. You're at the mercy of what turns you on, and obviously that Black sermon turned me on."

Updike has often explored themes of religious faith and disillusionment. In Terrorist, he links those themes to the legacy of fanatical violence. "It's about an America now in which you can't get into a federal building without being checked for a gun, where boarding a plane has become an ordeal in a way it never used to be. Every day we – especially people who try to move around – feel the tensions in what used to be our freedom. We feel all these very real effects that Mohamed Atta and his colleagues created."

And yet Updike portrays Ahmad with empathy. "I think there are enough people complaining about the Arab menace that I can be allowed to try to show this young man as sympathetically as I can," Updike says. "He's my hero. I tried to understand him and to dramatize his world. Besides it's not just young Muslims who are killing themselves. We have all these American high school students, steeped in Protestantism and Judaism, who bring guns to school and shoot up the cafeteria knowing they're going to die at the end of this rush. There are a lot of teenagers who are going to take big chances."

In novels like Terrorist, John Updike himself, now in his mid-70s, also takes big chances. "I've not become jaded about writing," he says. "That still seems somehow very worth doing. I don't quite know why it is worthy in an age that is groaning under the weight of unread or little-read books. But just to conjure up things out of your head and turn them into black marks on paper is a great privilege and remains very exciting to me."

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

 

John Updike, whose provocative 22nd novel, Terrorist, tells the story of an 18-year-old, New Jersey-born suicide bomber, attributes his remarkable productivity to the way he has arranged his life. "Out of habit as well as compulsion" he shows up at his office around 9…

Fiction

Monica Ali

Interview by Alden Mudge

"You didn’t ask the question everybody else seems to be asking," Monica Ali says at the end of our conversation about her second novel, Alentejo Blue. In less than a minute, Ali must leave her home outside London to fetch her son and daughter, ages seven and five, from school. Ali’s writing day is defined by her children’s school schedule, but today the school has agreed to keep them an hour longer so she can take a call from BookPage.

"Everybody wants to know after the big success of the first book, how I feel about the second book coming out," Ali continues. " I hate being asked that question."

Oh, the sophomore jinx question. "I’m anxious to see the reaction to the book," is all that Ali will say at the moment. And frankly? As far as Ali’s Alentejo Blue is concerned, the question is moot.

Monica Ali’s widely and deservedly praised first novel, Brick Lane (2003), told the story of a community of Bangladeshi immigrants living in public housing in London’s East End. Based on its almost Dickensian narrative energy, its graceful writing and its deep compassion for its characters, the novel became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Man Booker and Kiriyama prizes, among others. Ali, who was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and came to England with her Bangladeshi father and English mother in 1971 when she was three, was named as one of the 20 best young British novelists. She was hailed, along with such novelists as Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru, as one of an exciting group of young writers giving voice to the new multi-ethnic, multicultural Great Britain.

So the first big surprise of Ali’s beautifully written new tour de force is that it is set in Portugal. Alentejo (roughly pronounced: Al en TAY zha) is a farming region of Portugal. "The particular region I’m writing about is the poorest area, very rural, where the major industries are cork oak production and wheat. It’s a beautiful area of unspoiled countryside," she says. The "blue" of the book’s title refers to the vibrant blue paint residents use to outline the doors and windows of their whitewashed farmhouses.

"I’d planned to write a completely different book, set in London and in the north of England," Ali says. But for some time she and her husband, a management consultant, had visited friends who owned a house in Alentejo, and eventually they also bought a house there, where the family now spends summer holidays. "When I would sit down at my desk in London, I would still have all these images and thoughts of Portugal, and stories and characters kept inserting themselves into my mind. I resisted for a while. I was a bit annoyed because I’d planned something else. I never really bought the idea that the material chooses you rather than you choosing it, but it turns out that it does. This was presenting itself to me, and the obvious thing was to go ahead and write it."

The second big surprise of Alentejo Blue is the range of characters and points of view Ali is able to convincingly and movingly inhabit. In Brick Lane, Ali clearly demonstrated her great understanding of human nature, but here she takes that understanding to new heights. She writes from the perspective of young and old, women and men, tourists and old-time residents. It is an astonishing performance.

"I had a sense of quite deep satisfaction with what I was doing," Ali says of the composition of the novel. " I felt that I was flexing a sort of writing muscle. I was challenging myself, and I enjoyed the challenge of getting into all those different heads."

The social center of Ali’s fictional village of Mamarrosa is Vasco’s café. Vasco, a surprisingly graceful, extraordinarily fat man, who takes great pride in the fact that he learned his trade working in restaurant kitchens in Provincetown, Massachusetts, is the comic centerpiece of the novel. Vasco’s thematic counterweight is the aged farm laborer Joao, whose lonely presence casts the shadow of the region’s history throughout the rest of Ali’s narrative.

Into Vasco’s café traipse a host of dreamers and sojourners, each of them waiting or hoping for something. Among these are a young British couple, wandering through the countryside on holiday while they try to figure out if they love each other enough to get married; the wildly dysfunctional Potts family, who left England just ahead of the law and live in fetid squalor at the edge of town; a young, dutiful local girl, Teresa, who is planning her escape from the village; and Harry Stanton, a blocked writer trying to finish his book while managing to distract himself by drinking and chasing after the Pottses.

Ali says she first thought she would write the book entirely from Harry Stanton’s perspective. "But I realized that wasn’t the right thing to do, because that character wasn’t the driving impulse. The driving impulse of Alentejo Blue was the place itself. I soon realized that I would have to develop some kind of choral range in order to give voice to the character of that place."

And this is the real achievement of Alentejo Blue. While each character’s story or vignette is wonderfully wrought, enthralling or moving, comic or tragic by itself, as they overlap and interweave, the whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts. A reader gets an ever-deepening sense of the rhythm and the soul of a landscape and of the people who are rooted there or are just passing through.

"I’m not expecting this book to do for Alentejo what A Year in Provence did for that region," Ali says laughing. "I think this book shows a side of life that that book doesn’t. So I don’t expect a boom in property values as a result. Good thing for me. I’d have to move house again if that happened, ship out and find somewhere tranquil."

Ali says she doesn’t like to think of her work in terms of a career. She has begun writing a third novel and has done little bits of research on another idea that intrigues her, "but after that I don’t know," she says. "Maybe I don’t have any more books after that." Given the beauty of Alentejo Blue and its implicit declaration that Ali will not be limited by past achievements, let us hope for many more novels to come.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

"You didn't ask the question everybody else seems to be asking," Monica Ali says at the end of our conversation about her second novel, Alentejo Blue. In less than a minute, Ali must leave her home outside London to fetch her son and daughter,…

FictionHorror

Scott Smith

Interview by Alden Mudge

In conversation, writer Scott Smith is such an appealingly modest Midwesterner, you wonder how it is that he is thriving in megapolitan New York City. After all, he is a guy who says things like, "I always liked writing. But I never entitled myself to the idea that I could make a living being a writer. Growing up in Ohio that seemed hubristic. Just not allowed." Or, regarding his writing habits, "I'm very distractible, but I am comfortable with my distractibility."

On the other hand, Smith is the same fellow who, fresh out of the Columbia University MFA writing program, penned the mesmerizing best-selling novel, A Simple Plan, a harrowing morality tale of a sort-of-normal, sort-of-understandable progression of evil in which nine people end up getting murdered. Smith then went on to write the screenplay for the somewhat different, but equally chilling movie version of A Simple Plan, directed by Sam Raimi and starring Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda. And now he has completed the deeply scary (and sometimes darkly humorous) horror novel The Ruins. For which he is, of course, writing the screenplay.

So perhaps some deeper, darker (and more darkly comic) current flows through Smith's veins – an effervescent sort of ice water, perhaps – that allows him to live as comfortably as a New Yorker as he once did as a Midwesterner.

But if Smith is aware of the deep fissure that yawns open between the memorably creepy products of his imagination and his friendly, sincere, self-effacing, humorous and somewhat bemused conversational self, he's not copping to it during a phone call to his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He tiptoes to the brink of admission when he remarks that his wife, Elizabeth Hill, a writer he met in grad school, is his first reader and the reader he has in mind when he writes his novels, and then adds, deadpan, "Even though she's my ideal reader, she's not my ideal reader, since she hasn't finished either of my books. They make her too uncomfortable. I guess."

For readers who enjoy being so discomfited that the hair on their neck stands on end, however, The Ruins is just the book to curl up with on a dark and stormy night. Unfortunately, what is best and most interesting about The Ruins – particularly the way Smith toys with our expectations about what a horror/survival tale should be is impossible to discuss without stealing from would-be readers the novel's most hair-raising pleasures.

In The Ruins, two young couples on a post-graduation vacation in Cancun agree to help a German youth they've met on the beach locate his brother, who has impetuously gone off with a pretty archeologist to a dig at nearby Mayan ruins in the jungle. The five, plus a happy-go-lucky Greek tourist they meet along the way, set off on their little dirt-road trip, despite increasingly ominous signs, and are soon trapped at the hilltop ruins, awaiting rescue, while a very scary entity tries to lure them to their deaths. From there things go from grim to grimmer.

"I had a short story idea about a group of archeologists who dig up a disease that sickens everyone back when I was in graduate school," Smith says. "Scraps of paper, an idea I never did anything with." He stuck it in a folder and went on to other things.

After completing A Simple Plan, Smith worked for five years on a novel about a feud in a small town. He ended up with over a thousand pages, which, he says, was about a quarter of the imagined book. A monstrosity. "I couldn't stop writing and I knew it wasn't going to work, so I fled to screenwriting. The opportunities were there after the movie of A Simple Plan came out, and I had a sense there was a window of opportunity that was going to shut very rapidly."

He worked on a number of projects with Ben Stiller, who at one point had planned to direct A Simple Plan. He adapted a history book about Edwin and John Wilkes Booth. He worked on a comedy. He adapted the Richard Stark novel Backflash. "I've been lucky in terms of the people I've worked with," Smith says. "They've given me a lot of leeway. I haven't had any of those horror stories that you read about between studio executives and screenwriters."

When Smith decided to attempt another novel, he opted to do a genre-based book with a strong plot. "I had just seen the movie Signs and thought it would be fun to create that horror movie chill effect. When I went back through my folder of ideas and came across this archeologist idea, I thought, what if they dig up something that isn't a disease but has a horror element instead."

The Ruins, as the author points out, is "oddly internal" for a horror novel. Smith allows readers to peer intently into the psyches of his four main characters as their love and friendships begin to crack under the pressure of the threat to their individual survival. This adds greatly to a reader's growing sense of doom. "When it came to choices, I would always opt to push it further," Smith says, "because I have an instinct that if I'm uncomfortable with it, I should do it."

Yet according to Smith, his seemingly well-crafted horror novel just sort of happened, without anywhere near the degree of planning and plotting that went into his first novel. Asked, for example, about a darkly comic and deviously resonant scene in which the central characters imagine who will play them in the movie version of their escape tale, Smith says, simply, "I needed them to have something to talk about. And that just came the day that I wrote it."

Hmmm.

But then again maybe one needn't – or shouldn't – probe too deeply for the sources of this casual, dark inspiration. Maybe it's enough simply to echo the cover blurb's exclamation that the product of Smith's inspiration and labors is "unputdownable."

Unputdownable? Is that a word? "I wondered about that myself," Smith says laughing. But real word or not, it's an apt description of Scott Smith's The Ruins.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Author photo by Joyce Ravid.

In conversation, writer Scott Smith is such an appealingly modest Midwesterner, you wonder how it is that he is thriving in megapolitan New York City. After all, he is a guy who says things like, "I always liked writing. But I never entitled myself…

Fiction

Janet Fitch

Interview by Alden Mudge

According to Janet Fitch, the overwhelming success of her previous novel White Oleander, an Oprah pick, was a mixed blessing. On the plus side, there was the fame, there was the fortune, there was the dinner with actress Michelle Pfeiffer, who picked Fitch’s brain about the character she would be playing in the movie version of the book.

On the downside, there was the internalized pressure to produce something bigger, better, even more ambitious in her next book. Fitch had been a history major at Reed College until her 21st birthday, the day she decided to become a novelist. So for a follow-up to White Oleander, she determined to write a historical novel. It grew and grew and grew without becoming quite anything, and in the end she had to write off three years of work as a demoralizing disaster.

"When I was finally able to say it was a massive traffic accident and walk away from it," Fitch says, " I started looking through old stories and found this three-person story called Love in the Asylum’ and thought I could do something with it."

The result of her expansion and alteration of that early story is Paint It Black, a passionate novel that Fitch likens to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher – not because it follows Poe’s storyline in any way but because it concerns itself, in part, with the internal corruption and destruction of a prominent musical family, and because the novel does cast a Poe-like shadowy spell.

Which is something of a surprise, given the fact that Paint It Black is set in the vividly described 1980s punk rock scene in Los Angeles and its heroine is Josie Tyrell, a runaway from Bakersfield, who earns a living as an artist’s model and actress in student films while orbiting at the edges of the scene.

"The punk era was such a good moment for me," Fitch says during a call to her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her 16-year-old daughter. "There was a philosophy in punk – DIY, do it yourself – the idea that things don’t have to be perfect, you just do them, you don’t need anybody’s seal of approval. And that was really good for me. At the time that I was writing this book it was something that I needed to remember. So it seemed very right that the setting should be the punk era. The feel of that period is very sharp for me."

The "persistently defiant" Josie falls in love with Michael Faraday, a well-bred, talented, idealistic art student and the son of an overly controlling mother, Meredith Loewy, who is a wealthy, world-class concert pianist. When Michael commits suicide near the beginning of the novel, Josie’s journey becomes a struggle to comprehend Michael’s torment and the meaning of her love and loss, which quickly places her in a psychologically fraught relationship with Michael’s powerful mother.

"There were a lot of things I was dealing with immediately and critically at the time I was writing Paint It Black," Fitch says, pointing to the emotional wellspring of the book. "Depression, perfectionism, maybe a way out of perfectionism. I like to work on things that are loaded. When you start a novel you want a situation that is really loaded, where there is enough tension in the initial situation that it will power your book. The most personal aspect of Paint It Black is the dialectic between Michael and Josie in terms of knowledge and perfectionism. There is a dance between your level of permissiveness in yourself and the demands your aspirations place on yourself. So Josie is my permissiveness and Michael is my perfectionism. And what happens to perfectionism? On a sliding scale, I think it’s better to go with permissiveness."

Fitch varies the mood of Paint It Black with some fine and funny satirical sketches of the student filmmakers who occasionally employ Josie in their productions. " I went to film school, briefly," Fitch says. "The level of self-importance is unbelievable. The harder you’re working, the less money you’re making, the more grandiose the fantasy. There’s definitely a comic element to it. But it is also another way to look at art and ambition, in opposition to Michael’s ambition. Michael is as serious as cancer, but other people have ambitions too, although their ambitions are not necessarily as serious or as well thought out."

Fitch also proves adept at exploring the nuances of the class divide that separates the untutored, working-class Josie Tyrell from the cultured, sophisticated Meredith Loewy. Maybe this is not so surprising, since in her long apprenticeship before the publication of White Oleander, Fitch supported herself for years as a typesetter, moving around the West and Northwest as the opportunities presented themselves. "Nobody sees the haves like the have-nots," she says. "Josie was brought up with the kind of people who never expected anything, which is why she is so defiant. She shapes her environment by making boundaries, whereas Michael and Meredith create their world directly. They know what they want from the world and the world just better deliver it."

But where Paint It Black is best is in the sensory detail of the place and time it describes. "One of tragedies of our times is that we’re cut off from our senses," Fitch says in what she calls one of her writerly rants. "We’re able to control our environment to the point that we don’t feel anything. We don’t feel, we don’t smell, we’re not rubbed the wrong way. But as animals we crave sensory stimulation. People work in windowless, air-conditioned environments in beige and gray, stare at the screen all day, go down in the elevator, get in their air-conditioned cars, and go home and watch a flat screen. I think when people read, they read to be reattached to a sensual world. So it’s really important for writers to remember to reawaken the reader to the experience of the senses, to put the reader physically in the character and in the story. That makes it vivid for the reader."

In Paint It Black, Fitch practices what she preaches.

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

 

According to Janet Fitch, the overwhelming success of her previous novel White Oleander, an Oprah pick, was a mixed blessing. On the plus side, there was the fame, there was the fortune, there was the dinner with actress Michelle Pfeiffer, who picked Fitch's brain…

Memoir

Adam Gopnik

Interview by Alden Mudge

Adam Gopnik arrived in New York City from Montreal in 1980 "with a satchel full of ambitions." First among them was the dream of becoming a songwriter. A close second was the desire to write for The New Yorker. He pursued both while officially being in New York to do graduate work in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts.

The songwriting career, alas, remains an elusive brass ring for Gopnik. But after six years of sitting in a 9-by-11 basement apartment on East 87th Street that he shared with his then-girlfriend-now-wife, Martha, hammering out weekly pieces that he would submit to the Talk of the Town section, Gopnik "finally, finally" broke in at The New Yorker in 1986. He soon became one of the magazine’s pre-eminent essayists.

"For me what makes the essay such a miraculous form," Gopnik says during a call to his family’s newer, larger, non-basement Upper East side apartment, "is that it’s the only form where ideas and emotions walk hand-in-hand. The novel or short story can be a highly intellectual form, but . . . when a work of fiction turns toward argument, we feel it’s a distraction from the drama. Similarly if a straight review takes too sharp a turn into the personal narrative, it feels extraneous. But with the essay, that’s exactly what you’re trying to do – find a subject that simultaneously sets off a chain of thought and sets off an association of feeling. When an essay works successfully, it is because it manages to fire on both sets of neurons at once."

In 1995 Gopnik went with Martha and their son, Luke, to be the magazine’s correspondent in Paris. Upon his return to New York in 2000, he published Paris to the Moon, a series of linked essays interweaving previously published and recently written work, a collection that most definitely hit both sets of neurons and is, quite simply, one of the most insightful and amusing books about France available today. Now, six years later, Gopnik returns with Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York, a book quite different in subject and tonal shadings from Paris but which is likely to rival it in readers’ estimations.

"I wanted very much for the book to have a particular kind of arc," Gopnik says. "An arc of excitement at homecoming, then loss, and then recovery." The five years he writes about include the devastating September 11 terrorist attacks and the return of the cancer which would prove fatal to Gopnik’s close friend Kirk Varnedoe, art historian and curator of painting and art at the Museum of Modern Art. "I hope that the me in this book, the narrator, goes from being happy to sad to a little bit wiser," Gopnik says.

Gopnik’s subjects here range from a hilarious remembrance of his former therapist, to observations on the strange effects of feral parakeets in Flatbush and telecom switch hotels in Manhattan on the power grid, to what is almost a hymn for 9/11, to the diminishment of the New York department store, once "the cathedral of material aspiration." But the bulk of the essays are given over to very funny and profoundly moving meditations on family life, and particularly on the lives of his son Luke and daughter Olivia as they grow up in New York over these five years.

"As the book makes plain, I like family life," Gopnik says. " I like living amongst kids and I’ve never found that hubbub an impediment to working." In fact, Gopnik admits to "an excess of nervous energy and unless I’ve got some source of noise that can siphon off that nervous energy so that whatever intellectual energy I have can go to work, I get very restless." So while working on this book, he set up behind a screen outside the door of his daughter Olivia’s bedroom, where he was "sort of the forgotten man in the house, listening to the children chatting in the kitchen nearby."

Gopnik says the biggest surprise in returning to New York was to find "how well-suited to children it is. I think it’s probably always been reasonably well-suited but it seems particularly so now. And I’m aware, as I say in the book, that many people find that appalling because they feel the city has become suburban and no longer has the kind of louche creative energy that it did when we arrived a quarter century ago. There’s some truth in that. Like everything else in life, New York is a series of gains and losses and question marks, not simple exclamation points."

The public and private losses are almost overwhelming during this period in New York. But so are the adaptations to loss. Led by son Luke, for example, the family – including the skeptical author himself – responds to the 9/11 attacks by becoming loyal Yankee fans. And in a brilliant arrangement of essays that pairs a seriocomic piece about the death of Olivia’s fish Bluie ("Death of a Fish") and a marvelous paean to Kirk Varnedoe ("Last of the Metrozoids") Gopnik actually moves both himself and his readers toward wisdom.

"My friend Kirk Varnedoe is in some sense the hero of this book," Gopnik says. "By brutal coincidence he had a recurrence of cancer just before 9/11 and in effect knew he was dying from that Fall on. On the day that 9/11 happened, he said, here is something that we can experience either as an injury or as an imagery. If we experience it as an injury, we will experience it as tragedy and grief. And tragedy and grief are things we can recover from. But if we experience it as an imagery, it will simply run on a recurring loop and never end.

"I am as haunted by what happened as anybody else is, but mortality is the circumstance in which we live, whether it’s the horrible murderous mortality of 9/11 or the comic mortality of poor Bluie or the slow death of a dear friend. In each case we cannot help but mourn, and we cannot help but begin again. If there’s a life lesson in the book – and my children always accuse me of offering far too many life lessons – I hope that’s it."

Alden Mudge fled New York City in 1989 for the left coast, and arrived just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Adam Gopnik arrived in New York City from Montreal in 1980 "with a satchel full of ambitions." First among them was the dream of becoming a songwriter. A close second was the desire to write for The New Yorker. He pursued both while officially…

Memoir

Ed Viesturs

Interview by Alden Mudge

Be careful what you let your children read. That may be one of the unintended lessons in Ed Viesturs’ thoroughly absorbing memoir about his 17-year campaign to climb the world’s 14 highest mountains, No Shortcuts to the Top.

Growing up outside Chicago in the early 1970s, Viesturs happened to read Maurice Herzog’s story of his 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first 8,000-meter mountain ever climbed. After that, "I just felt that Illinois was not quite right for me," Viesturs says during a call to Bainbridge Island, Washington, where he lives with his wife, Paula, and their three young children.

In fact, nothing but the Himalaya would ultimately satisfy the questing urge inspired by that and other accounts of adventure Viesturs read as a youth. "For whatever reason, I like things that are difficult," he says, " things that are not only athletically challenging but that also make me really think about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. Plus it’s just so beautiful up there, and the higher you go, the more spectacular it gets. You realize you are only one of a few people to be in these amazing places."

Viesturs is one of just 12 humans ever to have climbed all the world’s peaks over 8,000 meters high – all of them in the Himalaya – and one of only six people to do so without supplemental oxygen. As a guide, Viesturs also climbed many of these mountains using extra oxygen, which afforded him the stamina to assist client climbers. He has summited Everest six times and, as he vividly describes in the book, was on that mountain in 1996 as logistical organizer, lead climber and on-camera talent for the IMAX movie expedition when disaster struck.

Two of Viesturs’ friends and longtime climbing companions – Rob Hall and Scott Fischer (who was the photographer at Ed and Paula’s wedding) – were among those who died in the fierce storm on the mountain that year, despite the heroic efforts of Viesturs, the IMAX team and others to save them. In No Shortcuts to the Top and in conversation, Viesturs is characteristically modest about his selflessness in giving up scarce resources and even scarcer time to rescue other climbers. "I’ve always felt that if other people need your help, that is the priority," Viesturs says. "If I knew that I got to the summit but another climber didn’t make it because I didn’t stop and help, that would bother me to the end of my days." Viesturs writes movingly about sitting with the frozen bodies of his friends after the storm had passed.

In a conversational tone that is remarkably similar to his relaxed, candid speaking style, Viesturs, with co-author David Roberts, writes about both the physical and financial challenges of being a mountaineer (he was fanatical about training, but in the early years struggled without sponsorship to finance his climbing expeditions while working first as a veterinarian and then – because it offered a more flexible schedule – as a carpenter); about the stress his career put on his family ("Hopefully it comes out that I’m sensitive to other people’s feelings, and Paula’s in particular"); about the details of daily life during a climb (which included long periods of waiting for good conditions, so that Viesturs would "read 20 books on an expedition . . . everything from the latest Tom Clancy to the classics to books by other mountaineers"); and about the personalities of the mountains he has climbed and the companions he has climbed with.

Fittingly, Annapurna was the final and most dangerous mountain Viesturs climbed in his quest. One of the most disciplined and safety-conscious climbers of all time, he had twice turned back from Annapurna’s summit before finally reaching the top on May 12, 2005. "I’ve always felt if I didn’t fail because of my lack of desire or training, I was fine with turning back. It was the mountain that was calling the shots," Viesturs says. "You can’t conquer a mountain. By having the right attitude, by being humble and respectful, I was allowed to go up. And I was allowed to go down. You have to follow your instincts and budget your resources and just keep plowing through it. And you have to remember that getting to the top doesn’t prove anything. It’s getting back that shows you have strength and intelligence. Otherwise it doesn’t mean a thing."

Alden Mudge has trekked to Everest base camp at 18,500 feet.

Be careful what you let your children read. That may be one of the unintended lessons in Ed Viesturs' thoroughly absorbing memoir about his 17-year campaign to climb the world's 14 highest mountains, No Shortcuts to the Top.

Growing up outside…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Jody Shields

Interview by Alden Mudge

A World War I-era photograph of Boston socialite artist Anna Coleman provided the spark for Jody Shields’ new novel, The Crimson Portrait. "It was a black-and-white picture of Anna holding a paintbrush to a man’s face," Shields says from her home in the Soho district of New York City. "The caption said she was an artist who painted masks for men with injured faces. I was immediately captivated."

With this real-life character as her starting point, Shields has created a lushly descriptive novel based on little-known events of World War I. Her willingness to gambol in the ambiguous fields between historical fact and imaginative invention also marked Shields’ widely hailed first novel, The Fig Eater, a detective story based on Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking case study "Dora." And as was true in that first novel, Shields in The Crimson Portrait is after something more than historical and psychological veracity. She is interested in the relationship between the shiny seductive surfaces of the known world and our notions of personal identity, grief and love.

As it turns out, the real Anna Coleman went to France with her husband, a doctor – before the United States entered World War I – as part of the Harvard Medical Corps of volunteers. Also among the corps was a dentist named Anton Kazanjian, who had fled Armenia as a boy, come to the U.S., worked in a mill, and eventually enrolled in Harvard Medical school at the age of 30, the oldest student in the school. In the novel, these two artistic outsiders form an intense bond, and when Kazanjian is transferred to England to work at a hospital devoted to the reconstruction of wounded soldiers’ faces, Anna follows and finds a new calling using her art in service of medical science.

"I hadn’t anticipated that Anna would turn into such a central character," Shields says, sounding genuinely bemused. "And I didn’t imagine that there would be a relationship between her and the dentist. But that’s fate. You just can’t plan everything. But what fun would it be if you could?"

Kazanjian and Coleman end up working at the country estate of Catherine, who in profound mourning over the loss of her young husband in battle has given over their grand house for use as a military hospital devoted to the new science of reconstructive facial surgery. The hospital is run by the tough, philosophical Dr. McCleary, and one of its more appealingly vulnerable inmates is a faceless young soldier named Julian, with whom Catherine eventually falls in love.

Through her dramatization of the bonds and antagonisms that exist among these central characters, Shields is also able to convey an astonishing amount of information about such things as the history of religious controversy surrounding plastic surgery, the mythological gardens of 18th-century English homes, the incredible properties of human skin, the moral and emotional impact of the human face, and, of course, the brutal horrors of war.

"The face is so small," Shields says, almost wistfully, "yet even though you can live without a face, I found an account from the period that said when someone’s face was blown off on the battlefield, he was injected with enough morphine to kill him because while they would try to save men without legs or arms, they just thought a man without a face wouldn’t be able to live as a human.

Shields later adds: "I write about what I find completely fascinating and interesting. It’s a kind of archaeology. I love the tension of research: You can’t plan what you’re going to find. It’s happenstance and luck. And I love spending time in libraries. When I travel I always go to libraries, just to see what they’re like. . . . The challenge is not to burden the book with too much research that doesn’t feel like it fits the story."

In fact, Shields’ deft interweaving of her vast historical research into The Crimson Portrait does not intrude upon her narrative. But it is her enviable descriptive powers that impress throughout. This is perhaps unsurprising, since Shields, who grew up in Nebraska, was a visual artist before becoming a writer; a fashion editor at Vogue before writing All That Glitters, a history of costume jewelry; and design editor at the New York Times magazine before becoming a screenwriter, first, and then a novelist. If not by training, then by instinct, it seems, Shields bedazzles us with the colorful skin of experience, then asks us to consider what lies beneath.

 

A World War I-era photograph of Boston socialite artist Anna Coleman provided the spark for Jody Shields' new novel, The Crimson Portrait. "It was a black-and-white picture of Anna holding a paintbrush to a man's face," Shields says from her home in the Soho…

FictionWorld Fiction

Vikram Chandra

Interview by Alden Mudge

Nine hundred pages? What was Vikram Chandra thinking? Quite a lot it turns out, as readers of Chandra’s exhilaratingly ambitious and entertaining novel, Sacred Games, will soon discover.

Set mostly in contemporary Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), where Chandra and his wife, novelist Melanie Abrams, spend half the year, Sacred Games is, on the surface, a police procedural novel. In alternating chapters the lives of Sartaj Singh, a Sikh police inspector, and Ganesh Gaitonde, a Hindu crime lord, converge and diverge as a story of international criminal intrigue unfolds. But, as any suspecting reader would surely conclude after hefting its door-stopper bulk, Sacred Games is about much more than its attractively polished surfaces.

"When I started, I thought I was writing a pretty conventional 250-page crime something or other. You know, the type of thing that starts with a dead body on the first page and then at the most 300 pages later ends up with everything figured out and fixed," Chandra says during a call to his home in Berkeley, California. Chandra and Abrams have been teaching in UC Berkeley’s creative writing program since leaving Washington, D.C., about a year ago, which is also roughly the length of time the couple has been married.

Soon after beginning the novel eight years ago, however, Chandra’s research among Indian policemen, crime reporters and even Indian gangsters and mob bosses led him to conclude that what seemed like a local crime "had all these connections to politics and religion and the ongoing struggles between nation-states in the region. I got this sense of this huge web of events, people, organizations and forces at work that were affecting people’s lives and linking them together. Then the structure of the book became more and more clear to me, and it started to grow in size and thematic concerns. At some point I realized, damn, this is going to be big."

Big it is. And rollicking and provocative and frightening and moving . . . and more. Chandra, who says British Victorian novelists are among his favorite writers, displays a Dickensian verve for character and event, with a decidedly Indian twist, of course. The small bribes and favors that come Inspector Singh’s way, for example, induce no cynicism and hold no real corrupting power over the redoubtable policeman and are often the hinges for small, comic turns in the plot. And the murderous Ganesh Gaitonde runs one of the biggest crime cartels in the country and at the same time tries to both produce popular movies and pursue a serious, if deluded, religious quest as a follower of the elusive Swami Shridhar Shukla.

This yoking of seeming opposites within a single person creates an often-unexpected empathy for the novel’s characters that Chandra says is one of his main goals here. "It became very important to me that Ganesh Gaitonde, for instance, be somebody that the reader really engages with, that if you don’t feel, and in some sense participate, in his desire, then the book didn’t work. So when the book was finished, Melanie was the first to read it. After she’d been reading it for a couple of days, she marched out of her study and told me she hated how much I made her like this guy. That was a very happy moment."

Still, Sacred Games seethes with the racial and ethnic conflicts that have repeatedly brought death and destruction in India and throughout the subcontinent over the past half century. "I wanted very much to treat those events," Chandra says, "because . . . things that happened 50 years ago in a sense wrote divisions physically into the geography of the region, but also into people’s bodies and minds. Those events continue to have very clear impacts on our lives today. And I wanted to get at least the feeling of that and not shy away from its ugliness. The propensity for violence that coexists with all those other feelings was something I wanted to deal with."

If the terrifying brutality of the violence in some sections of Sacred Games is not exactly redeemed, it is a least sensibly situated within Chandra’s vivid portrait of the clash and jangle and excitement of modern-day Mumbai – and India, in general – and within the flavorful hybrid of English he uses to tell his tale. Chandra, who reads Hindi and some Punjabi and understands several other regional languages, purposefully spices his tale with linguistic borrowings.

"Bombay is full of immigrants," Chandra explains. "The language that people actually use on the street tends to be sprinkled with all these words from different regions. If I was sitting in a bar in Bombay telling these stories to my friends, I would use an English that has all of these words from other tongues in it. It is so much a part of the texture of life in India now and of Bombay in particular that I just wanted to get that on paper as fluidly as I could."

Not surprisingly, that hybrid language reflects the technological powerhouse that India is becoming. It also reflects an unexpected part of Chandra’s own personality. While studying fiction writing in graduate school in Houston, he earned a living as a computer programmer. He thinks computer programming and fiction writing are not so very different, since both require "constructing a sort of self-contained world in which various components must interact with each other." In conversation Chandra refers to himself as "a computer geek" and admits that his writing studio is filled with gear and gadgets, screens and speakers, whereas Abrams’ studio next door is "a much calmer place."

By Chandra’s account, he and Abrams have an unusually close working relationship, exchanging ideas, working through plot problems, acting as sounding boards for each other. So when, after eight years of writing 400 words a day, six days a week, Chandra completed a considerably longer version of Sacred Games, he and Abrams spent several months together editing down the manuscript. Now, Chandra says, "In my mind, at least, it is as short as it could possibly be."

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland.

 

Nine hundred pages? What was Vikram Chandra thinking? Quite a lot it turns out, as readers of Chandra's exhilaratingly ambitious and entertaining novel, Sacred Games, will soon discover.

Set mostly in contemporary Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), where Chandra and his…

Arts & Culture

Joan Acocella

Interview by Alden Mudge

As if you don’t already have enough to read! Add to the top of your growing pile Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Joan Acocella’s thrilling new collection of essays illustrating the "ordinary, Sunday-school virtues" that, she argues in her introduction, enable artistic genius to flower. Then dip into the nicely diverse set of books that provide the occasions for these intelligent, witty and provocatively entertaining excursions into the creative enterprise. Or some of the books at any rate.

"Sometimes the essay is longer and more ambitious than the occasion is huge," Acocella admits during an early morning call to her apartment near Union Square in New York City. Thus, she devotes a mere paragraph to a recent biography of Mary Magdelene before unpacking centuries of conveniently shifting views of Jesus’ closest female companion, who receives just 14 mentions in the New Testament. And she dismisses a tawdry biography chiefly focused on choreographer Jerome Robbins’ cruelty with a fatally funny quip – "Don’t worry, ladies. The Robbins story remains to be told." – then proceeds to convey vibrantly the importance of Robbins’ contributions to American dance, despite the conflicts that gnawed at his soul.

"I had some thoughts about Robbins that I wanted to unload," Acocella says simply. She speaks with a smoky, cultured voice that bears hardly a trace of a childhood spent in the hills of Oakland, California, back when it was "a nice place where you could roller skate in the street without getting run over." She came to New York with her husband, a native, for graduate school in comparative literature and made her "swerve to dance" while writing her dissertation. "I had a husband, I had a child, we needed money," she says. So she went to work as an editor and, later, as a writer. She also began attending the New York City Ballet and "had – I mean this happens to people – I had a transforming experience. I saw the works of Balanchine when he was healthy and when the company was simply wonderful, and I really lost my heart." Acocella has been the dance critic for the New Yorker magazine for more than a decade.

"I’m actually now as much a book reviewer as dance reviewer," Acocella notes. So while she is one of the great dance journalists of the era – as essays here on Vaslav Najinsky, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martha Graham and Suzanne Farrell amply demonstrate – she devotes most of her attention in this collection to novels and novelists, many of them little-known or under-read.

In the essay "Devil’s Work," for example, Acocella writes about the difficult life and dark, satirical novels of English writer Hilary Mantel with a passionate appreciation ("I had been cooking that essay for years," Acocella exclaims, "and I just jumped at the chance to write about her"). Her penetrating essay on the remarkable novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, who published her first novel at 60 and her last at 83, includes a hilarious account of a non-interview with the author ("I flew across an ocean, I flew to England, to get that completely uninformative interview!" Acocella complains, laughing). Her essay on Primo Levi releases that author from the grip of his most extraordinary book – Survival in Auschwitz – and makes tangible to readers just how large and courageous were Levi’s spirit and works ("Certainly, Levi is the greatest moral hero in this book," Acocella says). And in the best essay of the book, "European Dreams," Acocella essentially resurrects the career of Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth and his extraordinary novel The Radetzky March.

"I do like to call attention to people who I think are not getting enough attention," Acocella says, and adds: "In the first weeks after the publication of the Roth essay [in the New Yorker in 2004], you couldn’t find a copy of The Radetzky March in any New York bookstore. I took an enormous pleasure in that because I think he’s wonderful."

Part of what makes Acocella so persuasive is her gift for narrative. The best of these essays tell stories that are rich with insight, observation and the drama of artists transcending their limitations. "I try to describe with love what I love," Acocella explains. "My secret ambition is to pierce through the veil: think about a work and then not just describe it but arrive at something, an underlying principal or an underlying emotion and then say what the work’s true value and beauty really is."

Alden Mudge, a juror for the California Book Awards, writes from Oakland.

 

As if you don't already have enough to read! Add to the top of your growing pile Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Joan Acocella's thrilling new collection of essays illustrating the "ordinary, Sunday-school virtues" that, she argues in her introduction, enable artistic genius to…

Fiction

Joshua Ferris

Interview by Alden Mudge

Then We Came to the End, the debut novel by Joshua Ferris which has—deservedly—inspired so much prepublication buzz? It's the book that Ferris was sure would be locked away in a desk drawer forever. The sort of fledgling first effort a young novelist never returns to, perhaps recycles when he moves to a new apartment. Or burns.

"I thought this would be my burned-drawer book," Ferris says during a call to his home in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. He and his wife moved to Brooklyn in 2003, after she had finished law school and he had completed his M.F.A. at the University of California at Irvine. She had a clerkship with a judge in Manhattan. He had won the Glenn Schaeffer Prize, which gives a substantial monetary grant to an emerging writer, allowing him to continue work on the book for a year or so without worrying about income. But Ferris soon "found the book wanting," put it in a drawer and started something new. "Then about a year later I had a real revelation about why it was that I had failed at it. And I got the first two sentences in my head."

The original version had been Ferris' "angry novel about work," based on his experiences working in an advertising agency in Chicago after earning his B.A. at the University of Iowa. "I never did advertising that was particularly sexy. I was more a news-letter and bill-insert man," Ferris says wryly. He apparently compensated for the routine nature of his work by conceiving a book that had a "far more fantastical and ambitious and unmanageable storyline."

Then We Came to the End is a much funnier, truer and wiser book "about work and the people who do the work" than its avatar. It tells the story of how a collection of go-getters, slackers, know-it-alls, petty tyrants, individualists and water-cooler gossips typical in offices throughout the land behave and misbehave when facing layoffs during an economic downturn. One of the many large pleasures of this novel is to see this collection of office archetypes gradually emerge as believable, often captivating, individual characters.

"With sufficient distance from work, I realized what I missed—the community that work provides, the feeling of identification, people stopping by your desk and asking you to go to lunch," Ferris says, explaining his change of disposition. He also realized "that along with those communal aspects, work provides a paycheck, puts the kids through college and takes care of the mortgage. With all of those things under threat, I could allow my characters to act in ways that were both more dire and also more reflective of the real value of work, of the office itself, and of the people we work with."

The most daring aspect of Then We Came to the End is that Ferris tells his tale from the first person plural point of view. This choral voice is technically difficult. But the effect here is both exhilarating and thought-provoking.

"I strongly believe there is a sort of subterranean, elusive voice that burbles up from any group," Ferris, who has an undergraduate degree in philosophy, says. "Even in a group of two you can tap into a groupthink mentality that is given voice by members of the group. You see this in religion, in politics and certainly in advertising, where there is always an implied if not explicit 'we' that represents the company's message to you the consumer. If you spend enough time within a group this voice comes through in a weird canine frequency. Given that the book is set in advertising, it was sort of a no-brainer that that was how this book had to be told. And the group dynamic versus the individual, the group's assumptions versus the individual's assertions was always really important to me as I was thinking about the work dynamic."

Ferris says that once he had the voice and resumed working on the novel, it took him only about 14 weeks to complete it, even though 95 percent of the writing was new. He and his wife and their two cats have recently moved into a new, more spacious apartment not far from the one in which he wrote Then We Came to the End. The new apartment is cold on the day we speak; Ferris says he is "bundled in about 15 layers." In the old, presumably warmer, apartment Ferris wrote in a nook in the middle of a railroad flat. "My poor, long-suffering wife had to crawl over the piles of the book if she wanted to go to the bedroom. If she wanted to go to the bathroom or the kitchen, she had to move through me," Ferris says.

The piles of the book were the large sheets of graph paper he composes on. "When I know what I'm going to write about, I tend to overwrite, be too explanatory, leave no room for the reader's imagination to meet me halfway. But when I write something I didn't anticipate that takes me in a direction I didn't know I was going in and follow it to its logical conclusion, I feel that's a keeper."

"These long broad sheets physically allow me to move around. If something isn't improvisational enough I'll switch to another quadrant of the pad." Ferris later transcribes and revises what he's written onto his computer.

During the 14-week flurry that produced Then We Came to the End, Ferris worked 14 to 16 hours a day, every day. " It was the best and worst experience ever," Ferris says. "For the first two or three weeks I knew I could write the book but I didn't have anything substantial down on paper. I didn't want to go out and run in case I got hit by a car. I stayed inside and ordered from Brooklyn restaurants, which was probably actually more risky for my heart."

Now at work on a new book, Ferris continues to devote long hours to writing. "I have always said that I have absolutely no talent, but a tremendous amount of discipline," he says.

Readers of Ferris' marvelous debut novel won't believe that "no talent" bit. Not one whit.

 

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland.

Then We Came to the End, the debut novel by Joshua Ferris which has—deservedly—inspired so much prepublication buzz? It's the book that Ferris was sure would be locked away in a desk drawer forever. The sort of fledgling first effort a young novelist never returns…

Memoir

A.M. Homes

Interview by Alden Mudge

Her closest friends call her by her initials: A.M. She reminds a caller that her often hilarious and frequently unsettling novels – This Book Will Save Your Life (about an L.A. businessman in midlife crisis); The End of Alice (about the correspondence between a college coed and a pedophile murderer); and Jack (about a teenage boy whose father comes out of the closet) – are anything but autobiographical. And while she is funny, friendly, even chatty during a call to her home in Manhattan, A.M. Homes deftly deflects any and all questions about her personal life: "What can I tell you about my family life? I have one child, I live in New York City, I have a dog and, you know, a really busy life," she says with pleasant finality.

No wonder that Homes, who is something of celebrity in New York literary circles, has a reputation for being a very private person. No wonder, too, that she found writing her extraordinary memoir about meeting her birth parents 30 years after being put up for adoption "so incredibly, god-awful hard."

The Mistress’s Daughter opens in 1992 during a Christmas visit Homes made to her family in Washington, D.C. After dinner on her first night there, Homes’ parents sit her down and tell her that her birth mother wants to meet her. Homes had always known she was adopted. Even as a child she remembers feeling she was "kind of in service to other people in some way" because of this. "So I was often paying attention to other people’s moods and what they might be thinking and feeling. Part of that is who I am as a person anyway. But always being slightly on the outside and always watching a bit more than participating is in some way a combination of the experience of being adopted and of my own personality." It’s also an experience that helped define her as a writer, she says. "I tend to observe people’s emotional lives. I’m not that observant of the physical world in some ways, but I really do know how to read people."

Homes’ appraisal of her own conflicted emotions about her birth parents is both unsparingly honest and psychologically harrowing. Of course there is much to be conflicted about. Homes’ birth mother, who was 22 when Homes was born, never married or had another child and was a complicated, needy, unpleasant woman who died alone of kidney failure in 1998 after walking away from an operation that might have saved her life. Homes’ birth father was a much older, successful businessman with a family when he began his affair with a teenage girl working in his shop. He demanded that Homes take a DNA test and when the test proved she was his daughter, he promised to make her part of his family. He also said "Now that I’m your father, I think that I have the right to ask – are you dating anyone?"

The Mistress’s Daughter is A.M. Homes at her mordant best. "I don’t think I could have written this book without all the experience I’ve had as a writer of novels, of editing and trying to be concise," she says of her struggles to complete the book. "One of the hardest things about it was taking something that was so emotional and psychological and finding words for it. It’s an emotional experience that’s very primitive. It’s the basic experience of being separated from your parents."

Homes wrote the first section of The Mistress’s Daughter shortly after her birth mother died and her birth father reneged on his promise to introduce her to the rest of her family. A version of the book’s first section appeared in The New Yorker in 2004. The publication was problematic and her professionalism was threatened because she shielded her birth father’s identity. "The guy never behaved particularly well but I always felt protective of him because it wasn’t like something he had asked for," she says.

But in 2005 Homes finally opened the "toxic boxes" of papers and photographs and memorabilia rescued from her mother’s apartment after the funeral and kept for years in mini-storage, and The Mistress’s Daughter became a book with a much larger purpose – the exploration of adoption, identity, questions of nature vs. nurture and the very meaning of "family" itself. "I suddenly wanted to be sure that I was going somewhere further, doing something more than just telling that story," Homes says.

One result of this enlargement of purpose was that Homes could no longer protect her birth father’s identity. "I had to be true to the story and not hide from it despite how painful it was for me to tell it and what it might feel like to somebody else," she says. "To not use the names [of her father and his ancestors] meant to negate the story all over again, when the whole point of this is to say that you do have the right to your own life story, that one person cannot decide that you are not allowed your lineage."

Another result of the process was the expansion of Homes’ own emotional point of view. She attained a new understanding and sympathy for her birth mother. And she accepted that her birth father’s family will see him differently than she sees him. "They would because they have a very different experience of him," she says. "Honestly? As you grow up you just realize that life is more complicated and people are more complicated than they first appear, which is kind of a great thing and kind of hard to deal with. It’s hard to reconcile and accept that people who are capable of great things also do horrible things. But the sophisticated approach is to realize that a person can be different and behave differently in different situations."

And it is this movement from personal history to broad understanding that makes A.M. Homes’ The Mistress’s Daughter such a powerful read.

Alden Mudge, who serves as a juror for the Kiriyama Prize, writes from Oakland.

Her closest friends call her by her initials: A.M. She reminds a caller that her often hilarious and frequently unsettling novels - This Book Will Save Your Life (about an L.A. businessman in midlife crisis); The End of Alice (about the correspondence between…

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