Alden Mudge

FictionWorld Fiction

Khaled Hosseini

Interview by Alden Mudge

After the unexpected success of his first novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini decided to focus his second book on a part of Afghan society often obscured from public view its women. "There are women characters in The Kite Runner, but I wouldn't describe any of them as major characters," he says. "So there was this entire aspect of Afghan society and Afghan life that I hadn't touched upon. It was a landscape that I felt was rich with possibilities for storytelling."

Hosseini, a superb storyteller, realizes those possibilities fully in A Thousand Splendid Suns, his textured, deeply affecting novel about the intersecting lives of two Afghan women. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Herat movie house owner. She grows up exiled with her mother to a hovel in the hills outside the city, visited occasionally by the father she adores. When her presence at the periphery of her father's life threatens family peace, she is forced into marriage with a shoemaker from Kabul. Life in Kabul goes from bad to worse under the Soviet occupation. Her husband brutalizes her and eventually takes in, then marries, a young, well-educated girl Laila who has been orphaned during the Afghan civil war. Most of A Thousand Splendid Suns depicts the extraordinary relationship that develops under grim circumstances between these two women.

"As a writer, the things that always move me are the intimate human stories, the links between the characters, their dreams, their disappointments, their crushing defeats and their atonements," Hosseini says during a call to his home in San Jose, California. Hosseini was an internist at a Bay Area Kaiser hospital before the phenomenal popularity of The Kite Runner allowed him to take an extended leave of absence. He and his wife have two young children. He briefly, politely, interrupts the call to kiss his son goodbye as he heads off to school. Hosseini appears remarkably unaffected by the hoopla over his first novel.

But later in the conversation, Hosseini admits the success of his first book, which has sold more than 4 million copies, cast a looming shadow over early attempts at composing the new novel. "Suddenly everybody was interested in what I was writing next," he says with a pleasant, rueful laugh. "You go through these crises of self-doubt. You wonder: Am I a hack? It took a little bit of work to ignore the noise outside my door." In fact, for a while, Hosseini rented an office in a nondescript office building, a room with nothing on the walls to distract him that he now calls his windowless bunker.

He worried about finding the right voice for the book, writing through four drafts using different approaches and points of view. He chastised himself because he had not only decided to write from a woman's standpoint, but had decided to write from the standpoints of two women. "I had to not only think about what it would be like to be a woman, but I also had to think about what it would be like to be a different woman. As long as I was self-conscious about the fact that I was writing from a woman's voice, it kept coming across as very self-aware and contrived. But as I wrote and as I began to know these women, began to understand their motivations, their dreams, began to understand them as people, the issue vanished on its own. At first I was a ventriloquist and they were dummies speaking with my voice. But as I began to know them, the characters took over and I became a mouthpiece for them. That was a watershed moment for me."

The completed book has the same big heart displayed in The Kite Runner, but even Hosseini (despite his writerly doubts) believes the new story is more masterfully told. "I feel this is a more subtle and somewhat more restrained book," he says. "I think that I, as a writer, have learned to trust readers and allow them to make their own connections." One sign of such mastery is the way Hosseini weaves recent history into the narrative. He says he struggled to restrain himself from getting too much into the history and political turmoil of those years. But he eventually found that the intimate story of these characters and the bigger story of what is going on in Afghanistan twisted around each other like a DNA strand. "It is really by necessity, because these two women happen to be living in the volatile period of recent Afghanistan history. There is no way I could have told the story of Laila and Mariam without telling the story of Afghanistan."

In addition to their concern for the plights of Hosseini's characters, readers will be carried willingly from page to page by the sensory and cultural details that enrich Hosseini's depiction of Afghan life in this era. Hosseini grew up in Kabul before immigrating to the United States as a youth. His family was originally from Herat, which he would visit for family gatherings. "I remember the city and how beautiful it was," he says. " I can speak Farsi in both the Herati and the Kabuli accent. This is part of my background." Breaking his rule of allowing only his wife to read and comment on drafts of his novels, he asked his father, a former Afghan diplomat, to read the final draft and serve as a sort historical and technical advisor. In 2003, a time of cautious optimism in Afghanistan, he visited Kabul. A Thousand Splendid Suns resonates with his remembered and recently witnessed details of Afghan life.

"The writer side of me," Hosseini says at the end of our conversation, "wants what every writer wants: that people respond to my characters, to feel their happiness and sorrow, and to be transported by them. Then there's the other side of me. I am from Afghanistan. And although it's not my intention to educate people about Afghanistan, I do hope that in some ways this novel gives people a window into Afghanistan, especially into the difficult existence of Afghan women over the last 30 years. Maybe this novel will give some identity to the nameless, faceless women in burqa walking down the street, so that a reader will now sense that these are real people who have dreams and hopes and disappointments. Just like everybody else."

 

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

After the unexpected success of his first novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini decided to focus his second book on a part of Afghan society often obscured from public view its women. "There are women characters in The Kite Runner, but I wouldn't describe any…

Animals

Jon Katz

Interview by Alden Mudge

One of the many pleasures of Dog Days, Jon Katz’s latest collection of "dispatches" about life on his 110-acre farm an hour or so north of Albany, New York, is witnessing a person in the process of opening up at a time in life when others tend to start closing down.

"Sometimes I feel there are two deaths for some people," the 59-year-old Katz says during a call from Bedlam Farm, which sits astride Patterson Ridge, overlooking the churches and 50 or so dwellings of the rural hamlet of West Hebron, New York. "The first comes when people enter middle age and start closing doors and windows and say the world is going to hell and change is bad. But occasionally you’re lucky enough to have the opposite experience. Something happens that opens you up and you have a chance to learn, to change, to grow and experience new things. The animals and the farm have done that for me."

Katz, the "grandson of Russian immigrants who lived their whole lives in two rooms in a tenement in Providence, Rhode Island," has been chronicling his change and growth from a big-city journalist to a rural dog trainer and farm owner since the 1999 publication of Running to the Mountain, which described the beginning of his "Midlife Adventures." A former reporter and editor for publications such as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Washington Post, as well as executive producer for "CBS Morning News," Katz made a radical shift in his life and career that surprised even his family. He now spends most of his week on Bedlam Farm by himself or with his helpers; his wife Paula Span, a journalist who teaches at Columbia University in New York, is a frequent visitor. They have a grown daughter, Emma, a sportswriter who will publish a book of her own next year.

The story of Katz’s midlife conversion to rural living will be in theaters with the upcoming release of an HBO Films adaptation of his 2002 book A Dog Year, starring Jeff Bridges in the role of Katz himself.

"A SWAT team from the movie came in and grabbed two bags of my clothes," Katz reports, laughing. "They said they were going to bring them back, but never did, of course. They ordered exact replicas from L.L. Bean and had interns sandpaper them so they would look as rumpled as mine. I have to tell you there’s no weirder experience than having this handsome, incredibly charismatic movie star wander around in my clothes. Because right off the bat, I am none of those things."

Katz’s dog training guide Katz on Dogs, along with his articles in Slate and his "Dog Talk" show on Northeast Public Radio, have somewhat gleefully antagonized the snobbish segment of the border collie community, who sniff derisively at Katz’s desire to train his sheep-herding dogs himself. In other words, Katz has often created a bit of a stir.

If not exactly mellower – Katz maintains strong, often provocative and sometimes unexpectedly humorous points of view – Dog Days strikes a new, slightly more philosophical chord. Like his previous books, which include The Dogs of Bedlam Farm (2004) and A Good Dog (2006), his latest work is rooted in the daily challenges of running his farm – interacting with his dogs Rose and Izzy, tending his 30 sheep, four donkeys, various and sundry chickens and barnyard cats, and restoring his 1862 farmhouse and its barns and outbuildings. But while focusing on the specific activities of a single season (the " dog days," Katz discovered, begin on July 3 and end on August 11, the period when Sirius, named "the Dog Star" by the Romans, rises with the sun), Katz is a natural storyteller and the topics covered in his new book range widely. He considers his friendship with the "farm goddess" Annie, who manages his farm. He observes the comically truncated, "grunt and grumble" conversations of local farmers. He ruminates on his lifelong sense of alienation, of being a "citizen of nowhere." He thinks long and hard about his moral responsibility to his animals.

Katz is quick to acknowledge that his farm isn’t exactly like the other farms in the neighborhood. "I have all the issues of a real farm and it is a working farm. I make a living from it, but I do it indirectly," he says. "The other farmers come by here and say, what are you doing here exactly? And I say, well, I grow stories. That’s my crop."

"I always try to write from the heart," Katz continues. "Whether it’s something difficult, something beautiful, or something surprising, I try to find the emotional geography that exists between me and the place or between me and my animals."

He works "very religiously" from early morning until early afternoon in a small room at the back of his farmhouse that looks out over the pig barn and the dairy barn. "The animals all come and stare at me when they’re hungry. I’ll look up and there will be sheep and donkeys and cows staring at me. There’s a lot of groaning and baaing and get out here and feed us. It’s very unnerving," Katz exclaims.

But these sorts of interruptions seem to lie at the center of Katz’s ongoing transformation. "Talk about humility," he says. "A writer gets pulled off his high horse every day here. This idea that you can just hole up and work in a pristine and pure environment? Forget it. I have people pulling into the driveway all day long. I have animals escaping, animals getting sick, pipes bursting, I don’t know when the shearer will show up or when the hay will be delivered because these people don’t make appointments. I looked out the other day and my 2,400-pound cow Elvis had gotten a little lonely and had strolled right through the fence and was underneath my window staring up at me. Elvis loves donuts. So I went out with my donut and walked him back and we bonded a bit. Then I called somebody to fix the fence and while I waited – and this is new to me – I realized that these distractions, interruptions and crises inform what I do and give me things to write about. They are not intrusions on my work. They are my work."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

One of the many pleasures of Dog Days, Jon Katz's latest collection of "dispatches" about life on his 110-acre farm an hour or so north of Albany, New York, is witnessing a person in the process of opening up at a time in life…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Jonis Agee

Interview by Alden Mudge

Jonis Agee didn't intend for her 10th book, The River Wife, to become her first historical novel. Instead, she set out to tell a more contemporary story of life in the heartland, as she had done in her 1993 novel Strange Angels, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and in her highly praised short story collections Acts of Love on Indigo Road and Bend This Heart. But sometimes a book has intentions of its own.

"I was in despair often," Agee says of her efforts to keep the novel recently named both a Book of the Month Club and a Literary Guild selection on track. She spoke about the particular challenges of writing The River Wife during a call to her home in Omaha, Nebraska. Agee and her second husband, to whom the new novel is dedicated, moved there this year, returning to the city of her birth after years in Iowa, New York state, Los Angeles, the Twin Cities and Ann Arbor as an itinerant student/writer/academic. Agee now teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. "I'm one of those writers who have to be in a place that works for me," she says. "I love Ann Arbor, it's a truly great university, but I felt like I was in an upside-down Tupperware bowl there. I had to leave. I like places that are not peopled. I need that immensity of space and that ability to feel small so that other parts of life can expand against that openness."

But Agee's compositional struggles had less to do with place and space than with the novel's back story. In the background of the work-in-progress lingered an alluring tale, based on a true account, of a young girl pinned under a fallen rafter and abandoned by her family during the catastrophic 1811 New Madrid earthquake, an event of Katrina-like proportions that changed the course of the Mississippi, destroyed nearby towns and altered a way of life.

"I couldn't get rid of the idea of that girl," Agee recalls. "Sometimes before I'd go to sleep, I'd figure out ways to rescue her. That story stayed with me for a couple of years, and my agent and my editor kept asking why I didn't tell it. But I resisted that stretch into historical material because I thought I didn't know enough. Finally I decided I had to try, and once I did, it just began working. Then it became a matter of paring things down, because I ended up writing a 700-page novel. That's the way it is for me: once the door opens, things just come flooding."

From that flood of imagination emerged the character of Annie Lark Ducharme, whose ordeal and eventual rescue in the aftermath of the earthquake is told in riveting detail in the opening chapter of The River Wife. Her rescuer and soon-to-be husband is a French fur trader named Jacques Ducharme. He is the magnetizing force of the novel, a soul-distorting mix of love and unbounded acquisitiveness that quickly transmutes him into a violent, rapacious river pirate and sets off an enduring contest of wills between Annie and himself, a conflict that reverberates through successive generations of Ducharme "river wives," through whose eyes we see and feel the action unfold, as recorded in the "family books" they keep.

The River Wife, with its familial conflicts, dark mysteries, regional history and evocative use of language, has the flavor and tone of a Southern gothic tale. This might be because Agee has always drawn inspiration from her "literary forebears" William Faulkner and James Agee, who is also a distant relative. But it is equally possible that she draws from an understanding arising from her own family history.

Agee's parents, she recounts, had a storied romance, meeting in third grade in a small Missouri town, falling in love despite the abiding hatred that existed between their two families and secretly marrying in high school, a fact their children learned only after their parents' deaths, which occurred within two days of each other.

"I grew up with a lot of family history, the way many Southerners do," she says. "You're told a lot of stories. There's a lot of gossip and there's always a little mystery involved: little entanglements adults won't explain, dropped sentences, suggestions. It isn't the sense of family that probably a lot of other people have. In every generation there is somebody responsible for keeping the family books, continuing the research, keeping the story going. I think I ended up writing this novel, which is historical, because in some way I am always working my way back."

Agee illustrates and enlivens The River Wife with vivid sensory detail. To achieve that depth of detail, she did large amounts of research, traveling through the region often, then surrounding herself in her workspace with old photographs and artifacts Civil War bullets, old handmade bottles dug from Mississippi River mud, pieces of stone, cotton gathered from the roadside during harvest near the site of New Madrid.

"Those tactile things kept me anchored to the work," she says. "I really wanted to enable my readers to bring their bodies to that place and time. I think one of my jobs as a writer is to preserve a time and a place like a historian. But a writer is also preserving more of the world than a historian. We're archivists not just of history, but of the physical and psychological and sociological world."

"I've always felt that our world is so endangered that I want to put as much of it in my books as is possible, so that we never lose it completely," Agee says. " I hope that if someone happens to read this book 50 years from now, they will be able to feel they are in the place and time, as we feel reading the novels and plays of other times."

 

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

Jonis Agee didn't intend for her 10th book, The River Wife, to become her first historical novel. Instead, she set out to tell a more contemporary story of life in the heartland, as she had done in her 1993 novel Strange Angels, which was…

Fiction

Valerie Martin

Interview by Alden Mudge

Valerie Martin is anything but an autobiographical writer. Her previous novel, Property (2003), which beat out books by Zadie Smith, Carol Shields and Donna Tartt to win the coveted Orange Prize, is set on a Louisiana sugar plantation in 1828 and tells the disturbing story of the loveless marriage between the plantation owner and his wife and the morally fraught relationship between the wife and the female slave she was given as a wedding gift.

Her 1990 novel Mary Reilly, which was made into a movie starring John Malkovich and Julia Roberts that Martin does not particularly like (and in truth, the book is far, far better than the film), is a brilliant recasting of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story told from the point of view of a household servant.

And even her rather amazing new novel Trespass, which tells an emotionally and politically charged tale of the elemental conflicts that are stirred to life when Brendan and Chloe Dale's only child, Toby, falls in love with a Croatian refugee named Salome Drago, does not in any obvious way follow the contours of Martin's own life.

Yet in conversation, one is struck by the way in which Martin takes bits and pieces of seemingly ordinary personal experience and coolly transmutes them into fictional events of extraordinary power.

"I had a poacher," Martin says, describing the origins of the book during a call to her home in Millbrook, New York. Martin and her partner, translator John Cullen, bought an old, four-bedroom Victorian house there not long ago. Before that, they lived in a house with a meadow and a wood very much like the one described in Trespass. "I did exactly what Chloe does in the novel: I walked out and went up to the poacher and said, 'Don't hunt here.' He had an accent so I guess I had a foreign poacher. I was interested in how I responded to that."

Martin's response to her trespasser was remarkably layered, as is her novel. Chloe Dale's response, on the other hand, is swift and visceral. Chloe is an educated, middle-class American mother whose husband, Brendan, is a university history professor on sabbatical while he slowly completes a book about Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and the Fifth Crusade. Chloe herself is an artist hard at work on the illustrations for an expensive edition of Wuthering Heights. Chloe sees her poacher as a threat and reacts, just as she sees Toby's new girlfriend Salome as a threat and reacts.

"One of the things I had been thinking about when I started was how often I've noticed that for my friends who have sons, their sons' girlfriends are never good enough," says Martin, the mother of one child, a daughter who now teaches ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "I've seen it often enough to make me think that this is some powerful force that they can't control. I'll often meet the young woman who has been described as just impossible' and she seems perfectly nice to me. But then I don't have a son."

Family conflict is not the only kind of uncontrollable force that permeates Trespass. Martin began composing the novel writing her scenes by hand on paper, then editing and typing them into a computer at the rate of about a page a day just as the Iraq war began. "I was thinking about the lead-up to the war and war in general," she says. "My original notion was that the poacher was Lebanese and I was going to write about his life. So I read a great deal about the Lebanese civil war, which was really complex. Then John, my partner, who used to work for oil companies as an abstracter in Louisiana, mentioned that the oyster fishermen down at the bottom of the [Mississippi] river were Croatian. Several generations of my mother's family were all from New Orleans, and I grew up there, but I hadn't known that and I got very interested in it. That's where the Croatian strand of the novel came from."

That strand the dark repercussions of a horrific, genocidal war on Salome Drago's family intrudes increasingly on the Dales' rather sunny life as the novel progresses. "I was conscious early on that the book was about both the fear and the attraction of foreignness, which I think Americans feel particularly," Martin says. And in that, Martin finds a parallel with Wuthering Heights, the book Chloe is illustrating. "It's a book about what my book is about, which is fear of foreignness and the ingratitude of the upstart. It's also a book I've always loved because I think it's profoundly sociological and at the same time mythical. The notion of people who live in the light and those who come from the dark is so important to that book, and I liked the idea that Americans live in realms of light and live in fear of the intrusion of the realms of darkness."

Martin weaves her themes of darkness and light deftly. Trespass is a book that keeps you up reading at night and stays in your thoughts throughout the day. It is full of surprises, large and small. Yet despite its complexity, the story moves swiftly, with sparkling clarity and remarkable compression, especially near the end.

"I noticed when I would finish reading a novel that I felt I had been dumped out of really rapidly, I liked the feeling," Martin says, explaining her interest in swift endings to her novels. "So for a long time I've had a routine when I get within three or four scenes of the end: I try to imagine how many scenes I can do it in, then try to do it in one less. But the ending should also come naturally out of the story. I just try to follow the story. I don't think about readers, because when you try to please them, that way madness lies. I'm always just trying to write the book I want to read."

Which in the case of Trespass works out very nicely for other readers, too.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

Valerie Martin is anything but an autobiographical writer. Her previous novel, Property (2003), which beat out books by Zadie Smith, Carol Shields and Donna Tartt to win the coveted Orange Prize, is set on a Louisiana sugar plantation in 1828 and tells the disturbing story…

Fiction

Ann Patchett

Interview by Alden Mudge

At first blush it is a surprise to hear Ann Patchett say, "I do think of myself as a social and political novelist." Her previous novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and became an enduring favorite of book groups, is widely regarded as one of the best love stories of recent decades. And her scintillating new novel, Run, will surely be considered by many of its most avid readers the very thing she seems to fear most:" a heartwarming family drama."

But to Patchett's point, the romance in Bel Canto blooms amid the political and emotional turmoil of a terrorist takeover at a tony international gathering in South America. And Run, which concerns the family of a former Boston mayor, often rings with the hopeful political oratory of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, while raising large questions about our responsibilities for people beyond our immediate bloodlines.

"I come from a very complicated family, with tons of stepbrothers and stepsisters," Patchett says, with a characteristic mix of good humor and passion. "That is so much at the core of my imagination. You know? Who is your family? Who do you love? Who do you have responsibility to? My mother was married to my stepfather from the time I was five until I was 25. He had four children. My mother is married to someone else now who I love very much, and he has three children. Where are my levels of love and responsibility to all these people? I come from the school that if you spend a night in my house, you're my family. And you're my family forever."

The family in the novel Run is less extended but no less complicated than Patchett's own. As the book opens, Bernard Doyle, a widower and former mayor of Boston, is alienated from his oldest son Sullivan and now hopes to see his own thwarted political ambitions realized through his adopted African-American sons Tip and Teddy. Neither of these boys is particularly interested in a political life. Tip, the more brilliant of the two, studies ichthyology at Harvard; Teddy considers becoming a Catholic priest, like the elderly uncle he is devoted to. The story begins with Bernard dragging the two boys to a speech by Jesse Jackson as a blizzard descends upon Boston.

Patchett says her characters developed as she imagined a father who wants to raise one of his children to save the world. "When I first started the book I thought if you were really going to save the world in this present day, really help people, you would do it through science. Then I thought about religion. Then ultimately, over a period of a very long time, I came to politics. I decided you have the best chance of effecting real change through politics. So I thought a lot about Joe Kennedy and a lot about the three brothers in The Brothers Karamazov. So for me the book comes from trying to think deeply about the world, from a place of intellect and problem-solving."

According to Patchett, problem-solving and intellect also characterize her usual approach to writing fiction. During a call to her home in Nashville, where she has lived much of her life and where two-and-a-half years ago she married a local doctor after an 11-year courtship, Patchett says, "My standard line is that writing is like taking a car trip. If I don't know where I'm going and I don't have a map, I don't get there. I understand a lot of writers say if they knew where they were going, there would be no point in writing, that a book is the process of figuring out where it is going. But I need to know how it's going to end before I start."

Still, the composition of Run presented Patchett with a number of surprises. "I imagined the story would take place over about four months . . . and then I realized I was on page 140 and I was only two or three hours into the story. The level of intensity in which everything is called into question is so enormous that none of the characters can turn away from the action, so I had to stay with them and write a book that takes place over the course of 24 hours."

Nor did Patchett's original road map include the marvelous Kenya, a talented 11-year-old girl whose mother is seriously injured when she saves Tip from an oncoming car and whose quiet assertion that she is the adopted brothers' sister sets off the intense moral and emotional quest of the novel. "I hadn't planned for that, Patchett says, but then Kenya moved forward and I thought, well, I'm going to let her rise into that role."

Patchett, who spent 12 years in Catholic school (and jokes that as a result when her writing is stuck she "runs the vacuum, or dusts, or cooks, or I iron my husband's handkerchiefs. I'm a great wife. And I enjoy it!") adds: "In the same way that I like writing a book that has religion in it but is in no way about religion, I like a book that has people of different races in it without it being about race. Somehow, whenever I see a book that has white people and black people in it, it's a book about race, and that seems wrongheaded and untrue to the experience of life. The stakes are higher when you imagine people farther from your own experience, but the farther your characters are from your experience, the more likely you are to work to make sure they are fully realized characters."

"The value of literary fiction," Patchett says near the end of our conversation, "is that the writer brings half and the reader brings half. You have to leave enough space to let the book become something different with each reading. To me Run is about social responsibility. But I don't want it to be a polemic. I can't devalue what it becomes in anyone else's hands. I have left it open for readers to make it their own book. And if they make it into a heartwarming family drama, and that works for them and it teaches them something, then the book is a success."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

At first blush it is a surprise to hear Ann Patchett say, "I do think of myself as a social and political novelist." Her previous novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and became an enduring favorite of book groups, is…

FictionWorld Fiction

Ha Jin

Interview by Alden Mudge

In conversation, Ha Jin displays a remarkably playful sense of humor about the smallish absurdities of life. " It’s crazy!" he exclaims, laughing, after describing how novelist Allegra Goodman, Nobel prize-winning poet Derek Walcott and he all share a single office in the English department at Boston University, making it impossible for any of them to actually write there. He laughs again, almost gleefully, as he relates how, after getting a doctorate in modern American poetry and after developing a reputation as a poet himself, he taught poetry writing at Emory, but at BU, where he has been for five years, "there are so many good poets that I only teach fiction writing and literature."

This ebullience is, frankly, surprising, coming from the author of the highly, and deservedly, praised novels War Trash, which offers a deeply affecting portrait of the grim fate of Chinese prisoners of war during the Korean conflict, and Waiting, which won a National Book Award for its suggestive look at the emotional and political paralysis of life in the People’s Republic of China.

On the other hand, a stylistic and thematic playfulness bubbles enticingly beneath the surface of Ha Jin’s marvelous new novel, A Free Life, a book that offers a notably fresh look at the Chinese immigrant experience in America.

"Every book is a kind of departure; every book is a step forward, a move away from the past," Ha Jin says of the new novel during a call to his home in Foxboro, Massachusetts, where he and his wife live in a quiet neighborhood on the edge of a state forest. The couple’s son recently graduated from Princeton in American history and is now in graduate school at Brown. "The style in this book is different from my earlier books," he continues. "The linguistic playfulness in this book cannot be translated anymore."

Ha Jin came to the United States as a graduate student in 1985. Like Nan Wu, the central character in A Free Life, he decided to remain here after the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. Unlike his main character, however, he has never returned to China, even for a brief visit. His novels, composed in English and translated into many languages including Chinese are banned in China. "I used to believe a good book should be translatable, meaning if it is translated back into Chinese it will be meaningful to the Chinese as well. But this book will be hard to translate into Chinese. Somehow it will be hard for Chinese to understand the meaning, the style, the playfulness. That is a kind of sacrifice, but I don’t care much about how the Chinese read this book anymore, mainly because I think of this as an American novel. Stylistically, I really wanted to do as much with English as I could."

A Free Life is a sweeping narrative that tells the story of Nan Wu, his wife Pingping, and their son Taotao as they struggle to establish a life in America over the course of about a decade. Nan moves from being one of the favored youth of China who was sent to be educated in the U.S., to a waiter and cook in a Chinese restaurant in New York after he rejects life in post-Tiananmen China, to a restaurant owner in Georgia, struggling to sustain his family while nurturing a desire to become a poet.

Throughout his absorbing story, Ha Jin offers an extraordinarily nuanced view of the complexity of immigrant communities and the individual human beings who inhabit them. The members of the Chinese community near Nan’s Georgia restaurant, for example, are divided over their conflicted loyalties to their homeland. Nan’s writer friend Danning is spiritually and morally at odds with himself about his artistic integrity versus his need to succeed in the restrictive social and political environment of China. Nan and his family face long, difficult periods of separation. They also encounter the subtle and not so subtle bigotry of some of the American inhabitants in the communities where they live. All of this is a forceful, moving reminder of the depth and range of human experience that unfolds, often below our awareness, in the seemingly monolithic communities of recent immigrants.

But Nan’s struggle is not merely about finding a way to fit into his new social environment, it is also about a more difficult effort within himself to seize the freedom that America offers him to become the person he chooses to be. "Nan’s struggle for freedom is not just about whether he has the right to be free," says Ha Jin, "it is about achieving a state of mind. A Free Life is about a person from a kind of totalitarian society, where freedom is alien, arriving here and being overwhelmed, because freedom involves a lot of uncertainty, risks, sacrifice and a lot of other things he simply couldn’t imagine."

That freedom, Ha Jin says, also involves more than just the ability to achieve financial success. "A lot of people come to the United States not just for material benefits. There is a kind of spiritual, even metaphysical aspect to this journey. It’s another part of the contemporary immigrant experience. In Nan’s case, he’s never really materialistic, so the general notion of the American dream doesn’t make much sense to him. For him the dream is much more than that."

In recent years, Ha Jin has spoken more and more frequently of his desire to become a truly American writer. To do that, he says, he has "to write more books about the American experience. I do believe the national experience is very important. It’s not just in the language but in really writing about the experience in a way that is somehow resonant with the audience." Later, near the end of the conversation, he observes, "I’ve been teaching immigrant literature recently, and I’ve realized that immigration is not a universal theme in literature, because it’s basically an American phenomenon."

So is A Free Life a book that allows Ha Jin to feel he’s become an American writer?

"It is a step toward the goal," Ha Jin says.

Indeed it is.

Alden Mudge, of Oakland, is a juror for the California Book Awards.

 

In conversation, Ha Jin displays a remarkably playful sense of humor about the smallish absurdities of life. " It's crazy!" he exclaims, laughing, after describing how novelist Allegra Goodman, Nobel prize-winning poet Derek Walcott and he all share a single office in the English…

FictionShort Stories

Nadine Gordimer

Interview by Alden Mudge

When the long-awaited collapse of apartheid in South Africa ushered in democratic elections in 1994, some readers feared that Nadine Gordimer’s fiction would lose its inventive energy and moral force. But Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, remained a vocal human rights activist and almost serenely continued to produce novels and stories, at least a few of which rank among her best. With Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, her 11th collection of stories (and 25th work of fiction), Gordimer, 84, continues to perturb and delight readers with her mastery of the short story form.

"I love to write stories. It’s such a wonderful form, like poetry, because it’s so distilled," Gordimer says during a call to her home in Johannesburg. Gordimer has lived in her " big old house" and written on an electric typewriter "in a very small room downstairs" for most of her adult life. She chose to remain in South Africa even after the government banned three of her books. Her husband, to whom the new collection is dedicated, died six years ago, after 47 years of marriage.

Gordimer says that the remarkably tight construction she achieves in her stories is a subconscious process. "I’m not conscious of compressing it while I’m doing it. If there’s something that captures my imagination or that I begin to ponder, I know right away whether it’s going to be a short story or whether it’s the germ of a novel. To me a short story is like an egg: When the beginning comes to me, I have the end. It’s complete. It’s got its white and it’s got its yolk and it’s got its shell containing it. I have it there complete, as if in the palm of my hand."

The textures and resonances of the stories in Gordimer’s Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black are as varied as an omelet, a soufflŽ and a hard-boiled egg. In the title story, for example, Gordimer continues to explore the scars left on the souls of South Africans by apartheid. Her protagonist, an intellectual and former anti-apartheid activist, goes in search of evidence of his own racial identity, after pondering the likely history of his great-grandfather’s time in the diamond mines.

"I got the idea from an announcement [about Beethoven] I heard on the radio," Gordimer says. " I thought, what does this poking back into the personal life, the DNA really, of a very, very great composer matter. But of course in some circumstances it could matter very much, and that’s where my story comes from. There’s a longing among many white South Africans to find what was denied before. You know, tucked away in a cupboard somewhere there was a black grandfather, or great-grandmother. I think it’s a natural impulse for people to want to explore that. And an honest one. That honesty was missing before."

In a story called "Gregor," Gordimer shows a playful side, writing with light and shadow about a cockroach stuck under the small viewing screen of her electric Olivetti, summoning also the spirit of Franz Kafka.

"I’ve resisted over many years any reference to Kafka or any kind of Kafka pastiche because everybody drags Kafka in," Gordimer explains. "But this is the only story in the book that is about something that really happened. That beetle or cockroach was there in my typewriter. Writing is a solitary business and having this unwanted partner or overseer was a very strange experience. I couldn’t resist. I named him Gregor. How could I possibly do anything else?"

Among Gordimer’s own favorites is a story called " Dreaming of the Dead" in which the author summons three departed friends Susan Sontag, Edward Said and Anthony Sampson to a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in New York. It is a story about friendship, vivid conversation, writing and political commitment, at once both sorrowful and funny. "It’s the only story I’ve ever written that way," Gordimer says. "It’s a kind of homage to people that I loved who have gone. But I also, of course, amused myself as I know they would do to me by making fun of them."

Turning reflective, Gordimer says, "I began to write very, very young in the small gold-mining town in South Africa where I was born. I didn’t come from a family with any literary tradition, but my mother read a lot, [and] she encouraged reading. Indeed the most formative thing for me was that she made me a member of the children’s library in this little town. And every Saturday, we would go to the library and select three books each for the week. And then when there were birthdays and Christmas and so on, the presents for me were always books. That was what I wanted and what I got. By the time I was 12, the librarian at this local library, who was also a friend of my mother’s, allowed me the freedom of the library. I wasn’t confined to the children’s section. I read everything from D.H. Lawrence to Thucydides. Nobody was guiding me. I was like a pig in clover and I found what I wanted and what was nourishing to me. The local library was unbelievably important to me. It was my real education."

Gordimer says that even in her 80s, she maintains the same writing routine she developed in her 20s. " My writing routine was constricted because I had a small child and was divorced and was living alone with her. My writing time was when she was at nursery school in the morning. I think it was good that it was constricted because when you’re a writer, you’re your own boss and unless you’re disciplined, you’re never going to get down to it. Later on my circumstances changed but I still kept to my routine."

"Indeed," Gordimer adds with a laugh, " I just finished a new story last week. A weird little story. I have no idea what will happen to it."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

When the long-awaited collapse of apartheid in South Africa ushered in democratic elections in 1994, some readers feared that Nadine Gordimer's fiction would lose its inventive energy and moral force. But Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, remained a vocal…

Fiction

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Interview by Alden Mudge

At more than 1,200 pages and almost exactly four pounds, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is the hefty tome against which all other hefty tomes are weighed and measured. This story of the French invasion of Russia in 1812 was first published in 1869 in Russian, no less. So why is this old literary classic suddenly sitting near the top of bestseller lists, surpassing swifter, lighter, more modern American novels? Probably because War and Peace has been freshly translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the husband and wife team who gained national prominence in 2004 when Oprah Winfrey selected their translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina for her immensely popular book club program.

"I had been translating from French, Spanish and Italian for many years," Pevear, a poet, e-mailed from his home in Paris, where the couple, now in their 60s, have lived, taught, written and translated since leaving New York's Upper West Side in 1988. "The idea of collaborating on translations from the Russian came to us not long after we were married," Pevear says. "I was reading The Brothers Karamazov in a well-known translation. Larissa [who was born in Russia, studied English from an early age and worked for a while as a translator for a group of biologists] began to read the Russian at the same time. She came upon something striking at the very beginning and wondered, 'How do they translate that?' She looked at the version I was reading and said, 'Ah, I see, they don't translate it.' We talked about what was left out of the translation and whether it was possible to do better. I saw that it was certainly possible, and we decided to try it. And we've been trying it ever since."

The couple's translations of works by Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy have been widely acclaimed by scholars, critics and general readers, and have won three PEN translation awards. The pair traveled to the U.S. this fall to promote the new book, something that is virtually unheard of for translators of a 138-year-old novel.

"We try to do in English what Tolstoy or Dostoevsky did in Russian," Pevear says. " We don't believe in modernizing or paraphrasing or writing smooth English prose. What we want is the most Tolstoyan or Dostoevskian English possible. But it has to move and live naturally, or at least as naturally as the original does." To achieve this, the couple collaborates in an unusual way.

"Larissa makes a complete first draft, in pencil, as literal as possible, with marginal comments on words, tone, rhythm, deliberate oddities, levels of usage, cross references to reappearances of the same word or motif. I take her draft, plus the original and other translations, and make my own complete draft, which I print out as I go (four to eight pages a day) and cover with penciled queries and uncertainties. We then go over that draft together, settling questions, arguing over choices, resorting to numerous dictionaries. From the results of that work, I then make another complete draft. Larissa reads the new draft line by line against the original, marking queries, making suggestions, and so on. Once we resolve the last problems together, I make a 'final' draft, which we send to the publisher."

Pevear admits that Tolstoy has suffered less than some of his countrymen at the hands of translators. Yet even the good translations fall far short of perfection. "We have tried to get closer to that impossible goal, mainly by paying closer attention to Tolstoy's Russian. We have also chosen to include all the French passages as Tolstoy had them (they amount to two percent of the text). All previous translations have removed them and have thus removed a whole dimension of the novel the war of languages that mirrors the war of armies. We thought it was time to stop underestimating the reader's intelligence. The French passages are translated in footnotes."

And what is the couple's advice for a general reader who has never before read War and Peace and is about to launch into the new translation? "Give yourself to Tolstoy's foreign world and you'll find you're at home; give yourself to its chaos and you'll find a great order."

At more than 1,200 pages and almost exactly four pounds, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is the hefty tome against which all other hefty tomes are weighed and measured. This story of the French invasion of Russia in 1812 was first published in 1869 in Russian, no less. So why is this old literary classic suddenly sitting near the top of bestseller lists, surpassing swifter, lighter, more modern American novels?

Food & Drink

Michael Pollan

Interview by Alden Mudge

Worried about what to eat? Michael Pollan’s new "eater’s manifesto," In Defense of Food, offers remarkably simple, practical advice on the question. "In a way I’ve written a book that comes down to seven words," Pollan says during a call to his home in Berkeley, California. " ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ Everything else is an unpacking of those words and an explanation as to why that should be so."

The unpacking and explanation are, of course, a bit more complicated than Pollan’s basic nostrum. But readers of his immensely popular previous book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), will be familiar with the broad strokes of his argument and his critique of food science and the American food industry. The Omnivore’s Dilemma was a delightfully informative narrative history of the food systems that underlay four meals consumed by Pollan and his friends and family. It was a book that tapped into or gave voice to a paradigm shift in American eating habits that had been building for some time, and it made Pollan something of a spokesman for the movement.

In Defense of Food is the result of Pollan’s encounters with readers of his earlier book. "One of the enormous blessings of a successful book is that you get to talk to thousands of readers in the year after it comes out," he says. "I not only did book tours but a lot of public speaking. So I really got to hear what people were confused about and what they wanted to know. I found that people still had this very simple question: Well, what should I eat? I decided that the question was best answered by really looking at the science and asking what do we really know about the connection between food and health."

Pollan seems uniquely positioned to examine the question. He was for many years executive editor of Harper’s, is a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, and has written widely on issues of animal agriculture, genetically modified crops and natural history. In 2003 he and his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac, now a freshman in high school, moved from Connecticut to Berkeley so that Pollan could head the Knight program at the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism. The program’s mission is to advance the quality of science and environmental journalism, and Pollan has used some of the program money to bring a wide array of food experts to campus and to help stimulate the growing debate about the American diet. " We came thinking we’d be here for two years," Pollan says, "but it’s worked out very well for us all. Besides, we bought a house at the top of the market, so I think we’re here for a while."

In the new book, Pollan examines the cult-like aspects of what he calls "nutritionism" and finds the supporting science riddled with unexamined assumptions, chief among them the idea that the key to understanding food is the nutrient. "I was surprised by how primitive the state of knowledge is scientifically," Pollan says. " It’s a very hard problem to study. Both the food side and the body side of the system are incredibly complex. Reductive, single-factor science has a lot of trouble understanding both a carrot and the digestion of a carrot. On the other hand we have thousands of years of cultural experience with various foods and we know which ones contribute to health. One of the interesting discoveries here was that culture may have more to teach us about how to eat than science. To me, that was a big ‘aha’ moment."

Picking up where he left off in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan also explores the problems of the Western diet, which has increasingly come to rely on edible foodlike substances largely derived from two highly subsidized crops corn and soybeans. "We co-evolved with the things we eat," Pollan says. "We have relationships that are based on the characteristics of these whole foods. So, as I explain in the book, we have a longstanding, very healthy relationship with corn as a food. But we don’t have a relationship with high fructose corn syrup, which is a kind of abstraction of corn. Our bodies are not accustomed to dealing with that the way they are with corn on the cob or cornmeal or tortillas. Our bodies have been exquisitely designed by evolution to deal with a whole food, to digest it, to make good use of it. But for these abstractions of a whole food, which are what the food industry makes the most money selling, our bodies have not evolved to handle properly, and won’t in our lifetime or maybe ever."

In the final section of In Defense of Food, Pollan boils down what he has analyzed and learned into a set of straightforward but provocative rules what he calls algorithms for thinking about what and how to eat. "The challenge was to come up with aids for thinking through these issues rather than a menu or a prescription," Pollan says. "I resent when people tell me what to eat, and I don’t think it’s my job to tell others what to eat. But given what I know and what I’ve learned about the food system, I can provide tools for people to think through their own decisions. Like don’t eat foods that make health claims, which sounds counterintuitive until you realize that only foods in packages are going to make health claims because they need somewhere to print those claims, that they are more likely to be processed foods, and that their claims are probably based on reductive science. The rule is meant to be a way of capturing a much larger piece of knowledge about how the food system works. Using them people will come to very different conclusions. These rules can lead to an infinite number of different menus, but all of them should be better than the industrial menu currently on offer."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Worried about what to eat? Michael Pollan's new "eater's manifesto," In Defense of Food, offers remarkably simple, practical advice on the question. "In a way I've written a book that comes down to seven words," Pollan says during a call to his home in Berkeley,…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Pat Barker

Interview by Alden Mudge

There is a moment in Pat Barker’s excellent new novel Life Class when Paul Tarrant, a conflicted young artist serving in France in the ambulance corps at the outbreak of World War I, stares admiringly out over the slanted village rooftops from the attic room he has rented to use as a painting studio when not on duty. It is a moment that comes vividly to mind as Pat Barker describes her own writing space.

"I write at a desk in front of the window straight onto a laptop," Barker says during a call to her home in the northern England city of Durham. "My room is on the top floor so I look out over the roofs of the houses at some trees in the distance. And although it’s not a rural, rural view, there’s a lot of greenery, and, actually, I’m extremely fond of it because of the different angles of the roofs, especially when it’s raining and the colors are brought out. It’s very beautiful in a strange kind of way. It’s very much the view that if I were a painter I would absolutely love to paint."

In normal times, Barker would sit at her desk with its beautiful view and blast out a minimum of 1,000 words a day (and often 2,000-3,000) in a very rough draft that is so "filled with typos that it doesn’t look like it’s written in English. All the right letters are there," she says with the sharp-witted humor that seems typical of her conversational self, "it’s just that all the other letters are there as well."

Unfortunately these are not normal times. Barker’s husband is gravely ill and she is his fulltime caregiver. The couple’s daughter, whose first novel was published last year, lives close by, and their son and his young family live outside Liverpool, on the other side of the Pennines. At the moment, Barker says, her writing room "is completely chaotic because it’s filled with things like disability aids." Then there is the recently discovered gift from one of her two cats—a dead rat lovingly deposited beneath her writing desk. "A decomposing rat on top of everything else is not a good thing," Barker adds wryly.

This unflinching directness revealed in her conversation also happens to be one of the many pleasures of Barker’s fiction. Her novels are slender and swift but live vividly in the mind’s eye and resound with moral force. Barker is best known for her Regeneration Trilogy, which centers on the experiences of the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon during World War I. The trilogy includes Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and Ghost Road, which earned Barker the Booker Prize in 1995.

In Life Class, her 11th novel, Barker seems drawn back to writing about World War I. Except that she doesn’t quite see it that way. "I feel this book is not linked to the trilogy so much as it’s linked to Double Vision," her previous novel, which is set in post-9/11 England. "One of the things Double Vision is about is how you represent real horrors in a way which isn’t exploitative, or disrespectful of people’s suffering, or damaging. While I was writing that book, I was very aware that the people I didn’t mention in earlier books were the people who painted the landscape of the Western Front. I wanted to continue with that theme. You know Susan Sontag’s book about representing the suffering of others? I’m dealing with those sorts of themes, I think, in both Double Vision and in Life Class."

The new novel focuses on the artistic and romantic entanglements of Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville, three young students who share a life-drawing class at an art school called the Slade in the spring of 1914. As she has done in her previous novels, Barker draws deftly from the historical record and populates her fiction with real-life figures such as Lady Ottoline Morrell and Henry Tonks, "a teacher of genius" at the Slade and a doctor who would become known for his pioneering work in reconstructive surgery of facial wounds during the war.

"The essential thing if you’re going to make some of your central characters with historical figures is that you oughtn’t to know much about them," Barker says. "It gives you blank areas of the canvas in which you can project." But the projection stops "at the bedroom door. It’s as simple as that. If it’s a real person, I don’t probe into the most private areas of their lives."

With her fictional characters, however, Barker is far less constrained. Her characters live fully both in their heads and in their bodies. "The human body and specifically the male body is at the center of both parts of the novel," Barker says. "It’s the kind of hinge on which the book turns since the function of the body in the first half is so radically changed in the second half."

Barker says she remains fascinated by this generation of young artists whose lives were so dramatically altered by World War I. "It was one of these curious collections of very talented people in one place at one time. Which sometimes happens. It has to be purely coincidental, though the fact that Tonks was a great teacher also helped to establish a kind of creative ferment within the class. But you had English aristocrats and really, really dirt-poor Jewish boys from the East End of London who were there on scholarship in the same classroom. A considerable proportion of them were really talented."

In fact, Barker hopes to restore order soon to the chaos in her workroom, reclaim her beautiful view and get back to work on another novel about this period. "I don’t want it to necessarily be a second volume or a sequel," she says with renewed enthusiasm, "but, yes, some of the same characters will appear, obviously with new characters. I’m quite interested in the hospital where Tonks did his plastic surgery and in the conflicts of identity which arise with the loss of the human face."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland.

There is a moment in Pat Barker's excellent new novel Life Class when Paul Tarrant, a conflicted young artist serving in France in the ambulance corps at the outbreak of World War I, stares admiringly out over the slanted village rooftops from the attic room…

Fiction

Steve Toltz

Interview by Alden Mudge

With simultaneous publication in the U.S., Australia and the U.K., Steve Toltz’s first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, is about to make a big splash. And why not? A Fraction of the Whole is a big book (530 pages) with big ambitions—it covers 40 years in an often laugh-out-loud, insightful, sprawling, impossible-to-summarize tale of the larger-than-life mishaps and adventures of an Australian father and son and the various miscreants and reprobates who surround them.

"It began as a little short story of a father and son," Toltz says during a call—his first interview ever, it turns out—to his home in the Bondi Beach section of Sydney, Australia. Toltz, who is in his 30s, lives there with his wife, a painter. "In Australia and England when the daily tabloids decide to tear someone apart they can be quite unsparing," Toltz continues, explaining the seed of his story. "Every now and again there will be someone skinned alive by the media. Oftentimes they deserve it, but other times they do not. It’s sometimes as if the community as a whole takes on the hating of someone almost as a community project. I would often look at a story like that and think, what if that was your dad? It seemed to be such a bigger story that I couldn’t stand for it to be a short story, and so the story expanded in every direction."

Thus A Fraction of the Whole opens with a youngish Jasper Dean sitting in a prison cell looking back over the events that have led him to his sorry state. Many of these have to do with his love-hate relationship with his father, Martin Dean, a self-taught philosopher-rebel who has become the most reviled man in Australia. And then there is his uncle, Terry Dean, a career criminal and sports enthusiast, who is one of the most revered men in Australia.

"The book is very Australian in terms of its subject matter," Toltz says. "It’s about Australian society and a particular Australian ethos—you know, sport and criminals—but it actually touches on a lot of Australian subjects. Some Australian writers are very good at describing the landscape here, but that’s not where my interest lies. The landscape I’m describing is a social landscape."

Out of this particular terrain, Toltz fashions a novel of remarkable psychological and thematic range. In conversation he explains his scope of interests by citing influences ranging from Woody Allen to Knut Hamsun, Henry Miller to Céline, Emerson to Lemertov.

"A lot of writers won’t read while they’re writing," Toltz says. "I am someone who lets himself be completely influenced by other writers. That’s the joy of it for me. What makes a voice unique is the combination of the writer’s sensibility and the combination of influences that wouldn’t otherwise have been previously combined. Like Woody Allen. Who else would have put the Marx Brothers with Ingmar Bergman just because they were people he happened to like? Add that layer to whoever he would have been anyway and you have something completely different."

In A Fraction of the Whole, this combination of Toltz and his influences provokes both thought and laughter. "I have a tendency to want to make myself laugh while I’m writing," he says. "In the earlier version there was a little too much. I was quite prepared to justify any unbelievability if it made me laugh. But as I went along, I wanted to believe the characters and story more."

Surprisingly, Toltz says this torrent of a novel was written at a snail’s pace. It took him almost four years to complete. "Everything I wrote in the first year got written out of existence. When I look back, it’s a much worse writer who wrote those early pages. The process was really the process of my ability catching up with my ambition. In the first year I had a relatively high opinion of my abilities and then I read other stuff and realized I was nowhere near it."

Toltz adds, "In Australia—and it’s probably quite similar in the United States—you can’t just say you’re a writer without some kind of evidence to back up this wild assertion. But in Europe they don’t really require evidence. You say ‘I’m writing,’ and it’s respected as an activity."

As a result, much of Toltz’s first novel was written in Spain and France, where he met his wife Marie. "My book is the first book she ever read in English," he quips. "Now she’s gone through it a few times, so I think she’s actually read four English books, and my book has been three of those."

To realize his large ambitions for A Fraction of the Whole, Toltz hit upon an unusual methodology. "Everyone always says that all a writer needs is a room of one’s own. I’ve always had a room of my own, but for some reason after about 20 minutes I can’t stand the sight of it. So I developed a really bad habit some years ago: I go for a walk. I write in parks or on beaches or in cafes or libraries or bars. I keep moving every two hours, which was great when I was living in places like Barcelona and Paris. Now I don’t even bother trying to have a space at home. In most of Australia there are little benches everywhere. I live at the beach. The benches look over the ocean, which seems like quite a nice office to me."

Returning to the subject of his ambition to be a writer, Toltz says, "When you’re unpublished you look at books that have a certain degree of international success and you wonder, is my book as good as this one or that one, you weigh it up. The biggest challenge for me was just learning to write. When you’re writing something of this scope it is also a challenge to get every page of it to have something good on it, to not have a couple of crappy pages to get to some other good bit. But I think writing a novel is what makes a novelist of you. Just the writing of it. If I wasn’t a novelist before, I am one now."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland.

With simultaneous publication in the U.S., Australia and the U.K., Steve Toltz's first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, is about to make a big splash. And why not? A Fraction of the Whole is a big book (530 pages) with big ambitions—it covers 40…

Fiction

Andrew Sean Greer

Interview by Alden Mudge

For a book whose author says casually that "this is a novel where not very much happens," The Story of a Marriage contains enough surprises that an interviewer must tread carefully for fear of depriving readers of some of the novel's great pleasures of discovery.

What Andrew Sean Greer seems to mean by his remark is that the scope of his narrative is intimate, the lives it describes in such resonate – often metaphorical – language are narrowly circumscribed. The Story of a Marriage is told by an old woman, Pearlie Cook, looking back on an event in 1953 that rocked her world.

Then again, this is the first time Greer has been interviewed about the novel, and he is just discovering how to think about and talk about a book he has spent the last four years producing. "I'm very curious to see what I'll say," he announces at the beginning of the conversation. Greer admits to being one of those writers who shows a work-in-progress to no one. In fact he makes up a story to tell people when they ask him what he is working on.

"I learned my lesson with Max Tivoli," Greer says during a call to his home in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco. The Confessions of Max Tivoli was Greer's critically acclaimed breakout novel, published in 2004. "When I would tell people it is about a man born in the body of an old man who gets younger, their faces would collapse with concern. It would make me think, what a bad idea for a novel, and it would put me off my writing. So I started saying it was a novel about Victorian San Francisco, and people would say, 'that sounds great,' and leave me alone." He says he described the current book as "a novel set in the '50s in San Francisco." True. But so minimal as to be almost meaningless.

Greer did not immediately launch himself into The Story of a Marriage after he completed The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Instead he began working on a project that proved to be too big. Casting about for "something realistic and domestic," he found himself returning again and again to a failed short story he had written years before called "The Ballad of Pearlie Cook." He finally decided the story had failed because it was in fact a novel.

The seed for that story came from a tale told to him by one of his family members. "It gives something, but not too much, away," Greer says carefully. "An elderly relative of mine who everyone considers sort of crazy, told me a story once about how in 1952 a family friend had taken her for a ride around Kentucky and stopped the car, turned to her, and said he had been her husband's lover for years. He wanted to go away with her husband. He said he would help her financially with their children, but he wanted the two of them to go away, and he needed her permission to do it. She said no. It was always the great regret of her life that she couldn't imagine saying yes. She couldn't imagine what life would be like for a poor woman in the '50s, alone, with two kids to raise. It became my job to imagine what if she had said yes. And because I wondered what would be the traps that would make my main character join forces with this man, I changed everything about her."

For one thing, he sets his story in San Francisco rather than Kentucky. Greer's family came from Kentucky but his parents, both scientists, worked in Washington, D.C., where he grew up. After attending Brown University, working in New York and getting an MFA from the University of Montana, Greer moved to Seattle to write. "It was cheap enough that I could sit in the house and lock myself in a room and write, but the rain started to get me down. It's one thing to be broke. But when you're broke and you feel trapped too, that's too much." He followed his twin brother to San Francisco and arrived at what he considers a lucky time, when many other young writers were moving to the city.

Greer wrote The Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Story of a Marriage in a former workshop he "rented in someone's basement six blocks uphill from where I live. This being San Francisco, it has a view of downtown from its window because it's so high up. It's a place where I can't do anything but work. I can't surf the web or read email. All I can do is read books or write books; both seem like a good use of my time. Napping also seems to happen."

Greer's 21st-century San Francisco is, of course, very different from Pearlie Cook's San Francisco of 1953. She and her husband, Holland, and their boy, Sonny, live in what is now called the Sunset district, but which on the day Charles "Buzz" Drumer showed up with his immoderate proposal was still referred to as the Outside Lands, a perfect place for this group of outsiders to inhabit.

Perfect, too, is Greer's moody evocation of a time that isn't yet what we think of as the 1950s and a place that isn't yet what we now think of as San Francisco. "There is a danger that you're just going to costume the whole thing and forget that you have a story about characters and real lives," Greer says about his months of research. "I didn't want it to be a novel about history, yet when I realized 1953 was the endgame of the Rosenbergs, the peak of McCarthyism and the end of the Korean War, a time when the papers said both that the end of the world is coming and that everything is going to be fine, I finally saw how these things related to my main character and went ahead."

Greer says he always tends to "overdo everything in the first draft because I have to write a lot to figure out how these events and characters come together thematically and as a story." But that is no longer a surprise to him. Nor is the hard work of editing and rewriting the manuscript.

However, comparing his effort on Max Tivoli to his work on this new novel, Greer confesses that he was quite "surprised to be drawn back into a plot which is intense and dramatic and about love and passion. I don't think of these as my main concerns, but the same questions of how you know another person and how you trust that someone loves you kept coming up. So I guess maybe they are."

 

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

For a book whose author says casually that "this is a novel where not very much happens," The Story of a Marriage contains enough surprises that an interviewer must tread carefully for fear of depriving readers of some of the novel's great pleasures of discovery.

…
Fiction

Andre Dubus III

Interview by Alden Mudge

For 25 years Andre Dubus III has been trying to get one story off his chest. "Like so many writers, there is part of the canvas that wants to come from my life," Dubus says during a call to the incredible-sounding house he has been building in the woods outside of Newburyport, Massachusetts, for nearly five years. "I didn’t grow up a lost boy in Sudan and I didn’t grow up in the ghetto with a 9 mm pointed at my face. I was the son of a great writer of short stories. My mother was a social worker. But it was a poor childhood, as in no money, divorce, a lot of physical violence – just this long story of poverty and moving around and drinking and drugging, all before age 15."

In conversation, Dubus, who nine years ago published the acclaimed novel The House of Sand and Fog, is a kind of natural force. Words and ideas spill from him in a torrent. His anecdotes brim with passion. But there are eddies, too. He pauses to ask his interviewer many questions. He quotes writers who have influenced him. He is friendly, familiar, effusive, self-aware. Each of his assertions is followed by a reflective pause. Sometimes he reverses course. One senses the writer – or writing teacher or carpenter – at work as he shapes his material.

"I’ve been trying and trying to write this autobiographical novel," he says. "One of the attempts at this was called Lie Down and Make Angels. Terrible, man. It was just so bad. . . . So I think I’ve decided I’m not one of those fiction writers who can write from my life. It’s like calling a dog. Maybe the dog just doesn’t want to come. Maybe you’re whistling for that dog and instead a rooster walks in. I guess you’re writing a rooster story."

One of Dubus’ "rooster" stories was the wonderful The House of Sand and Fog. To Dubus’ surprise it became a bestseller, an Oprah pick and a movie starring Ben Kingsley. Until its phenomenal success, he had worked as a bartender, a carpenter and an occasional teacher of writing (he now has a permanent appointment teaching writing at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell), to support his wife and young family (his children are now 15, 12, and 11). Until then he had never owned a home. With the book’s earnings he bought his mother a truck and with his brother and friends, began to build a house.

"I went a little cuckoo. This is just one monster of a house. I built this beautiful in-law apartment for my wife’s parents. I built my wife a dance studio – she’s a dancer with a dance company. You know? I built a big house and quickly ran out of money. So for the last year the floor’s been painted plywood subfloor. I wrote the last part of the new book, The Garden of Last Days, in the future master bathroom on a plywood floor near a hole in the floor where the toilet will go. But I tell you, the whole thing was completely absorbing. It was one of the most beautiful experiences – one of the most beautiful ordeals – I’ve been through. It’s funny, I’m 48 and we moved in three years ago and I realized that this is the first time in 45 years that I didn’t have a landlord."

This is just one of the many ways in which Dubus makes a point that he repeats throughout the conversation: "There is a distinction between the writing and the career. As a provider for a family of seven, I’m very grateful for the career that I stumbled into, especially since The House of Sand and Fog. But writing should be looked at like the practice of yoga or praying. It’s a daily meditative practice where you learn over the years that if you just do it you’ll look back and there will be a story or novella or a novel. That’s got to sound disingenuous on one level because I did have a contract for The Garden of Last Days and I needed it financially. But I honestly believe I have to ignore the career and give the writing permission to completely fall apart and be a nine-page essay, a novella or a poem."

Luckily, Dubus’ new novel, The Garden of Last Days, did not fall apart and might be another career-making novel. It vividly portrays the lives of an unexpected set of characters who collide – to emotionally wrenching effect – in a Sarasota, Florida, strip club in September 2001.

"The novel began with this image of cash on the bureau," Dubus says. "I didn’t know where it came from but it soon became clear that it belonged to one of these women I had read about after the literal and figurative smoke cleared after 9/11. I remember reading a couple of brief references to the terrorists being seen in strip clubs and wondering what that was about. But what captured my curiosity even more is what it would be like to be a stripper and realize that some of the money on your bureau is from one of these guys who went on to kill 3,000 innocent people."

Dubus is a writer who is driven to take risks. "I talk to my students about the ‘n’ word," Dubus says. "I tell them writing takes a lot of nerve. A lot of nerve. Especially after you are two or three years into writing a novel." In The Garden of Last Days, Dubus exhibits a novelist’s steely nerve by making his young stripper, April, the terrorist Bassam and the hapless working stiff AJ – who form the novel’s central, desperate triangle – as humans deserving our empathy at least as much as they deserve our condemnation. He does this in part by revealing these characters’ elemental loneliness.

"Loneliness is a common theme in the books I’ve written. I don’t want to over-psychologize, because I think the roots of a writer’s characters are mysterious; their origins go beyond a writer’s experience and tap into something universal. But, you know, I was a new kid in school about 12 or 13 times growing up. I did eventually find my place and my friends. But who knows? That little boy could be working out a lot of demons in these stories."

Could be, too, that Dubus’ compelling new novel will have the same astonishing reception as did The House of Sand and Fog. If so, then one must surely wonder: what new edifice will Dubus build in his woods and how long will we wait until the next "rooster" wanders into his yard?

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

For 25 years Andre Dubus III has been trying to get one story off his chest. "Like so many writers, there is part of the canvas that wants to come from my life," Dubus says during a call to the incredible-sounding house he has been…

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