Alden Mudge

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…

History

David Maraniss

Interview by Alden Mudge

When David Maraniss finished his much-praised biography of baseball superstar Roberto Clemente (Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero), he was "determined not to write another sports book anytime soon." He had previously written a highly regarded biography of perhaps the greatest football coach of all time, Vince Lombardi (When Pride Still Mattered), so his feeling was: been there, done that.

Besides, during a 30-year career at the Washington Post, Maraniss had developed a reputation as a great observer of the American political scene. In 1993, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his series on the early days of Bill Clinton’s presidency. (He also shared in the 2008 Pulitzer given to the Washington Post team that covered the Virginia Tech shooting.) He published an astonishing account of the 1960s (They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967). He wrote a seminal biography of Bill Clinton (First in His Class). And, as Maraniss finished his work on the Clemente biography, the preliminary jockeying for position in that other great American contact sport — the run for the presidency — was already beginning.

Unfortunately for Maraniss — but not, it turns out, for readers — Roberto Clemente and the Pittsburgh Pirates were on their way to the World Series at the same time that the world was traveling to Rome for the 1960 Olympics.

"I was doing research on August and September 1960 and I kept seeing these names in the sports section – Rafer Johnson, Wilma Rudolph, Abebe Bikila, Cassius Clay," Maraniss says during a call to his home in the Cleveland Park section of Washington, D.C., where from his third-floor office he can see the spires of the National Cathedral. Maraniss and his wife, Linda, the "quirky saint" to whom he dedicates Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, now divide their time between Washington and Madison, Wisconsin, where they grew up. "Those are pretty intriguing names. That’s what first struck me. But I kept saying I really don’t want to do a sports book."

As he read on, however, Maraniss noticed that this was the time when Nikita Khrushchev was about to make his first visit to the United Nations in New York as the Cold War turned serious. "Black Africa was gaining its independence that summer, so that was another layer. Then I read that a doping death had taken place that year and that it was the first televised summer Olympics. And that was enough." From these strands and additional stories turned up through the prodigious research and reporting that is typical of his books, Maraniss fashions a completely captivating and frequently surprising narrative of the 17 days of athletic competition and political intrigue in Rome during August and September 1960.

First of course, there are the athletes. This was the Olympics when a brash, unknown 18-year-old boxer from Louisville named Cassius Clay burst on the scene. But in that moment, the future Muhammad Ali could not hold a candle to the immensely respected decathalon winner Rafer Johnson, who was the first black athlete to lead the American team and carry the United States flag during the opening ceremonies. It is one of the wonders of Maraniss’ storytelling that he can present a charmingly callow Cassius Clay, bragging his way through his fear of flying, without succumbing to the huge temptation to make Clay’s the dominant story of these Olympics.

"The one thing people know about the 1960 Olympics is Cassius Clay," Maraniss says. "But that’s not where Rome 1960 focuses. The other story that I downplayed, but for different reasons, was the basketball team. I love Oscar Robinson and Jerry West. I think that backcourt is for the ages. But I have never thought that basketball represents the Olympics, so I didn’t want to get sidetracked on that."

Instead Maraniss writes marvelous, suspenseful accounts of competitors from around the world. Among the most fascinating of these is the story of the eccentric Joe Faust, an American high jumper who didn’t come close to winning and yet remained so obsessed with the sport that he continued to jump with almost religious fervor into his 70s. "What an interesting life and mind," Maraniss says of the hours he spent interviewing Faust. "He’s the kind of character that as a reporter you’re always looking for."

Just as important to Rome 1960 are the intense political battles that were being waged behind the scenes. This was a time when Cold War antagonisms were nearing their height, and the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. vied mightily to win the Olympic propaganda war. Among his many discoveries, Maraniss uncovers the story of the American’s ham-fisted attempt to get Soviet athlete Igor Ter-Ovanesyan to defect. Maraniss also offers a ground-breaking account of the fierce political competition between China and Taiwan that played out during the summer of 1960.

"In Rome 1960 you see the roots of what exists today," Maraniss says. "The Chinese are using the Olympics for political purposes just as the U.S. and the Soviets did during the Cold War. You can’t take politics out of the Olympics no matter how hard you try. So you probably shouldn’t try. I don’t think anybody should boycott the Olympics, but the athletes and countries that go should say whatever the hell they want to say about China."

Then, ever the consummate journalist, Maraniss adds, "The Chinese have never experienced the world press the way they will during the Olympics. I don’t know what will happen but it will be fascinating. But I’m not going. I have asthma and I don’t want to be in all that air pollution."

That’s too bad. Imagine the stories he would tell.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

 

When David Maraniss finished his much-praised biography of baseball superstar Roberto Clemente (Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero), he was "determined not to write another sports book anytime soon." He had previously written a highly regarded biography of perhaps the greatest football…

Fiction

Andrew Davidson

Interview by Alden Mudge

Just before his 30th birthday back in 1999, Canadian Andrew Davidson realized with a start that he had not yet lived in another country. Living abroad was one of the 35 items Davidson had included on his "things to do before I die" list back in his 20s. So without much fanfare, he soon took off to Japan to teach English for a number of years.

This summer, Davidson will cross another item off his life list with the publication of his first novel, The Gargoyle. Publication, it seems, is both climax and anti-climax for Davidson. Climax because the manuscript of The Gargoyle set off a spirited bidding war that left Davidson the highest paid first-time novelist in Canada in decades. Anticlimax because Davidson has been writing seriously, "with consistency and discipline," since he was 16. The Gargoyle itself took seven years to complete, much of the work being done at night while Davidson was in Japan.

"I would work from 10 in the morning until 7 at night at my office job," Davidson says during a late-night call to, well, to his laptop in fact, located somewhere in Winnipeg, Manitoba, near where he grew up (Davidson does all his telephoning over the Internet, a holdover from working abroad). "I would walk home, which took me one hour and five minutes. That time was necessary to clear away the workday. I would spend maybe two hours watching television, answering emails, playing computer solitaire, and then I would work from 10 or 11 at night until 2 in the morning. It was the closest I could get to an overnight schedule. The natural rhythms of my body, strangely enough, are to be awake at night." Perhaps Davidson's nocturnal writing habits explain the dreamscape – or nightscape – feel of much of his first foray into long fiction. The Gargoyle tells the story of the unnamed narrator's gruesome car crash, his vividly described recovery in a hospital burn ward, and his meeting and developing relationship with Marianne Engel, a possibly insane sculptor of gargoyles who believes she has known and loved the narrator for more than 700 years.

"The book really began with the character of Marianne Engel," Davidson says. "She arrived first and she arrived with her name and with her look, which is the wild hair and the eyes that shift colors. She came in an image standing in front of a church saying things that could quite possibly sound insane. But I knew they weren't. She started intruding on my other writing until I couldn't ignore her any longer and had to give her a larger space to function in. I had worked through all the other forms – I started writing poetry and then stage plays and screenplays and short stories. I finally felt I was ready to try a novel, and Marianne Engel demanded it of me."

Fairly quickly, Davidson also realized he needed a narrator to encapsulate Marianne's story. And then, as so often happens, his narrator required a life of his own. "I get interested in the strangest things," Davidson says. "At the time I began the novel I was fascinated by the treatment of severe burn survivors. For years I've been thinking about the idea of people being 'burned by love' and I've wondered what if a romantic relationship didn't end with that feeling but began with it. So I just took it to the most literal level of having an actual burn survivor as the protagonist. I thought I just needed someone to tell the story of Marianne Engel and then I realized that the story was actually also about him."

To bring the threads of his story together, Davidson did an "an awful lot of research, from burn treatment to Dante and life in the Middle Ages to German mystic theology, from Viking times to Victorian times, from Japanese glassblowing to medieval book making."

The result is that Davidson infuses The Gargoyle with historical detail and with borrowings from earlier literary eras. With a nod to Dante, for example, Davidson's nameless narrator takes a harrowing journey through hell as he detoxes from the morphine he has subsisted on in the hospital. And, mining the Medieval tradition of stories within the story on the theme of love, Davidson offers four gem-like tales of love throughout the ages that illuminate the emotional dilemmas faced by Marianne and her beloved burn victim.

"I have a particular affection for the story of Sei, the Japanese glassblower," Davidson says of the fictional girl who filled the glass sculptures she made with the sighs of her forbidden love, sighs which burst hauntingly forth when each glass container was broken. "On one level it has to do with my affection for Japan. It's also a story that I think could go out into the world outside the context of the book."

In 2004, Davidson returned to Winnipeg to "concentrate on my writing and play old-timers hockey. I have a lot of family and friends in Manitoba. It's so cold in the winter you want to stay in, so you might as well stay in and write overnight. One of the things that I like very much about now being able to living as a professional writer is that it affords the opportunity to live anywhere. So why not Winnipeg, really?"

The move certainly didn't hurt his writing career. Last year the literary world buzzed with the news that the unknown Canadian author had landed a deal with Doubleday for more than $1.25 million for his first book.

"I understand why that's the story," Davidson says with a hint of resignation. "The book's not out there and reporters need something to write about. I'm really looking forward to publication, when the book is really out there for the public and that becomes the story. For any writer, and I'm no exception, it's about the story we want to tell."

To Davidson's apparent relief, that vivid story will finally reach readers' hands this month.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

Just before his 30th birthday back in 1999, Canadian Andrew Davidson realized with a start that he had not yet lived in another country. Living abroad was one of the 35 items Davidson had included on his "things to do before I die" list…

FictionHistorical Fiction

James McBride

Interview by Alden Mudge

Like other gifted writers of his generation, James McBride has the enviable capacity to enlarge and complicate his readers’ understanding of what it means to be human. McBride amply demonstrated this ability in his first book, the lyrical, transcendent memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (1996). He proves it again in his first novel, Miracle at St. Anna. 

"I’m always looking for that connective tissue that binds one piece of humanity to the next," McBride says during a call to his home in New Jersey. "I really live in that gray space between black and white. Because that’s where the truth lives."

Based on a little-known factual episode of World War II, Miracle at St. Anna tells the story of four black soldiers from the segregated 92nd Division during the campaign in Italy in the final year of the war. The narrative focuses mainly on Sam Train, a hulking, otherworldly, Christ-like innocent from America’s Deep South who finds and cares for a traumatized Italian child who was a survivor of a Nazi massacre in the village of St. Anna di Stazzema.

"That was the best part of the book to write," McBride says. "Because you had these two creatures who in many ways typify innocence and yet are so culturally, physically and humanistically different. I loved that relationship."

The inspiration for the novel, as McBride states in his acknowledgements at the end of the book, came from the stories his Uncle Henry, a World War II veteran, told at family gatherings in New York. Because of those stories, McBride says, he was always curious about the role blacks had played in World War II. "After The Color of Water became a success and I had some creative freedom, I decided to write a book about the black soldiers who liberated a concentration camp in Hungary. But it just didn’t work. It wasn’t the story I was put here to tell. Eventually I realized I didn’t want to write a book that just glorified war, because war is not a glorious thing. The whole business was just a futile act of human madness. So I started to research this piece and began to construct my story and seek the characters that would inhabit it, and I essentially became very depressed for several months. From this outrageous hurricane of tumultuous events I had to find something that had some meaning."

To research the book, McBride moved himself and his family to Italy for the better part of a year. "You can’t reach the kind of detailed knowledge you need by reading a book; you have to go there. You have to eat it and live it. My research process is always very extensive. For The Color of Water I interviewed friends that I grew up with because they remembered details of my life as a child that I had no recollection of. In Italy, I interviewed everyone I could."

The result is a vibrant portrait of a rural, war-torn Italy that will be unfamiliar to most American readers. "There’s another world in Italy that is much deeper than what Italians usually allow outsiders to see. The land is just haunted. They believe that God shaped the mountains with his finger and that witches live in the hills. "

In Miracle at St. Anna the Italian villagers and the black American soldiers develop a special bond, a relationship McBride says is based on historical fact. "Every single black soldier I talked to who was in Italy just loved the Italians. German soldiers and white American soldiers disdained the Italians. Black soldiers knew what that felt like. They had enormous compassion for the Italians. They respected them. And the respect was mutual."

McBride, who delivered a beautifully nuanced portrait of racial relations in his memoir The Color of Water, brings the same humanity and understanding to his exploration of the complicated relationships between black soldiers and their white commanders in this novel. "There was a tremendous amount of distrust between the soldiers and the officers who commanded them," he says. "You also had Northern officers and Southern officers who were at odds over how blacks should be treated. It’s easy now to look back on these officers and say they were bad, but we were basically asking these men, normal men, to do an extraordinary thing — greet America’s civil rights movement with open arms while at war. We funneled our civil rights problem into the hands of four or five hundred officers of the 92nd Division. Some of them were up to the task and some of them weren’t."

According to McBride, the two military campaigns his four protagonists participate in have been viewed as failures by military historians because black soldiers cut and ran, refused to fight or became disorganized. His own research and recent work by military scholars have challenged this assessment

But McBride’s purpose isn’t really to rehabilitate reputations or glorify war. "I wrote the book because I think war is a bad thing," he says emphatically. "I plan to make that very clear whenever I talk about the book." And, indeed, the novel is sometimes brutal and tragic; McBride’s warriors suffer.

They also transcend. A deeply religious man, McBride says he wanted Miracle at St. Anna to also "speak to the miracles that happen if you believe in God. I sort of skirt the mythical. I just scrape the top level of suds off the beer mug, just enough that you can suspend your disbelief for a moment."

Reflecting on his own life, McBride says, "I’m at the point where I realize that the only things keeping me from being wormfood are the tiny molecules dancing around in my body; to me that’s a kind of miracle.

"I’ve come to believe there’s no such thing as control or safety," he says. "I love America. My family is a living example of what is possible in America, and so am I. But American society has become in many ways the moral equivalent of cardboard. We have all these fancy gadgets that keep us materially comfortable. We feel we have the technology to make other people suffer and keep ourselves immune from suffering. But there is no safety. . . . That’s why everyone is so upset right now. No one is immune from suffering. We will all suffer someday. So the deeper question is how do you want to live? We can live in fear. Or we can live as sharing, caring people. In that way, I think it’s a good time for Miracle at St. Anna to come out."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Like other gifted writers of his generation, James McBride has the enviable capacity to enlarge and complicate his readers' understanding of what it means to be human. McBride amply demonstrated this ability in his first book, the lyrical, transcendent memoir The Color of Water: A…

Fiction

Jim Lynch

Interview by Alden Mudge

Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover? The startling image of flocking birds that wraps around Jim Lynch’s rambunctious second novel, Border Songs, is a near-perfect analogue for the setting, subject and narrative energy of the story inside.

The image comes from a recent painting by Walton Ford, Lynch says during a call from his home in Olympia, Washington. Lynch lives there with his wife, who teaches English as a second language, and their 16-year-old daughter. The watery environs near his home inspired Lynch’s well-regarded first novel, The Highest Tide, whose pint-sized 13-year-old narrator relates the outsized adventures of a formative summer at the water’s edge. Lynch composed Border Songs, set along the U.S.-Canada border in Washington state, in a “mini private-eye office”—complete with a frosted glass door, but minus Internet or phone service—in one of the oldest office buildings in Olympia.

Lynch says setting and a sense of place are important hallmarks of both his novels. “To write about western Washington and not have the kind of lushness [represented in the painting] seems almost impossible to do,” he adds, then notes that his publisher thinks the book cover will “be one of those what the hell!? kinds of covers that you just have to pick up.”

And why not? Viewed from a certain angle, the cover even mirrors the deft comedic exaggeration that makes Border Songs such a lively read. Nowhere is that quality more evident than in the character of Brandon Vanderkool, the hulking, sweet-souled, rookie U.S. Border Patrol agent who is the protagonist of Border Songs and who just happens to have some very unusual abilities.

“I didn’t start out to make a six-feet-eight dyslexic 23-year-old guy who is into landscape art and who is really into birds the central character of the book,” Lynch says. “I actually started out on a kind of writer’s dare. My protagonist in The Highest Tide is just four-feet-eight, and I’m a short guy myself, so I was thinking, OK, I can write tall. I’m going to make this guy six-feet-eight. The more I thought about it, the more it amused me to have a character who was unusually tall. Then I started giving him abilities that matched the extremeness of his size.”

Brandon, it seems, has always been the weird Harold of the small farming community along the Washington-British Columbia border where he grew up and now patrols amid post-9/11 border tensions. But, in one of the wonderful comic twists of the novel, the same strange affinities with birds and art that alienated him from his classmates during his youth, now make Brandon unwittingly—and uncannily—successful as a Border Patrol agent. With every wrong turn or seeming blunder, he ends up apprehending a drug smuggler or undocumented alien, exciting the interest of superiors and congressional committees, the surprise of his father, a local dairy farmer, and the bemused envy of fellow officers.

Alas, no similar happy twist of fate immediately lifts Brandon’s quest for the heart of Madeleine Rousseau, the girl from 50 or so feet across the border who had been one of Brandon’s rare childhood friends but is now a rookie girl-gone-bad in the British Columbia pot-exporting business.

“I’m either drawn to or fascinated with reckless women,” Lynch says. “All of my characters are trying to squeeze more out of life. But Madeleine is trying to find something well outside the norm. She’s in trouble and she’s gone awry and Brandon senses that, although he’s clueless about what to do about it.”

Around the charged relationship between Brandon and Madeleine, Lynch populates his story with a motley, engaging, vividly drawn assemblage of Border Patrol agents, national politicians, local dairy farmers, parents, children, Canadian pot dealers, illegal aliens and even a few potential terrorists. Lynch spent 15 years working as a reporter, including a stint as a political reporter in Washington, D.C., and he tells his story with remarkably clear prose punctuated by a sort of well-informed wink at the ridiculous attitudes on both sides of the border.

“When I was at the The Oregonian I went up and hung out in the pot cafes in British Columbia and wrote about their whole marijuana culture,” Lynch says, highlighting the wellsprings of the novel. “They would tell me that the whole problem with America is that we’re euphoria-phobic. They have a guy who calls himself the Prince of Pot and who likes to get arrested smoking huge joints out in front of police stations. The self-righteous audaciousness of that struck me as a fun contrast to our drug czar, get-tough-on-marijuana policy,” he says.

“When I was riding around with the Border Patrol I kept noticing all the birds. Border guards spend so much time spitting sunflower seeds, chewing tobacco and moseying around doing nothing that I thought having a birding Border Patrol guard would actually make sense . . . . [Besides,] the border guards weren’t catching a lot of illegals—your basic job-seeking illegals. But they were intercepting huge amounts of BC [British Columbia] bud. They would take me into the rooms where they stored these huge bags of marijuana and they were like teenagers with the big buds in their hands, aping for the camera,” Lynch recalls. “It was just goofy and it struck me that here was this little-known battlefront in the war on terror and the war on drugs with great comic potential.”

Lynch concludes, “We go through these absurd cycles from hyper paranoia about the border to forgetting it’s even there to ramping up and getting tough on Canada as a potential menace. To me there’s a nonsensical dynamic to the way we guard our border with our peaceful neighbors to the north, and a certain absurdity to the way we wage our war on drugs and our war on terror. If that seeps through to the reader as I describe life on the border, so much the better.”

Lynch’s provocative critique of U.S. border policies does indeed seep through Border Songs, but, thankfully, it wafts on the breeze of a warm-hearted guffaw.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover? The startling image of flocking birds that wraps around Jim Lynch’s rambunctious second novel, Border Songs, is a near-perfect analogue for the setting, subject and narrative energy of the story inside.

…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Teri Coyne

Interview by Alden Mudge

People who know Teri Coyne’s work as a stand-up comedian are going to be very, very surprised by her intense, emotionally wrenching first novel, The Last Bridge. There are many good words that could describe Coyne’s story of 28-year-old Alex “Cat” Rucker, an alcoholic waitress who fled her rural childhood home as a teenager then returns to confront her family demons 10 years later, after her mother’s suicide. “Page-turner,” perhaps. Or “psychologically compelling.” But “funny”? Most definitely not.

“People ask, wow, where did that come from?” Coyne says with a characteristic laugh during a call to her home on Long Island’s North Fork. For some years Coyne managed a technical writing and training team at a New York law firm and divided her time between an apartment in Queens and the 110-year-old house she bought and renovated on Long Island, while performing and writing on the side. The favorable early buzz about her first book has not entirely freed her from needing a job, but she now works as a consultant and spends more time at her North Fork home composing an early draft of a second novel. “I am drawn to the darker side of humor,” Coyne says. “I was inspired and influenced by comedians like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks. But when I performed, I certainly wasn’t intense and dark like this book.”

The Last Bridge developed from a kind of vision Coyne had after abandoning standup in order to tell a larger story than she could in her comedy routines. “The book started with an image in my head of a mother taping garbage bags to the wall, a shotgun and the opening line of the book: ‘Two days after my father had a massive stroke, my mother shot herself in the head.’ Once I heard that voice, I couldn’t stop. I wrote the opening line and it just started coming. Looking back, it started at a time in my life when I was exploring this concept of what makes a family, what makes a person a parent. Is it blood or is it choice? Are we the product of our experiences? Or are we the product of our choices? As I started to write this story, it became very clear that that was really what I was trying to explore.”

The exploration did not go entirely smoothly. “Clearly when it takes you 10 years to write a book, you’re not in a big hurry to get something out there,” Coyne says, laughing. “This was my first book. I was learning the process of writing a novel while I was working on it. My goal was not publication but rather to make it the best story I could make it. That meant spending a lot of time writing and rewriting and focusing on getting the tone right.”

Interestingly, Coyne says that she had to leave her house to write the most difficult parts of the book. “When I was working on something that was really, really emotional it was easier for me to just go sit in a public space because for some reason I’m not as distracted in a public space.”

Although she can’t listen to music while she writes, Coyne uses music to get into the writing. She developed playlists for each character she was working on. “Every character has a song and that song just puts me immediately into the head of that person,” she says. Her playlists are on iTunes and her website.

Coyne’s early struggles to learn her craft were not helped by the nature of her central character, Alex, otherwise known as Cat. “It’s very difficult to write a character that you know your reader is not going to like right away. Cat is not a very likeable person in the beginning. But I felt very protective of her. I had to find a way to keep readers with me until I could show who she really is. Anger is not a real emotion and Cat’s anger is a disguise for something deeper. I had to find a way to show what that anger is covering.”

Part of what Alex is covering—or running from—is an abusive relationship with her father. Coyne’s unnerving portrait of that relationship draws on research she did with victims of abuse and from her own family history.

“Cat is not me,” Coyne says, “and none of the characters are reflective of people or characters in my own life, but some of their qualities are composites. That said, I made them all up, so they really are me. I dedicate the book to my father. He had a drinking problem and he had abusive and violent behavior. I struggled with that, as did all the people in our family. There’s this very private thing that happens inside of the family and then there’s this public life you lead in school or outside of the family. You learn very early that your family situation is not something you share outside of your family.”

“I had a lot of friends who had siblings who were kind of the black sheep or developed drug problems or drinking problems,” Coyne recalls. “People thought these people were broken, that something was wrong with them, that they were weak, that they didn’t have any ambition. But the older that I got and the more that I talked to people and saw what really happens to people who come from abusive families, I saw that these are not weak people. These are people that are masquerading a tremendous amount of pain. As I started to learn more and understand more, I started to really see that we have these notions or conceptions about people who are troubled that often aren’t really honest about what that person is really going through. It’s very, very important for me to shed light on that.”

As a result of this passion for bringing light to a difficult subject, Coyne’s empathic and ultimately redemptive first novel has struck a chord with early readers in ways that have completely amazed her. “It has been a lifelong dream of mine to get a book sold and published,” she says. “It’s a phenomenal thing that has happened to me. But I have to say I am in total awe of the reading community. It has just really blown me away how passionate readers are and how they do go out of their way to make contact with me and how dedicated they are to getting the word out about The Last Bridge. It’s really impressive and inspiring.”

The feeling, it seems, is completely mutual.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

People who know Teri Coyne's work as a stand-up comedian are going to be very, very surprised by her intense, emotionally wrenching first novel, The Last Bridge. There are many good words that could describe Coyne’s story of 28-year-old Alex “Cat” Rucker, an alcoholic waitress…

Biography

Tracy Kidder

Interview by Alden Mudge

While working on Strength in What Remains, the excruciating and ultimately uplifting story of a survivor of the genocidal conflict in Burundi and Rwanda, Tracy Kidder violated one of his cardinal writing principles. He wrote on airplanes.

“I really can’t have someone looking over my shoulder when I’m working,” Kidder says during a call to the summer home in Maine that he and his wife, a painter, bought in the 1980s, around the time when The Soul of a New Machine earned him a Pulitzer Prize. “Privacy is a big thing for me.”

Usually Kidder has found privacy in what he describes as his uninsulated, “beautifully built little cottage down by a salt water cove” on the couple’s property in Maine. Or in the quiet office “with plenty of room for pacing” in their house—an old, converted creamery not far from Northampton, Massachusetts. But over the last five or six years, while he was researching and writing Strength in What Remains, Kidder traveled frequently to college campuses all over the country, where his marvelous account of Dr. Paul Farmer’s effort to heal the world, Mountains Beyond Mountains, has inspired enough interest that, as Kidder puts it, “hundreds of schools have inflicted it on their incoming students.”

So out of necessity, Kidder learned to write “a little bit” on airplanes.

“Writing is for me, and I suspect for many other people, a way of thinking,” Kidder says. “It is the only way that I can begin to make sense of things for myself. So I don’t write in a very efficient way. I have to concentrate. The whole idea is to lose myself somewhat, to lose self-consciousness. And when I do that, I feel very vulnerable.”

If Kidder feels vulnerable writing under normal circumstances, imagine how he must have felt writing Strength in What Remains, a stunning account of the harrowing journey of a young medical student, Deogratias (Deo), when the horrific civil war between Hutus and Tutsis broke out in Burundi in 1993. It is an amazing journey. Deo witnessed some of the most unimaginable acts of cruelty human beings can commit against one another. He barely escaped death himself. Through luck and the kindness of a schoolmate, he arrived in New York City with $200 in his pocket, not knowing a soul and not speaking English.

Haunted by his nightmarish memories, Deo slept in Central Park and worked for about a dollar an hour delivering groceries while trying to learn English by reading dictionaries in libraries and bookstores. Helped, eventually, by a number of unlikely New Yorkers, Deo entered Columbia University, studied philosophy, went back to medical school and then began working with Dr. Paul Farmer. Eventually he found a healing path for his return to Burundi.

“My wife heard an outline ofhis story and told me about it. The memory of someone else’s memory stuck with me,” Kidder remembers when asked about the origins of Strength in What Remains. “For me the only hard thing about being a writer is deciding what to do next. My wife said, why don’t you go see Deo? I did. And once I heard the story for myself, I thought I had to tell it. Deo is an enormously charming person. Captivating. One feels that even before one knows his story, but the story only enhances that— that a guy could be so good-hearted and so strong that he could return to Burundi and open a clinic, which is really such an instrument of peace. There’s a radiance about him.”

Kidder spent hours with Deo, dredging up often painful memories, “just talking and talking and talking, and listening really carefully. I’m not a good listener in my regular life, but I’m pretty good when I’m working,” Kidder says. Deo was at first a reluctant subject, Kidder says. “I don’t blame him. I would never let anybody do what I do to other people. And Deo is, of course, completely publicity shy. There were times when I thought I should stop, and I felt like a real creep for doing this to someone. But once he decided to do it, he did it.” In the dramatic finale to the book, Kidder accompanies Deo on a return visit to Burundi and Rwanda.

Kidder lets Deo’s story unfold in an unusually affecting double narrative—first as a sort of page-turner, which Kidder says is meant to present “as accurate an account of Deo’s memories as I can,” and then from a bit of a distance, “to show Deo in the throes of memory.” A postscript adds historical context for the chaos and violence unleashed between Hutus and Tutsis in Burundi and Rwanda. But nothing can answer the question Deo seeks to answer when he enrolls in a philosophy course at Columbia: what kind of human being can take up a machete and slaughter his neighbor?

Ultimately, Kidder says, Strength in What Remains is about memory—and forgetting, and taking action. Visiting a genocide memorial site with Deo in Rwanda, he writes that of course we need such memorials. But “too much remembering can be suffocating.”

Afflicted by “ungovernable, tormenting memories, Deo first sought solace by studying philosophy at Columbia. But it didn’t work.”

“I think Deo’s solution is not to dwell on memories and not to extinguish them either,” Kidder says, “but, rather, to act. The best solution is for him to go back and try to bring public health and medicine to one village. The phrase ‘never again’ has clearly become an empty platitude, because genocide keeps happening everywhere. The real answer is remembering, being guided by those memories, and acting.”

Growing more reflective Kidder says, “Over the last nine years I’ve spent the better part of my time with Paul Farmer and Deogratias. They lead you beyond conventional wisdom. A lot of conventional wisdom represents an attempt to ignore the fact that most of humanity is impoverished and in deep misery. These guys and their colleagues are confronting that misery. Through that, I believe another way of looking at the world is bound to arise.”

Kidder’s Strength in What Remains offers a glimpse of that new world arising.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

While working on Strength in What Remains, the excruciating and ultimately uplifting story of a survivor of the genocidal conflict in Burundi and Rwanda, Tracy Kidder violated one of his cardinal writing principles. He wrote on airplanes.

“I really can’t have someone looking over my shoulder…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Jeannette Walls on her grandmother, a ‘tough old coot’

Interview by Alden Mudge

In her riveting memoir about her hardscrabble childhood, The Glass Castle (2005), Jeannette Walls described being severely burned while boiling hot dogs when she was three years old.

“I used to think being burned was my earliest memory,” Walls says during a call to the home she shares with her husband, writer John Taylor, in Culpepper, Virginia. “But I also remember going to a cafeteria with [my grandmother] Lily and her standing up, pointing to me, and shouting to the entire place: SHE’S ONLY TWO YEARS OLD AND SHE’S DRINKING FROM A STRAW! SHE’S A GENIUS!”

The loud, irrepressible and ever-resourceful Lily Casey Smith, who in later years took pleasure in brandishing both her “choppers” and her pearl-handled pistol in the air, is the subject of Wall’s captivating new “true-life novel,” Half Broke Horses.

Lily grew up in the vast, still-unpopulated reaches of the Southwest. As a child she helped her rancher father break horses. In her teens, she left home to become an itinerant schoolteacher, riding 500 miles to her first job on horseback. She later lived for a while in Chicago, where she worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy family and was seduced and wedded by a bigamist. Chastened, she returned to the Southwest and married Big Jim Smith, and together they managed a spacious ranch in Arizona. Hers is a story that evokes an American way of life that no longer exists. Lily died when Walls was only eight but her she left an indelible imprint on her granddaughter.

“She was a leathery woman and she would just pick you up and toss you in the air. She’d always yell. She’d enter a room and say HERE I AM! She loved to dance. Every time we’d go someplace where there was music, she’d just grab some guy from his seat and start dancing with him. She was always driving us around in this great big station wagon. She thought she was a brilliant driver but she was really quite reckless. There were always cars sort of crashing and screeching around us. But for all her sort of wild recklessness, she was very orderly,” Walls remembers.

“She had all these rules and was very bossy. My mother and she would clash very badly. My father and she would clash even worse. When I was growing up, my mother told me on a regular basis that I was just like her mother, and I don’t think she meant that as a compliment. Lily glommed onto me at an early age. She sensed a kindred spirit. She was a lot tougher and ballsier than I ever was, but I do think we’re similar in a lot of ways.”

Among the obvious similarities are Walls’ own loud, embracing laughter, a gift for storytelling and the sort of indomitable spirit that enabled Walls to overcome the dysfunctional childhood she describes in The Glass Castle.

These similarities explain why Walls found it so easy to slip into Lily’s unusual voice in Half Broke Horses. “I remember Lily so vividly,” Walls says.  “I found it was much easier when I wrote in her voice than when I wrote in third person trying to capture her voice. When I was writing in the third person about Lily, I was just writing in my own voice.” As she explains in an author’s note in the book, Walls’ decision to tell this story in her grandmother’s distinctive voice rather than as an objective historian is one of the reasons she decided to call her book a “true-life novel.”

“I’ll bet most people in America have similar ancestors,” Walls says. “The details might be different but the overall story is the same—some tough old broad or tough old coot who came to this country and did what had to be done to survive. I think most people are tougher than we realize and that we have this inner strength and resilience that we’re not aware of. One of the ways to get in touch with that is to look at our ancestors.”

But for Walls, writing Half Broke Horses was also as least as much about gaining an understanding of her own difficult, free-spirited mother, Rose Mary Smith Walls, as getting in touch with her ancestors. “When I was on book tour,” she remembers, “readers of The Glass Castle would often ask me why, with a college education, my mother would choose the life she did. At the time I didn’t know the answer. But writing about your parents and your ancestors is like going into intensive therapy. You really get at the roots. I now see that the time when she was growing up on the ranch without electricity and running water was the idyllic time of my mother’s life. She’s always tried to recreate it, the wildness and lack of discipline. Her life is very much a search for that freedom she had as a child.”

Now at age 75, Rose Mary is living in a mobile home a hundred yards away from her daughter and son-in-law, surrounded by the menagerie of rescued dogs, feral cats and horses her daughter and son-in-law have collected since abandoning a tony life in New York City for a semi-rural one in northern Virginia. Rose Mary’s vivid stories of her childhood and about her parents’ lives in the Southwest 50-some years ago helped define her daughter’s new book.

In fact, Walls interviewed her mother extensively for Half Broke Horses. She says with deep satisfaction, “My mom gave me these stories without reservations.” And, she adds, “She is not a normal mom, whatever the heck that means. But she’s a fascinating woman and she’s given me a great deal of joy.”

Among the most moving stories Rose Mary shared “so passionately and tenderly” with her daughter was the story of half-broke horses, the wild horses captured on the range that were only half broken by her father’s ranch hands. “Hearing her describe their plight and the love and affinity she had with these creatures that don’t belong anywhere really struck me,” Walls says. “Mom really does see herself that way, as a creature who is a little too wild for civilization but broke enough, civilized enough, that she can’t survive in the wild.”

Reflecting on the experiences of her grandmother and mother, Walls says, “It’s a bit of an anachronism, but there’s a lot to be said for the tough pioneer spirit and the untamed wilderness. I think it’s important that we don’t forget our roots. And our own half-brokeness.”

Half Broke Horses is Walls’ evocation of that American legacy.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkley, California.

“I think most people are tougher than we realize and that we have this inner strength and resilience that we’re not aware of. One of the ways to get in touch with that is to look at our ancestors.”
Fiction

John Irving

Interview by Alden Mudge

John Irving did not actually attend his induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, some 15 years ago. But now he wishes he had. “I regret it,” Irving admits during a call to his hotel room in San Francisco, where he has come to dine with Bay Area booksellers prior to the publication of his exuberantly inventive 12th novel, Last Night in Twisted River. “There have always been these two parts of my life, and they don’t overlap very easily. My wrestling friends are not very easily mixed with my writing friends, and vice versa. But it’s an honor that meant a great deal to me because that sport was such a huge part of my life,” says Irving, who competed in wrestling in high school and college.

Writing and wrestling may not mix in Irving’s real life, but the tension between the two worlds—the intensely physical world of wrestling and the inward, reflective world of a writer’s imagination—has been a powerful source of that exciting blend of comedy and tragedy that is one of the hallmarks of his best fiction. Irving’s breakthrough novel, The World According to Garp, is a case in point. So, in a way, is his newest novel.

Last Night in Twisted River takes place first in the physically dangerous, working-class world of New England logging camps, and then, a bit later, in the physically exhausting kitchens of the Italian restaurants of Boston’s North End. These places comprise a world that somewhat unexpectedly produces a young novelist whose later career bears remarkable similarities to Irving’s own.

This new novel, whose pages contain some of the most entertaining and intellectually playful storytelling of Irving’s career, opens in 1954 in a logging camp in northern New Hampshire during one of the last river drives, just as logging roads and logging trucks are beginning to supplant river transport as a way of moving logs out of the forest to downstream lumber mills. Dominic Baciagalupo (“Cookie”), the camp cook, and his 12-year-old son Danny, the future novelist, are in a sort of emotional holding pattern after the drowning death of Dominic’s wife (and the boy’s mother).

Then through one of those tragicomic accidents so typical of Irving’s fiction, father and son become fugitives from a relentless deputy sheriff and spend the next 50 years in hiding, often in plain sight. During their time on the run, they change identities—the father goes from cook to chef and the son raises a family and becomes a best-selling writer.

“One of the things I like about the structure of the fugitive story,” Irving says, “is that from the violence that begins part one, you know what is going to happen. There’s going to be a shootout. It’s inevitable. It’s just a question of how and when. I like how that satisfies something I’ve always liked to do with readers, which is to allow readers to anticipate where the story is going—almost. I want the reader to say, ‘Oh, I know what is going to happen. I see this coming.’ But they don’t quite see everything.”

Among the many items that readers familiar with Irving’s previous novels will anticipate, but not necessarily accurately predict, are the electric profusion of subplots and plot twists; the large and idiosyncratic cast of characters; and the bravura demonstrations of audacious storytelling skill in chapters like “In Media Res,” wherein Irving offers a dizzying and delightful example of jumping right into the middle of his story and telling it from both ends and the middle.

That particular chapter, Irving advises, “is a labyrinth. You have to walk your way very slowly through it. . . . Like the novels I most like to read, this is one in which you know you’ve got to pay attention.”

A careful reading of Last Night in Twisted River turns out to be richly rewarding, for this multilayered novel is, in part, an emotionally resonant exploration of 50 years of American life and, in a way, of Irving’s own life as a writer.
“I like the part of this novel that is about a writer’s process,” Irving says. “I’ve written about it before, but I feel I’ve never written about it as well or as comprehensively. I think I’ve woven the reasons for Danny becoming the kind of writer he is into the story of what happens to him.”

And what about the fact that Danny’s career and attitudes—including his objection to readers who think his fictional works are merely veiled autobiography—resemble Irving’s own?

“I’m having fun with that,” Irving says. “Like Danny, I went through years and years of being asked if I was writing autobiographical fiction, the assumption being that I was. But I wasn’t. My earliest novels were entirely made up. My later novels have become more autobiographical. I’m a very slow processor, and those things that had an impact on me when I was a child or an adolescent, I did not write about when I was in my 20s, my 30s or my 40s. But I have written more about my childhood and adolescence lately—over the age of 60. One reason for that is if you let enough time pass, your memory is no longer the tyrant it once was. You can afford to be playful and take liberties and invent better stuff.”

Irving pauses and adds, “When you repeatedly write about things that have never happened to you, but which you hope don’t, when you write about things you fear, you are also being, at least psychologically, autobiographical. In how many of my novels is a child lost? But I have never lost one, thank God. I have three children and I think about it every day—as any parent with an imagination does. You think that isn’t autobiographical? Of course it is. What is thought to be autobiographical in fiction is so narrowly defined and is often trivial. Whereas the things that truly obsess a writer, that a writer even unconsciously goes back to again and again, those things are real and they are autobiographical—whether they happened or not.”

So, call Last Night in Twisted River part 12 in the psychological autobiography of one-time wrestler John Irving, if you like. Better yet, call it a darn good novel and a delight to read.

Alden Mudge writes from San Francisco.

 

RELATED CONTENT

Our coverage of John Irving

 

John Irving did not actually attend his induction into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, some 15 years ago. But now he wishes he had. “I regret it,” Irving admits during a call to his hotel room in San Francisco, where he…

NonfictionEducation

Greg Mortenson

Interview by Alden Mudge

As the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan seems headed from bad to worse, Greg Mortenson, co-author of the blockbuster Three Cups of Tea (140-plus weeks and counting on the New York Times bestseller list), and his Central Asia Institute are building more schools in that volatile region than ever before. The ongoing effort is the subject of Mortenson’s new book, Stones into Schools, a sequel that is at least as good as its inspiring predecessor.

“This year has been by far our most successful year,” Mortenson says during a call to his home in Bozeman, Montana. On this particular afternoon Mortenson is at home caring for his 13-year-old daughter, who had her tonsils removed earlier that morning. “She loves singing, so that’s the main thing she’s worried about—her voice and vocal chords,” he says.

Mortenson, it quickly becomes obvious, is not a man for sound bites. He is well-read (“I read about two books a week. I read all nonfiction, mostly related to my work, much to my wife’s dismay. Right now I’m reading The Graveyard of Empires by Seth Jones.”). He is knowledgeable enough about working successfully in Afghanistan and Pakistan that the U.S. government, and especially the U.S. military, now regularly seeks his advice (“I’m pretty much a pacifist, so it’s a little hard for me to tell our politicians and the public that the military really gets it. But from my honest perspective on the ground, I’d say a lot of our commanders and NCOs do get it.”). And he is thoughtful, rather than ideological (“We often have to work with some pretty shady characters, including the Taliban, opium smugglers and corrupt government officials. [The success of the work] is about empowering elders, listening more and building relationships. It’s about getting local buy-in. . . . I always say politics won’t bring peace, but people will.”). In conversation, one thought leads him to another, which leads to an exploratory aside, which leads to a question, which leads to a humble demurral, which leads to a revision of the original thought. All of this is part of Mortenson’s genuine personal appeal.

Circling back to the original question about the success of his school-building effort, Mortenson says, “It took us eight years to set up the first 30 schools. This year we set up 31 schools. Over the last two years we’ve been moving significantly into areas where the Taliban prevail and we’re able to do that entirely because of our relationships with the local elders.” None of the schools Mortenson has helped build has been forced to close, despite the growing insurgency, because, he says, “the community is so fiercely devoted to something they’ve put their sweat, tears and blood into.”

"I always say politics won't bring peace, but people will."

Stones into Schools continues the story of these devoted relationships that Mortenson began to tell in Three Cups of Tea. Like its predecessor, the new book offers a dramatic narrative of derring-do, a geographical and cultural education about a poorly understood region of the world that has become increasingly important to U.S. interests, and a moral education about the value of humility in international relationships.

But Stones into Schools is also different from the previous book. For one thing, it makes a compelling case for what Mortenson calls the Girl Effect—the importance of educating girls and young women in the developing world. Educating girls, Mortenson says, “reduces infant mortality, reduces the population explosion and improves the quality of health and of life itself.” In addition, Mortenson points out, young men wishing to go on jihad “first must get permission from their mothers. . . . The Taliban very deliberately target impoverished, illiterate communities because many educated women refuse, even at the risk of their lives, to allow their sons to join the Taliban. There is a profound influence from the mother, especially if she is educated.” So communities where Mortenson’s organization builds schools must agree to send their girls to school.

Another difference between the two books is in the telling of the tale. Three Cups of Tea is written in third person, and Mortenson is the story’s main protagonist. Urged by Viking, his publisher, Mortenson tells the second installment of his story in the first person. “I’m a pretty shy guy,” Mortenson says. “I was really embarrassed to write it in first person. My wife told the publishers, ‘If Greg writes a book in first person, it will be a pamphlet.’ ” But with help from editor Paul Slovak (“I can’t praise him enough,” Mortenson says) and assists from writers Mike Bryan and Kevin Fedarko, he has produced a compelling first-person account that, ironically, is less about Mortenson than it is about the accomplishments of the “Dirty Dozen,” the ragtag local staff that has assembled around Mortenson’s school-building effort over the years and “is now achieving much more than anything I could ever do. They’re willing to risk their lives. They’ve gone into areas where it would be very, very risky for me to go. I’ve been enjoying taking a back seat and watching this happen.”

Finally, Stones into Schools gives a glimpse of Mortenson’s changing role. Because of the phenomenal grassroots response to Three Cups of Tea, he now spends far less time in distant reaches of Pakistan and Afghanistan and more time on speaking tours or in his office in Bozeman, building the organization to support the burgeoning efforts of the Dirty Dozen. To avoid the cynicism and burnout he has seen in other career humanitarians, he has made a deliberate choice to take better care of himself “emotionally, mentally and physically.” His wife, Dr. Tara Bishop, tries to limit him “to 120 days away a year, although last year it was more like 160 days.” The couple has a date every Tuesday night, “no matter what,” and he devotes every Saturday to his son and daughter. “I’m just a very stubborn Midwesterner,” Mortenson says. “I work very hard at things. I’m not a rocket scientist, and I’ve tried to stress how many failures I’ve had. It is sometimes painful, but you have to let people do things themselves. So now I just call myself a cheerleader, or I say I am the Chief Tea Drinker.”

Well, then, long may Greg Mortenson drink tea—and continue to write about it.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

As the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan seems headed from bad to worse, Greg Mortenson, co-author of the blockbuster Three Cups of Tea (140-plus weeks and counting on the New York Times bestseller list), and his Central Asia Institute are building more schools in that…

Memoir

Elena Gorokhova

Interview by Alden Mudge

Elena Gorokhova’s transformative moment as a writer came in 2004 when she enrolled in Frank McCourt’s memoir class at the Southampton Writers Conference. For the previous 10 or 15 years she had occasionally written—and published—fictionalized bits and pieces about her childhood and youth in Leningrad during the Brezhnev era. Writing was a pleasure, even a necessity, but more tangible concerns—her teaching responsibilities, raising a child, cooking dinner—kept her from taking it seriously.

Then came Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes. “He was a brilliant storyteller, but also just as brilliant a teacher,” Gorokhova remembers during a call to her home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where she lives with her second husband, their daughter and her 95-year-old mother, a figure who looms large in Gorokhova’s enthralling memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs.

McCourt’s classroom included 11 other students and two celebrities who were auditing the class—actors Alan Alda and Anne Bancroft. “The synergy of these three enormously talented people provided this incredible, electric atmosphere. Magic happened every day in that classroom!” Gorokhova says. “From that moment, from that seminar, A Mountain of Crumbs all came together.”

One thing Gorokhova learned from McCourt was to focus on the “hot spots,” those defining moments in life when something significant changes. “He compared it to walking on the beach. ‘You can just look at the surface of things,’ he said, ‘or you can go with a metal detector and go for the gold that’s deep inside.’ ”

Gorokhova has clearly gone for the gold. The 20 episodes in A Mountain of Crumbs are extraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail and offer an engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Beginning with Gorokhova’s mother’s brutal experiences after the Russian Revolution and in World War II as a doctor, the narrative follows Gorokhova through interactions with her friends and family members, her early education—in school and in the Soviet system—her intellectual and sexual awakenings and her growing disillusionment with the Communist government, until in 1980, at age 24, she meets and marries a brilliant American physics student and leaves Russia for good. Along the way, the wryly ironic Gorokhova illuminates the ludicrous tensions that existed between public and private life in the Soviet Union and tweaks the noses of authorities, including her mother.

“The United States is a different country and has different tensions and different kinds of stresses,” says Gorokhova, a linguist who has taught English as a second language since 1981. “What it doesn’t have is the kind of schizophrenic slicing of your soul in half that we had in the Soviet Union. There were things that I could say and that I could show to my family and friends. Then I would go outside, like everyone else, and I knew I couldn’t say or show that to people I went to school with or worked with, and especially not to any officials. It was the post-Stalin era, so they were not going to throw us into Siberia for a joke [during Stalin’s rule, Gorokhova’s uncle had disappeared in the Gulag after telling a joke to a foreigner]. But we had to be careful, we had to pretend everything was all right. The essence was that the government lied to us and we knew they were lying. They knew we knew they were lying. But they kept lying anyway. And we kept pretending to believe them. It was this duality, this divide, that ruled life there.”

For much of the narrative, Gorokhova associates that duality with her overprotective mother and an equally overprotective motherland. A somewhat more forgiving Gorokhova now says, “My mother was born three years before the Revolution. She went through famine and through two wars. She was a surgeon in World War II at the front. Her first two husbands didn’t last long and my father died when I was 10. She was very strong, obviously, and very controlling. Of course she loved us and was very protective of us but she didn’t show the warm side. She stifled. It occurred to me she was just like the country. What was the intention of the Soviet state? To have a just and equal society, to take care of the people. In the Soviet Union no one starved. No one was out of work. We all got our miserable wages for sitting at a desk for eight hours and doing crossword puzzles. The money was little, the food was scarce, but we were all in the same situation. There was this control and smothering on one side and this protective quality on the other.”

Gorokhova’s path away from the stifling system toward independence opened when a grade school friend played a recording of a basic English lesson. “It was so mesmerizing,” Gorokhova says, “an English male voice speaking English. It was captivating.”  Gorokhova begged her mother to pay for English lessons, and her mother finally agreed. Her knowledge of English afforded Gorokhova the opportunity to encounter Western visitors in Leningrad and to catch glimpses of a different sort of life in English-language books and movies. “It was putting these little bits and pieces together that told me that all this about capitalism rotting and crumbling and socialism succeeding and thriving was nonsense,” she says.

“And when I came here, I started writing in English,” Gorokhova continues. “I never tried to write anything in Russian when I lived in Russia. But when I came to this country, I felt the necessity and I allowed myself to write—in English. It took me a few years to learn the English rhetoric. Then in 2004 I saw that the legendary Frank McCourt was teaching his memoir class. I thought, this is ridiculous. Who is going to accept me into Frank McCourt’s class? But then I thought, why not? I submitted an application, and I got accepted. I was stunned. I was stunned.”

And from this beginning, an American writer was born.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkeley, California.

RELATED CONTENT
Watch a video interview with Elena Gorokhova:

Elena Gorokhova’s transformative moment as a writer came in 2004 when she enrolled in Frank McCourt’s memoir class at the Southampton Writers Conference. For the previous 10 or 15 years she had occasionally written—and published—fictionalized bits and pieces about her childhood and youth in Leningrad…

Fiction

Olga Grushin

Interview by Alden Mudge

To follow her highly praised first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov—which tells the story of a Surrealist artist who, in an act of artistic self-betrayal, becomes a Soviet art functionary, only to find his world upended years later under glasnost—Olga Grushin set out to write a novel about a Russian émigré living in America who then returns to Russia. But after struggling through about 100 pages, Grushin abandoned the project.

“Hopefully my second novel jinx was the one that didn’t work out,” Grushin quips during a call to her home outside Washington, D.C. Grushin was born in Moscow in 1971 and came to the U.S. to attend Emory University in 1989. Her Alabama-born husband is an attorney, and they have two children—a boy and a girl—whose births coincided with the completion of each of Grushin’s novels. “Are we going to see a third child for the third novel?” Grushin says, laughing. “No, this is not a literary trend.”

While struggling with her novel in progress, Grushin happened upon “this story of how Igor Stravinsky, who was 80 at the time, was invited to return to his homeland for the first time in 50 years. People, when they learned of it, lined up and waited to buy tickets literally for a whole year. I was amazed by that story. The line itself became this complex social world with its own rules, its own leaders and its own social networks. As I kept struggling with my novel, I kept returning to this story again and again. I kept asking myself what kind of lives these people would have outside the line to make this possible. What would make them stand in line for a year to hear a two-hour concert? I was haunted by this episode. I kept thinking about it and I started writing little notes to myself. Finally I realized that this was the book that I actually wanted to write.”

Thus Grushin’s extraordinary novel, The Line, was born. But it is a mistake to think of this as a historical novel in any way, shape or form. Grushin says she spent no more than a day or two reading about the historical episode that so intrigued her. Her invented famous composer, Igor Selinsky, is more an object of hopes and fantasies about life in a better place than a physical presence. Even her vividly rendered setting is as much Kafkaesque dreamscape as it is Soviet bloc housing. “I didn’t want to make it too Russian,” she says. “I wanted to go in a different direction. I set out to write a more universal tale about hoping and waiting and dreaming about changing your life.”

The Line centers on the lives of four family members, each with different hopes for the future and different, sometimes conflicting reasons for being in line for tickets. One of the marvels of the novel is how Grushin, a great descriptive writer and a masterful psychologist, gradually brings these family members—and the people in line around them—into sharp, resonant relief. “I thought of each character as being like a mirror, so that you get different reflections of the characters, in snippets from different points of view,” she says. “In the beginning of the book each character is in some ways completely alone, cut off. You get bits of the same story told from different points of view and it’s a completely different story. But the line is a sort of transformative presence. I didn’t conceive of some pat transformation. I wanted something deeper. The line is this sort of gift, people being transformed by their common weight, their hopes, their coming together.”

The novel’s success in providing a depth of experience about such an unlikely, even dreary subject as a ticket line is a testament not only to Grushin’s large talent but to her sustained control of her art. “I think it was E.L. Doctorow who said that when he writes a novel he knows the departure point and the destination point but the rest is like driving at night with your headlights lighting up just a small portion of the road,” Grushin says. “For me it’s not at all like that. I have to have an outline. I had a little more of a smudged outline in this case than with my first novel because I wanted to explore a different way of writing, also quite consciously. In the first novel I was maybe a little too logical and rigid in my approach. It was the first book and I was nervous about letting myself write more freely. With this book the concept was more fluid.”

Grushin says she now begins her work day writing in a notebook in a local café; when the piece begins to flow, she returns home, types what she has written into a computer and goes on from there. Since she arrived in the U.S. and became serious about publishing fiction, Grushin has written in English. “I do strive for a kind of merging of the Russian and the English in my use of language,” she says. “I do feel it’s important for me to preserve the Russian cadences and feel to my work. On the other hand I live here and I’ve been writing in English for 20 years, which has obviously changed me.

“I grew up reading every conceivable writer. I had this sense of entering this great ocean of literature within which there are maybe little bays—the bay of Russian literature, the sea of American literature—but basically it was this one water. I don’t see myself as either Russian or American, really. I see myself more as just a writer of the world.”

In The Line, Olga Grushin shows herself to be one extraordinarily capable swimmer in the world’s great ocean of literature.

RELATED CONTENT
Review of Grushin’s The Dream Life of Sukhanov

To follow her highly praised first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov—which tells the story of a Surrealist artist who, in an act of artistic self-betrayal, becomes a Soviet art functionary, only to find his world upended years later under glasnost—Olga Grushin set out…

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