Alden Mudge

Animals

Thomas French

Interview by Alden Mudge

How does a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter overcome a lifelong fear of animals? By writing a captivating newspaper series about Tampa Bay’s Lowry Park Zoo, to begin with. Then by transforming that series into a remarkable book about life and work inside a zoo and the difficult questions zoos raise about how humans relate to nature.

“I had some bad experiences as a paperboy and I never really got over them,” says Thomas French, discussing the origins of his animal angst. “But I had to get over them because to do this project I was going to be spending a lot of time around a lot of animals. The animals were so interesting and their keepers were so wonderfully open in allowing me into this world that I really grew. This project was one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve had as a journalist.”

That’s saying a lot. French spent three decades as a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times, winning his Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1997, and a host of other awards along the way. He recently accepted a buyout offer and now teaches at the journalism school at Indiana University, flying to Bloomington to teach classes in narrative journalism midweek, then returning home to “St. Pete” for the weekends. “I empathize with the George Clooney character in Up in the Air,” French says. “Not with his disengagement from humanity, but with his tips on how to like working on a plane and how to deal with all the travel.” French’s wife, Kelley Benham, is enterprise editor at the St. Petersburg Times and part of a team that was a Pulitzer finalist this year. French’s sons, a high school senior and a college junior, are both interested in playwriting. “Yeah,” French says, “we’re a family of writers.”

And it is a writer, rather than some therapeutic urge, that French credits with inspiring what became his marvelous book Zoo Story. “I read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi in the summer of 2003, and I was totally enchanted by that book. I was drawn as a reporter to a passage where the narrator talks about the misconceptions people have about life inside a zoo. It wasn’t the heart of what the book was about, but it drew me because as a narrative reporter I’ve spent a lot of time reporting inside other institutions— courthouses, police stations, public schools—and when I read that passage, I realized I’d never read a detailed, in-depth look inside the institution of the zoo. I sent the passage to Lowry Park Zoo and asked if that is what it’s really like. They emailed me saying it was actually more complicated than that.”

Complicated indeed. French began his reporting as Lowry Park Zoo was embroiled in a controversial effort to import 11 elephants from Swaziland. Elephants, as French shows so clearly, are remarkable animals, intelligent, highly sensitive to their environs and perhaps even self-aware. But their habitat is shrinking and, like humans, they “have the ability to alter their surrounding ecosystem.” This leaves Africa’s nature parks and game reserves with hard choices—cull the herds or transport the animals elsewhere. But moving elephants, especially long distances, has its own complex set of issues. In French’s remarkable narration, the story of moving and settling these elephants—one of the through lines of Zoo Story—is filled with drama and surprise.

“That’s what narrative reporting is,” French says. “You look for what a friend of mine calls fault lines, where good intentions clash with other aspects of reality. Or where the need to make a profit runs up against other questions, such as the issue of conservation. This is really a story that takes place at the intersection of conservation and commerce.”

Thus another side of French’s Zoo Story is the tale of the zoo as an organization of management and staff. Management in this case is Lex Salisbury, Lowry Park’s CEO and an alpha among alphas. “Lex is an interesting guy to write about,” French says. “He’s very admirable in many ways. He’s a visionary. He brings a lot of joy and passion to this enterprise. But he’s very, very complicated. The arc of his ambition and his passion gets tangled up with his leadership style. There are a lot of people who do not like him.”

Some of the people who do not like Salisbury are current and former staff. “Lowry Park for a long time has not paid their keepers very much money,” French says. “Part of the calculus is that this is a job that many, many people long to do. People love to work with animals. So realistically, they don’t have to pay their keepers very much money. No zoo does. But it’s a physically demanding job, it requires a lot of expertise, and it is dangerous.”

The conflict between a passionate, knowledgeable, underpaid staff and an equally passionate, dictatorial boss creates an explosive situation. And it is a drama that continued to unfold beyond the printing of the book’s first galleys. “I’ve been reporting on that and revising until much later than is healthy, just trying to keep up with the story,” French says.

Still, the primary focus of Zoo Story is on the animals. French has done a considerable amount of research and writes interestingly on animals ranging from orangutans to dart frogs and on issues ranging from the Machiavellian behavior of chimpanzees to Lowry Park’s groundbreaking efforts to save endangered manatees. He writes with passion and sympathy about a regal Sumatran tiger called Enshalla and a tragically mixed-up chimpanzee named Herman. But in writing so well about these animals in the zoo, French raises fundamental questions.

“From the very beginning I had in mind this question of freedom. What does freedom mean to humans? What does it mean to other species? What are the limits of freedom in a world that is so crowded that many species are becoming extinct every year?” French says. “A zoo is one of the frontiers where we confront these issues . . . where we see the fault line between wildness and civilization. Just watch people standing in front of tigers, the way they behave confronting an animal with such lethal potential. It’s stunning. It brings something out in people.

“Zoos are here,” French says. “They’ve been a part of human culture for centuries. A zoo is a laboratory not just for the study of animals but for the study of the human animal. As time went on, I felt I was learning as much about people as about any other species.”

In Zoo Story, French opens a window on the inner workings of a zoo, and it turns out to be a mirror in which we see something new about ourselves. 

How does a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter overcome a lifelong fear of animals? By writing a captivating newspaper series about Tampa Bay’s Lowry Park Zoo, to begin with. Then by transforming that series into a remarkable book about life and work inside a zoo and the…

Fiction

Gary Shteyngart

Interview by Alden Mudge

Gary Shteyngart thinks it might be time to buy a desk. Not as a reward for finally completing his super sad, super funny third novel. Not because he’s just been named to the New Yorker’s list of the 20 best fiction writers under the age of 40.

And not because he will soon move from his one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to more spacious digs elsewhere in downtown Manhattan. No, it turns out that Gary Shteyngart needs a desk because he has a back problem.

“I write in bed,” Shteyngart explains during a call to his soon-to-be-abandoned apartment near the Williamsburg Bridge. “Wherever I go, I always write in bed. I began this novel in New York. Then I went to the American Academy in Berlin, which is in this horrible suburb outside Berlin, and everything I wrote there had to be trashed. Then I went back to New York and worked on it some more. But it wasn’t until I got a fellowship in Umbria that I really solved all my [novel’s] problems so that in a month and a half the book was done. My posture was so bad that I was in the ER with some back problems. I think it’s time to buy a desk.”

Adventures in a near-future America where reading is outmoded and everyone gets instant ratings for personality and sex appeal.

An exaggeration? Fans of Shteyngart’s wildly exuberant novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002) and Absurdistan (2006), would not be surprised—or necessarily disappointed—if it were. The outsized characters (Misha of Absurdistan is the son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia and weighs 325 pounds) and outsized events (Vladimir, the hero of Russian Debutante’s Handbook, concocts a hilariously improbable Ponzi scheme for the Russian mafia) show Shteyngart’s unique capacity for comic exaggeration in the service of pointed satire. Why not carry that over into real life?

After all, real-life chaos in post-Soviet Eastern Europe and Russia, where Shteyngart was born in 1972, shaped his first two novels. Real-life economic turbulence in the United States, where he and his parents moved in 1979, shapes his third book, Super Sad True Love Story.

“I wanted to write a novel where I took a little baby step away from the Russia theme and began working with America,” Shteyngart says. “The U.S.S.R. fell apart in such a violent, horrible way and that was the place where I was born, but I started to notice that the place where I was living, especially under the Bush administration, was becoming very frightening in and of itself. Some of the same things I remember from the Soviet Union are happening here: the hyper-patriotism, the economic decline. . . . So I started to think about what would happen if things began to really turn bad.”

Set mostly in New York City in the not-too-distant future, Super Sad True Love Story describes a country that is far enough from our own to be very funny but plausible enough to be simultaneously terrifying. It is a country after the collapse, a place dominated by youth culture, where our 39-year-old hero Lenny Abramov, who is both emotionally immature and physically over-the-hill, sells the technology of eternal life to high net worth individuals (HNWI) for the Post-Human Services division of a major multinational corporation. It is a place where the dollar has been supplanted by the Chinese yuan as the world currency. Where the bipartisan American Recovery Authority runs the country. Where everyone has a smart-phone-like äppärät that allows each individual to instantly rate the personality and sexual appeal of everyone else. Where corporate mergers have refined business to its most simplistic expression: Credit, Media and Retail. And where, to add insult to injury, Staten Island is more fashionable than Manhattan. It is, in short, a world where Shteyngart can romp and cavort, deploying his extraordinary gifts for invention.

“The book tries to be a book for our times, and our times move so quickly that there’s almost no present anymore, we’re living in the future all the time,” Shteyngart says. “What I’m trying to do is find a way to talk about it. “

But this is also a super sad love story. So the hapless Lenny pursues a much younger Eunice Park, the fashion-conscious daughter of Korean immigrants and a girl who expresses her every random thought through text messages and email. She is at first resistant to Lenny, then flattered, and then kinda, sorta for a while transformed by him. Throughout his depiction of Eunice, Shteyngart displays a brilliant satirist’s ear for language.

“I’m always trying to listen to the way people talk and the way they write messages and I’m trying to get that clickety-clack,” Shteyngart says “Given that this is the future where nobody can read, I think Eunice’s messages are actually quite beautiful and very introspective. . . . Eunice is a unique character. Despite the fact that she is so modern, she’s really old-fashioned at heart and maybe that’s why she connects with Lenny.”

In fact, Lenny even gets Eunice interested in reading a book. And in that moment lurks Shteyngart’s most radical critique of the future. Early in Super Sad True Love Story, on an airplane home, Lenny opens a book of Chekhov short stories. The young jock sitting next to him, “a senior Credit ape at Land O’LakesGMFord,” says, “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks.” Lenny, it seems, is one of the last people on Earth who is still seriously reading fiction.

“I’m not a Luddite,” Shteyngart says. “I’m speaking to you on an iPhone, I have computers lying around. But something terrible is being lost, I think. What that is is empathy for other human beings, which you can get only by entering their minds through something like a novel. As wonderful as film is, it still requires a camera lens. It does not allow you inside the mind of its creator, whereas a book still does. That experience requires a deep train of concentration and that deep train of concentration is what is being slowly chiseled away at by instant gratification forms of media.”

“Reading is now considered non-interactive as compared to, say, video games. But a good piece of fiction has enough stuff missing that it requires the reader to fill in many different emotions and feelings,” Shteyngart says. “The major difference with the new generation is that when you’re playing a video game, you are the hero or the heroine of the game. You are the avatar. You control things. But reading fiction, you give up a little bit of your own identity, your own authority. You meld with something else. And that is scary but exhilarating.”

And that, dear reader of fiction, is also the perfect description for Shteyngart’s new novel: scary but exhilarating.

_____

For a taste of Shteyngart's humor, don't miss the trailer for Super Sad Love Story:
 

 

 

 

Gary Shteyngart thinks it might be time to buy a desk. Not as a reward for finally completing his super sad, super funny third novel. Not because he’s just been named to the New Yorker’s list of the 20 best fiction writers under the age…

Fiction

Jonathan Franzen

Interview by Alden Mudge

Nine years have passed since the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s monumental novel The Corrections. That book, a National Book Award winner, remains one of the best and most popular American works of literary fiction of this new century. And it casts a long shadow over any piece of fiction Franzen subsequently chooses to write.

“The disorientations of going from relative obscurity to relative well-knownness were obviously daunting,” the author acknowledges during a call to his home in Santa Cruz, California. Franzen “got involved with a Santa Cruz girl,” the writer Kathy Chetkovich. As a result, each year the pair spend a month in the winter and most of the summer on the West Coast. In New York, Franzen writes in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment. In Santa Cruz, while school is out of session, UC Santa Cruz offered him office space.

“I have the kind of nature that needs to prove that it wasn’t any fluke, that I can do it again.”

Addressing the personal impact of the success of The Corrections, Franzen says, “I have the kind of nature that needs to prove that it wasn’t any fluke, that I can do it again. So the pressure from the outside was combined with an enormous internal pressure.”

The pressure has served Franzen extremely well. His new novel, Freedom, is different from The Corrections but is, in its own way, as good as its predecessor. The novel concerns the travails of the Berglunds, a seemingly perfect, progressive, middle-class family whose lives fall apart shortly after 9/11.

Freedom is a sort of contemporary epic, part tragedy and part comedy, whose basic story is swiftly outlined in the novel’s pitch-perfect opening section, “Good Neighbors,” part of which appeared in the New Yorker. There we meet the young Berglunds, early gentrifiers of the Ramsey Hill section of St. Paul, Minnesota. Patty, a former college basketball star, is a self-deprecating, “sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen,” so devoted to parenting her children Jessica and Joey as to excite envy among her neighbors. Walter, a “generous and smiling” young lawyer who rides a commuter bike to work and spends weekends rehabbing the family’s Victorian, is thought by neighbors to be “greener than Greenpeace.”

The first fissure in the family façade develops as their entrepreneurial and surprisingly self-possessed son Joey rebels against his father’s authority, then falls in love with the girl next door, the daughter of a jilted mistress of a local politician, and finally moves out of the Berglund household and into the considerably more conservative and lower-class home of his girlfriend. By the time Joey finally heads off to college, the family is in tatters. They leave St. Paul and head to Washington, D.C., where Walter has taken a job with a foundation devoted to saving the habitat of the Cerulean Warbler, whose sole funding comes from an energy magnate named Vin Haven—who is, as it turns out, a close associate of Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remainder of the novel drills deeper into the family’s frustrations, competitions and betrayals, and the moral and political compromises that divide these family members and their friends and lovers. Franzen’s characters are not entirely likable people, and there is more than enough sadness and disappointment to make Freedom a difficult book to read. And yet, through the sheer force of Franzen’s abilities—his mastery of tone and voice, his sharp understanding of family dynamics and his subtle sense of humor—Freedom rings with meaning and pulses with recognizable contemporary life. In the end, the novel is oddly and surprisingly uplifting.

In conversation, Franzen is extremely reluctant to speak about his weighty novel’s multiple levels of meaning. It’s as if he doesn’t want to intrude upon a reader’s freedom to decide for herself. Asked what he’d like readers to think about when they finish reading Freedom, he demurs, saying, “I’m just hoping people have an experience with the book. I want the pages to turn without effort. I think that’s probably more important than ever. Because we are competing with so many other media, the challenge is to try to do something interesting and halfway serious, within the context of easily distracted people. I mean, I am an easily distracted reader. If the book’s not doing it, there are a lot of other things I could be doing.”

On the other hand, Franzen is astonishingly, even courageously forthcoming about the personal demons that at some subterranean level inform 

Freedom. “Even though The Corrections drew directly on some experiences I had when my father was dying,” Franzen says, “it didn’t get into the real stuff with me and my parents, and it steered entirely clear of my rather long marriage. Even though there’s nothing in the new book that actually happened to me—there’s not a scene, there’s not an incident that is from my own life—to go a little way into the shameful heart of my fraught relationship with my mom, to go a little way into the kind of things, again shameful, that happen in a long marriage, was really the core adventure.

“And I might also say that not having kids was something I was dealing with in the years when the book was coming together. Specifically it manifested itself in a kind of rage against young people that I was feeling some years ago. So it was important for me to try to create a young character [Joey] who I could love and forgive—if only to be rid of an anger that I knew really had nothing to do with its object.”

Then there is the thread of Franzen’s political and environmental anger. “I’m an old environmental writer,” Franzen says “Yet the environment is just about the hardest thing there is to write about. The news is bad, and your rhetorical options are either to shrilly and unrealistically decry what other people are doing, or to guiltily and despairingly acknowledge what is happening. Neither of those make for good fiction. So I wanted a character [Walter] who might be lovable for other reasons, who could also embody some of the environmentalist rage that I was certainly feeling during the Bush years and am certainly feeling now with what’s happening in the Gulf.”

Yet the wily, manipulative energy baron Vin Haven is, in Franzen’s characterization, a pretty good guy. “It’s very hard to make fiction out of political anger,” he explains. “When you’re speaking politically, you really can’t allow in the possibility that you are the problem. But of course we are all the problem. The flip side of that is that the people we see as the problem in our political way of thinking are also people too.”

Franzen’s adherence to the dictates of good fiction at the expense of ideology is embodied in a set of psychologically, morally and, yes, politically complex characters. The novel, he says, “only took a year to actually write the pages. The eight years preceding that were spent coming up with interesting, difficult characters who I could nonetheless love.”

Whether readers will also love these characters remains to be seen, but they will certainly appreciate Franzen’s ability to transmute the dross of contemporary American life into the gold of Freedom.

Want more on Freedom? Check out Alden Mudge's 'behind the interview' blog post.

Nine years have passed since the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s monumental novel The Corrections. That book, a National Book Award winner, remains one of the best and most popular American works of literary fiction of this new century. And it casts a long shadow over any…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Ken Follett

Interview by Alden Mudge

To complete his hugely ambitious trilogy of historical novels about the 20th century, Ken Follett has set himself a punishing writing schedule. Lucky for us. Because readers who compulsively turn all 985 pages of Fall of Giants, the gripping first book in the Century Trilogy, will not want to wait long for its sequel.

“If at all possible, I want to publish these books at two-year intervals,” Follett says. “So I work six days a week, and for the first draft I try to write six pages a day, which is 1,500 words a day.”

That means Follett hardly has time to enjoy his beach house in Antigua, where he is taking the call from BookPage, he says, in his library, “a white room with white bookshelves and very large open windows that look out onto the beach.”

“You get a different kind of understanding through your imagination, with the help of the author's imagination, of why people did the things they did."

Follett is there with his wife Barbara, who was for 13 years a member of Parliament and was also the minister for culture in the recently defeated Labour government of Gordon Brown. Back in England, the couple has a townhouse in London and a larger house, a converted rectory, 30 miles north of London, where they can host a tribe of children, stepchildren and grandchildren. Each of those houses also has a library where Follett writes.

“I do find it pleasant to be surrounded by books,” Follett says. “It’s very nice just to be able to reach out for the dictionary or the encyclopedia or something I use quite a lot—a reference book about costume at different periods of history so that I can describe people’s clothing. Books also remind me of the enormous culture to which I owe most of what I know and understand.”

The library in the country house, Follett says, pays special tribute to that cultural debt. In addition to books, its walls are lined with drawings and illustrations of well-known writers, among them a Picasso print of Balzac, which has pride of place over the fireplace. “I like the robustness of Balzac’s writing,” Follett says. “He’s not afraid to confront the dark sides of human nature. Obviously my work is not perceptibly affected by the Modernism of Joyce or Proust. However, I’m not unusual in this. Almost all the books you see on the bestseller list are basically novels in the Victorian tradition, stories with plot, character, and conflict and resolution.”

Perhaps. But not many of those bestsellers match the epic scale of conflict and resolution Follett deployed in his bestsellers about seminal events in England during the Middle Ages, The Pillars of the Earth (1989) and World Without End (2007). If anything, the Century Trilogy is even grander in conception than these fictional predecessors. The trilogy will follow the intertwined fates of five families—American, English, German, Russian and Welsh—through the tumult of the 20th century. Fall of Giants opens in June 1911 with the crowning of King George V of Britain. On that same day, 13-year-old Billy Williams, who along with his sister Ethel will become one of the most stirring characters in the book, begins his first day of work in a coal mine in Wales. The novel closes in 1924 after the reader has experienced World War I, the Russian Revolution, the beginnings of the women’s suffrage movement and the collapse of an antiquated class system, not to mention the emotional, spiritual and political ups and downs of the book’s central characters. In fact, by page 985, Follett has brought the reader into contact—sometimes glancingly, but more often at some depth—with roughly 125 characters, more than 20 of whom are actual historical figures.

“The research and effort at authenticity is more difficult when you’re writing about history that is within living memory,” Follett says. “One of the features of writing about the Middle Ages is that from time to time you ask yourself or you ask your advisors a question and nobody knows the answer. So then of course, as an author, you’re entitled to make it up. But with the 20th century, if you want to put, say, Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary at the outbreak of World War I, at a social event on a particular day in July 1914, you really have to find out where he was on that day. You can’t make it up. Because somebody somewhere knows where he was every day.”

For a book with the international reach of Fall of Giants, Follett, who takes pride in the accuracy of his historical fiction, hired eight historians to read the first draft. These included experts on America, Russia and Germany.

Initially, Follett says, history drove the conception of the book. But as the work progressed, he drew on other sources. A story he heard years ago from a friend whose mother had emigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1913 underlies Follett’s conception of the Vyalovs, a Russian émigré family in Buffalo whose rise to political power will be important in the trilogy’s second book. And Follett’s own boyhood in Wales informs his portrait of the fictional mining town of Aberowen and the boyhood of Billy Williams.

“My mother’s family lived in a town called Mountain Ash, which is very like Aberowen. We were there probably every other weekend when I was a little boy to visit my grandparents. . . . My descriptions of the steep streets and gray houses that snake along the hillsides and also the way people talk and the comic nicknames people have, that’s all Mountain Ash.”

Follett also credits his mother with his interest in stories and storytelling. “I think my mother was a very imaginative woman. She told me stories and nursery rhymes and sang me songs when I was a baby. I was the first child. First children always get a bit more attention, don’t they? I think my interest in the imaginative life comes from her.”

And it’s that interest in the imaginative life that makes Follett a historical novelist rather than a historian. “If you want to understand the Russian Revolution, one way to do it is to read the writings of Lenin and Trotsky and of analysts and so on,” he says. “But in a novel you try to imagine what it was like to be a factory worker in St. Petersburg, why he would want a revolution, why he would pick up a rifle and start shooting. That doesn’t happen in a history book. You get a different kind of understanding through your imagination, with the help of the author’s imagination, of why people did the things they did.”

Fall of Giants, Follett says, is about a period of history that “people find baffling. Most people don’t know why we had the First World War. They know that it started with an assassination in Sarajevo but they don’t know what caused the war. I want readers to understand it, but I didn’t want to give a history lesson. My mantra while writing Fall of Giants was ‘they don’t want a history lesson.’ So I had to find ways in which all of these developments were part of the lives of characters in the story. That was probably the major challenge of the book.”

It is a challenge Follett has met—and surpassed.

To complete his hugely ambitious trilogy of historical novels about the 20th century, Ken Follett has set himself a punishing writing schedule. Lucky for us. Because readers who compulsively turn all 985 pages of Fall of Giants, the gripping first book in the Century Trilogy,…

Memoir

Carlos Eire

Interview by Alden Mudge

After Waiting for Snow in Havana unexpectedly won a National Book Award in 2003, Carlos Eire began hearing from schools asking him to apply for jobs teaching Cuban history. His evocative memoir of growing up in Cuba when Fidel Castro was coming to power had led many people to assume that his academic specialty was the history of his native country.

“I had to tell them, ‘I’m sorry, you have the wrong man,’ ” Eire says with a characteristic warm, wry laugh during a call to his home in Guilford, Connecticut. “People are often extremely surprised to learn that I teach late medieval and early modern European religious history.”

In fact, in his non-memoirist identity—the one where he spent his early career studying John Calvin and Calvinism, where he writes scholarly, footnoted tomes on such matters as the early Reformation and “the art and craft of dying in 16th-century Spain,” and where he currently teaches a two-semester survey course on “all 2,000 years” of Catholic church history—Carlos M.N. Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs professor of history and religious studies at Yale University.

But for eight weeks in the summer of 2009, writing mostly at night in his office above the family garage, Eire once again put aside his professorial identity and “got back to footnote-less writing.” The resulting memoir, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy, is just as vivid and compelling as its predecessor. It, too, flashes with Eire’s jubilant humor and inventive wit. But it also tells a story that is shadowed by sadness.

Learning to Die in Miami opens with the 11-year-old Eire’s arrival in Miami in 1962. Along with his older brother, Tony, he was one of 14,000 children who fled Castro’s Cuba in what became known as the Pedro Pan airlift. “When the flights ceased abruptly in October of 1962,” Eire says, “there were still 80,000 on the island waiting to leave.” Among those was the boys’ mother. So for the next three years the brothers bounced miserably from place to place until they were finally reunited with their mother in Chicago, where things changed without getting all that much better.

Up to a point, Eire says, his story is a representative one. “For all of us, there was the pattern of arriving at the camps and being sent somewhere else. Many of us were sent to institutions or to foster families. Many of us bounced from one place to another. And then there was the even more painful part of the pattern—reuniting with your family. . . . [You] had to care for your mom. You had to go apartment hunting and find an apartment rather than the adult, because the adult was totally clueless and helpless and didn’t speak the language.”

But as common as it might be, Eire’s story also had its own unique miseries. Chief among them is the surprisingly long time he and his brother spent at a place Eire calls with withering irony the Palace Ricardo. An unholy mix of a Dickensian orphanage and Lord of the Flies, it was a quasi-institution whose proprietors resented the privileged backgrounds of Eire and his brother and allowed the older, bigger, more criminally inclined boys to prey upon the younger ones.

“It was a kind of crucible,” Eire says. “I had to decide who I was. Was I going to be like these thugs? Was I going to be intimidated by them or not? It taught me a lot about human nature, too. You come to terms with who you are. Most people come to that gradually through adolescence as they become adults. Being in a place like that, you have to come to terms with it very abruptly and definitively.”

And the impact of those experiences carries forward to this very day. “It has made it very difficult for me to be a good parent,” Eire—the father of a son in high school and another son and a daughter in college—says ruefully. “When they’re having problems—I’ve learned not to do this because it backfires—but my [instinct] is to say, ‘After all I went through? You have it so easy. Why don’t you just get up and go?’ That’s not a good thing to do. I have to put myself in their place, and that’s nearly impossible for me to do.”

As he movingly relates in Learning to Die in Miami, Eire found both solace and direction through his interest in school, an interest his brother did not share, and through a book: The Last Temptation of Christ. “It’s a very funny thing, this book,” Eire says. “You were only allowed to take one book with you from Cuba. I very quickly outgrew the three changes of clothing I had brought with me. So the two things that were left to me that were physical contact with my family were the religious medal my dad gave me and this book. Plus my mother and grandmother had given me instructions that if I ever had a problem I should just open the book at random and I would find an answer. I kept doing that but I wasn’t ready. ”

Eire’s memories of the events he describes so vividly in Learning to Die in Miami came flooding back to him during a 2009 trip to Eastern Europe. The minute he set foot in Prague, he says, “I knew immediately that I was back in the Soviet empire, or former empire, and I felt like a double exile. . . . Here I was in the very place my parents had tried to keep me from back then. It made me feel really weird and it just kept escalating as I traveled farther and farther. The high point was being in Berlin and seeing the remnants of the Wall and being able to move freely, so freely, on a bicycle between East and West. It just blew my mind. It reawakened all sorts of feelings and memories. And a lot of it was kind of painful. There was a lot of pain involved in thinking that for 20 years now these people have been free, and my people are not.”

Then Eire tells a humorous anecdote. While in the Czech Republic, he discovered there was a Museum of Communism. It amazed him and it set him to questioning who he was. “I wondered: Am I an item to be exhibited in the Museum of Communism? Or am I supposed to be a visitor to the Museum of Communism? I asked one of our Czech tour guides—she was about my age—‘Hey, have you been to the Museum of Communism?’ She said [here Eire exaggerates a curt, indignant Eastern European accent], ‘I do not need to see it. I lived in it.’ ”

Eire says he returned from that trip feeling exactly the same intense inspiration he felt when he began writing Waiting for Snow in Havana. He worked nights, writing from memory in a kind of white heat. The result is a book that, like its predecessor, is a deeply affecting portrait of a difficult boyhood, an unusual coming-of-age story that combines laughter with an abiding sense of sorrow.

After Waiting for Snow in Havana unexpectedly won a National Book Award in 2003, Carlos Eire began hearing from schools asking him to apply for jobs teaching Cuban history. His evocative memoir of growing up in Cuba when Fidel Castro was coming to power had led many…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Pat Conroy

Interview by Alden Mudge

During Pat Conroy’s sophomore year in high school, a charismatic English teacher told him that he should read 200 pages a day. “I thought he was serious!” Conroy says, laughing, during a call to his home in Beaufort, South Carolina. “So I did that, and I’ve tried to keep it up. Sometimes I don’t make it, but usually I do. Usually I go beyond that.”

As if that’s not enough, Conroy also usually tries to complete five pages of new work handwritten on a yellow legal pad each day. On a good day he’ll put those pages on the steps leading up to the office of his third wife, novelist Cassandra King. She’ll leave her pages on a pillow near where he reads after dinner, while she goes back upstairs to work.

“Sandra’s the first wife I’ve had who has not complained that I have too many books. We have books in almost every room,” Conroy says, turning away from the phone for a moment to confirm that with Cassandra, who says, “Everywhere!”

“These books mean a lot to me,” Conroy continues. “I love them. I like to handle them. I can look up from my desk and see walls and walls and walls of books. It’s an extraordinary beauty for me.”

Conroy’s love of books is the subject of his beautiful, passionate and often funny new memoir, My Reading Life. The new book’s title, however, is just a tad misleading. Readers will quickly discover that for Conroy there is no real separation of his reading life from his writing life. Or of his reading/writing life from his lived life, for that matter.

In My Reading Life, Conroy forcefully advocates the pleasures of reading books as different as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; he pays eloquent tribute to reading mentors like his long-suffering mother, Peg Conroy, high school teacher and friend, Gene Norris, and the writer and teacher James Dickey; and with remarkable—even courageous—openness, he reports his insecurities and charts the sometimes harrowing emotional and intellectual path that has made him the writer and person that he is.

“One of the things I can’t do is not expose myself,” Conroy says. “Some people do not like that about my writing, but I can’t help it. I write with emotion and I write with passion. I’ve caused such pain in my life with these stupid books. . . . My father [a Marine fighter pilot] went nuts when The Great Santini came out. My teammates in My Losing Season were absolutely horrified when I was writing that book. And my college [The Citadel] went nuts when The Lords of Discipline came out. But I’ve gotten used to that, I think.”

In My Reading Life, Conroy sometimes shines a bright, critical light on himself, but he is usually generous and wide-ranging in his enthusiasms for other writers. He may not like the company of writers (“I stay away from other writers if I can. They eat their dead.”), but he sure likes their work. “I can pick up a book and I can enjoy anything. I enjoy mysteries. I blurbed a romance novel. I end up reading a lot of people’s books because I still blurb. I like to always blurb first novelists because it’s hard to get blurbs then. I couldn’t get any when I was a first novelist, and I remember that.”

Conroy is also an avid reader of nonfiction. “I have an abiding interest in nature, so I like nature books. I’ll read a biography of anyone. What I like about modern biography is that they do the childhood. That’s the part I’m most interested in because usually you find some secret of what ignited them, what set them off.”

Conroy even offers appreciative words about books by writers who have personally offended him. In a chapter about attending his first writers’ conference, Conroy tells of looking forward to meeting Alice Walker because he likes her novel Meridian. Walker, however, rudely snubs him—apparently, a friend explains, because “she has a thing about Southern white men.”

But being Southern and, more importantly, being a Southern writer, is essential to Conroy’s sense of himself. “There’s something phony about my whole life. The reason I embrace being Southern, the reason it fills my heart with joy every time I’m called a Southern writer, is because I grew up feeling like I was nothing, like I had no home, had no place I could call my own. We didn’t own a house; the government gave us housing. We moved almost every year. I went to 11 schools in 12 years. When Dad was dying, he gave me a thing that shocked me because it showed that I’d moved 23 times from when I was born until I was 15. So when they call me a Southern writer, I am delighted because they are identifying me with a place.”

Still, Conroy says, Southern writing has changed appreciably since he began writing. “When I started out as a Southern writer, we were all boys. There’s been a fabulous influx of the girls, the daughters of Flannery O’Connor, the daughters of Eudora Welty. They have come roaring in and that’s been a great thing for Southern writing.” After his wife, he says, his favorite Southern writer is Janis Owens, who “has written three wonderful books” (My Brother Michael, Myra Sims and The Schooling of Claybird Catts).

In fact, Conroy regrets that his new book does not include a defense of another Southern woman writer, Harper Lee, who has recently taken flak in some quarters. “I wish I’d written about that,” Conroy says, “because in To Kill a Mockingbird she gave us —and by us, I mean white Southerners—models to live our lives by. I think that for people like Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, me and other Southern liberals, that book had a huge influence on us.”

Yet for all his delightful championing of other writers, Conroy remains insecure about his own work. “I’m always surprised when somebody likes what I write,” he says at the end of our conversation. “Someone told me they were visiting a writer’s house and he took them back and showed them his office and said, ‘Here’s where the magic happens.’ I roared with laughter when I heard that. I thought, my God, it must be nice to have that. But that gift was not given to me.”

Maybe not that gift—but as My Reading Life amply shows, Conroy has many other gifts to share with readers.

During Pat Conroy’s sophomore year in high school, a charismatic English teacher told him that he should read 200 pages a day. “I thought he was serious!” Conroy says, laughing, during a call to his home in Beaufort, South Carolina. “So I did that, and…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Lisa Genova

Interview by Alden Mudge

While she was being “wildly irresponsible”—writing her first novel, Still Alice, instead of going back to work at a high-powered Boston consultancy firm—Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, decided, what the heck, she might as well take acting lessons too.

“I was a divorced single mother at the time,” Genova says during a call to her home on Cape Cod. “I wasn’t doing anything I was supposed to be doing, and I had always wanted to act.” So for a year and a half Genova trained as an actress. “One of the things I learned,” she says, “is that you always raise the stakes as high as possible whenever possible.”
 
It’s a lesson Genova seems to have applied in much of her creative life. When Still Alice wasn’t picked up by a publisher, for example, she decided in 2007 to self-publish the novel, which offers a moving depiction of the life of Alice Howland, a Harvard professor who develops early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. “It was self-published for 10 months and in that time I sold just over 1,000 copies, and I was really, really proud of that,” Genova says, laughing. “Then it was bought by Simon & Schuster, and Barnes & Noble sold more copies than that on the first day it was released!” 
The popularity of Still Alice allowed Genova to become an Alzheimer’s advocate and to write full time. When she began to develop the character of Sarah Nickerson, the high-achieving, 30-something narrator of her new novel Left Neglected, Genova says she was inspired first by her curiosity about an unusual condition called Left Neglect Syndrome and then by her concern about the crazy-busy lives so many Americans lead these days.
 
“Most women who are raising kids and who have to work are finding themselves doing way too much in a day,” Genova says. “In fact, it’s sort of a badge of honor to say that you’re really, really busy. So I could have given Sarah a normal job but I thought, raise the stakes as high as possible whenever possible, and I decided to give her a really crazy job. I wanted to make her exhaustion and level of multitasking pretty severe. I wanted readers to see that there are so many things she’s not paying attention to in her own life. She’s not paying attention to her distant relationship with her mother because it’s easier not to look at that. She’s ignoring the fact that she and her husband haven’t had sex in a while. She’s ignoring the elliptical machine in the basement and the fact that she’s 20 pounds overweight. And she’s not paying attention to the road because she’s on her cell phone.”
 
Left Neglected tells of Sarah’s attempt to recover from that moment of inattention on the road and to learn to live with Left Neglect Syndrome. “It’s a confusing condition to wrap your brain around,” Genova says. She first read about it in Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and the disorder would crop up in her neuroscience classes at Harvard. Left Neglect is a condition in which trauma to the right side of the brain results in a person not being able to recognize left-side space. “If you ask a patient with it to draw a clock,” Genova explains, “they would draw the numbers 12 through 6 and think they had drawn the whole clock. I’m like, wait a minute, how does this person walk through the world if they’re only recognizing half of it? I knew that if I got to write another novel, I wanted to write about someone with this condition.”
 
One of the great accomplishments of Left Neglected is how fully Genova allows a reader to inhabit Sarah’s experiences of this peculiar disorder. Those experiences are often frustrating, but they are also laced with humor. “I didn’t know Sarah would unfold that way,” Genova says. “I haven’t written humor before, but there’s a lot of physical comedy in the book, and that was fun to see evolve.”
But Genova also has a larger purpose in mind in writing Left Neglected.
 
“I wanted to use this condition as a metaphor for our crazy lives as a culture right now,” she says. “It’s one of the things I have wrestled with in my life. In my 20s, I was very driven to succeed, like Sarah. I had my head down barreling a thousand miles an hour toward what was an outwardly, visibly successful life. A Ph.D. in neuroscience, a job that was very, very well paid. I had a sort of laundry list of things I would have: I would get married, I would have kids, I would do it all, without really thinking about what I wanted my life to look like. Then when I was 33, I got divorced. That sort of shook things up. It was devastating on the one hand, and on the other hand it gave me an opportunity to stop and think about what I wanted.”
 
In Left Neglected, Sarah Nickerson quite literally crashes and is then forced to rebuild her life. She struggles with her disorder and she struggles to reconnect with her mother, her husband and her children and to discover how to lead a meaningful life without the preconceived standards of success.
 
In Genova’s own life, she metaphorically crashed after her divorce and “began choosing a simpler life.” In 2007 she married photographer and filmmaker Christopher Seufert and moved to the Cape, where the family lives in a house overlooking a saltwater creek. She writes at Starbucks most mornings and attends her 10-year-old daughter’s soccer and softball games in the afternoons. She is now the author of two novels and the mother of two more children—a two-year-old son and a three-month-old daughter.

“That’s right!” Genova says, laughing, “I delivered a baby and a book this year. It was a little crazy.” 

 

While she was being “wildly irresponsible”—writing her first novel, Still Alice, instead of going back to work at a high-powered Boston consultancy firm—Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, decided, what the heck, she might as well take acting lessons too.

“I was…
Fiction

Karen Russell

Interview by Alden Mudge

When Karen Russell was “lost in the swamp” of composing Swamplandia!—her outlandish and haunting first novel about the Bigtree family of Florida alligator country —a host of solicitous friends and relatives offered her well-meaning advice. 

“At one point,” the 29-year-old Russell recalls during a laughter-filled call to her “tiny, dirty apartment” in Manhattan, her dad asked her, “Why don’t you write a love story? Set on a boat? During wartime? People like those things!”

“You have to have a solid bedrock to grow your crazy out of. Florida is such a weird, weird place.”

Then there were the skeptical-but-supportive “oooh-er-umms” of friends who made the mistake of asking what her novel-in-progress was about. “Try telling people you’re writing about a scary bird monster,” Russell says, laughing uproariously. “I’m like, well, one girl falls in love with a ghost. Her younger sister teams up with this scary bird monster-type man to rescue her from the Underworld. And their brother is working on the mainland in a Florida theme park.”

And finally there were the research trips into the Florida Everglades, not far from where she grew up, with her father, brother and grandfather. “My grandfather, who [recently] passed away, was very concerned,” Russell says. “He knew I was an inside girl and he would say, why are you writing about that swamp? People don’t want to read about that place; it’s full of bugs! He just knew I was going to get everything wrong. So he went out with me on this tram tour and he kept correcting the tour guide. She’d be like, ‘You see those brambles over there, that’s a gator’s nest.’ And he’d say, ‘That’s not a damn gator’s nest!’ He would reject all her facts. So I basically learned nothing on that research trip, except that my grandfather had strong opinions.”

Luckily, despite the strong opinions of her grandfather and the helpful suggestions from others, Russell stayed true to her swamp. As a result, Swamplandia! achieves the same exhilarating, remarkably inventive amalgam of the real and the fantastic that won Russell universal praise for her short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006) and led to her being chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and then, in 2010, being named one of the New Yorker’s 20 best writers under 40 years old.

One of those much-heralded early stories, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” Russell says, provided the seed for what becameSwamplandia! “When I was done with the other stories in that collection, I had no desire to go back to them. But with the Ava story, I really felt haunted. I kept thinking about the sad things that had happened in her family.”

Thus, Swamplandia! is told mostly from the point of view of Ava Bigtree, the 12-year-old daughter of Chief and Hilola Bigtree, the fake-Indian proprietor-performers in “the Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café” on the Ten Thousand Islands off the Gulf Coast of Florida. When Ava’s mother, the theme park’s main attraction, suddenly dies, things fall apart. Her father goes off to raise money to save the park. Her brother Kiwi, convinced he is some kind of genius, leaves to find fame and fortune on the Florida mainland. Her older sister Ossie seeks—and apparently finds—a ghostly sort of love through the Ouija board and sets off with her lover for the Underworld. And Ava naively decides she will hook up with her strange bird-man and go through hell and high water to bring her sister back. 

“They all sort of get lost,” Russell says. “It’s like a cue-ball break: Each member of the family gets lost in their own little pocket of grief. Everybody has their own doomed scheme to save the family and the park. And they’re all equally ridiculous in their own ways.”

But despite its wildly imaginative riffs, Russell says much of the book “feels pretty personal and exposing in a way. I mean, it’s not a memoir or directly autobiographical, but some of the emotional stuff feels pretty raw to me. I was just totally besotted with fairy-tale worlds when I was a kid. And we did have a swampy mangrove patch in our backyard. So at an age when I’m sure I was supposed to be using lip balm, my best friend Alexis and I were still wandering around in the muck near my house. I mean, I was not a tomboy because that implies athletic prowess. But I really loved being outdoors, and I loved reading fantasy books, all that sort of coming-of-agey, emotional stuff. So Ava’s emotional world is close to what I remember feeling when I was that age.”

Russell found further inspiration in her research into the Florida history that serves as a backdrop for her story. “You have to have a solid bedrock to grow your crazy out of,” she says. “Florida is such a weird, weird place. When I was researching this book I realized how much of our state’s history, or what I thought of as our state’s history, is totally fabricated. Fantasy is its big industry. . . . I wanted some of that history in Swamplandia! because the Bigtrees’ whole game is this really American project of self-invention. It seemed right for the texture of the book to let people know that the state itself is a mix of the real and imaginary.”

And then there are Russell’s marvelous descriptions of Florida’s prodigious, profligate landscape. “My mom would insist that we go on these doomed family outings where we would go biking in the Everglades even though we are all short, potato-shaped people. And I found that, geographically, Florida is just the most beautiful place in this country,” says Russell. “But it’s rubbing shoulders with all these strip malls and fast-food chains and super-development. My mom grew up in Miami Springs and my dad grew up in Sarasota. They both have this real nostalgia for it. When I was a kid it felt like there was this world I had just missed, a time when the place was just totally foliated and a lot more wild. So I think some of the book is born out of a nostalgia I’m probably not entitled to for the old Florida or for this wilderness that we’ve paved over a decade or two before I was born.”

Swamplandia! is thrillingly permeated with those competing American emotions—hope and doom. As for Karen Russell herself? “I’ve been very, extraordinarily lucky,” she says of her success. “Lucky in the way that, to make the math come out right, I’ll probably be eaten by a shark before I’m 30. I think that will just about balance the books.”

When Karen Russell was “lost in the swamp” of composing Swamplandia!—her outlandish and haunting first novel about the Bigtree family of Florida alligator country —a host of solicitous friends and relatives offered her well-meaning advice. 

“At one point,” the 29-year-old Russell recalls during a laughter-filled call…

Fiction

Téa Obreht

Interview by Alden Mudge

Sometime in the not-too-distant future Téa Obreht plans to move to New York City. “That’s where the action is, I guess,” she says, sounding in the same instant both eager and skeptical.

But for now, Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York, where she has remained since finishing her M.F.A. at Cornell two years ago. In Ithaca’s relative calm she has ridden out the hoopla of being named to the New Yorker’s list of the 20 best writers under 40—and at 25, she is the youngest writer on that list. “Ithaca is a nice environment to write in, and I have a community of writers here, so I have stayed,” says Obreht, who is remarkably composed for a young writer cast suddenly into the limelight. “Besides, changing environments in a situation where the book was in final edits wasn’t something I wanted to do.”

“I was interested in the point [that] a story becomes so important to a person that it doesn’t matter if it’s truth or legend.”

The book in question is Obreht’s stirringly accomplished first novel, The Tiger’s Wife. Set in an unnamed country in the Balkans after prolonged civil war, the story is narrated by a young doctor named Natalia as she travels into the borderlands, where emotions about the war are still raw, to deliver medicine to an orphanage. Early in her journey Natalia learns that her grandfather, also a doctor, has died in a remote village while on his own mission of mercy. Her grandmother asks Natalia to retrieve a packet of his belongings. As Natalia travels deeper into the fraught landscape, she unravels the meaning of the two central stories that ran “like secret rivers through all the other stories of [her grandfather’s] life”—the story of his repeated meetings with the deathless man and the story of his childhood experience with the tiger’s wife.

Like her narrator, Obreht was very close to her grandfather. She was born in Belgrade in 1985 and lived there with her grandparents and her mother until 1992, “when things got pretty heated.” As fighting intensified in the former Yugoslavia, her family fled.

“My grandfather was an engineer and he had connections in different places, so we ended up in Cyprus for a year. Then we lived in Cairo for three and a half years until we were lucky enough to come to the United States. A lot of our family lived in a far suburb of Atlanta, so we lived there for two or three years. And then my mother met my stepfather and we moved to Palo Alto.” The summer before she left for Cornell her grandfather died. “He was always very supportive of my decision and desire to write,” she says. On his deathbed he asked her to write under his family name—Obreht—“and now I do.”

Obreht has been writing since the age of eight. As an undergraduate she “went to the University of Southern California to study creative writing, with the full support of my mother. But she also wanted me to have an additional major so I could get an actual job. So I chose art history!” she says, laughing. At USC, Obreht wrote prolifically at first and then stopped for a year. “In any artistic endeavor when you’re just learning something, there comes a moment in your progress when you hit a wall and the wall is simply there. And the only way for that wall or curtain or whatever it is to dissolve is to wait it out.”

Obreht’s wait lasted until her senior year, when she took a workshop with T.C. Boyle. “I suddenly understood there was this whole thing to be done with structure, how it works and looks and what it feels like to read a good short story and understand what makes it good,” she says. “After that, writing for me was the absolute top priority once again and it has remained so.”

The Tiger’s Wife, Obreht says, began as “a terrible short story that took all kinds of beatings in workshops. It failed but there was something I was really attached to and I wasn’t willing to give up on—the tiger. I’ll say without embarrassment that writing the tiger sections was my favorite part of the process. I write out of chronological order. I skip around a lot. But I wanted to stay with his character and go on this journey with him. So those were the parts that got written first.”

As the story grew, Obreht drew first on things she knew from her own life and from stories her relatives told her. Then in the summer of 2009 she went to Serbia and Croatia “to hunt for vampires for Harper’s” (her nonfiction piece appeared in the November 2010 issue of the magazine). “We ended up bumming around a lot of villages in a car with a tape recorder, getting out and asking, ‘Does this village have any vampire stories?’ It ended up being a much-needed lesson in village life, the way village society functions, the way myths operate in a village setting.”

The result of that research is one of the most powerful aspects of The Tiger’s Wife—the novel’s strong sense of place: not merely place as vividly described locale, but place as the location of layers of often conflicting emotion. In the villages Natalia visits, for example, the recent civil war is never discussed, but the sorrow and distrust it has left behind seem to seep out of the earth itself.

Likewise, Obreht’s exploration of folktales and myths adds powerful resonance—and compassion—to her narrative. “I think when people suffer great tragedy, they turn to myths,” Obreht says. “I was interested in the point a story becomes so important to a person that it doesn’t matter if it’s truth or legend. Sometimes the fact that the story exists at all is moving in itself. I think there’s a lot of that where I come from, and a lot of that generally in the world.”

The final thread in the development of The Tiger’s Wife, Obreht says, was her experience of her
grandfather’s death. “I had tried for a long time not to deal with it and not to think about it and say to myself, ‘I’m doing fine. I’m great.’ Then this story started to come together with this narrator who had a grandfather who had died. . . . Maybe this isn’t the right thing to say because we’re talking about writing. But personally in the process of writing this novel I ended up making peace with the fact that my grandfather was dead. I’m not pleased with this [in the sense of] ‘oh, this is an accomplishment,’ but somehow . . . it became a fact that I could process in a way that I hadn’t thought I could do before. The writing of the book got me there, and I’m happy."

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan.  

 

 

Sometime in the not-too-distant future Téa Obreht plans to move to New York City. “That’s where the action is, I guess,” she says, sounding in the same instant both eager and skeptical.

But for now, Obreht lives in Ithaca, New York, where she has remained…

History

Erik Larson

Interview by Alden Mudge

Erik Larson, author of the nonfiction bestsellers The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck and Isaac’s Storm, believes he has the “tiniest office in the world.” He’s never actually measured it, he admits. But he says the teeny room—a sort of foyer to the master bedroom’s closet—once served as the makeup room for a previous owner who was a prominent local newscaster.

“It is very small, but it’s cozy,” Larson says during a call to the home in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that he shares with his wife, Dr. Christine Gleason, who heads the neonatology department at the University of Washington medical school, and their three daughters. “It’s probably the best office I’ve ever had.”

“No one really studies the very first year of Hitler’s rule. This is about the first dark warnings on the horizon."

One of its saving graces, Larson says, is that “a good chunk of it has windows. I’ve got what you call territorial views to the north. I see a hilltop, then a valley, then the next hilltop and the next hilltop, then a little lake. It’s very, very nice.”

And that captivating perspective—along with his “addiction to tennis”—seems to have provided at least a partial antidote to the gloom Larson experienced while researching and writing his riveting new book about the first year of Nazi rule, In the Garden of Beasts.

“When you get immersed in this era there’s something so repulsive about it that it can really drag you down,” Larson explains. “No one really studies the very first year of Hitler’s rule. This is about the first dark warnings on the horizon.

“What I found was that when you’re writing a book like this, in territory that has been pretty heavily mined in other ways, you have to read the basics. And there are a lot of basics to read. You just have to read and read and read. That’s what starts to infect you,” he says. “It’s the accumulation of these little bits and pieces of horror. It began to drag me down. And you feel this immense frustration: Why didn’t anybody do anything?”

That is one of the needling moral questions that haunts a reader throughout In the Garden of Beasts. To bring that and other questions vividly to life, Larson presents the experiences of an American family who were there and witnessed the almost-overnight changes in Germany. Charles E. Dodd, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to be U.S. ambassador to Germany, arrived in Berlin in 1933 with his wife, his son and his daughter Martha.

“Dodd and his daughter were probably ideal characters to follow because they came from very different perspectives,” Larson says. “Martha’s life in Berlin really does follow an almost novelistic arc. She begins utterly enthralled with the Nazis, becomes less so, and is finally so disgusted that she goes over—as many did—to seeing the salvation of the world in Communism. She became a very mediocre, more or less useless agent, and it destroyed her life.”

Martha is, frankly, a piece of work. She has affairs with highly placed Germans and a long-term affair with a Russian agent. She is out and about provoking grumbling, if not consternation, among consular staff. How did this not exasperate her rather strait-laced father?

“My sense is that this is a time when people gave their children a lot more independence at a younger age,” Larson says. “I’m a father of three daughters [they are 22, 20 and 17 years old] and we’re close, but I can’t pretend, at this moment, to know what goes on in their REAL lives. They could be dancing on a table in a bar right now. I think there is a sort of wishful blindness that all fathers engage in.”

Ambassador Dodd, on the other hand, is an almost Mr. Smith Goes to Washington character. A history professor with a dry sense of humor and a strong belief in Jeffersonian principles, he was friends with Carl Sandburg and President Woodrow Wilson. He shipped his unprepossessing Chevy to Berlin, raising eyebrows among both scornful U.S. State Department elites and the Nazi leadership, which prized symbols of wealth and brute power. Many in the foreign service thought he was out of his depth.

“To his credit I actually think he did exactly what he should have done in that era,” Larson says. “He wasn’t kowtowing to the Nazis. He had his own prejudices about the Jews and so forth, but they were sort of an ambient background prejudice, they weren’t going to get in his way. I think in some weird way he was the right man, in that place at the right time, because he drew a line, a moral line. Especially after the events of June 30, 1934, he reacted appropriately, with horror. If the world had done the same thing, who knows how things would have turned out. The conventional wisdom is to criticize him. But there are those who refer to him as Cassandra, because he knew before everyone else what was happening. I think that’s accurate.”

In Larson’s telling, what happens in Berlin unfolds in chilling detail. “Getting the detail right is a very important part of my mission,” Larson says. “I want to present, to the extent I can, what something smelled like, what the weather was like.”

Yet despite his love of discovering historical detail, Larson doesn’t think of himself as a historian. “Partly that’s because there are multiple layers of dust that accumulate in one’s mind when one says the word historian,” he says, laughing. “I think of myself more as an animator of history. Now I’m not talking at all about making stuff up. I mean finding enough details to put into the narrative that readers will connect the dots and the story will come alive. So my goal is to bring the past alive and to create a historical experience.

“Ideally, I want somebody to jump into the book at the beginning and in one night or two or three or four read all the way through it and at the end come out of that book feeling as though they had experienced a past time in almost a physical way,” Larson says.

By that measure in particular, In the Garden of Beasts is a resounding success. It will keep you up late at night, turning the pages.

Erik Larson, author of the nonfiction bestsellers The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck and Isaac’s Storm, believes he has the “tiniest office in the world.” He’s never actually measured it, he admits. But he says the teeny room—a sort of foyer to the master…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Marcus Sakey

Interview by Alden Mudge

In The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, Marcus Sakey has written a seriously good thriller. Really good. So of course we can’t tell you too much about it.

“It drives me crazy when people [he means reviewers] give away all the stuff I worked so hard to make surprises,” Sakey says during a call to his home in Chicago, where, he reports, “life is a little chaotic.” He and his wife g.g. just moved to new digs a mile and a half west of Wrigley Field two days before our call.

Chicago’s neighborhoods have been the setting for all four of Sakey’s previous novels, including the highly regarded The Blade Itself (2007) and Good People (2008), the film version of which will be produced by and star Tobey Maguire. It gives nothing away to say the new book is, therefore, a departure, opening in Maine and ending in Los Angeles, with a crazy sort of road trip in between. Nor will it deprive readers of the edge-of-the-seat, smack-to-the-forehead pleasures of every nasty twist and turn of the plot to let them know that the title character suffers from amnesia. When the man awakens to find himself lying naked on a desolate beach, he has no idea who he is or how he got there.

Sakey’s publishers are so happy with the new book that they are calling it “a breakthrough achievement.” Sakey himself sounds more circumspect. Despite the truly scary, brutal edges of some of the characters he imagines, Sakey seems like a good-humored guy you’d enjoy having a beer with. He says he likes calling into reading group discussions about his books. He admits to “pet peeves” rather than towering rages. One of his pet peeves, he says, is discourtesy. “I’m a big fan of courtesy. I think it’s basic human decency to be courteous to one another.”

So, is his latest thriller a breakthrough? “That’s a hard question to answer. I will say that I feel it’s my most ambitious book. And it was a monster to write. It’s the book I’ve thrown away the most of. I reached a point where I realized that what I was writing was kind of bleak and joyless. I wasn’t enjoying it and I didn’t think others would either. So I had to throw out probably 150 pages. Which is pretty much a call for martinis.”

One of the biggest challenges, Sakey says, was finding a way to make all the plot twists and thematic layers of his story work together. “I wanted to make them honest surprises, where each significant discovery Daniel makes takes the book in a different direction. . . . And—I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious; I don’t think I’m pretentious—I was really trying in the way I told the story to say something about memory and about what stories mean. I think memory is just a story we tell ourselves, and if that’s true, then our identity is always malleable. There’s no certainty in who we are; it’s just the choices we make.”

But themes and ideas, Sakey acknowledges, are a touchy subject when it comes to writing a thriller. “There’s this perception that, ‘oh, you’re a thriller writer,’ pat on the head. But if a book doesn’t have ideas, I don’t understand why you’d read the book, much less write it. Without that, it’s just run, run, chase, chase, shoot, shoot. That doesn’t give me anything to anchor to as a reader and certainly not as a writer.”

Sakey grounds his ideas and twisty plots in small, vivid details. “I’m a big fan of the pull-out detail that makes you feel it. I like the little bit of verisimilitude rather than two pages of explanation.” And that tendency extends to his scariest characters. “A lot of times when people try to make things scary, they go into this weird slasher-movie mode. Like the more ridiculous and bloody harm they can make a character do while laughing the better. I just don’t buy that. I get annoyed by authors who do that.”

Which prompts Sakey to talk about another of his pet peeves. “I’ll hear some authors say that they don’t read while they’re writing. I don’t understand. Because first of all I am writing all the time, so then when is it I’m allowed to read?”

Sakey says he reads widely in his genre—Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, Richard Price, to name a few—“but I probably read more outside the genre than within it. My tastes run to David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham. It’s like somebody once said: There are two kinds of writing, good writing and bad writing. I don’t really care what the genre is, I read the good stuff.”

You can put Sakey’s The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes right up there with the good stuff.

 

In The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, Marcus Sakey has written a seriously good thriller. Really good. So of course we can’t tell you too much about it.

“It drives me crazy when people [he means reviewers] give away all the stuff I worked so hard to…

Fiction

Stefan Merrill Block

Interview by Alden Mudge

About four years ago, just before he began work on his beautifully written second novel, The Storm at the Door, Stefan Merrill Block installed a new black-and-white checkered floor in the apartment kitchen where he writes. The floor is now seriously chipped around his writing desk and darkly stained near the coffee pot.

“If you were to take an aerial shot of the floor, it would be like a map of my anxiety,” the 29-year-old Block says, laughing. “But I’ve come to understand that it is anxiety that writes the books.” Anxiety, Block adds during the call to his apartment in Brooklyn, pushes him “to go through draft after draft after draft and focus on every sentence and every word until the point where there’s no further you can take it.”

“There’s something spooky about [writing]. It’s strange how these observations that you didn’t know you thought about people or the world come out of you.”

Fortunately that anxiety is invisible to readers. As the many fans of Block’s first novel, The Story of Forgetting, know, he has an uncanny ability for someone his age to inhabit the deepest parts of his characters’ psyches and to find language that precisely evokes those states of being.

“There’s something spooky about it, as Norman Mailer said—he called fiction ‘the spooky art.’ Because it’s strange how these observations that you didn’t know you thought about people or about the world come out of you.”

Block’s first novel was a sometimes fanciful, often moving story of a family with inherited, early-onset Alzheimer’s. The Storm at the Door, an even better novel, is a sort of mythic re-imagining of a period in the 1960s when his grandmother put his grandfather in a mental hospital. Block thinks the two books share a lot thematically, but that the new book “addresses those complications in what feels like a much truer way. It feels like the first novel was like a rough draft of this book. But I’ve only written a few novels. Maybe that’s the way a career feels. Maybe you always feel that the previous book is a rough draft of the new one.”

The Storm at the Door arose out of “a deep personal urgency,” Block says. “I had been haunted by this absence my whole life. I was homeschooled by my mom. My relationship with my mother has been my central relationship from my childhood, and we are still very close. She is my first reader even now. On the opposite side of her is this absence [her father died some years after his institutionalization when she was in college] and this sadness that has been transmitted through her. In some ways it feels like I have been the correction to that. So I think my relationship with my mother first compelled my curiosity about my grandfather. The other fact that I know is that we look quite similar [for example, Block’s grandfather was 6’6” and he is 6’3”]. Since I was a kid, my relatives have been very moved by our obvious physical similarities. And everyone said he was the writer in the family. So I’ve always had this extremely close sense of identification with him, as if he is an alternative version of myself. . . . There has always been this terrible urgency to understand who he was and what happened to him.”

Then why didn’t Block simply write a memoir? “My grandfather was absent for so much of my mom’s childhood and he died so young that there’s little that factually remains. Basic things that are so telling of a person’s character—the way he held his body, the kinds of conversations that he had, the women he loved—all these things that are so important to understanding a person are gone, so I felt that the only way I could explore this urgent need was through fiction.”

Of course Block’s novel is much more than historical fiction about his grandparents. Block’s grandfather was institutionalized at McLean Hospital, a place with an “inverted sort of glamour” outside of Boston that was undergoing immense change at the time, with decidedly mixed results. The great poet Robert Lowell was there then and wrote of his experiences with mental illness in Life Studies. Block heightens and transforms McLean into a more mythic place called The Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill. Lowell appears in the novel, but for the most part Block peoples the institution with a set of invented characters who blaze with the strange and discomfiting beauty of madness.

“I’m very interested in the way that societies consider madness,” Block says. “It has a long and complicated history. In biblical times it seems that schizophrenics were considered prophets. Then there’s this long romantic history of the link between madness and genius, particularly poetic genius. I was interested in assessing the truth of that, whether there is a link or if madness is what keeps poets from being even greater poets. In general, I don’t write with any sort of political objective but I was also interested in exploring what now seems like the obvious mishandling of mental illness as a way of understanding how little we understand it and probably still mistreat it.”

Block says his writing begins every day with “a reading of a novel that I’ve carefully selected to restore me to a literary voice.” For this novel, he read Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Chabon’s Wonder Boys and Yates’ Revolutionary Road, whose voice he deliberately echoed.

He also had before him a photograph of his grandmother and one of his grandfather, which are reproduced in the novel. “I know there’s this tricky interplay between fact and fiction and between memoir and imagination in the novel. And the photographs were a really important part of the writing process. I wanted to present my story as earnestly as I could—that this is how I think of my family’s history, that there are things that are true and that I know and that there is all this space that I have to imagine. I feel it’s a type of story I don’t see depicted often, probably because it straddles such an awkward line between nonfiction and fiction.”

Which returns Block to a discussion of his writer’s anxiety. “Most of my anxiety is that I have not yet written the book that I feel I can write,” he says. “That anxiety is something I hope I never lose. I hope I never feel satisfied with anything I produce, that I always have the worry that the book on the page will never equal the book I have in my mind, because that is what really powers me forward.”

About four years ago, just before he began work on his beautifully written second novel, The Storm at the Door, Stefan Merrill Block installed a new black-and-white checkered floor in the apartment kitchen where he writes. The floor is now seriously chipped around his writing…

Fiction

Kevin Wilson

Interview by Alden Mudge

You could easily imagine that with all the hilarious—and, well, less than hilarious—antics of his fabulous fictional family Fang, Kevin Wilson might have some serious family issues of his own. You would be wrong. 

“I have incredible parents and I have a sister with whom I am very close,” Wilson says during a call to the “little cabin” in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife Leigh Anne, a poet, and their three-year-old son. Wilson, who recently turned 33, is the author of an award-winning story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. This fall he will become a full-time faculty member at The University of the South in Sewanee. Until then he will be “basically a secretary,” helping organize the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and teaching fiction-writing workshops.

Wilson’s parents live just a 20-minute drive down Monteagle mountain, where his father—whom he describes as “the most capable person” he’s ever known—sells insurance. “My parents didn’t really understand what I wanted to do when I wanted to write, but they were always supportive. My father was paying for me to go to this great school [Vanderbilt] in part because I was going to get a good job. When I told them I wanted to write, both of my parents said, ‘That’s what you should do.’ They just kind of embraced it. My father always reads everything I write.”

And his parents’ impressions of his first novel, The Family Fang? Or their thoughts about performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang, who sow chaos wherever they go—with the reluctant help of their children Buster and Annie (known in the art world as Child A and Child B)?

“They loved it! The characters of Camille and Caleb are so divorced from them that it was pretty much impossible for them to mistakenly read themselves into them,” Wilson says. “Sometimes I think they worry about being characters in my stories. But with this book I think it was so bizarre that they just didn’t worry about it.” 

The Family Fang is told from the alternating points of view of the older and perhaps wiser Buster and Annie, who woefully return as adults to live with their parents after a series of missteps. When their parents mysteriously disappear, Buster and Annie launch a skeptical search, more than half-believing that the disappearance is just another of their parents’ performance-art schemes. The setup allows Wilson to dazzle and amuse us with some very inventive and provocatively imagined performance art.

“I hesitate to say that I’m a fan of performance art because I know so little of it. But when I was in junior high or high school, I read about this guy who had someone shoot him for a performance piece, for an art piece! The way it was posited in the article was ‘isn’t this ridiculous, this is not real art, this is a kind of profanity.’ But I thought, this is the best art, this is the most incredible thing I can imagine. I was just so taken with the idea that art can bleed into the spaces where art is not supposed to enter.”

In this case, Wilson’s performance art pieces allow him to enter the deeply complicated spaces of family relationships.

“The thing that I most care about in writing is the ways in which we’re bound to these people who for all intents and purposes create you. They build you up, and the second step after they make you is that you unmake that and become your own person. I think that’s a really weird relationship.”

And so there is a startling point at which The Family Fang is suddenly something quite different from the satirical romp through the art world that it first appears to be.

“One of my strengths is humor. It’s easier for me to get into the darker stuff if I initially treat it as absurd. It gives me an entry point. One of the things I’ve always loved in the books or movies I admire is that moment when something funny shifts so quickly into sadness that you are laughing and you are crying. That’s a wonderful thing. It’s a magic trick. And it’s something I’ve tried to emulate. One of the things I want to do is make it light in a way that right up until the moment it becomes dark, you don’t notice how much light has disappeared from the story.”

Wilson continues, “I like the absurd, I like magical realism, I like fairy tales. When those things are done correctly, what is a dream and what is real bleeds into each other so much that you just cannot trust that yourself. I think those transformative moments when you are not sure what is reality are just wonderful. I’m very much interested in that kind of magic, where you’re amazed by the strangeness and weirdness of the world.”

The Family Fang. Magic indeed.

 

You could easily imagine that with all the hilarious—and, well, less than hilarious—antics of his fabulous fictional family Fang, Kevin Wilson might have some serious family issues of his own. You would be wrong. 

“I have incredible parents and I have a sister with whom…

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