Alden Mudge

Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Tom Perrotta

Interview by Alden Mudge

Tom Perrotta is often called a satirist. It’s a nice, neat label, as square-cornered as a pigeonhole. But it’s just not true.

"The classical definition of satire is that you’re exposing the folly of human behavior,” Perrotta says during a call to his home in the Boston suburb of Belmont. Perrotta lives there with his wife, the writer Mary Granfield, and their two teenaged children. “For me there is no position where it is possible to be a human and not be implicated in the folly of human behavior. I always feel I’m implicated in that folly.” 

Perrotta supposes he earned the satirist label from the movie Election, which starred Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick. He wrote the novel on which the movie is based. “Election is one of the great satires in recent film history,” Perrotta says. “It was much more satirical than the book. Just compare Tracy Flick in the book with what Reese Witherspoon does with her in the film. The book is a comic novel but it’s not a satirical novel. The film pushes out! Because Election first brought me to the attention of most people, I’m in this box: People think of me, they think ofElection, and they think of the movie.”

Perrotta’s boldest novel to date puts a whole new spin on apocalyptic anxiety after a Rapture-like event.

Not that Perrotta has any objections to the movie. “I really loved the movie, myself. I still do. It really holds up too, and it’s been really influential in all sorts of ways. I think the success of the movie basically changed my life. I had published a few books and I was struggling to find an audience. I felt a real difference in the aftermath.

“I used to have that moment where I’d be introduced at a party and say, oh, I’m a writer, and people would say, have you written anything I’ve read? And I’d name my books and I’d get that terrible blank look. Now I could say, well, there was this movie with Reese Witherspoon, and people would light up,” Perrotta recalls. “It felt like a big difference that my name was attached to something people had positive feelings toward. The other concrete thing it did was allow me to find work as a screenwriter, which allowed me to stop teaching and really solidified my sense of myself as a professional writer.”

Still, the satire label that has trotted beside Perrotta like an over-friendly stray dog does not come close to encapsulating his estimable gifts as a writer. Or, as Perrotta says wryly, “Certainly what I’m doing now is very far away in terms of tone from that movie.”

That’s for sure. Perrotta’s early novels were set in working-class New Jersey, where he grew up and developed a passion for writing that eventually took him to Yale. But since his novel Little Children (2004), “there’s been a shift in the suburban territory that I write about” that both comically and tenderly reflects the attitudes and personal dilemmas of residents of the more affluent middle-class suburb where he now lives.

Not only that, his use of language has matured. Reminded that he once proclaimed that he wrote in the plain American English tradition of Ernest Hemingway, Perrotta laughs and says, “If you go back to Bad Haircut (1994) you’ll definitely see more of the Hemingway influence. I mean those sentences were just so short! But even then I was using that shortness for comedy in a way that Hemingway didn’t. Probably since Joe College (2000) the sentences have gotten looser and more complex in terms of syntax. So I’ve moved away from the Hemingway impulse. But I have to say that I have not moved away from the idea that literary fiction should work the way that popular fiction works, in terms of being a pleasure to read, with a story that moves swiftly.

“I have always wanted to be democratic,” Perrotta says. “My parents didn’t go to college and a lot of people I grew up with are not ‘intellectuals’ in the graduate school sense. I never wanted to write for a self-selected group of people who see themselves as literary. I want to write for anybody who is interested.”

All of these maturing impulses meld in near-perfect harmony to bring us Perrotta’s newest, most audacious and best novel to date, The Leftovers.

Set in the leafy suburb of Mapleton, The Leftovers opens on Departed Heroes’ Day of Remembrance and Reflection, three years to the day after a Rapture-like event has caused millions of people all over the world to disappear in an instant. In reaction, some people, like Laurie Garvey, join a monastic penitential cult called The Guilty Remnant, whose members dress all in white, smoke cigarettes as an article of faith and ghost about Mapleton to remind people that the end is near. Others, like Laurie’s college-age son Tom, follow the prophet Holy Wayne, a former UPS delivery van driver, and his Holy Hugs Movements. But many, like Laurie’s husband Kevin, the mayor of Mapleton, struggle to lead normal lives and keep their children—in Kevin’s case his teenage daughter Jill—from going off the rails. The action of the novel unfolds over nine months, as the Garvey family and their friends and acquaintances struggle to make sense of a world that is in most ways much the same as before but is also profoundly different.

Perrotta, who devours literary biographies and hardboiled detective fiction rather than literary novels while he is composing his own books, admits that he was thinking about books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road while writing The Leftovers. 

“Obviously The Road was on my mind. But I think this book is almost the opposite ofThe Road. The landscape of The Road is utterly altered in the physical and in the human/social sense. What I wanted to do was create a world where the landscape wasn’t altered at all physically or socially. But psychologically it’s completely different. So whatever strangeness there is, is hard to locate, aside from the people dressed in white who are smoking, I mean. There are some changes that are visible and troubling. But in most cases it’s just much more a sense of ‘I can no longer trust the nature of the world,’ and that creates this feeling of anxiety.” 

Another huge difference between The Leftovers and The Road is Perrotta’s gift for comedy. “I certainly found subject matter that is hard to treat comically. Loss is not easy to treat in a comical way,” he says with a laugh. Yet Perrotta is such a keen observer of human psychology—and human foibles—that many moments in The Leftovers are laugh-out-loud funny. “I think the comedy in this works best when it’s organic to the situation,” Perrotta says. “There’s comedy in incongruity. This juxtaposition of almost clinical grief with this insistence on living a normal life does create certain kinds of very dark comedy.”

But Perrotta’s comedy is colored by great empathy for his characters. “Certain characters open up over time. It’s very satisfying for me as a writer to live with these characters long enough to get a fuller sense of who they are and how they fit into the story. They just seem to get more agency somehow to tell you a little bit about who they are.”

Among The Leftovers’ most appealing characters are the smart, vulnerable teenager Jill and her Goth friend Aimee. “I’ve written a lot about my own teenage years and coming of age. But with this book I suddenly realized I had to write the Jill sections from Jill’s perspective, and this time I was filtering that through my daughter and her friends, not through my own personal memories.” 

Perrotta notes, “I had this idea and it seized my mind—but for a long time I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. It’s probably good for a writer to feel that way, to feel like you’re delving into messy, interesting, important subject matter without exactly knowing why. And I was starting to feel my identity was almost too solid. Like people talked about me in a certain way. Like they knew what a Tom Perrotta novel was. I wasn’t comfortable with that. You start going into the old bag of tricks too much. 

“Obviously some things in this book will be familiar—the setting and the subject matter will remind some people of other things I’ve written. But I think on the most basic ground level, I’ve forced myself into unfamiliar territory.”

It’s true. In this brilliant novel, he has definitely gotten himself a whole new bag of tricks. If you’ve never read a Tom Perrotta novel, now’s the time.

Tom Perrotta is often called a satirist. It’s a nice, neat label, as square-cornered as a pigeonhole. But it’s just not true.
NonfictionFilmArts & Culture

Susan Orlean

Interview by Alden Mudge

Author Susan Orlean says she “certainly did not set out to write a book about a dog.” And, in a way, she hasn’t.

Yes, a dog—and not just any dog—is the grain around which this pearl of a book grows. But Rin Tin Tin: The Life and Legend is about so much more—world wars, movies, television, luck, devotion, the quest for immortality—that to call it simply a book about a dog is to diminish its nature and its appeal.

“Any book is a leap,” Orlean says during a call to the home in Columbia County, New York, that she and her husband and their young son will soon leave to spend a year in Los Angeles. “You have to go with your gut feeling that your curiosity is big enough and—fingers crossed and toes crossed—that the subject is big enough. An idea has to dilate the more you learn about it. There has to be the feeling of being off-kilter, of finding out things that just were not at all what you had expected. With Rin Tin Tin it felt instantly enormous. I went from thinking, oh, the television show from the 1950s, my god what a nostalgic moment, to oh my god, there was a real Rin Tin Tin? He was born in 1918? He was a silent film star? The idea grew and grew.”

Orlean traces the rise of a canine cultural hero, from the real-life pup found on a WWI battlefield to starring roles in movies and TV.

It grew so big, in fact, that the book offers a strangely riveting perspective on 20th-century America. Who knew, for example, that shortly after Pearl Harbor thousands of people donated their dogs to Dogs for Defense? One young donor, now an 81-year-old veterinarian in Louisiana, received a surprise call from Orlean, an intrepid reporter if ever there was one.

“Actually, my husband found him,” Orlean says. “He’s amazing at finding people. I thought he was probably dead. But all of a sudden my husband just handed me this phone number.” Orlean’s husband, John Gillespie, was a literature major who strayed into finance and became an investment banker. He is her first reader, shares her love of Faulkner and is the reason for their move to the West Coast.

Orlean, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of seven previous books, including the bestseller The Orchid Thief, spent considerable time in Los Angeles researching her latest work. The original Rin Tin Tin and his descendants track the rise of American popular entertainment, from silent movies, to talkies, to television, and Orlean finds a way to swiftly and entertainingly chart the arc of those changes.

The Los Angeles area was also home to the two human stars of the book. Lee Duncan, who spent part of his childhood in an orphanage, found the original Rin Tin Tin as a newborn pup in a bombed-out German kennel in the waning days of World War I. The find transformed Duncan and gave him a single-minded sense of purpose to make his extraordinary dog into a star. Years later, Herbert “Bert” Leonard became similarly entranced by the idea of Rin Tin Tin and developed the popular television program. In Orlean’s telling, their stories are remarkable and moving.

“I felt enormous tenderness toward both of them because they were very flawed people with a tremendous capacity for loyalty and a kind of devotion that sometimes seemed very wrongheaded,” she says. “But I think what happens in life is that there are certain people who turn their lives into a vessel for carrying something forward that the rest of us then enjoy. I think Lee had a fundamental loneliness; even when he was an old man he seemed like the same little boy who lost his dog. Bert was a character, a very different type of guy with a messed-up personal life. But his principles were really admirable. They were both amazingly principled. They felt that there was something really special about this idea and this dog and it shouldn’t be cheapened or sold to the highest bidder.”

Orlean says she, too, came under the spell of Rin Tin Tin, the silent film actor. “When I read all these reviews saying he was an amazing actor I thought, well that’s so silly. Seeing the movies was amazing, because he really is credible. There are scenes where he’s suffering and you think, oh my god how could they do this to a dog? I mean, he is really good. And his face is very intelligent. German Shepherds are not goofy. They have a pretty serious face and it’s a really different emotion they convey just looking at you.”

Not only are German Shepherds not goofy, but Orlean discovered that they were bred into existence in 1899, and that their breeder fell afoul of the Nazis, who wanted to control the pedigree of their favorite dog.

“Isn’t that weird!” Orlean exclaims. “I almost died. You think of them as so classic, the ur-dog. And you think they’ve been around forever. The idea that they were engineered and within recent history was just amazing to me.”

It’s stories within stories like this one that make Rin Tin Tin such a compelling read. And thinking about these stories, she says, “resonated in a much deeper—forgive me if this sounds pretentious—sort of spiritual way. The only things that last forever are ideas that keep being carried forward, ideas that move us in some way. The first Rin Tin Tin lived a normal dog life, but the idea of this character and the idea that you could feel inspired and moved by this character kept being carried forward.

“I do think everybody is striving either overtly or not so overtly to live forever,” Orlean says. “Whether it’s by having children, writing a book or making a lot of money and naming something after themselves. The human impulse is to fight against mortality. So I think Lee and Bert were right, that Rin Tin Tin did live forever. And now I feel in my own way that I’m carrying it forward.”

Author Susan Orlean says she “certainly did not set out to write a book about a dog.” And, in a way, she hasn’t.

Yes, a dog—and not just any dog—is the grain around which this pearl of a book grows. But Rin Tin Tin: The Life…

Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Colson Whitehead

Interview by Alden Mudge

Colson Whitehead has a problem—a big problem. He can’t stop thinking about zombies, even when he’s asleep.

“I’ve been having zombie dreams ever since I saw Dawn of the Dead in seventh grade,” Whitehead says during a call to his home in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. “Some people have anxiety dreams about showing up late for school or having forgotten about that big assignment. I have zombie dreams.”

Whitehead is explaining the genesis of his newest marvel, Zone One, about a zombie fighter in lower Manhattan whose post-apocalypse nom de guerre is Mark Spitz.

“I had some guests out to Long Island but I was going through something and I think I really wanted to be alone. I was wishing that my guests would leave, and I had a dream that I was going downstairs to the living room and I was wondering if someone had cleared out the zombies yet. I woke up and I thought, hmmm, that’s something you have to consider: Once you put civilization back together, what do you do with all these zombies? So the book grew from there.”

Whitehead, a highly—and deservedly—praised novelist and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, says his “schtick at the moment is to try different genres. Sag Harbor is a coming of age novel. John Henry Days has a very loose structure. The Intuitionist has a very tight structure. . . . In Zone One I wanted to pay homage to the zombie movies and horror movies that I loved as a kid and still love to watch.”

Of course Colson Whitehead inhabits a genre like no one else. And his take on zombie/horror movies pays homage to the form but is at the same time startlingly original. “I have a darkly absurdist sense of humor that is part of my personality,” he admits. 

Whitehead’s main character, Mark Spitz, is a supposedly mediocre human being. “My sense,” Whitehead explains, “is that if you’re incredibly dumb, you’d probably be killed off quickly, and if you’re really on top of things, you’d probably kill yourself.” 

“I thought . . . once you put civilization back together, what do you do with all these zombies? So the book grew from there.”

But Spitz is also the consciousness through which Whitehead delivers some of his most enthralling—and sometimes hilarious—observations about modern life: “But then there are the personal barricades, Mark Spitz thought. Since the first person met the second person. The ones that keep other people out and our madness in so we can continue to live.”

Or, describing a chopper trip over Central Park: “Mark Spitz had seen the park unscroll from the windows of the big skyscrapers crowding the perimeter, but never from this vantage. No picnickers idled on their blankets, no one goldbricked on the benches and nary a Frisbee arced through the sky, but the park was at first-spring-day capacity. They didn’t stop to appreciate the scenery, these dead visitors; they ranged on the grass and walkways without purpose or sense, moving first this way then strolling in another direction until, distracted by nothing in particular, they readjusted their idiot course. It was Mark Spitz’s first glimpse of Manhattan since the coming of the plague, and he thought to himself, My God, it’s been taken over by tourists.”

Although Whitehead is a native New Yorker, Zone One is the first novel he has explicitly set in the city (The Intuitionist was set in a kind of “alternative gotham”). A meticulous researcher who plans out his work before he begins writing, he notes that “about two years ago at this time, I was taking photographs of downtown New York, trying to figure out what corners would be good settings for the story. Part of the tone in Zone One is a nostalgia for your lost city and trying to get it back. I spent six or nine months before I started actually writing the book researching and plotting it out. I mean, I knew where Mark Spitz was going to be on the last page on the very first day I started writing. Some people start with a blank page and see where the characters will take them. I always feel it’s hard enough to find the right words each day. If you wake up and don’t even know what’s going to happen, it’s twice as hard. That’s my simple model.” 

Whitehead’s “right words” make Zone One not just keenly observant and funny but often downright scary. Before signing up to fight zombies in lower Manhattan, Spitz tries to escape the horror of the all-pervasive plague that unleashed the zombies by making a harrowing journey to Northampton, Massachusetts. In retrospect, as with many horror movies, a reader might laugh, but in the moment, such is Whitehead’s skill, one is more likely to cringe or even scream. Zone One is at times quite disturbing.

“Well I was disturbed when I was writing it,” Whitehead says. No, he doesn’t think that was because he was contemplating the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack. “I grew up in New York in the ’70s. It was a sort of apocalyptic New York then. But certainly tackling the idea of how you come back from disaster, how you make the world livable again after it has been destroyed, how you find those reserves of strength in yourself and other people was important. I wasn’t thinking about 9/11 specifically, but it was one of the many disasters, personal or communal, that I was thinking about.”

The father of a six-year-old daughter, Whitehead was newly divorced while working on Zone One and wrote the book “camped in the corner” of his smallish new digs. “I like working at home. There’s something about being able to make coffee, watch some CNN, take a nap and go back to writing that works for me. I play loud music when I work. When I have only a couple of hours left, I put on ‘Purple Rain’ by Prince and ‘Daydream Nation’ by Sonic Youth. That’s my exit music for all of my books.”

Whitehead is justifiably proud of the final pages of Zone One. “Finally after a year and a half, you get to what you’ve been building toward. What makes a good ending is secretly encoded all along.”

And the ending of Zone One is very good indeed.

 

Colson Whitehead has a problem—a big problem. He can’t stop thinking about zombies, even when he’s asleep.

“I’ve been having zombie dreams ever since I saw Dawn of the Dead in seventh grade,” Whitehead says during a call to his home in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene…

Fiction

Adam Johnson

Interview by Alden Mudge

Adam Johnson’s five North Korean minders didn’t know what to make of him. They took him to the national museum in Pyongyang to show him room after room of paintings whose only subject matter was the glorification of Korea’s ruling family, the Kims. But Johnson wanted to know where the fire stations were.

Later an assistant minder tried to tell Johnson about the Dear Leader’s (Kim Jong Il) thoughts on terrorism. But Johnson wanted to know why he didn’t see any mailboxes. How did people get their mail? Why was there no one in a wheelchair in the capital? Weren’t there any handicapped people in North Korea?

“It’s so surreal to see the sameness of everyone. I would walk through these crowds of people and they wouldn’t dare to look at me.”

“I asked all these verisimilitude questions that I don’t think anyone had ever asked them before,” Johnson says, recounting his strange, darkly funny experiences during a five-day visit to North Korea in August 2007. 

Johnson had gone to North Korea—no easy task for an American—about halfway through his seven-year effort to complete his spellbinding new novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Part thriller, part love story, part tale of daring impersonation, part wrenching examination of repression and its toll on human nature, the novel is set in North Korea (with a side trip to Texas).

“Most of the nonfiction about North Korea I found was about nuclear policy, economic theory or military history instead of human issues,” says Johnson, who lives in San Francisco with his wife, the writer Stephanie Harrell, and their children, ages 9, 7 and 5, and teaches in the creative writing program at Stanford University. “The more I looked to find what human life might be like there, the more elusive it became and the more I felt this was important to know. I can’t say I’m a big do-gooder. I wrote the book as an imaginative work for my own reasons. But I did feel I needed to go see the place to understand it.”

But, as Johnson learned, it is illegal for an unauthorized North Korean to talk to a foreigner, a crime that would likely land the perpetrator in Korea’s gulag. “You’d walk down the street in throngs of thousands and thousands of people. I’m six foot four and a half and 280 pounds. I’m a big guy. And these people weigh like 130 pounds. There are four shoe styles for men in North Korea; there’s one shade of lipstick for women; it’s so surreal to see the sameness of everyone. I would walk through these crowds of people and they wouldn’t dare to look at me. It was a risk. So it was really clear that not a single spontaneous thing could happen there. It was just too dangerous to look at the strangest human you’d ever seen.”

Johnson manages to embed this sense of fear within the personal relationships of many of his characters. “The idea of what it would be like for a character to live under that fascinated me,” Johnson says. “I am a person who loves narrative, who teaches narrative theory. In our stories in the West we believe every character is the center of his or her own story. We believe every human is unique and valuable, has yearnings and desires. 

“But in North Korea there is a national script, conveyed through propaganda. There is one notion about who the people are and what the national goals are, and you as a citizen are conscripted to be a part of this national narrative. . .  You have to relinquish your own personal desires.”

The Orphan Master’s Son unfolds in two parts. In the first, we -follow the travails of Pak Jun Do, who is born among orphans, the country’s most expendable creatures. As Johnson says, “Jun Do hews to the national script,” first assigned to live in the ever-dark incursion tunnels dug beneath the border with South Korea, then tapped for kidnapping expeditions to Japan, then to serve as an English translator at a listening post aboard a vessel disguised as a fishing boat, where he “begins to become his own character,” and in so doing runs afoul of the authorities and ends up in a Korean gulag working in the mines.   

In part two, set a year after Jun Do disappears into the mines, we take up the story of Commander Ga, head of the nation’s mining operations and erstwhile friend of leader Kim Jong Il. One of Johnson’s most audacious acts of storytelling is to make the Dear Leader a central character in the book. “I felt I had to get the scriptwriter. There was a character who was making the entire reality of the world for these people, and I had to go take a look at him.” 

A number of the events described in the novel are clearly inspired by true-life incidents. And Johnson jokes that he actually had to leave out some of the wackier actions of Kim Jong Il because they would have interfered with his novel’s essential believability. But the dazzling virtuosity of Johnson’s storytelling makes The Orphan Master’s Son a work of far greater depth and range than a fictionalized panorama of life under the most repressive regime on Earth. 

Part two, for example, is told in an astonishing medley of voices and tonalities, ranging from a standard third-person point of view, to the chilling but also creepily comic voice of Propaganda, to a first-person account from a state interrogator, all while the narrative swirls backward and forward in time. There are rapturous descriptions of the sea at night. There is the often-funny inverted dialogue of interrogators and their prey. And there are moving passages about the human need for intimacy, which in this society can be a revolutionary act.

Johnson, the author of the short story collection Emporium and one previous novel, Parasites Like Us, says dealing with this challenging subject forced him to grow as a writer. “My tradition is formal realism, but in North Korea what is real is in question. So I couldn’t try to cram this story into ways I was familiar with. Things that I had taken for granted about how characters work, stories unfold, and how plot, momentum, pacing, tension and withholding work had to be different here. I was really open to taking risks, trying new things.” 

He adds, “I didn’t set out to write a big North Korea book. I was very curious about this place where all the rules of storytelling seemed different. It made me write a very different book than I have written before. And in the end I feel like I got a pretty good book out of it.”

Adam Johnson’s five North Korean minders didn’t know what to make of him. They took him to the national museum in Pyongyang to show him room after room of paintings whose only subject matter was the glorification of Korea’s ruling family, the Kims. But Johnson…

Fiction

Lauren Groff

Interview by Alden Mudge

Thirty-three-year-old Lauren Groff calls herself a “soft-label” Luddite. She thinks the best decision she and her husband made when they moved to Gainesville, Florida, was not to own a television.

She wrote the first drafts of her beautifully chiaroscuro second novel Arcadia in notebooks and on legal pads before reluctantly turning on her computer. She occasionally goes on “digital fasts”—no email, no web surfing, no computer, period—to slow down her brain.

On the other hand, she sure likes Twitter.

“I’m in a place where I don’t come into contact with other writers almost ever, so I go to Twitter to be part of the conversation,” says Groff, who won critical acclaim for her debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton. “I think [connecting with people] is what technology does so well. But you have to be very vigilant of it taking over because it is really seductive.”

The skeptical, vigilant part of Groff’s views about technology—along with her desire for community—is shared by the central character of Arcadia, the extraordinarily good-hearted Ridley Sorrel Stone. Called “Bit” since childhood because of his tiny size, he achieves in the novel’s final section, set in 2018 when he is 50 years old, a hard-won equanimity, if not exactly happiness. A smallish example of that is his grudging acceptance of his 14-year-old daughter’s ever-present eReader.

The subject of technology is just one slim thread in the novel’s rich tapestry of story exploring how we sustain hope and idealism in a world that presents us with unavoidable sadness and sometimes seems bent on its own annihilation.

Groff explains that she began writing Arcadia when she was pregnant with her first son, Beckett, to whom the novel is dedicated. “It came out of an enormous amount of anxiety and guilt about bringing a child into the world,” says Groff, who recently gave birth to a second son. “In early drafts the novel was much more dystopian than it is in the final draft. But with Beckett’s arrival, I had to have hope. So the book grew as he grew. He is for me inextricable from the character of Bit and lends a lot of his personality and observations to the character. It’s not a single thing, just the whole amazing majesty of little boyhood.”

In Groff's novel, a sensitive boy negotiates the path from an idyllic commune to the world "outside."

Indeed, Bit is an extraordinary boy. Deeply sensitive, keenly observant and empathetic, he is innocent, without being naïve. When the novel proper opens in 1973, he is a five-year-old living with his parents in a hippie commune called Arcadia, located in New York state, not very far, as the imagination flies, from Cooperstown, where Groff grew up.

Arcadia is at first an idyllic place. Among the ragamuffin band of commune children, Bit is both a cherished insider and solitary child who wanders in a vividly rendered, forested, fairy-tale landscape that has less to do with Disney than the Brothers Grimm.

“There is a lot of mythology and fairy tale in this book and in everything I write,” Groff says. “The Grimms were my uncles when I was growing up. I loved their horrible stories when I was little, and they form a part of my cultural DNA. Being a bookish, shy teenager in upstate New York, where there is really nothing to do in the summer, I also read a lot of Greek myths . . . so they’re part of my life and they’re associated with that part of the country, too.”

“Myths and fairy tales, especially Grimm fairy tales, have a very frank way of looking at the world that has been sanitized in most children’s stories today,” Groff adds. “A sensitive child will pick up on that, especially because life is savage in a lot of ways. Bit in particular responds very deeply to the Grimms because they help him to articulate what is wrong with his world, or at least show him how to read his world.”

If what is right about this Utopia is embodied by Bit and his parents, what is wrong is illustrated by the crash-and-burn life of Bit’s best friend and soul mate, Helle, the unloved daughter of the commune’s narcissistic guru, Handy. In Groff’s narrative, the relationship between Bit and Helle is both sublime and achingly painful.

“Even though a lot of the children who come out of these communities grow up to be amazing, freethinking, stunning human beings, a lot of them are damaged,” Groff says. “It’s hard not to damage your children just in general, even if you live within society. Living outside of society you surely do some sort of trauma to your kids. It was fascinating for me to think about the impact of something so entirely good-intentioned on innocent people who aren’t yet able to make their own decisions.”

Groff’s vibrant depiction of commune life—its light and its darkness—arises from a combination of imagination and research. Groff points out that in the early 19th century the region of New York where she grew up was a hotbed of social and religious ferment and home to dozens of utopianist communities. During her research Groff visited Oneida, New York, home to the Oneida Community in the 1860s, and  The Farm, an ongoing commune founded by 1960s-era hippies in Summertown, Tennessee. “You feel a lower-level boil,” she says of The Farm, now home to a smaller group. “But you can tell what it had been at one point. There’s still a beautiful sense of peace.”

Like most real-life, 1960s-era communes, the fictional Arcadia begins to fall apart, a victim of its successes and its excesses, just as Bit is entering the tumult of adolescence. He and the other children carry their confusion and their longing with them as they are forced “Outside,” as they call it. And that mix of emotions—portrayed by Groff with psychological acuity and stylistic daring—roils Bit’s life well into adulthood.

“Stories tell you what they need,” Groff says of her decision to continue Bit’s story until he enters his 50s. “And I eventually did realize this story needed to be a man’s story. I knew Bit so deeply as a child and then as an adolescent that I really had no qualms in writing about him as a man.”

About the overriding architecture of her carefully structured novel, however, Groff says she had many qualms. “The architecture of fiction is one of the most urgent things for me. I have to find those parallel resonances between structure and story; I have to know the story inside and out before I know the shape of the house around it.”

The shape of Arcadia’s house was especially challenging because, Groff says, returning to a recurrent theme of our conversation, “at its base this book is an argument with myself for hope. This is a time when, if you pay enough attention, it sometimes seems naïve to have hope for the future. I fought very deeply with myself to find out how I really believe it will be. It was a long, protracted struggle. And I ended up on the side of transcendence.”

Thirty-three-year-old Lauren Groff calls herself a “soft-label” Luddite. She thinks the best decision she and her husband made when they moved to Gainesville, Florida, was not to own a television.

She wrote the first drafts of her beautifully chiaroscuro second novel Arcadia in notebooks and on…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Ron Rash

Interview by Alden Mudge

Ron Rash believes that “almost all of the great books are regional books.” What, he asks, “could be more regional than James Joyce’s Ulysses,” which unfolds during a 24-hour ramble through Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904?

So Rash bristles—in a modest, gentlemanly sort of way—when people use the word regional to pigeonhole, diminish or dismiss fiction like his, which roots itself in a particular place—Appalachia, and especially western North Carolina, where his family has lived since the 1700s.

“It’s an important issue to me because I think there’s a difference between regional and local color,” Rash says during a call to his office at Western Carolina University (WCU) in Cullowhee, North Carolina. “Local color is writing that is only about difference—what makes this particular place exotic. Regional writing is writing that shows what is distinct about a place—its language, culture and all of that—yet at the same time says something universal. Eudora Welty says it better than I can. She says that one place understood helps us understand all other places better. That’s been a credo for me. I think that if you go deep enough into one place, you hit the universal.”

A point in his argument’s favor? Ron Rash’s novels, especially his recent bestseller Serena, are popular in France. He’s been invited to read his fiction in places as far away as Australia and New Zealand. His books sell well in China. And his short stories and novels have been nominated for national, not just regional, awards.

Still, there is his sense of loyalty to his place of origin. On a 10-city book tour in France, for example, Rash, a charming storyteller with a strong regional accent, remembers that “they had me go to a local high school, I think partly [so students] could hear an American speaker. The first thing I told them was not to imitate me; they certainly would not be understood in New York City if they sounded like me!”

"Landscape is destiny. The environment you grow up in has to have some kind of effect on how you perceive the world."

A regional setting and universal themes are definitely hallmarks of Rash’s atmospheric new novel, The Cove. Set in the small western North Carolina town of Mars Hill at the end of the First World War, The Cove uses a little-known historical incident as a stepping-off point for a haunting narrative about intolerance and redemptive but illicit love.

“Obviously I love to read about the region’s history,” says Rash, who is the first person to hold the endowed Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies Chair at WCU. “But a few years ago I was doing some research and I was amazed to find that [there had been] a German internment camp near where I live in western North Carolina during [World War I]. And this camp was not for POWs. It was for German civilians who happened to be marooned in the United States when the United States entered the war. That was fascinating to me. And it became even more fascinating to me when I started reading about the Vaterland, which was the biggest ship in the world at that time and was much more elegant than the Titanic, and these guys who ended up in Hot Springs [North Carolina] had been on the Vaterland.”

Then Rash read an account of the internment camp that mentioned in passing the fact that one and only one German prisoner had ever escaped. “Wow! I thought, boy, what I can do with that. To me there was just this incredible story here that even a lot of people in the region did not know about. At the same time, because of some things that were happening in the United States, contemporary issues, I thought there were interesting connections.”

But Rash, who customarily writes between 12 and 14 drafts before completing a novel—usually while sitting in front of his fireplace with his two dogs at his feet—could not get his story of a German escapee to fly. Not, that is, until he realized that the real emotional center of his book was Laurel Shelton, a young woman who has lived all her life in a sheltered cove near Mars Hill and who longs to escape from a life blighted by the superstitious beliefs and confining scorn of most of her neighbors. Her dilemma threatens to split her apart from her brother Hank, who has returned to the family’s hardscrabble farm in the deep shadows of the Appalachian mountains after being wounded in the war.

“To me,” Rash says, explaining his intense interest in describing the ghostly place in which his characters rise and fall, “landscape is always a character. And I would say the cove itself, the landscape, is in some ways as dominant a character as any other character. . . . It’s hard for me to completely articulate but to me it’s like landscape is destiny. The environment you grow up in has to have some kind of effect on how you perceive the world. I would argue that The Great Gatsby could only have been written by a Midwesterner because the kind of expansiveness Gatsby could imagine fits a Midwestern sensibility; looking out on this endless expanse gives you a sense of endless possibility. The same might be true of someone who was born at the ocean. But if you live in mountains—I’ve seen this in my own family—two things can happen. One is that you feel protected by the mountains, almost like it’s a womb that protects you from the outside world. But the other thing that can happen is that the lack of light does something physically to people who live in a cove. There’s always a sense of your smallness, your puniness and insignificance compared to these mountains that have been here millions of years and loom over you. The result can be the kind of fatalism I saw even in my own family. I think The Cove is my strongest attempt to show that.”

Though based on historical research and set almost 100 years ago, The Cove is artfully layered with Rash’s concerns about the present. One of his most persistent concerns is how easily we turn other people into enemies and go to war against them. In a remarkable way, The Cove dramatizes a hope that loving, reasonable sensibilities will prevail—and a fear of the tragic consequences if they do not.

“I don’t want to be a propagandist, but I hope the reader senses that this is in the story. Certainly there are questions of what it really means to be patriotic, what it means to go to war. You kind of lay it out there and let the reader make the connections or not.”

Then Rash returns the conversation to his interest in discovering the continuities of past, present and future. While researching his previous novel, he reports with delight, he discovered that the house he owns about three miles from the WCU campus had been in his family roughly 230 years ago. And the future? Well, he says with some pride, like his wife and himself, his 24-year-old daughter and 22-year-old son have chosen to become teachers. “At least we didn’t run them off from the profession.”

 

CORRECTION: Updated to reflect the fact that the setting of Mars Hills is an actual town in North Carolina, not a fictional one.

Ron Rash believes that “almost all of the great books are regional books.” What, he asks, “could be more regional than James Joyce’s Ulysses,” which unfolds during a 24-hour ramble through Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904?

So Rash bristles—in a modest, gentlemanly sort of way—when…

Fiction

Nell Freudenberger

Interview by Alden Mudge

The writer Edmund White once told Nell Freudenberger it takes maybe 15 or 20 years to write about an experience. “So in terms of writing about marriage, I’m definitely jumping the gun,” says Freudenberger, laughing, during a call to her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Freudenberger, author of The Dissident, a highly praised debut novel, and Lucky Girls, a collection of stories, was engaged but not yet married to architect Paul Logan when she began ruminating about the narrative that would eventually become her thoroughly captivating second novel, The Newlyweds.

“I was just thinking the other day that I will have had two children in the course of writing this book,” says Freudenberger, who was just days away from the birth of her second child when she spoke with BookPage and just weeks away from the publication of her new novel. “It’s a little discouraging how much longer the gestation of a book is than the gestation of a human. Of course there’s a lot more that you do afterwards with children. With a book, once you’re finished with it, you pretty much let it go.”

Freudenberger is about to let go of The Newlyweds, which explores the life of a middle-class Muslim woman from Bangladesh who meets an American electrical engineer on an international online dating site, then travels to Rochester, New York, to marry him.

The seed of the novel, Freudenberger says, was a conversation on an airplane. Freudenberger was on her way to Rochester to help her father, screenwriter Daniel Freudenberger, clean out the house of her grandmother, who had recently died after living there for more than 40 years. She took a seat next to Farah Deeba, who was returning from New York City to Rochester with her fiancé. The two struck up a conversation about their grandmothers, among other things.

"Farah gave me an enormous gift: telling me the stories and allowing me to make them into something different."

“I was curious about her, just because I’ve spent a lot of time in South Asia, and I assumed, wrongly, that she was Indian,” Freudenberger says. “And then I was interested that a middle-class Muslim woman would choose to meet somebody online and get married, because it’s a really unconventional choice. The prohibition about marrying outside the faith is even stronger for women than for men.”

Freudenberger and Deeba remained in close contact after the flight. “Farah loves to tell stories and I love to listen to them,” the author says. By the time Deeba invited her to visit her grandmother’s village in Bangladesh, Freudenberger had already asked for and received permission to use her experiences as the basis for a novel.

“I always start with the germ of something real, usually a second-hand story about somebody that I don’t know. This gives you a structure that you then make unrecognizable in the end. But this process was different. This was five years of conversations—not interviews, conversations. A lot of times the book seemed to be moving along a parallel track; the things that happened in the book weren’t the things Farah was telling me about, but without her stories, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine the place the way I did. Farah gave me an enormous gift: telling me the stories and allowing me to make them into something different.”

The central character of The Newlyweds, Amina, shares a few of the events of Deeba’s early life—her formal education ended at 13, but studying on her own she managed to pass her O levels and become fluent in English. The events of Amina’s later life, however, are Freudenberger’s invention—Amina’s struggle to find her bearings as an immigrant in Rochester, the ups and downs of the marriage, her husband’s hidden past and the temptation she feels to abandon her American marriage when she returns to Bangladesh to bring her parents back to Rochester.

“As I wrote the book, I was more and more aware of how much Amina is my own creation and is not Farah. The person I was making, in spite of her life looking so different from mine, has many similarities to me. I’m much less brave than this character, but certainly her weaknesses, like her drive to succeed maybe without enough forethought, wanting to get a gold star from the teacher, are something I share. . . . There’s always some part of fiction that’s confessing or writing about yourself. It’s a way, I think, of tricking yourself into being honest.”

The drive to be honest is equally apparent in Freudenberger’s crystalline prose, despite the fact that she feels largely unconscious of her sentences during composition. “When I’m writing, I’m inside somebody’s head, trying to see a situation as someone else would, so I’m not really thinking about the sentences. I think of sentences in terms of rhythm and balance and sound, but that’s a part of writing that’s almost athletic. It’s something that feels like exercise, like habit—in a good way. That’s why you do it every day. Otherwise, you get creaky.”

Freudenberger certainly did not get creaky while working on The Newlyweds. “I took so many wrong turns that needed to be scrapped,” she says. “I would always think of my father, who is a screenwriter. He would have a big bulletin board with Post-it notes pinned up with all the different scenes. The project was incredibly well organized before he started. For whatever reason I don’t think fiction works like that. I need to write a thousand drafts.”

Freudenberger adds, “I remember the day I sat down at my computer and wrote the first few pages in Amina’s voice, and I knew then that  I could write the book. I didn’t know what was going to happen in the book, but I felt as long as I stayed inside the characters, as long as the characters felt right, I could have faith that what happened to them would resolve itself.”

But the book also had to garner Deeba’s approval. “Having Farah read the novel was definitely a precondition for publishing the book. I was the most nervous when she was reading it. I was so afraid she wouldn’t like it or that it wouldn’t seem true to her.”

Deeba seems to have liked the results of Freudenberger’s work on The Newlyweds—and the rest of her readers will, too.

The writer Edmund White once told Nell Freudenberger it takes maybe 15 or 20 years to write about an experience. “So in terms of writing about marriage, I’m definitely jumping the gun,” says Freudenberger, laughing, during a call to her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Freudenberger,…

Fiction

Richard Ford

Interview by Alden Mudge

A reader might speak of Richard Ford’s haunting and uplifting new novel, Canada, in terms of magic, mood and morality. But Ford himself talks about the novel he has been thinking about for 20 years mostly in terms of technique: diction, sustaining an illusion and obsessive devotion to the hard work of his craft.

“It’s hard for me not to fasten down on things,” Ford says during a call to his office at the University of Mississippi, where he is teaching creative writing this year. He has been good-humoredly describing how earlier in the day he stopped the HarperCollins presses to correct a few smallish errors in the book. “I’m dyslexic. So in order to function at all, I’ve had to teach myself to be extremely disciplined. I mean I don’t touch anything that it doesn’t get a mistake riven into it somehow. I mistype, I reverse letters. One of the odd things about dyslexia is that what your eye sees will not register in your brain. It’s a well-known phenomenon, but it has advantages, too, I will tell you. The need to so intensely concentrate on every word is good, because that is how you’d like to be responsible as a writer.”

Of course, great powers of concentration and a keen sense of responsibility don’t come close to explaining how Ford has become one of America’s best contemporary fiction writers. But it’s a start.

Ford gained widespread acclaim for The Sportswriter (1986), the first novel in his Frank Bascombe trilogy, and won a Pulitzer Prize for its sequel, Independence Day (1995). Canada, Ford’s 10th work of fiction, is, quite simply, his best book to date.

"Suddenly life is broken and it goes another way, and you never get to come back to that again."

Set in Montana and Saskatchewan in 1960, Canada tells the story of 15-year-old Dell Parsons, whose middle-class parents—an unlikely romantic combo and even more unlikely pair of criminals—rob a bank in Montana and are quickly arrested and imprisoned. Abandoned to their own devices, Dell and his twin sister Berner go their separate ways. The rebellious, sexually precocious Berner heads to San Francisco, almost though not exactly with flowers in her hair. Dell, whose tale this is, is spirited away from social-service authorities and taken to Saskatchewan by his mother’s friend, where he falls under the spell of a charismatic American ex-pat named Remlinger who turns out to be an embodiment of chaos and violence. Canada is ultimately about Dell’s consequential choice to make a decent life for himself.

“I was sitting around in a little wheat prairie town called Dutton, Montana, waiting for my editor Gary Fisketjon to send me back the edited manuscript for Wildlife [1990],” Ford says of the origins of the novel. “Just twiddling my thumbs. So I rented a little room above a car repair, and I started writing a story about a kid who somehow or other was made to leave his parents and is somehow or another taken to Canada. Then after five or six days, here comes the edited manuscript, so I set the book aside.”

But the idea didn’t go away.

“I’m a person who for better or worse when I write a book I think I have basically written all I know on the subject. But then my mind goes on playing over things. So 20 years later I come back to certain kinds of formal features, certain kinds of tonalities and I want to see if I can extend this whole thing further and better. In the intervening 20 years, I kept on squirreling away notes on this story, without ever going back and looking at it. And I wanted to write about Saskatchewan and I wanted to be able to tell it in the first person and I wanted it to be more active, more antic than Wildlife. I wanted guns to go off. I wanted big actions to take place. Henry James talks about the germ of a story. I had a whole phylum of germs.”

From these seeds, Ford grows a story that seems to be heading in one direction until it veers sharply in another. It’s a shift that will cause readers to catch their breath.

“I very much wanted the move from part one to part two to be abrupt and for the book to change. Because to me that’s consonant with the way kids sometime experience life. Suddenly life is broken and it goes another way, and you never get to come back to that again.”

But as dramatic as its turn of events are for Dell, Canada is also remarkable for Ford’s great descriptive powers. In Ford’s telling, the vast western landscape of the United States and Canada is both physically tangible and resonant with meaning. It’s a landscape Ford knows well.

“Ray Carver and I used to go up to Saskatchewan and go goose hunting, so I have been all over that landscape for 20 years. You could say that was research, but more than research it was just living life. For me life comes first and writing comes second. I hardly ever go someplace with the intention of writing about it. But if I start to write about something and feel I don’t know enough about it, I’ll go look. I did that several times. I would take forays up there with my tape recorder and drive the roads that I knew would be in the novel and record what I saw and how I felt about the things I saw.”

After these forays, Ford would return to a rather spare writing room, a former boat repair shop, on Linekin Bay in Maine to work on the book. Ford and his wife, Kristina Hensley, have lived in Maine since 1999. Ford, who is 68, was born in Mississippi and considers himself a Mississippian, but he has lived all over the U.S. as Hensley pursued her career. Most recently she was head of city planning in New Orleans and then chief of staff for that city’s post-Katrina renewal project. Next year, if the logistics work, the couple will have a joint appointment at Columbia University.

Ford and Hensley have been married 44 years. “She’s my first reader,” Ford says. “Always has been.” He has dedicated each and every one of his books to her.

Returning to the new book, Ford says he found writing the end of part two, where Dell witnesses and is implicated in a gratuitous murder, “actually quite elevating.”

Why?

“Because it allowed me to take human behavior that was in some ways like any other human behavior—I mean people do rob banks, as Dell keeps saying. Kids do get abandoned. People do murder other people for completely stupid reasons—and have an opportunity to say provisionally, as all novels are provisional, what the human consequences of this are. We think conventional wisdom tells us what the human consequences are, and we rely on that. Yet to try to invent new consequences, to try to see the consequences through new eyes, made me try to take my book beyond the duff of just murders and bank robberies and abandonment.”

Part of the magic of Canada is that it does indeed take a reader “beyond the duff” of plot and story into some new emotional and moral terrain. Canada is about a boy crossing all kinds of borders, physical and metaphorical, and coming to hard choices about how to lead life as a full human being.

Ford seems reluctant to wear the label but he does admit that his type of realistic fiction does have a moral purpose. “Realistic fiction—and probably any art, whether it’s realistic or not—has as one of its moral goals to bring us closer to life and make us value it more and see it more clearly. And that is what I’ve grown to want to do.”

The remarkable Canada achieves that goal.

A reader might speak of Richard Ford’s haunting and uplifting new novel, Canada, in terms of magic, mood and morality. But Ford himself talks about the novel he has been thinking about for 20 years mostly in terms of technique: diction, sustaining an illusion and…

FictionShort Stories

Claire Vaye Watkins

Interview by Alden Mudge

Until she moved to Columbus, Ohio, to pursue an M.F.A. in creative writing, Claire Vaye Watkins couldn’t imagine writing a story set in her home state of Nevada. Her early stories of young lovers and parents tended to be set in exotic locales like Hawaii, where, according to family mythology, her relatives ran a “mango-cum-pot farm.”

“It hadn’t occurred to me that Nevada or the desert was interesting to anyone,” she says by phone from Columbus.

Watkins, who is 28, now has what she calls a “big-girl job” teaching writing at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, but at the time of our conversation she’s back in Ohio for the graduation ceremonies of her beloved, writer Derek Palacio. “When I came to Ohio it was the first time that I had ever met people who weren’t from Nevada or California. It seems quaint to say the move changed my worldview. But it did. My friends from New Jersey would say, what a weird place Nevada is; did you ride your horses to school? So it occurred to me that it was interesting to people.”

Thus was born Watkins’ powerful debut collection of short stories, Battleborn (the book’s title derives from Nevada’s nickname, “the battle born state,” because it became a state during the Civil War).

“Early on I was often crippled about being able to write about anything, . . . Eventually I decided to choose place as my form,” she says. “By the end of the collection, I was actually looking at a map and thinking, where haven’t I written about? I couldn’t really start a story without understanding where it was set—because I can’t really start to think about who these characters are and what kind of trouble are they going to get into if I don’t even know what they see when they get up in the morning.”

"I think my relationship to my dad and his involvement in the Manson family has always been a storytelling relationship."

And Watkins’ characters do get into all kinds of trouble. In the electrifying story “Rondine Al Nido,” for example, a 30-year-old woman trades stories with a new lover about shameful things they’ve done in the past and remembers herself at 16 traveling from a small Nevada town to Las Vegas with a naïve friend, looking for danger, and pushing her friend toward self-destruction among a group of frat boys.

“Some people have said my [stories] are gritty, but I don’t think of it like that at all. I just want to be true to real experience. So thinking about a teenager in rural Nevada who lives over the mountain range from Las Vegas like the girls in ‘Rondine Al Nido,’ well, we used to take those trips all the time, tell our parents we were staying at someone’s house and then go into Vegas to see if we could get into some trouble. I didn’t want to whitewash it by saying this was just a story of hijinks, like getting change out of the fountains and buying hamburgers with it. We were after danger and destruction there.”

Many of the characters in Battleborn teeter at the edge of physical or psychological catastrophe. But in the best of these 10 stories, Watkins’ prose possesses the bright clarity of desert sunlight—she has been compared to Joan Didion—with the result that even her most lacerating tales can be oddly exhilarating.

The first and best story in the collection is “Ghosts, Cowboys,” a haunting exploration of the troubling mythologies surrounding her father, Paul Watkins, an early and important member of the Charles Manson family.

“I don’t know much about my dad. He had Hodgkins disease and died when I was six,” Watkins says. “So it’s hard to know if I actually remember anything about him. Stories become memories, you know? And in our family the stories that you tell about dead people are pretty flat, so that person becomes a very one-dimensional character. I mean the stories I get from my family about my dad are: He was a good man and he loved you very much. That’s not really enough. I have been so very, very curious about him my entire life.”

Watkins says she discovered that her father had been a member of the Manson family when she was 10. “I learned because a kid had been teasing my sister at school about it. We came home and asked my mom. And she said, yeah, he was in the Manson family but he didn’t kill anyone, and she gave us Helter Skelter. We looked him up in the index and read about him. We were happy that he hadn’t killed anyone and we just kind of went on with our lives,” she says.

“I think my relationship to my dad and to his involvement in the Manson family has always been a storytelling relationship. I have been asked in the past if I’m interested in writing a memoir about it. But that doesn’t really interest me. On the other hand, it is interesting to think about him in terms of the American West and my own family mythology. I think that’s why fiction is the place that I worked it out, or tried to. I think that felt right because art is about trying to understand yourself and who we are.”

Watkins says one of her earliest introductions to storytelling culture came through Alcoholics Anonymous. Her mother and stepfather “were in recovery and were very involved in the 12-step club. I spent much of my childhood in the car. When we lived in Tecopa, California [a town of 100 inhabitants in the Mojave Desert on the southern edge of Death Valley], there was no grocery store or hardware store there. So once or twice a month, usually on the first or the 15th, we would drive either into Pahrump, Nevada, where there was a grocery store which was quite expensive, or we’d drive into Las Vegas. And we would listen to AA tapes in the car on those long drives,” she recalls.

“AA is a culture where the story, your story, is really important. But it’s not just any story, it’s your rock-bottom story, your worst story. I think that sometimes gets simplified into: It was bad and now it’s good. So we used to listen to these speaker tapes that were really thrilling to me for probably like the first 90 percent, and then the last 10 percent came—you know I was a kid—and I remember asking my mom: can I listen to something else?”

As a teenager, Watkins planned to become a filmmaker rather than a writer. By the time she entered the University of Nevada, Reno as an undergraduate, her ambition was “to be a geologist and a feminist critic. But that didn’t work out.” Besides, she’d run into Christopher Coake, a teacher she refers to as “my guy, my mentor and my friend.” He and a handful of writers whose writing stayed with her—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Amy Bender, Louise Erdrich, Joan Didion, Mary Gaitskill—made a writing career imaginable.

In Battleborn, the first step of that career, Watkins undertakes some astonishing fictional explorations of the mythologies that have shaped her—from family stories to the lore of the American West.

The stand-out novella-length “The Diggins,” for example, is a harrowing Gold Rush-era story of two brothers who come West from Ohio to make their fortunes in the goldfields. In it Watkins deftly mimics the syntax of 19th-century 49ers’ letters while at the same time exploring the violent, despairing human stories at the root of our national myths of Manifest Destiny and rugged individualism.

Much closer to home is “The Archivist,” a story in which the central character imagines a museum of lost love curated from the detritus left in her exes’ jeans pockets. “The moment when the character says the mother wing of the museum would probably be empty?” says Watkins, whose mother died of a prescription-drug overdose the month before she graduated from college. “My own mother wing would probably be a not-very curated place, very messy and very chaotic. I think I’ll probably be sorting that stuff out for the rest of my life.”

Until she moved to Columbus, Ohio, to pursue an M.F.A. in creative writing, Claire Vaye Watkins couldn’t imagine writing a story set in her home state of Nevada. Her early stories of young lovers and parents tended to be set in exotic locales like Hawaii,…

FictionShort Stories

Junot Díaz

Interview by Alden Mudge

Some months after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his dazzling first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz overheard a friend telling other friends: Listen, Junot won the Pulitzer Prize and we never had a party, we never went out for drinks, he like never mentioned it!

“I would point out that I come from a family where there was no celebration of AN-Y-THING!” Díaz says during a call that reaches him in Boston. Díaz teaches writing and “the traditional grammars of storytelling” to “super-energized kids” studying new media at MIT during the spring semester. He lives and writes in Manhattan the rest of the year.

Díaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968 and moved to a working-class, immigrant community downwind from one of the largest landfills in central New Jersey in 1974, explains that he grew up in a military family where the attitude was: Why should we bake a cake for you for doing what is considered your duty?

“Prizes are wonderful,” Díaz says. “They sell your books, they get you invited to places you would never be invited. I would never give mine back. But I know them fundamentally for what they are. They’re just today’s applause. They have no bearing on whether a piece of art or an artist will exist into the future. I’m more preoccupied with that. And I think that preoccupation frees your art in lots of ways.”

Of course, artistic freedom has its price. The vaulting energy and seeming spontaneity that are among the hallmarks of Díaz’s breathtaking stories and his novel arise from exacting labor. “I’m such a slow writer,” Díaz says. “I require absolute solitude. I am part of the no-distractions universe.” He says he conceived of the shape and texture of his new story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, in 1995, so it has taken him roughly 17 years to bring it to fruition.

"The one principle that we have in literature and art is that the universal arises from the particular."

“I needed a framework to start out. I had this idea of writing a book of collected stories about the rise and fall of a cheater. What drove me nuts was getting this whole thing from beginning to end pieced together. It’s like building a building. I won’t say it’s like building a cathedral, but it’s sort of like building a barn. You want to get it working and you want to get everything fitted nicely,” he says. “What drove me bananas was searching for, wrestling with the missing beams. Had it been a novel, I think it would have been a very different book, and one day I will write a novel about the rise and fall of a cheater, but I wanted to do this as a kind of fragmentary whole.”

The nine stories in This Is How You Lose Her, with settings in Santo Domingo, New Jersey and Boston, and told from third, second and first person points of view, do indeed explore, among other things, the vicissitudes of loving and being loved by another human being. In the story “Otravida, Otravez,” for example, Yasmin, who works in a hospital laundry room where she does her lover’s laundry in secret, is buoyed by her lover’s hopeful seriousness that they will soon buy a house together and crushed by thoughts of the letters her lover’s wife sends to him from back home in the Dominican Republic. But there are also stories like “Invierno,” an aching portrayal of the chilling isolation of young children who arrive to begin new lives in the United States in the dead of winter.  In the vortex of many of these stories is Díaz’s recurring character Yunior.

“Really why I’m drawn back to Yunior consistently, persistently has a lot to do with who the hell this guy is. Yunior is someone who recognizes at an intuitive level, at an emotional level and at an intellectual level how ­f__ked up and flawed he is. He has a heart with a utopian impulse. He wants to be in love. He wants a normal, healthy, nourishing relationship. He knows that one of the great challenges of the human condition is to connect with someone else, fundamentally and intimately, and he longs for that. He has all these recognitions, but he’s not capable of stopping himself from doing all the f__ked up things he wants to do. He’s got this tragic condition where he can recognize in himself his limitations, but he doesn’t have the strength to transcend them. But he’s also aware that there’s a social dimension for his problems. I don’t think he looks at the social dimension to escape responsibility or blame. He’s the kind of guy who in condemning himself throws a light onto the world we live in. Which is quite different from condemning the world as a way to avoid recognizing the part we play in it.”

Asked about the autobiographical nature of these stories, which in some ways mirror the physical and emotional geographies of his own life, Díaz says, “The way you’ve got to chip your life away for it to work as a story or as a novel is just incredibly deforming. By the time you get done wrangling your life into the form that can fit into the box of fiction, it doesn’t look like your life anymore.”

Still, these stories—all of his work, in fact—generate voltage from Díaz’s uncommon ability to evoke the alternating currents, the back and forth toggle from one culture to another, that comprise a soul-wrenching dimension of first-generation immigrant life. Díaz’s stories also deploy a scintillating blend of English and Spanish and broad literary references. His books—and conversation—romp from smooth academic-literary tonalities to earthy descriptiveness and expletives and back again. All of which, Díaz indicates, is consciously used to capture the particularity of contemporary human experience.

“Thermodynamics has these neat, tidy little laws that hold true, and evolution has all these great little principles that hold true. The one principle that we have in literature and art is that the universal arises from the particular. It’s the actual thumbprint uniqueness, it’s the granular idiosyncratic, one-of-a-kindness of a work of art that gives it power across time, across space, across language, that allows it to clear that most terrible of all barriers, the barrier that separates one soul from another. We’re still reading Shakespeare because Shakespeare was so incredibly particular. . . . Hamlet rings across the ages because Hamlet is a f__king Dane, not in spite of it.”

Díaz, a voracious reader who walked miles to his local library to borrow books as a child, credits Sandra Cisneros with opening his eyes to his literary mission. “She was the first contemporary Latina author that I ever met. Her book Woman Hollering Creek was everywhere during my first year in college. I had never seen a book like that. I grew up in central Jersey. I grew up listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees and the f__king Furious Five. I felt there wasn’t anything that was coming close to our experience, you know? My entire cohort of friends were college nerds, we were kids who worked and went to school, and I felt, wow, who is covering that experience? Then I encountered Woman Hollering Creek and the Brothers Hernandez’s Love and Rockets comics and I suddenly recognized the dimensions of my calling.”

Reading, Díaz says, remains central to that calling. “I cannot write without having at my back a whole bunch of works and books and authors who came before,” he says. “What feeds my writing is reading.”

Then Díaz shifts the discussion back to teaching. “For me teaching is a wonderful civic duty, a great way of giving back. There’s that Maya Angelou sense that the debt of knowing is to teach. I’m teaching at the heart of what we could call the practical machine. If there is any place where this country’s indifference to art and its sense that art is at best a privilege and at worst irrelevant [could make sense], it would be an institution like MIT,” he says.

“What really pulls me to this teaching is that I take kids who have a billion reasons why they shouldn’t spend a nickel’s time on art and try to convert them to the belief that there is no authentic human life possible without an engagement in art. If I can do that, well, I feel like I’ve done a f__king good thing.”

Some months after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his dazzling first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz overheard a friend telling other friends: Listen, Junot won the Pulitzer Prize and we never had a party, we never went out…

Fiction

Louise Erdrich

Interview by Alden Mudge

About four months into the composition of her outstanding 14th novel, The Round House, award-winning author Louise Erdrich was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I just never thought anything like this would happen to me,” Erdrich says during a call to her home outside Minneapolis, where she lives with her second husband and their 11-year-old daughter. Another daughter, Persia, lives nearby and works at Birchbark Books, the independent bookstore Erdrich owns with her sister in Minneapolis. During her illness, a third daughter came home from New York to help care for the household. “There’s no breast cancer in my family, and I’ve always been incredibly healthy. It was picked up by accident by my wonderful doctor, who found what hardly showed up on a mammogram.”

Lucky thing. The cancer turned out to be a very aggressive, fast-growing strain, but caught at such an early stage, it was entirely treatable. Erdrich is now “very well,” she says. “I was very lucky with this.”

Still, in the first days of her treatment Erdrich did not feel so lucky. She wondered if she’d be able to write through it. Then, remarkably, she entered one of the most productive periods of her writing career. Not only did she work intensively on The Round House, but she wrote a completely new version of her seventh novel, The Antelope Wife, and a new children’s book, Chickadee, all of which are arriving on booksellers’ shelves in summer and early fall.

“I think it’s because I played the C card,” Erdrich says, laughing. Throughout the conversation, she laughs easily and frequently, seeming very much at home with herself. “I suddenly had a good excuse to get out of just about anything anyone asked of me. It’s ridiculous! Why should a person have to go through cancer in order to just say I’ve got to stay home and write? But that seems to be what happened.”

Since she made her name with Love Medicine and The Beet Queen in the 1980s, Erdrich has been writing about the social and spiritual lives of contemporary Native Americans. Her brush with cancer seems to have sharpened both the emotional and narrative drive of her latest novel, The Round House, which tells the riveting story of 13-year-old Joe Coutts coming of age on a North Dakota reservation in 1988.

In Edrich's powerful new novel, a mother's rape launches her son's search for justice.

“It’s always hard to tell what piece of yourself goes into a book,” Erdrich says. “My particular fear was of leaving my children. As a parent you’re not really afraid for yourself, you’re just afraid to leave them. I’m never helpless around my children, but I was helpless then. And I sensed nothing but them wanting to help me. My memories are of laughing very hard, reading funny notes, eating wonderful food that my daughters prepared and holding their hands. The sharpness of the emotion I felt may have helped me in understanding the characters. It’s a very character-driven book, and it’s very much about emotions between Joe and his mother.”

It gives little away to say that in the first pages of The Round House, Joe’s mother, Geraldine Coutts, is brutally raped by a white man in a savage act of vengeance. Traumatized, Geraldine withdraws into silence, leaving her husband, a tribal judge, with a kind of roiling, helpless grief and anger, and Joe with the need to resolve profound questions about justice, revenge and the inexplicable nature of evil.

Justice, Erdrich says, was the seminal issue for The Round House. “Right now, tribal governments can’t prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on their land,” she says. In the novel’s afterword, she writes about the appalling numbers of non-Indian men who rape Indian women on tribal lands and escape prosecution because of jurisdictional issues. “I’ve known about this for a long time but it’s an injustice I never knew how to write about. I didn’t want to write a polemical piece. Every time I’d talk about the novel, I’d say it’s about jurisdiction and—YAWN, people’s eyes would glaze over. I thought, I have to find a way to tell this story that doesn’t make them completely lose consciousness.”

Readers of The Round House will find themselves fully alert and paying rapt attention to the story. This is one of Erdrich’s most suspenseful novels. “I wanted to make it a book with suspense,” Erdrich says, “so I keep answering questions all through the book. There’s always something unanswered.”

But, as she hopes, it is the vibrancy of Erdrich’s characters that give this book its liveliness. Joe and his three valiant boyhood pals ride around the reservations on their bicycles, longing for girls and getting into the minor, sometimes comical scrapes young teenage boys do, even while they are forced to confront daunting moral challenges.

“I grew up in a small town where your bike was your means of freedom,” Erdrich says when asked about how she entered the mindset of her boy characters. “My brothers did crazy things, my husband is one of many brothers, and my daughters were always great pals with boys. So I just knew and know a great many 13- and 14-year-old boys. That age always gets to me. I know boys of that age who really hide their tenderness for their mothers, and I wanted to write something about that because it’s so mysterious: that simultaneous feeling of wanting to break away and wanting to protect them. Having gone through life with my daughters and their friends, I just have this sense of a great purity of courage in those boys. They haven’t thought it out, but they know exactly what’s right.”

The spiritual part of Joe’s journey involves a mix of Native spiritual practices and Catholicism. Joe assists tribal elders with their sweat lodge ceremonies, but he and his friends are fascinated by Father Travis, a virile young priest and an Iraq War veteran. “I’ve always had a different sort of priest in every book. This priest is the first one who has a sense of irony and who has really questioned his own life,” Erdrich says.

“The Ojibwe people’s earliest contact with non-Natives was with the Jesuits, so there’s a long history of entwinement of the cultures,” she points out. “But it’s always up to the individual priest how much he’ll allow the traditionalists into his belief system. It’s anathema to the church itself to admit the truth or goodness of any other form of religion, especially a non-Christian religion. But priests are sometimes hit over the head by the fact that they’re trying to teach spirituality to an intensely spiritual people, and they’re trying to take their spirituality away from them in order to force another form of spirituality upon them. Father Travis has a lot of respect for traditional people, he tells Joe. He has, I guess, a very masculine, soldierly view of the world and is willing to talk to Joe on a level that I don’t think most priests really would.”

Joe and his friends come of age discovering the existence of injustice and real evil in the world. But Erdrich’s own vision has a wider embrace. Surprisingly, The Round House is often laugh-out-loud funny. This is because the elders, who have been through their own torments and sorrows, joke about everything, especially about sex.

“It’s a relief to be around elders because they can say anything,” Erdrich says. “They delight in embarrassing young people. They don’t have to hold anything back, and there’s just a lot of sexual joking that elders can do that young people aren’t really supposed to. I guess part of me wants to joke on that level too but I’m not quite allowed to yet. So those parts were a lot of fun to write.

“When I’m with older relatives, we just laugh nonstop. I laugh a lot with people my age, but not with the kind of merciless hilarity that comes in looking back. It’s an intense sort of freedom that maybe only comes to those who are lucky enough to be that old and be able to see back into the crazy hearts of the young.”

And that is the real wonder of Louise Erdrich’s newest novel. It vividly portrays both the deep tragedy and crazy comedy of life.

About four months into the composition of her outstanding 14th novel, The Round House, award-winning author Louise Erdrich was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I just never thought anything like this would happen to me,” Erdrich says during a call to her home outside Minneapolis, where she…

NonfictionMemoirMedicine

Susannah Cahalan

Interview by Alden Mudge

She thought she had mono. Then she decided she was bipolar. To her disgust, a famed New York City neurologist told her that she simply worked too hard and drank too much.

Susannah Cahalan’s mix of Google-search self-diagnosis and hit-and-miss expert opinion might have been comical if her situation hadn’t been so dire. At the age of 24, Cahalan, a reporter for the New York Post, began feeling less and less herself, then had a seizure, and then ended up in the hospital for a month, out of her mind for most of that time, while a small army of doctors and medical researchers tried to figure out what was wrong with her.

“It was one of those things that wasn’t completely obvious at first,” Cahalan says, remembering the onset of her mystifying disease during a call to the apartment in Jersey City she shares with her boyfriend Stephen, one of the heroes of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, her book about this harrowing experience. “Maybe if I had been working a more stable or less exciting job, I would have been more aware of what was going on. But because I was working at the New York Post and there are so many highs and lows to journalism, I wasn’t aware of the fluctuations.”

Stephen (her boyfriend of just six months at the time and a colleague at the Post, where she had begun working as a “copy kid” at 17) and her estranged parents, however, had become increasingly alarmed by her behavior just before her seizure. Later they would all become key informants as Cahalan tried to piece together what had happened to her during her month of madness.

“It’s so hard for me to get to that person again,” Cahalan says. “I did a lot of yoga trying to access these hallucinations and these lost memories. . . . I wrote by hand, which I thought would maybe help me better access these things. I do remember things, but I don’t know if it’s because I’ve spent so much time writing about them that I’ve created these memories.”

"People who don't have a diagnosis have to be their own advocates. It's important to question medical authority."

So Cahalan’s efforts to write Brain on Fire became an attempt both to reconstruct how she became the crazy person she briefly was and to understand the science that led eventually to a successful diagnosis. Early drafts of the book, Cahalan says, were very “science-y.” The published book tends—reluctantly, she says—more toward memoir. Readers will likely find it a swift read, an intriguing mix of scientific detection and personal story. Cahalan includes excerpts from her medical records, from videos of her bizarre behavior in the hospital, and from her follow-up interviews with the two doctors at the University of Pennsylvania—Dr. Souhel Najjar and Dr. Josep Dalmau—who cracked her case.

Diagnosing her illness required a battery of sometimes redundant tests including CAT scans, blood tests, MRIs and a gruesome-sounding brain biopsy. Eventually, Cahalan became only the 217th person to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis, a rare form of autoimmune disease.

Cahalan says one of her hopes is that Brain on Fire will in some measure help people with undiagnosed conditions and raise awareness about autoimmune diseases. “The brain gets all the attention,” she says. “But when I was researching the science for the book, I realized we are just at the beginning of understanding how important the immune system is. Auto­immune disease is an amazing, emerging field of study. Right now 50 million people in the United States have an autoimmune disease. They’re especially common in women, which is a mystery. The research that’s being done now is basically blurring the lines between immunology, neurology and psychiatry. It’s very exciting.”

Treatment for Cahalan’s disease was considered experimental at the time. It involved a regimen of nearly 20 intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) injections at $20,000 a pop. The total cost of her hospitalization and treatment? Something to the north of $1 million, she says.

In the final section of Brain on Fire, the section Cahalan found most challenging to write, she describes her long recovery and reflects on the physical and emotional challenges she faced after she left the hospital. On the plus side, she has grown closer to her father, who was distant from her after her parents’ bitter divorce. For the length of time she was in the hospital, her parents united to become her chief advocates. “People who don’t have a diagnosis have to be their own advocates. It’s important to question medical authority. I couldn’t be my own advocate in the hospital because I couldn’t be there for myself. But my parents were.”

Cahalan’s boyfriend Stephen was her “rock in the hospital. The fact that he came every day when we’d only been dating about six months was amazing.” But trouble loomed when she came home to recover. “I was dead set on moving ahead. I was getting better. I was back at the Post. Everything seemed fine, but he knew I still wasn’t 100 percent. It was a scary experience for him. I think it changed him and he became a different person. Now it’s been three and a half years since I was in the hospital and we’ve worked that out.”

Still, the question of how fully she has recovered remains. When her doctors finally reached the correct diagnosis, they told her that treatment would bring her back to about 90 percent of normal.

“It’s hard for me to say if I’m 100 percent recovered,” Cahalan says. “I know I’m different from the person I was before and I know that has something to do with my illness because it was a huge life experience that I think about every day. But I was 24 then, I’m 27 now. I don’t know how much of my change is due to getting older and being in different life circumstances and how much of it has to do with surviving this illness.”

She thought she had mono. Then she decided she was bipolar. To her disgust, a famed New York City neurologist told her that she simply worked too hard and drank too much.

Susannah Cahalan’s mix of Google-search self-diagnosis and hit-and-miss expert opinion might have been comical…

NonfictionMemoir

Richard Russo

Interview by Alden Mudge

Novelist Richard Russo had no doubt that he should write a book about the close and emotionally complicated relationship he had with his mother. The question was, should he publish it?

“I had to write the book because after my mother’s death she was very much in my waking thoughts and haunting my dreams as well, which suggested to me there was some unfinished business,” Russo says during a call that reaches him at the apartment he and his wife Barbara own in Boston. Most of the year the couple lives in Camden, Maine. Russo travels frequently for book tours, lectures and his scriptwriting work, and he’s found that it’s much easier to fly out of Boston. In fact, the morning following our conversation, he will fly from Boston to Helsinki to speak at opening ceremonies for the U.S. State Department’s new library there.

“My mother’s story seemed important both in terms of the private, intimate mother-son story and in terms of its broader cultural and political context,” Russo says. “She was part of the World War II generation and what happened to her is very much an American story and a story about the changes that were taking place in America as she grew into her maturity. That’s why this book is so much about Gloversville.”

In a beautifully evocative prologue to Elsewhere: A Memoir, Russo tells us that, in its prime, the upstate New York town of Glovers­ville produced 90 percent of the dress gloves sold in the world. Russo’s mother and father grew up there, married young and separated when he was a little boy. By the time Russo was a teenager, most of the glove-making work had been shipped overseas and the toxic residues of processing leather were left for the dwindling local population to deal with. “By the time I graduated from high school in 1967,” Russo writes, “you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul.”

Russo’s mother, as the book’s title implies, had conflicting feelings about her hometown. “What she thought about Gloversville depended on whether she was there or elsewhere,” Russo says. “It was the central dilemma of her life and in some ways it has been the central dilemma of my artistic life as well. There is the actual physical place, which fills me at times with the visceral loathing that I learned from my mother. Then there’s the Gloversville that’s been transformed into Mohawk [1986], Empire Falls [2002 Pulitzer Prize winner] and Thomaston [Bridge of Sighs, 2007]. In all those places I am free to love the fictional avatars of Gloversville with my whole heart and whole soul, and my mother’s opinion of the place doesn’t enter into it because those places are drawn from my imagination.”

Much of Russo’s fiction has explored his relationship with his mostly absent father. “All those charming, feckless men that turn up in my novels—from Sam Hall in The Risk Pool straight through to Max Roby in Empire Falls—are rooted in some way in my own father,” Russo says. “As I write in Elsewhere, I became closer to my father when I became of legal drinking age in New York, which at the time was 18.”

An only child, the young Russo had an extremely close relationship with his mother. In an early chapter of Elsewhere he vividly describes traveling with his mother on a vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, where he begins to perceive that, yes, he is her anchor but he is maybe also the millstone around her neck. Fiercely independent, Russo’s mother was also very needy. Even into adulthood, when Russo, his wife and two daughters moved about the country for his academic appointments, they brought his mother to live nearby. Russo and Barbara, a person of heroic patience and empathy, often joked mordantly that they were so bound to his mother that they “never went anywhere for longer than it took for her milk to spoil.” Through writing Elsewhere, Russo has come to believe that his mother suffered from a probably treatable mental disability in a time when such a disability was impossible to acknowledge.

“Writing Elsewhere did provide me with answers to the questions that I had posed to myself about my life and my mother’s life,” Russo says at the end of the phone call. “But in terms of closure, I still haven’t shaken that sense of betrayal and self-doubt because she’s not here to defend herself. I wanted to feel vindicated in having made the right choice to tell this story and I don’t quite feel that. . . . But after consulting with Barbara and my daughters it became clear to me that this book might actually help somebody else feel less alone in the world.”

Novelist Richard Russo had no doubt that he should write a book about the close and emotionally complicated relationship he had with his mother. The question was, should he publish it?

“I had to write the book because after my mother’s death she was very much…

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