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.”

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.

Some novels percolate in their authors’ minds for years. In the case of Eleanor Morse’s superb third novel, White Dog Fell from the Sky, the brew-time was at least a dozen and possibly as many as 40 years.

 “Alice came to me more than 12 years ago as part of another book that didn’t get off the ground,” Morse says during a call to her home on Peaks Island, a three-mile ferry ride across Casco Bay from Portland, Maine. Alice Mendelssohn, one of two central characters in the novel, is an American woman who has come to Botswana with her husband in the mid-1970s, shortly after the new African nation gained its independence from Great Britain. “My books are not plot driven,” Morse continues. “I count on the characters to drive the story, so I have to know who they are and what they are about before the story can really get going. And that requires a kind of patient listening to them.”

Isaac Muthethe, the novel’s other central character, was born in Morse’s mind some years later while she was teaching a fiction writing class. Isaac is a medical student who is forced to flee from South Africa to Botswana after he witnesses the shocking murder of a friend by white police officers. Isaac and Alice, both of whom feel profoundly displaced, develop an awkward acquaintanceship when she hires him to work as her gardener. Their friendship deepens dramatically when Isaac is mistakenly deported to South Africa and is imprisoned and tortured, accused of being an African National Congress terrorist, and Alice sets out to find him.

“It matters to me to write a book that has some significance to it,” Morse says. “I’ve felt over the years that this is something that needs to be written. I’ve been interested in people who have been displaced for some time. I think that’s connected to all the moving around we did when I was a child. I understand what it feels like not to belong to a place.”

"I wanted the setting to be something that embraced a reader throughout the book and was a constant companion."

Morse’s father worked for General Electric, and as a child she moved frequently around the Northeast and the Midwest. She has been writing fiction since she was very young, she says, but “didn’t feel very supported in that desire. I had no models in my family. When I hit about 40, I decided that no matter what else is going on in my life, I have to do this. That’s when I went back and got an M.F.A.”

Morse’s first novel, An Unexpected Forest (2007), won a Best Regional Fiction prize from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. She now teaches fiction writing in the M.F.A. program at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.

While her characters Isaac and Alice may feel out of place, Morse’s descriptions of that place—the vast landscapes of Botswana—are specific and ravishing. “When I was going through the editing process there was some question about whether there was too much setting in the book. I argued strenuously for keeping as much setting as there is. Because like a character, it doesn’t just appear and then you forget about it. I wanted the setting to be something that embraced a reader throughout the book and was a constant companion.”

Morse was familiar with much of that landscape after living in Botswana from 1972 to 1975 as a newlywed. Her then-husband, the son of British missionaries, was born there and was serving as permanent secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture. The couple had two children. She found a job at the tri-country University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland as head of the adult education wing. She had a weekly radio program and ran a national education campaign that trained learning groups in remote parts of the country to run conversations on what it meant to be part of a government. “This was only six years into being an independent African country. It was fascinating work,” Morse recalls.

Little wonder then that White Dog Fell from the Sky touches on the politics of the era. But it’s a light touch. “I didn’t set out to write a political novel,” Morse says, “but it certainly has political aspects to it. I didn’t want to make it a polemical novel, and I was anxious to make the sections having to do with South Africa balanced. So there’s a white family [Isaac’s benefactors] who are not oppressors.

“There’s some remorse in me that I was not more political when I lived in Botswana. I was certainly aware of what was going on next door. Every time I went over the border I was stopped for 45 minutes or an hour because I had a radio program and I was teaching and I was an American. Those three things made me suspect in South Africa. So I experienced the regime, and I experienced white South Africans needing to justify how they were living. They couldn’t keep away from it. It just worried them. You could see it worried them.”

Within the political and natural landscape of the novel, Isaac and Alice—particularly Alice—struggle to become and remain fully human. “Alice is a seeker,” Morse says. “She wants to live a large life. She bumbles around some as she struggles to accept the discomforts around her and make something of them.”

Of her own challenges in writing her new novel, Morse says, “Once characters are born in me I have a responsibility to be as true to their story as I can be. From writing this book, I know that takes a certain amount of courage. It meant returning again and again to that place of deep imagining.”

Then, referencing William Faulkner’s Nobel address, she says, “I wanted to write about the human heart, its losses and joys, its separations and connections.”

A reader finishes White Dog Fell from the Sky believing Morse has accomplished exactly that.

With her superb third novel about to arrive in bookstores, does Ruth Ozeki think of herself as creating a body of work, an oeuvre, so to speak?

“I’ve never had the temerity to think that,” Ozeki says during a call that reaches her while she is in transit from Toronto, where she has been visiting her in-laws, to her home nestled amongst 20 acres of rainforest on Cortes Island, British Columbia. “A body needs four limbs. And a head,” she notes, laughing. “Now that I have three novels and two films that I’m proud of, I am beginning to think, wow, maybe before I die it will be possible to have something that could be called a body.”

But asked then to characterize the common concerns that link one book to another, Ozeki demurs. “I wouldn’t ever want to approach it from the outside like that. What’s important to me is the integrity of the book I’m currently writing. Maybe the notion of a body of work is something that’s applied afterward by other people.”

Good point. But Ozeki’s widely praised first and second novels—My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003)—do share common threads with A Tale for the Time Being, Ozeki’s best and most adventurous novel to date. First there is a common flare of vivid storytelling. And, as a very close second, all of her novels delve provocatively into history, raise concerns about the fate not just of her human characters but of the Earth itself, and play with profound philosophical questions.

As the title of the new book suggests, one of the questions Ozeki explores here is what it means to live in the present. The book began in her imagination, she says, when the voice of a young girl spoke the words that are now the opening lines of the novel: “Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being.” Nao (pronounced Now) is the sweet, chatty, troubled Japanese teenager whose diary washes up on the shores of Cortes Island sometime after an earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011.

“I was intrigued by
. . . this idea that we are all time beings, that time is our medium.”

“Nao was persistent and she was distinctive and she just kept showing up and saying the most outrageous things,” Ozeki says of the origins of the novel. “And I was intrigued by this idea of a ‘time being’ and this idea that we are all time beings, that time is our medium.”

Over the course of the book, Nao becomes a fully realized character in part because Ozeki is well acquainted with Japanese culture. She grew up in New Haven, the daughter of a Japanese mother and an American father. After college she worked and attended graduate school in Japan and, later, traveled back and forth to Tokyo while directing documentary-style programs for a Japanese company. She and her husband, Oliver Kellhammer, a Canadian land artist and writer, returned to Tokyo during the composition of this novel to get a feel for the city’s Akihabara Electric Town, the flashy shopping district where her character Nao hangs out in a somewhat creepy maids café writing in her diary and fending off unwanted advances from inept nerds.

“The voice and character of Nao were never a problem,” Ozeki says. “But I knew that Nao needed a reader. In some ways this book is also about the relationship between a writer and a reader. I auditioned four or five characters for the role of reader and wrote complete drafts of the book. I tried all sorts of different people.” None of them worked.

Then after the 2011 tsunami, Ozeki returned to an early story­telling impulse she had first rejected. “I’ve always had this semi-autobiographical relationship with some of my characters,” she says, “and Oliver and I were talking about this one day, and he said, you need to step out from behind the veil of fiction and be in your book.”

So the character who discovers and reads Nao’s diary; the character who worries and frets about Nao as the teenager describes her suicidal father, her 104-year-old great-grandmother Jiko, and her own despairing thoughts about her life; the character who meditates on the riddle of Nao’s ultimate fate is a version of Ruth Ozeki herself.

“We’re living in a time when the membrane between fiction and nonfiction is quite permeable,” Ozeki says, explaining her audacious narrative choice. “The distinctions are falling away, and I think that’s because of the Internet. Everyone has an avatar now, or multiple avatars. We’re always fictionalizing ourselves and everyone understands this now. Every person we talk to brings out a different facet of ourselves. In this case, the Ruth who stepped forward was drawn out by Nao’s particular voice.”

But the choice to put a version of herself in the novel had implications for others around her, especially her husband. “I said to Oliver, well, if I’m going to be in the book you have to be in the book, too. He said that’s a good plot experiment. Go for it. Now he’s a little nervous. His concern about the Oliver character is that I’ve made him smarter than he is,” she says, laughing.

Like her character Ruth, Ozeki is a Zen Buddhist, and the concepts of her practice permeate, unobtrusively, the novel. Ozeki was ordained as a Zen priest in June 2010. She is associated with the Brooklyn Zen Center, and spends part of each year in New York City, where she has maintained an apartment in the East Village for more than 20 years.

“I started practicing Zen seriously when my father died, when things were really falling apart in my life. I got more and more serious about it as I was taking care of my mother when she had Alzheimer’s. When she died I thought a lot about succession. We don’t have children, so in a way, I don’t have a future. I’d been practicing Zen and I just realized I want to be a part of a lineage, a tradition, and help keep the practice alive and flourishing in the world. So I decided to ordain.”

Ruth’s and Nao’s separate but interconnected lives play out against a background of large-scale human suffering—the tsunami, 9/11 and the legacies of World War II.

“That’s certainly my experience of my life,” Ozeki says, “that there are these huge catastrophic events, one after the other. Each one is seismic and each shifts the ground on which we stand. My feeling is that fiction is where we process this. It’s where I try to make some sense of these kinds of events. Otherwise it’s just one damned thing after another.”

Yet, strangely enough, there is nothing particularly bleak about Ozeki’s novel. Part of that is due to her sly, often Zen-like sense of humor. “There’s almost a slapstick quality to Zen humor. It’s disarming. Literally. Because the whole point of Zen is to take away your armament, to sort of make you put down your defensive weapons. And feel things.”

And that happens to be an apt description of the impact of A Tale for the Time Being, a novel that is both disarming and likely to leave readers feeling its emotional impact for a long time to come.