Alden Mudge

Fiction

Joanna Hershon

Interview by Alden Mudge

Novelist Joanna Hershon says she has always wanted to write about her father and baseball. Until a few years ago, her father was the official doctor for the New York Yankees; he is now the team’s senior medical consultant.

The problem, Hershon says, is that her father “is self-effacing. He’s the strong, silent type. He rarely talks about work. I think that’s why he lasted so long with George Steinbrenner,” she adds, laughing. “He is definitely not giving out gossip, which is good for his job but not so great for eavesdroppers and writers.”

But if her father’s reticence has frustrated Hershon’s career as eavesdropper and writer about baseball, his and his classmates’ experiences at Harvard in the late 1950s are a tributary to the cascade of observations, investigations and imaginings that flow seamlessly into Hershon’s fourth novel, A Dual Inheritance.

Hershon—who lives in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens with her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, and their 7-year-old twin sons—remembers spending hours as a seventh grader in her father’s study reading about his classmates in the Harvard Red Book.

“There’s something we’re drawn to in the other. I think we’re all looking for what’s missing.”

“Basically alumni are asked to write about their lives. Some people write a couple of sentences; some people write a kind of personal essay. As a 12-year-old, I was just completely fascinated with these self-expressions. I was from a conservative suburban home, and I was always drawn to kind of fringy characters. How much our culture changed over those years just always fascinated me. At the time I was not thinking, oh I’m going to write a novel, but looking back, I think it planted a seed in my imagination.”

From that seed sprouted the opening of Hershon’s capacious new novel, which begins on the Harvard campus in 1962, at the start of the unexpected friendship of Hugh Shipley, reluctant scion of a storied New England family, and Ed Cantowitz, rejected son of an embittered, widowed, former boxer.

“I’m fascinated by environments in which unlikely friendships are possible, and I’m especially interested in male friendships,” Hershon says. “I think that has something to do with my perception as a woman of male friendships being kind of mysterious, with a depth of feeling that maybe isn’t always expressed.”

Then, after a pause, Hershon adds, “I’m aware that writing a book about a friendship between a Jewish guy and a WASPy guy is walking the line of stereotypes,” Hershon says. “But the reason I think it’s done all the time is that people, including me, are fascinated by it. There’s something we’re drawn to in the other. I think we’re all looking for what’s missing. I’m also really interested in insiders who feel like outsiders. So I didn’t find these characters remotely stereotypical, and I really committed to them.”

Indeed. Hugh and Ed—each with unique personal, cultural and sexual baggage, following divergent career arcs—end up at opposite ends of the world. Hugh, rebelling against the prejudices of his privileged upbringing, goes to East Africa as a dilettantish sort of anthropologist and stays on to dedicate his life to humanitarian efforts. Ed, driven to accumulate the sort of wealth that Hugh’s family has had for generations, goes first to Wall Street, then to China and then to jail. Theirs is a friendship that does not last very long after they leave college.

But in the long arc of the story—which takes the reader up to 2010—Ed and Hugh are brought together again through the more elastic and more enduring friendship of their daughters, Rebecca and Vivi.

“I always knew this was going to be a book where a great deal of time passes,” Hershon explains. “I wanted to explore that sense of nostalgia and the mystery of why certain friendships ignite something and remain, and certain friendships completely fizzle out with no lingering effects.”

One of the reasons A Dual Inheritance feels so lived or lived in—at times almost autobiographical—is Hershon’s unusual method of researching the book. “This book is kind of an experiment in my own crackpot anthropology,” she jokes. Instead of lots of traditional book-based research, Hershon “did a lot of interviewing people, a lot of really intimate discussions.”

Early on in her research, for example, Hershon tried to interview everyone she knew who had been at Harvard and Radcliffe in the late 1950s and early 1960s. When she ran her invented character of Hugh Shipley by one of her interviewees and asked if the character sounded plausible, the friend introduced her to the seminal anthropological filmmaker Robert Gardner, “who gave me just amazing information that I incorporated into the book.”

The vivid detail of Rebecca’s emotionally fraught visit with Hugh along Lake Tanganyika, which occurs late in the novel, derives from long conversations with Dr. Amy Lehman, a schoolmate who now heads a floating clinic on Lake Tanganyika. “That and good old imagination,” says Hershon, who has never set foot in Africa.

Even the novel’s title reflects Hershon’s anthropological point of view. “I was trying to find something that had a kind of anthropological, tribal nuance because in some ways I think this book is about people in their tribes trying to escape what does or does not define them.” Only after she settled on the title did she discover that the term is used for an actual anthropological theory.

Hershon has written three previous novels (Swimming, The Outside of August, The German Bride) and believes her latest is her most ambitious book yet. “It has a larger scope. It has a larger cast of characters than my previous books and a larger conversation about politics and work and class and money. I think that in itself is a departure. But reading a summary of the book, I worry that it doesn’t sound as good as it is. I think, oh gosh, you’re just going to have to read it.”

And she’s right. Summary doesn’t do justice to A Dual Inheritance. Readers will have to discover the book’s appeal for themselves.

Novelist Joanna Hershon says she has always wanted to write about her father and baseball. Until a few years ago, her father was the official doctor for the New York Yankees; he is now the team’s senior medical consultant.

The problem, Hershon says, is that her…

NonfictionMilitary HistoryHistory

Rick Atkinson

Interview by Alden Mudge

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Atkinson left the Washington Post in 1999 “to raise my game, to become a historian and use the longer lens of history” to write about World War II in Western Europe. He didn’t know that it would be 14 years before he typed the final words of The Guns at Last Light, the brilliant, more-than-worth-the-wait final volume of his epic Liberation Trilogy.

Atkinson did know from the outset that he faced daunting odds. An online search, for example, revealed something like 60,000 books devoted to World War II. The “Green Books,” the surprisingly well-written official U.S. Army history of WWII, run to 117 volumes. And the WWII archives of the Allied nations are seemingly endless. “The U.S. Army records alone—one service, one country—for World War II weigh 17,000 tons,” exclaims Atkinson, a self-described “archive rat,” during a call to the home he shares with his wife of 34 years, in Washington, D.C., abutting Rock Creek Park.

But for Atkinson, who was born in Munich in 1952 while his father, a career U.S. Army infantry officer, was serving in the occupation forces, WWII was “a part of the culture, a part of the landscape I grew up in. I think it’s part of my DNA.”

Then in the mid-1990s as a journalist, Atkinson “covered the endless successions of 50th-anniversary commemorations”—D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, VE Day—and had two epiphanies. “One was that because this was one of the greatest catastrophes in human history, it was the greatest story of the 20th century, and it was just bottomless. I don’t think you tap out the greatest events in human history. There will be more to write about this forever. The other epiphany I had was that World War II did not start at Omaha Beach for the Americans. There were earlier D-days in Africa and in Sicily and southern Italy. It’s a triptych, and the three panels are Africa, Italy and Western Europe.”

Atkinson published An Army at Dawn, the first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, in 2002. Hailed for its narrative power, vivid detail and riveting blend of the human experiences of common soldiers and battlefield commanders alike, it won the Pulitzer Prize for history. It also established the narrative style that would serve Atkinson so well throughout the trilogy. Each volume has a prologue, an epilogue and 12 chapters divided into four parts.

WWII was “a part of the culture, a part of the landscape I grew up in. I think it’s part of my DNA.”

“I sort of stumbled on the structure for volume one,” Atkinson explains. “Like a gem cutter, I think, I was trying to understand the structure of the story and how the facets naturally cleave. Then because I wanted to signal that this is really one story and that each volume mirrors the others, I thought having a similar structure would help me accomplish that, if I could do it without it being forced.”

The shared narrative structure does not feel at all forced in The Day of Battle, Atkinson’s brilliant account of the war in Sicily and Italy in 1943-44. Nor in The Guns at Last Light, the new and final volume of the trilogy, which takes readers from D-Day preparations to German surrender.

In fact, the exceptionally well-written new volume possesses an epic grandeur, draws from a broad range of historical and literary references, mobilizes an astonishing array of little-known detail and illuminates both the strategic and human dramas of all-out warfare in ways that allow it to shine even more brightly than the other panels in the triptych. In the 14 years since he began work on the trilogy, Atkinson’s children have grown into adulthood—his son is a Justice Department lawyer in Washington, and his daughter is a surgical resident in Cincinnati—and Atkinson himself has grown into mastery. The Guns at Last Light should be read not just as a great work of narrative military history, but as an accomplished work of American literature.

“By the time we get to the third book,” Atkinson says, deftly side-stepping a question about his literary ambitions, “the war has metastasized from company-level actions of a few score or a few hundred men in North Africa to Army Groups in which literally millions are fighting one another. It allows a sweep. There’s a tapestry quality to the whole thing. It’s almost as if you’re trying to write the Bayeux Tapestry. It’s just a big, huge, sprawling, awful calamity that you have an opportunity to write about in the grandest terms as a military historian.”

Atkinson says he turned down an appointment to West Point after high school because he already knew he wanted to be a writer, and the military academy “was not only all male at the time, it was all engineering. That didn’t play to my strong suit.” He thought he might become a college English professor but left the University of Chicago after earning a master’s degree because he “decided teaching was just too sedentary for me.” He became a journalist instead, and then, 14 years ago, a military historian.

“The challenge,” Atkinson says of his craft, “is to take a story that people think they know and about which much has been written—good stuff, too, in many cases—and try to make it fresh, try to make it sound in the reader’s inner ear as if this is a story they haven’t heard before.”

To that end, Atkinson first recruits the extraordinary detail gleaned from burrowing deep into the archives, examining not just official records but personal journals, letters and memoirs. Then, like a good novelist, he writes his chapters in dramatic scenes, highlighting the titanic (and petty) clashes of ego among the Allied leadership and the harrowing efforts of troops on the ground. Even more importantly, throughout the trilogy and especially in this final volume, Atkinson writes with great power about the wrenching human cost of the conflict.

“There’s something at play here that’s just so heartbreaking,” he says. “So I try to take this industrial-strength catastrophe that we call World War II and bring it down to an individual level so that the singularity of death—it’s like a snowflake or a fingerprint—comes home to the reader periodically to remind them of what this is really all about.”

Atkinson adds, “My feeling is that the true ambition of a narrative historian should be to bring people back from the dead.” To which an avid reader can only say, amen.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Atkinson left the Washington Post in 1999 “to raise my game, to become a historian and use the longer lens of history” to write about World War II in Western Europe. He didn’t know that it would be 14 years before…

Fiction

Tash Aw

Interview by Alden Mudge

Tash Aw says he is “by nature a solitary person.” No writing in cafes for him. He needs the solitude and silence of his small apartment in London to do most of his work.

But he wrote the middle section of his dazzling third novel, Five Star Billionaire, in Shanghai.

“I think I got caught up with the energy of Shanghai,” he says in British-accented English during a call to his borrowed office at Singapore’s Nayang Technological University, where he is finishing up a semester as writer in residence. At about that moment, a bell sounds and a polite voice in the background announces that the building is being evacuated, but Aw calmly reports that he is not in danger and continues our conversation. “At some point I became aware that I was writing with much more pace than I had been before.”

Five Star Billionaire explores the interconnected lives of five quite different characters who immigrate from Malaysia to Shanghai. “I’m interested in why people leave their homes to go to another country to start a new life. I think that’s one of the big themes in all my work,” he says of the earliest impulse behind the novel. “What I noticed about the process of immigration is that, for many immigrants, even though they want to commit themselves to their new life, their new country, what matters most to them emotionally is their old country. They’re trying to find something in their new country that they didn’t have back home.”

Aw, who is 41, grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and attended college in England. While there, he discovered it was possible to think of writing as a career, and he has made England his home base ever since. His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), won several awards, and his second, Map of the Invisible World (2010), drew literary raves as well.

In his latest, Five Star Billionaire, Aw unfolds the lives of his characters in Shanghai as he slowly and subtly reveals the circumstances in their past that have led them there and the emotional holes they are hoping to fill.

“I think this book opens a window as to what’s happening in China in a way that makes China fathomable.”

The characters’ stories are captivating and complex. Phoebe, who arrives in Shanghai as a poor factory worker with dreams inspired by the self-help books she avidly consumes, steals an identity card and sets out to remake herself by finding a rich husband. Yinghui, a woman of a certain age, abandons her artsy past back home and comes to Shanghai to reinvent herself as a businesswoman. Gary is catapulted to instant fame when he wins a talent contest. Justin, scion of a super-rich real estate development dynasty, comes to Shanghai on family orders to extend the company’s reach. Walter Chao, who speaks in grandiose self-help terminology and is the author of one of the self-help books Phoebe reads, turns out to be working a different plan altogether.

The plights of Aw’s characters are by turns comic and sorrowful. He writes with such specificity about their circumstances that their stories feel universal. But there is another vibrant character in the novel that American readers will likely find just as fascinating: the city of Shanghai, self-proclaimed cultural and intellectual leader of the New China.

“Shanghai has a strong personality. It’s a brash, modern city, but underneath all that there are layers of history and tradition as well,” says Aw, who, with writing fellowships and the ability to speak Mandarin (with, he notes, a Taiwanese accent), was able to explore the city and absorb its energy for a year.

“Shanghai wants to see itself as the New York for our times, as the place where people can arrive from anywhere and reinvent themselves. And there is a hell of a lot of reinvention going on because the New China is growing so rapidly that people don’t ask questions about where you’re from. They need your presence, they need your work, they need your labor and creative input.”

As his characters move through their lives in Shanghai, Aw presents a visceral sense of the vast appeal of this burgeoning, sometimes difficult city. Aw thinks his ability to do this with such deep understanding has something to do with being a writer from Malaysia, a smaller Southeast Asian country.

“Malaysians, Singaporeans, Thais and Indonesians grow up being really aware of how one’s fate is linked to the fate of people in the other countries around you,” he says. “China and America are big countries. In many different senses—economically, culturally—they don’t need the rest of the world. What my work reflects is that if you live in a lot of Asian countries, particularly the smaller Asian countries, you have an inextricable link with the other countries around you.”

Aw was among the first generation of Malaysians to be educated abroad. “Identifying as coming from somewhere and being something sometimes defies logic,” he says. “The experiences that are important to me are those from my first 18 or 19 years, and my relationship with Malaysia is much more complex than it is with England. It’s much more screwed up in some ways, but I think that sense of having a very tangled relationship means that I have a stronger identification with the place.”

Aw remains closely connected to his parents and large extended family in the region. His decision to spend a semester in Singapore, which is roughly 10 miles from Malaysia, was influenced by his desire to act as a guide and mentor for young writers there. “I think it’s important for me to give back something, to try and be a part of the new writing that is coming out of Southeast Asia today,” he says as the emergency announcements blessedly end.

Returning to the question of his identity as a Malaysian writer, he says, “It involves hybridity. The whole meaning of what it is to be Malaysian is one of worldliness.”

For some readers the captivating worldliness of Five Star Billionaire will be a wake-up call. Aw says this was never his aim. “My aim was to record what I saw going on, how Shanghai is this magnet for people from all over the world. I think this book opens a window as to what’s happening in China in a way that makes China fathomable. It doesn’t make China weird and scary. It gives, I think, a straightforward, truthfully complex view of what’s going on.”

Tash Aw says he is “by nature a solitary person.” No writing in cafes for him. He needs the solitude and silence of his small apartment in London to do most of his work.

But he wrote the middle section of his dazzling third novel, Five…

Fiction

David Gilbert

Interview by Alden Mudge

David Gilbert seems largely unfazed by the online kerfuffle regarding the title of his terrific second novel & Sons.

“I heard a little about it after the fact,” Gilbert admits during a call to his office on the ground floor of the Greenwich Village apartment where he lives with his wife and their three children, ages 11, 10 and almost 5. The issue is that “&” as an opening character refuses to show up in Internet searches, which could mean that online book buyers will miss a chance to read one of the best novels of the year.

But Gilbert was never asked about and never considered changing the title. “I remember walking around New York and seeing these ghostly building signs—‘. . . & sons’—and wondering, who are these sons? The ampersand is essential to the title because it evokes the idea of a family trade, the sense that there is the family business of family and you’re kind of stuck in the business.”

In truth, & Sons is less about family per se than it is about fathers and sons: biological fathers and sons and literary father figures and their progeny. A.N. Dyer, the novel’s central character, is an aging, reclusive New York writer whose first novel, Ampersand, was a coming-of-age story about upper-crust prep school boys. An instant bestseller with enduring appeal, the book lofted Dyer into the literary stratosphere. He became a famous writer and, alas, a lousy father—at least to his two older sons, Richard and Jamie, who are in their 40s (like David Gilbert himself) when the novel opens. The disruptive arrival of a third child, Andrew, who is 17 when & Sons begins, gives A.N. Dyer a chance for a paternal do-over. And the death of Dyer’s lifelong friend and butt of his literary oeuvre, Charles Topping, causes him to anxiously bring his alienated tribe back together in Manhattan for one weird week. Add to this the fact that this whole oddly exhilarating tale is unreliably related by Philip Topping, a failed writer who has issues of his own with his recently departed father and with A.N. Dyer & sons, and you get a novel with layers upon layers to contemplate, savor and laugh about.

"I think laughing with a book is as intimate as crying with a book."

Gilbert, who enjoyed early success in collaborative screenwriting ventures—most notably the Sundance pick Joshua—thinks of A.N. Dyer as a combination of J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon and a “Philip Roth-like character with the WASPy background of John Updike, who takes his life and spins it into fiction, in some cases burning bridges because of that.”

The roots of the novel, Gilbert says, lie in an unpublished short story that included a character who was a sort of footman-biographer to a great writer, and in an experience Gilbert had when listening to a talk by his father, former chairman of the investment bank Morgan Stanley.

“My dad is this impressive guy, but he’s also kind of unknowable; he is this naturally intimidating figure,” Gilbert remembers. “I was sitting at an event with a really old friend of his who had grown up with him. As he was starting his remarks, she turned to me and said she was always amazed to see my father in these situations because as a teenager he was so incredibly shy and awkward. And I thought, wow, that was never the way I saw my dad. My impressions of him have not changed in 45 years. But if I had seen him when he was 17, he would seem a totally different person. That’s where & Sons started to spin.”

In & Sons, Gilbert—who graduated from Middlebury College, then escaped west to the University of Montana to earn an MFA in fiction writing and returned to New York reluctantly, pulled by his need to reconnect with the woman who would be his wife—also pays homage to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The novel’s central character, his sons and their cohorts circumambulate this heady, mostly privileged realm. Most of the novel’s action takes place in vividly described apartments and hotels of the Upper East Side, on the eastern edge of Central Park, and at the lovingly rendered Frick Museum. Sense of place is usually thought of in terms of Faulkner’s South or Stegner’s West, but, strange as it seems, Gilbert’s & Sons argues for an Upper East Side sense of place.

“I have a love-hate relationship with New York and the Upper East Side,” Gilbert says. “My wife and I grew up within 12 blocks of each other. In the 1970s we carried mug money, and we certainly got mugged all the time. Coming back to New York in the 1990s felt like a defeat. But it is my home. I go up to 73rd and Lex, and it’s still the place I think incredibly fondly about. It has changed a lot over the last 30 years. But it’s still a place that makes you bump up against a lot of people you wouldn’t normally bump up against. It puts you in situations that are uncomfortable and new. I loved growing up in New York.”

What holds & Sons together sentence by sentence is its sense of humor. Despite its characters’ difficult or persnickety personalities and the psychological pain of the father-son relationships, the novel is frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

“I was the youngest child, and my currency was to make my siblings and, particularly, my mother laugh,” Gilbert says. “My mother has this great laugh. So growing up, my goal was to make her laugh. I’m too much of an introvert to ever be a comedian. But in writing I am always going for the laugh. I think laughing with a book is as intimate as crying with a book. It pierces that private element of reading a book, and it’s magical when it works.”

Gilbert’s & Sons has the magic. It will make you laugh. And it will make you think.

David Gilbert seems largely unfazed by the online kerfuffle regarding the title of his terrific second novel & Sons.

“I heard a little about it after the fact,” Gilbert admits during a call to his office on the ground floor of the Greenwich Village apartment where…

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Marisha Pessl

Interview by Alden Mudge

After the soaring critical and commercial success of her first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, it took Marisha Pessl quite a while to settle into the creation of her moody, boldly ambitious new novel Night Film.

No, it wasn’t anxiety about the so-called sophomore jinx, Pessl says during a call to her writing studio. On the phone, Pessl is friendly, even buoyant, laughing frequently, in contrast to the brooding atmosphere of her new novel. “I had taken time off because I was traveling a lot, and it took some time to get back into that limber, almost athletic, writer’s mentality,” she says. Pessl, who is 35, also got divorced and, after “a long 10 years downtown,” moved to a quiet, tree-lined street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The disruption and delay, she now thinks, were essential to the psychological underpinnings of Night Film. “So much time had gone by since I had written Special Topics that in a sense I had no memory of how I had done it,” says Pessl, who grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and wrote her first novel in 2004 while working as a financial consultant. Special Topics in Calamity Physics earned her a reported $500,000 deal with Viking, became a bestseller when it was published in 2006 and created a stir in literary circles.

“I had plotted Special Topics in a very detailed way, but with Night Film [I decided] to leave things to the subconscious rather than stage-manage everything,” she says. “Setting out on this really uncertain, dark journey, as terrifying as that was, helped me get to a total feeling of dislocation, which I hope parallels Scott’s experience.”

Scott McGrath is the novel’s central character. As the book opens, his life is in disarray. Once a prominent investigative journalist, his career has very publicly crashed and burned after he made outrageous accusations and a not-so-veiled threat against the elusive cult filmmaker Stanislas Cordova. As a result, his wife has left him in a bitter divorce, taking with her McGrath’s beloved daughter, Sam. Not long after, McGrath learns that Cordova’s 24-year-old daughter Ashley has been found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. McGrath sets out to solve the mystery of Ashley’s death, but ends up on a risky and very different sort of journey in pursuit of an entirely different magnitude of truth.

Pessl created a body of work for her fictional director, including the plots and casts of his 15 films.

“I love the conceit of a mystery,” Pessl says. “There’s something about that journey that we take when we try to get to the bottom of something that is so fulfilling. It’s that sense of being a truth seeker. I love being a seeker, an adventurer, always asking the question that no one wants to ask, looking behind the curtain when everyone tells me to stop. That’s just my nature. I have this instinctual curiosity about people and events and my environment. And for Night Film, working within that enigma, I wanted to create a dark journey that kept getting darker and darker, where the characters lost all sense of the real world.”

While Scott McGrath is the main seeker and central character of the novel, Stanislas Cordova is the reclusive, artistically driven, magnetizing mystery-figure of the book. He is a sort of black hole with great gravitational pull on each of the characters, but he never actually appears in the action of the story.

“I started conceiving Cordova after I watched a ‘60 Minutes’ interview with Mark Zuckerberg,” Pessl recalls. “He was talking about Facebook and the idea of total world transparency. I remember thinking to myself, why is that necessarily a good thing? There’s nothing wrong with hidden recesses. There’s nothing wrong with those sides of ourselves we will only reveal in a dark room. Total transparency is actually ridding human beings of the multifaceted nature of ourselves.

“I think of Cordova’s work as being compelling because his art gives people the opportunity to have the opposite of transparency—to be opaque, to be unknown, to be inexplicable, to be strange, quote-unquote, to be outside the norm. I liked the idea of creating a pop culture figure who was shadowy and who let people explore their darker selves.”

In one of the most riveting sections of the novel, McGrath and his compatriots—an aspiring actress named Nora and a slacker named Hopper, each with their own reasons for seeking the truth about Ashley’s death—sneak onto the grounds of The Peak, Cordova’s massive estate in the mountains north of New York. McGrath becomes separated from the others and is soon blundering around in the dark, terrified, among the sets of Cordova’s psychologically disturbing cult movies.

“I know the plots of all 15 of Cordova’s films,” Pessl says, “I know many of their scenes and I cast all the characters prior to actually writing Night Film.” She adds, laughing, that her mom (her “first, right-hand reader” and lifelong literary influence) “finally said, ‘I think Random House is waiting for you to write a novel, not direct 15 films and start a movement.’ I became somewhat obsessed with Cordova’s work and with making it real.”

The boldest and most enthralling way that Pessl makes Cordova—and other aspects of the novel—real is her use of graphics. Night Film includes eerily real-looking screenshots from websites, news reports about the Cordovas, reproductions of police reports, postcards and period photographs.

Pessl conceived of the novel’s visualizations, then worked with Kennedy Monk, a design agency in London, to bring them to life. “They were so fun. We literally cast some of the characters and made sure each illustration was shadowy enough that it wasn’t intruding upon the reader’s imagination,” she explains. “Today we learn from so many different sources, we expect to draw from a multitude of voices to form our conclusions. I wanted to have a visual archive that was very tangible for readers. I wanted to have the feeling that even though Ashley wasn’t present and even though her father wasn’t present, what they’d left in terms of imagery was so vibrant, it was as if they were there.”

While the characters and images of Night Film emerged with seeming ease and power from Pessl’s subconscious, she says she struggled with the novel’s pacing. “For me it is really easy to write internal thoughts, but it’s more difficult for me to move characters in space.” She never used to like to show her writing to anyone, except perhaps her mother, until the writing was complete. For her second novel, however, she “wanted to have a lot of eyes reading it. Even though it’s a long book, I wanted it to be a fast read. I didn’t want anything to drag, and I didn’t want anything purposeless in there.”

Pessl says she has never written from her personal point of view, and, laughing, she assures the interviewer that she comes from a close and happy family. “We don’t have any of the dark secrets I write about. But for each character and each voice, I have located those places in myself where I am very much in alignment, and I just tap into that. It’s like slipping into someone’s shoes and their overcoat and feeling like them.

“Cordova is a much more extreme character than I am, but in the past I have grappled with how much to give my art, to what extreme I can take my writing. When I am in the process of writing a novel, I become very embroiled in that world. It’s such a captivating experience that it’s easy to get lost. So some of the things that Cordova grapples with in terms of his art and his family, I have experienced in some ways, too.”

Night Film opens with a quote, supposedly from Stanislas Cordova, which begins, “Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love.”

Asked at the end of the conversation if she subscribes to that view, Pessl says, “I do. I think we find mortal fear in different ways. But if we’re not risking anything and we’re not putting ourselves on the line, then we are not living life as fully as we can. I think it’s an underlying human thing to stay safe and comfortable. But pushing myself and being bold, and making mistakes and walking to the edge of my talent and experience to see if I can be better is how I want to live—both as a writer and as a person. The process of coming to that realization is definitely reflected in Night Film. I think fear is healthy, and uncertainty is something we should welcome. Because when we figure out what’s beyond that, we have grown.”

In a way that many of her fans, new and old, will appreciate, Pessl has grown as a novelist in Night Film.

After the soaring critical and commercial success of her first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, it took Marisha Pessl quite a while to settle into the creation of her moody, boldly ambitious new novel Night Film.

No, it wasn’t anxiety about the so-called sophomore…

Fiction

Jennifer duBois

Interview by Alden Mudge

Jennifer duBois is concerned that some readers of her stunning new novel, Cartwheel, might think the book is somehow factual since the themes of the novel were “loosely inspired” by the Amanda Knox story.

“I’ve noticed that people are sometimes very suspicious of the notion of fiction,” duBois says during a call that reaches her in Orem, Utah, where she is visiting her husband’s family. DuBois, who is 29, and her husband, novelist Justin Perry, met in a writing workshop at Stanford, where both were Stegner Fellows, married almost exactly one year ago, and recently moved to Austin, where she teaches creative writing. “With my first novel [the widely and deservedly praised A Partial History of Lost Causes], because of its female first-person narrator, the first question I was always asked was how much of it is autobiographical. In this case, it’s a famous news story, so there are a lot of questions.”

But in fact, Cartwheel shares only the most basic outline with the story of Amanda Knox, the real-life American student who was tried in Italy for the murder of her roommate. In duBois’ novel, Lily Hayes comes to Buenos Aires for a semester abroad and little more than a month later is arrested for the brutal murder of her roommate Katy Kellers, a college student from Los Angeles.

“I wanted to explore some of the broad issues I saw in the Amanda Knox case,” duBois says, “so Lily Hayes is indeed a conventionally attractive, privileged young woman in a country that she sort of understands but maybe doesn’t totally understand. Beyond that, in all the dialogue, in every scene, nothing at all corresponds to the reality.”

“People seemed to look at this young woman and this case and see very, very different things.”

What most interested duBois about the case was that “people seemed to look at this young woman and this case and see very, very different things—but with similar levels of intensity. So some would say, oh, absolutely that girl did it, there’s something really wrong with her, you can just tell. Then you’d hear others say she was railroaded, it’s ridiculous, there’s no way she did it. And I realized that these reactions and the certainty with which people were feeling them were influenced and inflected by broader issues. This case unfolded at the nexus of a lot of countervailing factors, in terms of class and race and gender and religion and, I think, a kind of cultural misapprehension as well.”

So Cartwheel is at least in part an exploration of how the stories we tell ourselves to explain the world are shaped. The novel unfolds through multiple, shifting points of view. At one extreme is Lily’s father, who, duBois observes, “has this image of Lily as one in a long line of innocent, persecuted young women, the next victim of a witch hunt-like hysteria.” And at the other extreme is Eduardo Campos, the emotionally and morally complex prosecutor, who “sees Lily in the context of a long line of murderous American arrogance.”

And of course Lily, a mixture of naive confidence and insecurity, has her own story about what motivates her. “Lily believes her motivations to be good,” duBois explains. “She looks at her behavior as the tip of this ultimately benign iceberg that means well and wishes no harm and can’t quite grasp that other people don’t see this. I think that’s something everybody always struggles with. We’re always the most sympathetic audience for ourselves because we know all the mitigating variables.”

What makes Cartwheel so psychologically fraught—a reader will not want to put the book down because the story is so gripping, but will find it necessary to put it down because the interactions among the characters are often so intense—is that duBois leaves enough room for doubt that, she reports, early readers are divided in their beliefs about Lily’s innocence or guilt.

“One thing I wanted to gesture toward,” duBois says, “is that each individual contains, certainly not the capacity for murder, but a capacity for some kind of callousness or brutality. Even if she were innocent that doesn’t mean Lily doesn’t contain any capacity for wrongdoing. Something I always think about when somebody commits a crime and they go back into their past and find some small brutality or something is that only in retrospect would this appear to be a horrifying prophecy or omen. It’s interesting to me how people read reality into things.”

One of the most interesting readers of the novel’s reality, a character who demonstrates both how far the novel is from the Amanda Knox case and duBois’ enviable capacity for insight, invention and wit, is Lily’s almost-boyfriend Sebastien LeCompte. A brilliant 20-something who has come home to live as a recluse in the house next to Lily’s host family after his wealthy parents die under mysterious circumstances, Sebastien is preposterous, sardonic, funny and sad, and he embodies a kind of critique of how we talk meaningfully about important things.

“I think Sebastien was the emotional access point to the novel for me because he was the character I came to be most fond of,” duBois says. “Obviously he is a very wounded and a very lonely, lonely person. And obviously the incredibly maddening half-ambiguity in everything he says is a defense against that.

“One reason I was interested in him is that I think somewhere along the line we have become uncomfortable with sincerity. My generation—Millennials—are very comfortable with our vernacular: sarcasm, verbal irony, always saying sort of the opposite of what we mean, which ultimately translates as sincerity because it’s just the inverse. I liked the idea of a character who occupies this hazy middle ground, where people can’t quite take what he says seriously but also can’t just reverse it. I liked the comic potential of that and also, ultimately, the tragic potential.”

DuBois says she thinks her two novels are similar only in that “both books have intellectual and philosophical questions at their center, and I hope those questions are instantiated in characters that feel alive and real and the questions feel not just abstract or silly or cerebral but urgent.”

Cartwheel does indeed move with a sense of urgency. It’s a novel that a reader will be eager, perhaps even desperate, to discuss with other readers.

Jennifer duBois is concerned that some readers of her stunning new novel, Cartwheel, might think the book is somehow factual since the themes of the novel were “loosely inspired” by the Amanda Knox story.

“I’ve noticed that people are sometimes very suspicious of the notion of…

NonfictionSports

Tom Ambrose

Interview by Alden Mudge

Tom Ambrose considers himself “a newcomer to cycling.” True, as a youngster in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s, he owned and rode a number of bicycles. And now, as a grandfather, he pedals around the countryside near his home in rural Suffolk on a Dawes, which he calls “a sporting amateur’s bike.” But until recently, Ambrose had never written a word about cycling.

That changed with the publication of his well-designed, richly illustrated and informative new book, The History of Cycling in Fifty Bikes. It’s a volume that racers, hipsters on fixies, families with cargo bikes and occasional cyclists in their seemingly endless contemporary varieties will want to add to their collection.

In brisk, short chapters, Ambrose covers the technological advances of the bicycle, from the first foot-powered bikes like the so-called Hobby Horse through the development of gears and derailleurs, carbon fiber, bike lights and such advances as John B. Dunlop’s inflatable tire and James Starley’s wire spoke, innovations that were necessary to the later development of automobiles and aircraft. He relates captivating anecdotes from bike racing’s early days to the present, including cheating scandals from the earliest Tour de France competitions. And he introduces readers to the wide array of inventive, competitive and sometimes cantankerous personalities who have shaped and been shaped by bicycles.

But Ambrose’s chief interest, one that mostly murmurs quietly just beneath the surface of his narrative, is what he calls the “social aspects” of bicycling, its social history. The topic of the bicycle’s relationship to women’s emancipation, for example, is one that percolates through several chapters in the book.

“The bicycle became a viable means of transport at the time when—in the 19th century— you’ve got a developing women’s consciousness about equality and women’s rights,” Ambrose explains. “A woman never had anything of her own in terms of wealth, and she depended on men for everything, including transport. As women got ideas that they wanted more social liberty, this became irksome. So the coming of the bicycle gave them this great freedom. In a sense you could say that the lady’s bicycle is probably the emblem of female emancipation.”

Likewise, Ambrose observes the impact of the bicycle on the ebb and flow of working-class life. “The bicycle really did offer reasonably low-cost commuting. Of course that enables your workforce to come in from farther afield. You have all these factories of the Industrial Revolution sucking people into the cities, and the bicycle was very useful for that. Later, as prosperity spread, you have the interesting thing of people being borne into the city for work purposes then using the bicycle as a means of escape.”

Ambrose adds, with a sort of virtual wink, “And the bicycle was probably a good sexual vehicle as well. Cycling clubs sprang up and encouraged young men and women to go off bird watching in the countryside and things like that, but the real purpose, of course, was to get to know one another.”

“The invention of the bicycle was the greatest contribution to human health because it enlarged the gene pool,” the author says. “Young men from villages in France or Britain or the USA could then court girls from more distant villages. They would ride two or three miles instead of being confined to a breeding pattern within their own community.”

Ambrose’s text on the history of biking is accompanied by extensive photos and other depictions of bikes. These include photographs or period illustrations of each bicycle, as well as many of the inventors and bike racers.

There are also close-up views of technological innovations like the Lucas bike lamp, an early oil lamp that made nighttime cycling safer and more convenient. And there are completely unexpected images, such as one showing overloaded, camouflaged bicycles used by the North Vietnamese army to transport supplies without detection during the Vietnam war. “That was a major demonstration of using a Third World technology to defeat a First World power,” Ambrose says, returning to his interest in the bicycle’s impact on history.

Ambrose, who became a full-time writer after a career in filmmaking and advertising, thinks we are now witnessing “a third kind of revolution or effect of the bicycle as it has become an urban vehicle. Yes, it’s still a major sporting vehicle. But bicycling allows you to smartly maneuver in crowded and congested cities. So it’s the city dweller who has taken over the bicycle in many ways.”

To which this citified cyclist says: Ride on!

Tom Ambrose considers himself “a newcomer to cycling.” True, as a youngster in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s, he owned and rode a number of bicycles. And now, as a grandfather, he pedals around the countryside near his home in rural Suffolk on a…

Fiction

E.L. Doctorow

Interview by Alden Mudge

Acclaimed author E.L. Doctorow suggests a variety of ways to think about the form and movement of his short, swift, emotionally absorbing, intellectually troubling and often disconcertingly funny 12th novel, Andrew’s Brain.

“Think of it as an Installation,” he writes in answer to an emailed question. “This book has a special coded way of working. It comes back on itself with its circulation of images or leitmotifs. Everything in Andrew’s Brain gives light to everything else.”

This is true and helpful, to a point. The “Andrew” of the novel’s title is a cognitive scientist disclosing his life story from an undisclosed location to someone—psychiatrist? prison interrogator? Our guesses about the identity of Andrew’s interlocutor evolve as the novel proceeds. Andrew’s story is at least in part about the depth of suffering he experiences following traumatic losses he blames on his own haplessness. Doctorow says the novel grew from his “recollection of a man I knew years ago who accidentally killed his own child.”

But in telling his story, the captivating but unreliable Andrew invents and evades. “This is a book that doesn’t make a distinction between what might be real and what might not be real,” Doctorow says. Moving forward, Andrew’s story loops repeatedly in widening gyres through his emotional and intellectual concerns: the wily inventiveness of the human mind; a wife lost, a daughter almost inadvertently given away; the significance of Mark Twain as, writes Doctorow, “the writer whom we like to think of as the carrier of our national soul”; and a sort of abashed fascination with sexual acrobatics, to name just a few of the motifs that recur throughout the novel.

So? Repeating images and themes. OK. But “an Installation”?

“I was afraid you were going to ask me about that,” Doctorow says, laughing, during a phone call that reaches him the morning after he has received the National Book Awards 2013 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In his acceptance speech, Doctorow facetiously congratulated the “shortlisted content providers” of this year’s National Book Awards winners and questioned the meaning of the rise of the worldwide “overbrain,” his term for the Internet.

A cognitive scientist tests the boundaries of consciousness in Doctorow’s thought-provoking new novel.

A similar question pulses through this novel. Andrew, the cognitive scientist, wonders what will happen when biological processes can account for consciousness, when our experience of the human mind can be replicated by a computer. Why does this question recur with such urgency in the novel?

Doctorow, who turns 83 years old in January, responds in an email: “The neuroscientists who accept the materiality of mind—that is, who regard the soul as a fiction—don’t know yet how the brain becomes the mind—how the three pound neuro-electric system in our skulls produces our subjective life, our feelings, our thoughts. There are people building computers to emulate the brain and who believe in theory that a computer can be achieved that has consciousness. I’m not talking Hollywood movies here. If that ever happens, as Andrew assures us, it’s the end of the mythic world we’ve lived in since the Bronze Age. The end of the Bible and all the stories we’ve told ourselves until now. How can that not interest me, or you, or anybody? The impact of that would be equivalent to the planetary disasters of global warming, overpopulation or another giant asteroid blowing us to smithereens.”

Later, in the follow-up call, Doctorow returns to the discussion of the narrative shape and movement of Andrew’s Brain. “Do you know the music of Steve Reich or Philip Glass? It’s phase music in which the music doesn’t proceed in a linear organization but as chords or musical statements that slowly, gradually change. Very often music has been an inspiration to me. In the process of writing it’s a felt thing, sort of visceral. One of the ways I think of writing is staying on the nerve of a book. And if you go off the nerve everything gets flat and dead.”

Thus Andrew’s Brain includes beautiful, nerve-tingling, riffing passages of prose, about which Doctorow says, “I’ve always been aware of the rhythm of sentences and the possible music in them. Which might drive me to a certain unconscious extent. I’m not sure. I grew up in a very musical family. My mother was a wonderful pianist and my father [was also musical] and my older brother formed a swing band when he was 16. I wasn’t particularly good at learning to play the piano; in fact when I announced to the family that I didn’t want to take lessons anymore, nobody objected. But somewhere or another surrounded by all this music, which I loved, the idea of music and language elided, so the sound of words and the rhythm of sentences has always been important to me.”

It is also a musical reference that introduces the final, explosive sequence of the novel. Andrew’s ex-wife is remarried to an opera singer who at one point encounters Andrew while dressed for the role of Boris Godunov, a pretender czar about to be overthrown by another pretender. Andrew considers the deceptions of a thinking brain, the mind’s ability to pretend itself into any situation, Andrew’s own inventive mind included. Then he tells his interlocutor a story that is in the same instant sharply funny and deeply anguished about a pretender he has known, a former resident of the White House.

In other Doctorow novels, his characters exist within an American social and political context. The same seems to be true in Andrew’s Brain. In fact, the novel’s final chapters cast a backward light and rearrange what we think we know about Andrew and what he has experienced. Does this mean that Doctorow, like Andrew’s frequently invoked Mark Twain, has written a book about the national soul?

Doctorow laughs. “The trouble with a question like this is that if an astute reader has creative interpretive ideas, he looks to the author for the certification of these ideas. But I’m the last person in the world to certify your reading. Really what happens is when you finish writing a book, you rely on other people to tell you what you’ve done. So I have to duck that question and say if you see that, if you feel that, more power to you.”

Doctorow can affably duck the question, but he can’t avoid the fact that he’s written a remarkable, provocative novel that readers will want to return to again and again.

Acclaimed author E.L. Doctorow suggests a variety of ways to think about the form and movement of his short, swift, emotionally absorbing, intellectually troubling and often disconcertingly funny 12th novel, Andrew’s Brain.

“Think of it as an Installation,” he writes in answer to an emailed…

NonfictionMemoir

Gary Shteyngart

Interview by Alden Mudge

After writing three critically acclaimed novels, Gary Steyngart turned to memoir. Little Failure, published this month, is an unsparing, often funny, account of Steyngart’s anxiety-ridden life from his early childhood in Russia, through his family’s immigration to Queens, New York, and ending with the publication of his first novel. Our reading of the memoir raised some additional questions, which Shteyngart answered via email.

You've written three successful novels. Why a memoir now, earlyish in your career?
Earlyish? I'm 41. That's 76 in Russian years.

You dedicate Little Failure to your parents and to your analyst. Readers will discover why. What does your analyst have to say about you honoring him this way?
He seemed pretty happy, although he doesn't really say much of anything. It's old-fashioned Freudian-like therapy where I just blather on and he keeps mostly quiet.

You describe a father frustrated by his failure to achieve his dreams who was abusive to you. Does he still believe the adage you quote in the book that "Not to hit is not to love"?
I don't think so. Now it's all about love without hitting.

Ok it was a mistake. But your father took you to see the film Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman? How old were you?
Old enough to know I was watching the best film ever made, young enough not to know what to do about it.

Like many Russian Jews who left the Soviet Union, your father idolized Ronald Reagan. Early on you did too. You describe your then self as a "ten-year-old Republican." While your father is still a conservative, you are not. What happened?
Oberlin College, that's what happened. Plus a general softening towards people. On my part.

You write that from your mother you inherited, among other things, "fanatic attention to detail." What traits did you inherit from your father?
Dark humor, love of nature.

You were severely asthmatic as a child growing up in Leningrad. Soon after you arrived in NYC at age 7 your symptoms seem to have disappeared. What's the explanation for that?
I think the asthma went away when I hit puberty, which I believe happens to many children.

You didn't entirely lose your Russian accent until you were 14. How much of a conscious effort did you make to speak American English like a native?
I practiced in the mirror like crazy. When I got a TV, I got a Texan accent (“Dallas” was on).

"Soviet vacationing was a rough, exhausting business," you write of your childhood trips to the Crimea in the 1970s. Where do you travel for fun these days?
To the Crimea of America. It's called Miami Beach.

You graduated summa cum laude from Oberlin College—despite the recreational excesses that earned you the nickname Scary Gary. Who coined the phrase and what episode inspired the coinage?
I can't fully recall who coined it. I think at some drunken party someone said, "Oh, look, even Scary Gary is here." A nickname was born.

Really? You never, ever had writer's block?
Sorry. I have many other problems, though.

What's your favorite photograph in the book? Why?
Maybe the one on the cover. Most boys would grab the steering wheel of the toy car, but I was scared out of my mind. I knew what the insurance rates in Leningrad were like.

Little Failure essentially recounts your life until the publication of your first novel. But in passing, jumping ahead, you several times mention your wife. You're married? Do tell.
I am married! To a woman! She's very nice!

After writing three critically acclaimed novels, Gary Steyngart turned to memoir. Little Failure, published this month, is an unsparing, often funny, account of Steyngart’s anxiety-ridden life from his early childhood in Russia, through his family’s immigration to Queens, New York, and ending with the publication of his first novel. Our reading of the memoir raised some additional questions, which Shteyngart answered via email.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Bich Minh Nguyen

Interview by Alden Mudge

The surprising source of Bich Minh Nguyen’s enthralling second novel, Pioneer Girl, was her discovery that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter Rose had traveled to Vietnam as a journalist in 1965.

Nguyen (pronounced New-win), whose family fled Vietnam in 1975 when she was 8 months old and settled eventually in Grand Rapids, Michigan, says she “had read the Little House on the Prairie books when I was a kid, and I loved them. And I would reread them as an adult as comfort literature. I identified very strongly with them, which some people would think really strange, because why would an Asian American like Little House on the Prairie? But there’s actually a strong connection in terms of the immigrant/migrant experience of starting over. When I found out about Rose Wilder Lane, I felt this was a connection that was asking me to investigate a little bit more.”

“The real story of our family is never known to us because so much of it happens before us.”

Rose Wilder Lane, as readers of Pioneer Girl—or Wikipedia—will discover, was a prominent journalist and well-regarded novelist in her era. She was a close enough friend to President Herbert Hoover that her voluminous papers are housed at his presidential library in Iowa. And many scholars think that if she did not write the Little House books outright, then it was her editorial hand that gave narrative shape—and popular success—to her mother’s efforts. Three years before she died, she went to Vietnam on assignment from a woman’s magazine to offer a woman’s perspective on the war.

The facts of Rose Wilder Lane’s life—and the secrets that may lie hidden beneath those facts—become a kind of obsession to Lee Lien, the narrator of Pioneer Girl. Unable to find a university teaching job after completing her dissertation on Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, she returns home to help her domineering mother and sweet-tempered grandfather run the Lotus Leaf Café, a struggling Asian fusion-ish restaurant in a strip mall west of Chicago. The discovery of a possible family connection to Rose Wilder Lane sets Lee on a quest to unlock the secrets—real or imagined—of Rose’s life and resolve some of the mysteries of her own family background.

“Meshing the historical with the fictional was a huge challenge for me,” Nguyen says. “I felt that taking a real-life character and imagining an alternate reality is a huge risk. I wanted to do justice to Rose Wilder Lane’s life. I didn’t want to treat her life as just ‘material’ because she’s a fascinating person and a wonderful writer. At the same time I was interested in the idea of mythmaking and the idea of trying to find one’s story.

“Rose kept so many journals and even copies of the letters she sent to other people because she wanted to be in charge of the trajectory of her story,” Nguyen says. “The narrator of the novel, Lee, is essentially in that same pursuit in her family. She wants to take control of her family’s narrative. But the real story of our family is never known to us because so much of it happens before us. We’re researchers picking up clues, trying to understand our parents and family members who are no longer with us. We’re wondering, guessing and coming to conclusions that may not be 100 percent accurate.”

What is certainly true is that Lee’s family is full of conflict. Lee and her mother clash often. Her brother Sam, the favored son, steals from the family and leaves Chicago for San Francisco, where, it turns out, Rose Wilder Lane lived for some years, and where Sam’s is not the only Asian-American face in the crowd, as he tells his sister when she arrives in pursuit of a resolution to the Rose Wilder Lane mystery.

“I’m really fascinated by conflict in immigrant families,” Nguyen says. “This conflict plays out regardless of ethnic background. If you’re a first-generation immigrant in the United States, your children are going to reject so much of what you represent and what you desire. It’s partly the desire for assimilation and partly trying to find one’s own identity while being stuck between two different cultures.”

“I’m really fascinated by conflict in immigrant families."

Pioneer Girl, which takes its title from the working title of the first book in the Little House series, offers a deeply resonant portrait of contemporary Asian-American immigrant life. But, with, for example, a marvelous riff on the generic Chinese restaurant that exists at the edges of many towns in the Midwest, the novel makes clear that it is exploring a different sort of immigrant experience than we often read about—call it the Middle America Asian-American experience.

“That was probably the most autobiographical part of the novel,” Nguyen says, “wondering why my family decided to stay in the Midwest. When we arrived as refugees, we were resettled in Michigan, and for a long time my family wasn’t particularly happy there, but my father never thought about moving. I always thought that was a fascinating aspect of my dad’s character.”

Nguyen previously touched upon these experiences in her highly praised 2007 memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner. “I think my Asian-American Midwestern experience is marked by alienation—not all the time, but a little bit—and self-consciousness. I don’t regret my upbringing because it was a fascinating way to grow up and there was so much conflict that it gave me material probably for the rest of my life. But because I grew up in this dual culture, I never quite felt at home anywhere.”

Still, until last summer, Nguyen had spent her whole life in the Midwest. In July, she and her husband, writer Porter Shreve (who also has a novel coming out in February), left their teaching positions in the writing program at Purdue University and moved with their children, ages 4 and 2, to the San Francisco Bay Area. Nguyen now teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at the University of San Francisco.

“I’m a Midwesterner. We sort of believe you should grow where you’re planted. So it was hard to leave,” Nguyen says. “It took me and my husband a long time to make this decision. It was such a life-changing decision. But the Bay Area is one of these places where, especially if you’re from the Midwest, you think—wouldn’t that be a dream. We love it here.”

The surprising source of Bich Minh Nguyen’s enthralling second novel, Pioneer Girl, was her discovery that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter Rose had traveled to Vietnam as a journalist in 1965.

Nguyen (pronounced New-win), whose family fled Vietnam in 1975 when she was 8 months old and settled eventually in Grand Rapids, Michigan, says she “had read the Little House on the Prairie books when I was a kid, and I loved them. And I would reread them as an adult as comfort literature."

FictionDebut Fiction

Nickolas Butler

Interview by Alden Mudge

"I wanted to write about Wisconsin,” Nickolas Butler says of the genesis of his soulful first novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, which gave voice to his homesickness.

“My first semester at the [Iowa] Writers' Workshop, I was down there alone. I was sleeping in this terrible apartment,” Butler says. Picture a fire-engine-red lower section of a bunk bed borrowed from his brother-in-law, a white table borrowed from his mother-in-law, and a folding chair, the only furnishings in the Iowa City apartment where Butler lived from Monday to Thursday before returning to his family.

“I missed my wife; I missed my son; I was just overcome by loneliness and homesickness,” he recalls. “I was sitting at that table, thinking about my hometown, and I started writing. The first 35 pages came basically in one sitting.”

Those opening pages are told from the point of view of Henry “Hank” Brown, who, with his wife Beth and their two young children, struggles to maintain a family farm on the outskirts of a tiny Wisconsin town named Little Wing. Hank’s is one of five voices that tell this story of contemporary small-town Wisconsin life and of close friendships disrupted by the passage of time.

“There’s a little bit of me in every character,” Butler says during a call that reaches him at his home in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, a hamlet outside of Eau Claire, where he grew up. “Hank is probably the moral, ethical side of me. He’s got this strong moral compass. He’s the most boring character in the book for me, frankly. Because basically he’s not going to do anything wrong, and that’s not super exciting.”

Small-town Wisconsin roots link five longtime friends in Butler's lyrical novel.

Most readers won’t actually agree with Butler’s assessment of Hank’s boredom factor. Hank is the novel’s true north, an intelligent, observant exemplar of the best of Midwestern values. He is in many ways a far better man than his close childhood friend, turned not-so-close friend, Leland  “Lee” Sutton, who under the nom de musique Corvus has become an international rock star. Lee’s first album—“Shotgun Lovesongs”—was recorded in a converted chicken coop outside of Little Wing and gives the novel its title. Lee’s ill-advised confession to Hank leads to one of the bigger disruptions among boyhood friends in Little Wing.

The character of Leland has also already brought some national media attention to Shotgun Lovesongs because of Butler’s real-life relationship with Justin Vernon, founder of the Grammy-winning band Bon Iver. Butler went to high school with Vernon, so some early readers have assumed that Leland is a thinly veiled representation of Vernon. Butler says he hasn’t spoken to Vernon in 18 years.

“You have to understand that in this community there was no template for artistic success before him. Justin gave a lot of us this sense of confidence that we could go out and do something different. So the character Leland is inspired by him, but he’s obviously not based on him. Justin has never been shot in the leg, and I don’t think he’s even ever been married. One thing that sets him apart from so many other people is that he went away, gained success, and then came home. He’s really involved in the community. Being homesick for Eau Claire and thinking about its landscape, he was a really nice way to get into all of that.”

Still, Butler says there’s much more of himself than Vernon in the character of Lee. “The story of Lee’s first album is a lot about the pressure I felt with this book. I was nearing the end of grad school. I’d had a string of terrible jobs that never paid any money at all and were at times dangerous, and I didn’t want to go back to that. I had a young kid, and I just wanted to be something more. So I felt a great pressure and urgency to write the book.”

Through Lee’s and Hank’s difficulties with each other, Shotgun Lovesongs vividly portrays the tensions that sometimes develop in male friendships as people grow away from high school and college and into adulthood.

“I’m hitting a point in my life when some of the easy friendships are becoming more difficult because of all the different real-world pressures: money, marriage, kids and jobs,” Butler says. “All of a sudden friends begin wondering why it’s so easy for somebody and so difficult for somebody else to make money. Why is it easy for couple A to have kids when couple B can’t? Something happens when these sorts of jealousies get overlaid on long-term friendships. I was experiencing a little bit of that in my life and was wondering why.”

"For me it was important to say, hey, this is the face of small-town America right now. It’s not what you think.”

Butler’s novel also voices an emphatic love song to what he calls “my place on earth,” and to small-town life in general. Not that Butler is unaware of the difficulties and of the changing nature of America’s small towns. Several characters in the novel end up leaving for greater opportunities in Chicago or Minneapolis. Lee for a while lives in a rural boarding house with Mexican laborers. “I don’t think it’s offensive to say, but a lot of the work being done around here is not being done by natural-born American citizens. It’s being done by really hardworking Mexican people, and that’s not something I’ve seen in literature. For me it was important to say, hey, this is the face of small-town America right now. It’s not what you think.”

For a number of years while he made his weekly trips to Iowa, Butler and his wife, an attorney and “a voracious reader,” and their son lived in the Twin Cities area. As he was revising the novel, the couple had a second child. Butler says they had been saving for years to return to the Eau Claire area, where his wife had also grown up. With the sale of the novel, last August they bought their house and 16 acres of land in Fall Creek. “My kids have all four grandparents within a 10-minute drive,” Butler says. “You can’t beat that.”

And despite the fact that it is 18 below zero outside when we begin our conversation, Butler says, “This world that I inhabit is important to me. It is beautiful to me. . . . I feel extremely fortunate now. I do feel like I’m kind of living inside a dream.”

"I wanted to write about Wisconsin,” Nickolas Butler says of the genesis of his soulful first novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, which gave voice to his homesickness.

“My first semester at the [Iowa] Writers Workshop, I was down there alone. I was sleeping in this terrible apartment,” Butler says.

NonfictionMemoir

Barbara Ehrenreich

Interview by Alden Mudge

Barbara Ehrenreich and her younger sister are very close. But her sister really, really does not like the title of Ehrenreich’s new memoir, Living with a Wild God.

“She thinks I’m being too soft on theism in this book. She’s like, how can you write a book with God in the title! It was hardcore, the atheism we came from,” Ehrenreich says with a bemused laugh during a call to her home in Alexandria, Virginia, where she moved some years ago to be near her daughter and grandchildren.

Readers of Ehrenreich’s earlier books—Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch or Bright-Sided, for example—know her to be a smart, funny, opinionated progressive voice. Her fascinating new book—her most personally revealing work so far—almost inadvertently points to the sources of both her rigor and her passion.

Ehrenreich accepts a challenge from her younger self to explore the “uncanny” mystical experiences of her youth.

Ehrenreich, who has described herself as a fourth-generation atheist, was the child of parents raised in radicalized mining families of Butte, Montana. Her parents, we learn, eloped in their teens and eventually became successful and admired community members. “They were smart,” Ehrenreich says. “They were unusual in their upward mobility. They encouraged reading, inquiry, curiosity. But they had problems. My father had the drinking problem first. And my mother didn’t like me. This would make no sense in today’s child-raising discourse, because we now have these artisanal project children, where we constantly think about their feelings and challenges. My mother’s belief was do something useful or get out of the way. My parents imbued me with a firm, dogmatic atheism and rationalism.”

This is the crux of the story Ehrenreich explores in Living with a Wild God. Sometime around the age of 13, she began to have strange experiences of the ineffable. “In these episodes of disassociation as a teenager, I could not look at a chair and see a chair. I saw something else, unnamed, unaccounted for, something beyond language,” Ehrenreich says. At the same time, as a rationalist, she pondered the meaning of a life that ended in death in a cooly “solipsistic” manner.

For a decade or so, starting when she was 14, she kept an episodic—and remarkably articulate—journal of her thoughts and observations about this dilemma, which she called “The Situation.” Her seemingly mystical experiences culminated in a vividly described, ecstatic, hallucinatory morning in Lone Pine, California, after a ski trip with her brother and a friend.

For years, as she battled with her parents, went off to Reed College, earned a Ph.D. in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University, and then made a U-turn into social activism and a career as a writer, Ehrenreich explained these teenage episodes to herself as a kind of temporary insanity.

But about five years ago she decided to write “a massive, sweeping history of religion, the rise of monotheism, which I do not applaud.” Ultimately that big idea didn’t work, but Ehrenreich did have the journal of her younger self wrestling with big thoughts. And, it so happens, in that journal her younger self threw down a challenge in July 1958 to her future self, writing: “What have you learned since you wrote this?”

“I think there was a little bit of a secret polemic here,” Ehrenreich says of her interest in writing about the struggles of her younger self. “Which is that I think that there is a narrative trend, certainly in mainstream American fiction, of maturing, of growing beyond whatever you were in your youth and coming to a more reflective and socially responsible state. I find that kind of repellant. I have respect for the child and the teenage persons of myself. I undertook this with the feeling that I had to return to them, that I could learn from them, that their experiences were not something to be put away. Some of it is very embarrassing, which is to say I was pretty self-involved. But I see the logical rigor that got me there.”

In the intervening years, it turns out that Ehrenreich has learned quite a bit. Researching this book, which as it develops becomes a compelling mix of memoir and metaphysical rumination, she read widely in philosophy, science and the writing of mystics and others who seemed to have had experiences similar to hers. One of her most personally satisfying scientific discoveries was that the seemingly botched results of her experiments on silicon electrodes for her college senior thesis could now “be explained by a complete paradigm shift in science. There were just phenomena that could not have been imagined in 1963.” She writes that “the reductionist core of the old science has been breached. We have had to abandon the model of the universe in which tiny hard particles interact and collide to produce, through a series of ineluctable, irreversible steps, the macroscopic world as we know it.”

"I have respect for the child and the teenage persons of myself. I undertook this with the feeling that I had to return to them, that I could learn from them, that their experiences were not something to be put away."

These previously undiscovered phenomena and the conceptual shifts in science in recent decades lead Ehrenreich to an astonishing speculation in her final chapter. She wonders if hers and similar experiences could be an attempt at contact from another kind of being—not God; Ehrenreich remains an atheist—but something like what scientists call “an emergent quality, something greater than the sum of all its parts.”

Asked about this idea, Ehrenreich says, “We don’t have the data. Let me say that scientifically. We don’t know enough about the experiences other people have. I suspect many people have uncanny, unaccountable experiences that they attribute to something conventional—God or what they’ve been told God is. Or they put it aside completely. What I’m saying in this book is, let’s not bury this anymore. Something happens often enough to enough of us that we ought to know what it is. The urgency for me is sharpened by my critique of science and its unwillingness in so many ways to acknowledge that there are other conscious agencies or could be in the universe than just ourselves.”

And does Ehrenreich now believe that she’s risen to the challenge made by her earlier self? “I do feel I’ve done my best to discharge my responsibility to her.”

Barbara Ehrenreich and her younger sister are very close. But her sister really, really does not like the title of Ehrenreich’s new memoir, Living with a Wild God.

“She thinks I’m being too soft on theism in this book. She’s like, how can you write a book with God in the title! It was hardcore, the atheism we came from,” Ehrenreich says with a bemused laugh during a call to her home in Alexandria, Virginia, where she moved some years ago to be near her daughter and grandchildren.

NonfictionMemoir

Tom Robbins

Interview by Alden Mudge

Tom Robbins had no intention of writing a memoir. “I was conned into it by the women in my life,” he says with a laugh during a call to his home in the small town of La Conner, Washington.

“They had been pestering me to write down the stories that I’d been telling them—bidden and unbidden—over the years. I wrote 20 pages and showed it to them, thinking that would shut them up. But it had the opposite effect.”

Bless the women in Tom Robbins’ life! They forced him into committing to paper Tibetan Peach Pie, a book that in conversation Robbins calls “an account of my personal pursuit of the marvelous” and in print carries the subtitle “A True Account of an Imaginative Life.” The book is both of these—and more.

Robbins calls his colorful new memoir “an account of my personal pursuit of the marvelous.”

Robbins, as fans of novels like Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Jitterbug Perfume (1980) or Villa Incognito (2003) know, has a Trickster spirit. He performs a sort of verbal-spiritual-comedic magic on the page. He characterizes his philosophical outlook, formed in part from his interest in Japan and Zen Buddhism, as “crazy wisdom and sacred mischief.”

“When I was in Japan,” he explains, “I got to have an audience with a famous Ninja, quite an old man. His house was full of Mickey Mouse memorabilia. This is true of the wisest people I have encountered in my life. They have all had this sense of playfulness. I think I was more or less born with it. It’s maintaining a fixed eye on the ultimate seriousness of life, but refusing to take events and, particularly, yourself too seriously.”

This energy and perspective also infuses Robbins’ memoir. Beginning as a child growing up in North Carolina and Virginia in the 1930s, Robbins writes that he was possessed by a seemingly inborn bohemianism and a “congenitally comic sensibility” that led his mother to lovingly refer to him as Tommy Rotten. He had a wandering, freedom-seeking spirit. He spent time in a military boarding school (where in a quixotic effort he foolishly re-entered a burning dormitory), time at Washington and Lee University (where Tom Wolfe, a founder of new journalism, was a big man on campus), and time in the U.S. Air Force in Korea (where he taught techniques of weather observation). He had four short marriages early in adulthood and, since 1987, a long one. He was an early, enthusiastic adopter of LSD and describes the first time he tried it as “the most rewarding day of my life, the one day I would not trade for any other.” He writes about, among many other events, encounters with Timothy Leary and Charles Manson and trips to far-flung regions of the world.

But Robbins also had an early love of words and stories. He won prizes—even in Air Force story-writing contests—for his fiction. He became a journalist. He was an art critic and music critic for underground newspapers in Seattle. And then he went to a concert by The Doors.

“It was so unlike any rock concert that Seattle had seen to that point. It just blew everybody away. I was in almost a traumatized state, an ecstatic trauma, when I went back to my house and up into the attic and sat down to write the review. It wasn’t that I was influenced by particular lyrics or by Jim Morrison’s style. It was such a cathartic experience that it loosened up something in my creative process. Almost instinctively I wrote the review. And then I thought, this is the way I want to sound from now on.”

Robbins’ first published novel, Another Roadside Attraction, became a kind of anthem of ’60s (or early ’70s) youth culture. “In that novel,” Robbins says, “I attempted not to write about the ’60s but to recreate the ’60s. In order to do that, I had to reinvent the novel, because the traditional novel moves from minor climax to minor climax to major climax, up an incline plane. But that didn’t lend itself to capturing that period with any depth or truth.”

“Sometimes the muse shows up and sometimes she doesn’t. But at least she knows where you’ll be at 10 o’clock in the morning. She doesn’t have to look for you in the bars or along the beaches.”

That novel captured the zeitgeist so successfully that to this day people assume that Robbins writes while stoned and that his sensibilities are trapped in the ’60s. These assumptions make Robbins laugh. He writes in the memoir that he is a slow and deliberate writer who avoids even mild stimulants while working and that the concerns of his novels have moved further forward into issues of contemporary life than the outdated views of his critics. Robbins’ beautifully profligate prose is labored over one sentence at a time. “If you’re a professional, you show up every day,” he says. “Sometimes the muse shows up and sometimes she doesn’t. But at least she knows where you’ll be at 10 o’clock in the morning. She doesn’t have to look for you in the bars or along the beaches.”

However, for the genre of fiction and the genre of memoir, Robbins waits on slightly different muses. About writing fiction, Robbins says, “I am one of the rare breed of writers who believes that the best part of writing is creating situations in which language can happen. I have to surround the act of writing with an aura of surprise and terror. So I take my research and imagination and my sense of humor and my vague feelings of where I want my day to go and pack them into my little canoe and push out onto the vast and savage ocean and see where the current takes me.”

Of this memoir he says, “I’m not inventing situations, I’m dealing with facts. The challenge for me was to keep the language lively and unpredictable, while remaining faithful to the facts.”

In July, Robbins will turn 82. That hardly seems possible given the antic energy of Tibetan Peach Pie. Wikipedia  and the Library of Congress can’t believe it either—they assert that Robbins is 4 years younger. “Wikipedia,” Robbins wryly notes, “is the fountain of youth. They obviously know more about me than my mother.”

These days Robbins goes to yoga and pilates classes, travels with his wife Alexa, and still shows up on time for his muse. In other words he stays connected with the women we must thank for his new memoir.

“I’ve had a messy life,” Robbins admits. “But in the tangle, I think the silver thread of spirituality, the red thread of passion and, of course, the elastic and multicolored thread of imagination have constantly run through it. And all of that is bound together with the inky thread of writing.”

That’s a self-assessment that sounds just about right.

 

Author photo credit Jeff Corwin.

This article was originally published in the June 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tom Robbins had no intention of writing a memoir. “I was conned into it by the women in my life,” he says with a laugh during a call to his home in the small town of La Conner, Washington.

“They had been pestering me to write down the stories that I’d been telling them—bidden and unbidden—over the years. I wrote 20 pages and showed it to them, thinking that would shut them up. But it had the opposite effect.”

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