Alden Mudge

FictionDebut Fiction

Jess Row

Interview by Alden Mudge

If a writer should follow Ernest Hemingway’s well-known dictum to write what he knows, then first-time novelist Jess Row just might be in the wrong business.

Case in point? In his highly regarded collection of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu (2005), Row, who taught English for two years in Hong Kong, wrote audaciously and movingly from the point of view of Chinese characters.

And, now, in his imaginative and thought-provoking first novel, Your Face in Mine, Row writes about a white man named Martin Lipkin who has “racial reassignment surgery” and becomes a black entrepreneur named Martin Wilkinson. In the process, Martin’s predicament allows Row to explore the perplexing, emotionally and politically charged issues of black and white identity. Row also invents a syndrome—Racial Identity Dysphoria Syndrome, or RIDS—that may leap from the pages of fiction to the pages of medical or psychology textbooks some day in the not-too-distant future.

Row's novel poses a startling question: What if we could change our racial identity through surgery?

“I was thinking, what if there was racial reassignment surgery that was like the gender reassignment surgery of our time?” Row says of the conception of the novel during a call to his home in NYU housing in Manhattan’s West Village. Named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007, Row teaches creative writing and literature at The College of New Jersey. His wife is a poet and scholar of African-American literature and black diaspora literature at NYU, hence their housing situation. “Then I thought, what if there were people who believed themselves to be born in the wrong racial body and had the surgical means to change that,” Row adds.

Sounds like science fiction, right? But on a research trip to Thailand where he interviewed plastic surgeons doing sex change operations, Row found that his premise was not so far-fetched. “When I told them what my book was about, one of them said that is already happening, we just don’t use those words for it. And when I asked if they had clients they thought would do this if it were available, they said absolutely, we talk to people all the time who want to transform themselves in this way.”

The very human desire for transformation is palpable throughout Your Face in Mine. The story is told by Kelly Thorndike, a former bandmate of the young, white Martin. As the novel opens, Kelly, now in his 30s, meets the financially successful, black Martin on a Baltimore street and becomes, shall we say, critically involved in the story. Kelly has recently lost his Chinese-born wife and daughter in a horrific car crash and as a result has his own burning need for a transformation.

But transformation is a difficult business, as Row, a longtime practitioner of Zen Buddhism, well knows. “In this novel, there’s something very deep that the characters don’t understand about themselves. They follow what is to me a mistaken path toward trying to alleviate what they’ve lost in their lives by transforming themselves. In no case does it solve their problems. I would say that the fiction I write, and fiction in general—if you look at it from the Buddhist perspective—is about modeling karma, how one event gives rise to another event, how actions have consequences. That’s the way in which fiction and Buddhism come together. They’re both really in some sense about causality.”

How Martin and Kelly work out their separate karmic paths in the novel allows Row to examine very complicated issues of racial identity in America. “My feeling is that black culture is American culture. Anyone with an American identity is in some sense rooted in a common experience that can’t be separated from the experience of black Americans and the experience of black culture. You can’t separate rock and roll from the history of black music. You can’t separate contemporary American culture from hip hop. You can’t separate the story of America from the story of slavery.”

Still, Row acknowledges, it’s possible for many Americans to live in what his narrator calls “white dreamtime,” an idea that “very much comes from my own experience. I’m turning 40 this year, which means I was born at the tail end of the Civil Rights movement. I had liberal, very well-meaning, relatively self-aware parents. But I lived an existence where, for the most part, people of color were at a distance, were not my intimate friends. Looking back on that time, it became clear to me that it’s possible for a variety of reasons for white Americans to imagine themselves in a world where people of color—it’s not that they don’t exist entirely—but they don’t meaningfully exist. And that is what Kelly describes in the novel.”

Baltimore, where most the novel’s events take place, is the perfect setting to illustrate this kind of divide. It’s also where Row went to high school. “I really love Baltimore and I grieve over it at the same time,” Row says. “From the time I moved away until now, which is more than 20 years, this city has been in an absolutely dire economic situation. That’s partly because it’s so close to Washington, D.C. It’s been used as a kind of laboratory for so-called solutions to urban poverty. And . . . none of those solutions has worked. So I wanted the novel to be a kind of love song to Baltimore and also a kind of wail of despair.”

Like other good works of fiction, Your Face in Mine is not merely a report on what the author knows from experience but an imaginative act. And in this case, it is an act with big risks. “A white person engaging with black culture is a very, very tricky business,” Row admits. “And in some sense there’s no way to get it right. But from my perspective that doesn’t mean that one should stop trying.”

 

Author photo by Sarah Shatz

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

If a writer should follow Ernest Hemingway’s well-known dictum to write what he knows, then first-time novelist Jess Row just might be in the wrong business.
NonfictionMemoir

Caitlin Doughty

Interview by Alden Mudge

The voice behind the popular web series “Ask a Mortician” exposes the grisly, hilarious details of working in a crematorium—and argues that everyone needs to be more closely connected to the realities of death.

Your book is often vividly gruesome—and just as often very funny. What do you think is the source of your “gallows humor”?
My parents are both very clever people. I grew up around humor. It just made sense to apply it to conversations about death and mortality. Especially since these heavy topics can often be easier to take in if they’re delivered with a lighter touch.

You write that the day-to-day realities of working in a crematorium “were more savage than I had anticipated.” What surprised you most in your first days at the crematory?
The bodies were savage, in the sense that I had never seen so many corpses in one place. But the real savagery was that the corpses were essentially abandoned. Our funeral home came to pick them up and take them away from their families and store them in a giant freezer. I was the only person there when the bodies were cremated. Most people have no idea they can be much more involved in the death care of the people they love.

Your obsession with death began when you were 8 years old and saw a child plunge from an escalator in a shopping mall. Working in the mortuary seems to have brought some resolution to your obsession. Was writing the book also cathartic in some way?
Absolutely. Part of writing the book was to let other people know that we’re all obsessed with death, to a degree. Death is the human condition, and it’s perfectly OK to be fascinated by it, perfectly OK to want information about what goes on behind the scenes. It’s not morbid, or deviant, or wrong. In a way, writing the book helped me to fully embrace that idea as well.

You’re critical of the modern American funeral industry. But you are also critical of Jessica Mitford’s landmark exposé of funeral home practices, The American Way of Death (1963). What’s your beef with Mitford’s book?
I try to make it clear that I have a great deal of respect for what Mitford did. However, I think she was so focused on subverting the old men of the traditional funeral industry that the book ended up being pro-direct cremation. Direct cremation (cremation with no services of any kind) is the cheapest alternative, but it doesn’t allow for something I believe we need, which is to care for and interact with our dead bodies. To have the body just disappear can hurt the grieving process.

You’re on a kind of mission in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Why is it so important that people have a closer connection with death?
I am on a mission! I would never claim to be an objective reporter. Death affects everything we do as humans, and we’re much healthier when we understand this. Other than television and film, we never see death any more, it’s not a part of our daily lives. We view this as “progress” but I don’t believe it is. We need the reality of death to remind us that we are not immortal, and our actions have real consequences.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

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

 

The voice behind the popular web series “Ask a Mortician” exposes the grisly, hilarious details of working in a crematorium—and argues that everyone needs to be more closely connected to the realities of death.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Jane Smiley

Interview by Alden Mudge

The question that will burn in a reader’s mind when she finishes Some Luck, Jane Smiley’s marvelous new novel, is: How long do I have to wait to read the second volume in The Last Hundred Years trilogy?

Jane Smiley laughs heartily when asked. “Well, that’s up to Knopf,” she says during a call to her home in Carmel Valley, California. Smiley is the author of such best-selling novels as Moo and the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, as well as five works of nonfiction. She says she has already completed all of the volumes in the trilogy, which covers 100 years in the life of one family, with each chapter focusing on a single year.

Smiley is emphatic in her desire that “all three [volumes] come out as soon as possible. I really do feel that it’s one thing, and it’s important for volumes one and two to be in the reader’s mind when he or she is reading volume three.”

Some Luck opens in 1920 with Walter Langdon, on the eve of his 25th birthday, walking the fence lines of his barely-making-it farm near Denby, Iowa. He is thinking about the vicissitudes of farming; the admonishments of his strict father, a more successful and established farmer who lives down the road; his love for his 20-year-old, self-possessed and talkative wife Rosanna; and his five-month-old son, Frank—the first of five children who grow into memorable individuals over the course of the novel, and, presumably, go on in the next two novels to great and less great things. Some Luck closes in 1953, with the Langdon family—responding to social and economic forces arising from the Great Depression and World War II—having mostly abandoned their hometown and moved to the far ends of the country, as so many other Americans did in that era.

The Langdon family diaspora promises much for Smiley’s exploration of 20th-century American culture and politics in future volumes of the trilogy. But in Some Luck, the family is largely homebound. Only Walter and Rosanna’s final child, Claire, for example, is born in a hospital; the rest are born, sometimes excruciatingly, at home. So, with her vivid, tactile depiction of isolated, rural Iowa farm life, Smiley has imaginatively recaptured the dangers and rewards, the play of good luck and bad luck, in a lost way of life.

“I really wanted to take these characters and follow them from babyhood to death,” Smiley says. “And I want the reader to be reminded that there’s so much that we don’t remember, that there’s so much that we don’t know.”

"I really wanted to take these characters and follow them from babyhood to death."

Smiley lived in Iowa for about 24 years as a student and professor and ended up living for a while in a sort of abandoned farmhouse.

“I used to take long walks in the countryside, and I used to think a lot about farming. It became an interest and continued to be an interest as I stayed in Iowa. How we get our food, who grows the food and what the food is made of is central to any culture. . . . The Langdons love the farm, but they hate the farm. They are suspicious of soybeans, but they love oats. It’s an incredible amount of work, yet they feel a great sense of accomplishment. It was a very great pleasure to write about that.”

Smiley describes in some detail the research that went into creating her trilogy—the stacks of books on her office floor and her gratitude to Wikipedia, “which is great for a novelist because it’s OK—in fact it’s better—for your knowledge of something to be partial.” Remarkably, that research is completely subsumed in the consciousness and conversations of her characters.

As a result, Some Luck moves swiftly and assuredly through just over 33 years of the Langford clan’s experiences. Smiley says the novel’s velocity arises from the quirky year-by-year approach she deploys throughout the trilogy.

“Most trilogies are groups of stories that include some of the same characters and then don’t,” she says. “I wanted to write a book about a family, but I wanted it to progress evenly for 100 years. I didn’t know of anybody who had done that before and thought it would be fun to try. That’s the nerdy side of me. I wanted each volume to cover 331⁄3 years and each chapter to be a certain number of pages. The only way I can justify that is that, in a novel with a plot, the plot gives you a form, but in a book that progresses through time, then something as simple as the divisions of the book give you form. I had to do a lot of research, but the energy that was inherent in that form really carried me along.”

Some Luck ends up being a quiet, almost self-effacing, Midwestern tour de force.

Some Luck ends up being a quiet, almost self-effacing, Midwestern tour de force. Smiley writes about farm life, family life and, suggestively, near the end, national political life. There are farming scenes, sex scenes, combat scenes and table-talk scenes.

Smiley says she began with the concept of the trilogy but ended up being swept away by the trajectories of her characters.

“There are three boys and two girls born over the course of 19 years. I wanted to be able to freely enter into everybody’s mind. So I had to be open to their most likely experiences. Frank at his age obviously is going to go off to the Second World War. So I have to be open to male experiences. And there is Lillian, who is the darling child—I’m really quite fond of Lillian—who realizes as she enters high school that she isn’t going to be everybody’s darling.

“I really did want to enter into the minds of the male characters, the female characters, the teenagers, the 20-year olds, the 40-year olds, and that meant I had to go everywhere that they might go.”

Wherever Smiley goes in Some Luck, most readers will willingly follow. Then wait, with bated breath, for her next steps.

 

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

The question that will burn in a reader’s mind when she finishes Some Luck, Jane Smiley’s marvelous new novel, is: How long do I have to wait to read the second volume in The Last Hundred Years trilogy?

FictionLiterary Fiction

Peter Buwalda

Interview by Alden Mudge

Dutch writer Peter Buwalda is keenly attuned to the ironies of being a successful novelist. “A successful writer is living a paradox,” Buwalda says from to his home in Amsterdam, where he moved after his gripping literary debut, Bonita Avenue, became a bestseller in Holland in 2010.

“Being successful and writing sort of exclude each other. Before I was a real recluse, and now I am an outgoing person. I have to be,” Buwalda says. “The exterior of my life has changed radically—where I live, the money thing, the people I meet, how those people behave toward me. But inwardly there’s not so much that’s different. How I look at myself  hasn’t changed much. The writing of the new novel isn’t any easier.”

Buwalda says that until he was 34, he worked as an editor and journalist and was “a very fanatical reader.” Then he decided to write fiction and “changed like Gregor Samsa in the story by Kafka into a novelist. For me it was late, so I had to try to write a thick, serious novel at once, without hesitating, diving into the deep.”

The idea for Bonita Avenue, which was published in English in the U.K. last year and arrives in the U.S. this month with a translation tweaked for American readers, began with Buwalda “thinking about the abyss between the younger generation of the 1990s and 2000s and the older generation. For the first time in history, I think, because of the rise of the Internet, people from the older generation know less about the world, maybe even about wisdom, than the younger generation.”

Buwalda realized that nowhere is that abyss more graphically evident than in the world of Internet pornography. “The thought that my grandfather has seen only my grandmother and maybe two or three other women while his grandson could watch all those pictures, all those movies on the Internet, made me wonder—what does this mean for people, for society, for relationships between family members?”

To develop and amplify this idea, Buwalda spent the next five years writing eight hours a day in the cramped kitchen of his tiny apartment in Haarlem, a Dutch city near the North Sea. He recalls that at Christmas the year before he completed work on the book, his brother said, “But, Peter, what if your effort is only a narcissistic dream? And I said, then I will have lost five years of my life and I will try to find a way to laugh about it.”

The finished book is, as Buwalda calls it, a hybrid of a plot-driven novel and a character-driven novel. The action starts when Siem Sigerius begins to suspect that his stepdaughter Joni and her photographer boyfriend Aaron are posting pornographic pictures online.

Sigerius is a fascinating and complicated character. As a working-class youth he became a national judo champion, but after an accident ends his judo career, he discovers he has an innate genius for mathematics and goes on to a stellar academic career. The story—and Buwalda’s deep investigation of his characters’ lives—unfolds through the alternating perspectives of Sigerius, Joni and Aaron.

“I think they’re mutants of my own character in a way,” Buwalda says. “I’ve given all my weak characteristics to Aaron. He’s insecure. He can’t sleep at night. He’s a jealous guy. He makes up things to show off. All the noble things in my character, the one who is ambitious, who cares about justice, who wants to win, I gave to Sigerius.

“And the more vulgar side of my character, the one who wants to earn money, who is easy about sexuality, who is funny, I gave to Joni. I wanted to make her, the girl, the strongest one in this story. She never hesitates, she is the most cruel, she’s not a victim. So I split up my own character—with a purpose, of course, because I wanted to split up the morality of the problem so readers can decide for themselves what is right or wrong.”

Enhancing the sometimes brooding character of the novel is the way time ebbs and flows throughout the book, both within chapters and between chapters. Buwalda says he learned this approach from reading writers like William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez.

“I want the characters in the novel to remember events the way we usually talk about our lives. We don’t start and tell a linear story about ourselves from birth to now. Instead we remember first the most important things, the most painful things or the most happy things. I tried to write the story the way memory works.”

Bonita Avenue, whose title comes from a street in Berkeley, California, where a younger Sigerius and his new family live briefly while he pursues his mathematics career at the university, pulses with other themes and insider knowledge of judo, jazz, mathematics and, of course, pornography.

“One of my goals was that for every subculture I entered in the novel—porn, math, jazz or judo—a reader must think I was a connoisseur,” Buwalda says, laughing. “So, yes, I had to do some research. Not so much for judo because I have a black belt.”

The novel ends with a vividly described, shocking conflagration of violence. Asked about that section of the novel, Buwalda says making it so vivid “was also one of my aims. But I will never have the same experience of it as a reader because I invented it and it took me a year or so to write. It’s a strange act, writing, because it is so slow, while the reader gets through it so fast.”

Like many things in his recent experience, Buwalda notes, “that is also a paradox.”

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

 

Click here to read international praise for Bonita Avenue on Read It Forward.

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Dutch writer Peter Buwalda is keenly attuned to the ironies of being a successful novelist. “A successful writer is living a paradox,” Buwalda says from to his home in Amsterdam, where he moved after his gripping literary debut, Bonita Avenue, became a bestseller in Holland in 2010.
Fiction

Amanda Eyre Ward

Interview by Alden Mudge

Amanda Eyre Ward had already finished writing The Same Sky, her moving novel about an 11-year-old Honduran girl attempting to reunite with her mother in the U.S., when the controversy about undocumented minors blew up along the border last summer.

“When I wrote the book, no one was paying any attention to these unaccompanied minors,” Ward says during a call to her home in Austin. “I am so thrilled that these young children at the border are finally being paid attention to.”

The author of four previous novels, including 2005’s How to Be Lost, Ward has a particular talent for revealing the ways in which characters’ lives are touched by larger world events. She traces her interest in immigrant children to a moment when, after three difficult years, she gave up “hammering and hammering away” at a novel that just wasn’t working.

“I put it aside, cried a little, and drank too much chardonnay for a month or so,” she says with a rueful laugh. And then she began reading widely.

A native of New York, Ward has lived in Austin for the better part of 15 years with her husband, a geophysicist at the University of Texas and a fifth-generation Texan. The couple has two sons and a daughter, ages 11, 7 and 2.

Ward’s reading on immigration led her to a meeting with Alexia Rodriquez, who runs shelters along the border.

“I went down to Brownsville with her and stayed at her parents’ house. Because she knew I wanted to write a novel about this, she embraced me. She’s very religious, and she kept saying God has brought you to us so that these children’s stories can be told. She’d go into the shelter cafeteria and ask, who wants to tell this woman your stories? And kids from 5 to 15 years old would raise their hands. They would sit across the table from me and tell their stories about their journeys and their hopes, and Alexia would translate.

“One of the girls was pregnant, and I have friends dealing with various fertility issues, and that night I went to sleep thinking about how these kids were so alone and so courageous, and I woke up in the morning with the whole novel in my head. That’s never happened to me before.”

The Same Sky is not a political novel. Instead, it’s a textured, emotional story that unfolds in alternating chapters told by a Texas woman and an immigrant girl. Alice and her husband Jake own a popular barbecue restaurant in Austin, Texas, but Alice is haunted by her inability to have a child. Carla is a young girl in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, who decides to seek out her mother in the U.S. after her grandmother dies and her life collapses because of poverty and gang violence.

“I wanted Alice and Jake to be the embodiment of the American dream,” Ward says. “They created something for themselves. With that restaurant, they made their own way.” But Alice puts her comfortable life at risk in misguided attempts to control circumstances and avoid dealing with the trauma and disappointment in her life.

“Alice is seeking some sort of solace, some sort of direction to her life, in all the wrong places,” Ward says. “My personal journey and also belief is that you have to just give up control of things like that and remain open to what fulfillment awaits you.”

Surprisingly, Ward says she worked harder on getting Alice’s voice right than Carla’s. The life of the Honduran girl is the polar opposite of the American dream, but, Ward says, “From the very beginning I heard her in first person. I knew that English was not her first language, and I didn’t know how on earth I would justify her speaking English until quite late in the process. But I trusted her story, probably because I had heard so many kids tell me about their journeys. A lot of their stories are about the food they ate or didn’t eat, because their needs are so basic. By the time a lot of them leave their homes, they are starving. They live in fear of being murdered by gang members. So Carla’s voice just came through. That is so rare and amazing that I just went with it.”

For a reader, the suspense in the narrative—the hope versus the dread—lies in our concern about whether or how these two contrasting lives will converge. To bring these characters fully to life, Ward reports that she did a vast amount of research: about South and Central American gang life, about the incredibly dangerous journeys undocumented children make from their homes to the U.S. border, about the East Side of Austin, a rough neighborhood now being gentrified where much of the novel’s action takes place, and even about Texas barbecue.

“Being from New York, I thought barbecue was cubes of meat in barbecue sauce,” she says, laughing. “Here in Texas that’s not what it’s about at all!” As a sort of consolation for an often wrenching storyline, Ward offers readers lip-smacking descriptions of barbecue, as well as vivid descriptions of Austin haunts.

But in the end, Ward returns to her concern for the plight of the children at the border. “These kids are so hopeful that someone will adopt them. They are so open and ready to be loved. They are so faithful, almost in a sense that seems insane. They believe deeply that a great life awaits them. That’s a kind of spiritual capital that a lot of us here in the U.S. are missing.”

As to how The Same Sky will be read in this particular political moment, Ward says she is unsure. “When you watch the news, when you hear the soundbites, I think a lot of people turn away from this very complex issue. I hope this book will help people hear one child’s story.”

 

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Amanda Eyre Ward had already finished writing The Same Sky, her moving novel about an 11-year-old Honduran girl attempting to reunite with her mother in the U.S., when the controversy about undocumented minors blew up along the border last summer.
NonfictionHistory

Erik Larson

Interview by Alden Mudge

Adept at spinning historical events into gripping narratives, Erik Larson couldn't resist the storytelling potential of the Lusitania. 

You started reading about the Lusitania on a whim. What was the discovery that led you to decide to write a book about its last crossing?
What drew me, really, was not so much any single discovery, but rather my realization that the array of archival materials available on the subject—the palette of narrative elements—would allow me to tell the story in a way it had not yet been told. Telegrams, codebooks, love letters, the submarine commander’s war log, depositions, interrogation reports—all of it. For me it’s like heroin.

You’ve always been a remarkable researcher, finding amazing details to tell your story. What were your biggest research scores for Dead Wake?
The best elements are the telegrams to and from the German U-boat that were intercepted and decoded by the British. It was kind of thrilling to see the actual paper decodes in the National Archives of the UK. Probably my favorite moment was when one box yielded the immense German codebook that opened the way for the British to begin reading all of Germany’s naval communications, with Germany utterly unaware. This was the actual book—the one that, according to one account, was recovered from the arms of a drowned German sailor.

Do you have a personal favorite among the passengers whose lives you so vividly describe?
Well, I’d have to say I particularly like Dwight Harris. His account, first of all, was very detailed—that’s why I chose him. That’s also why I chose my other central characters; I swoon for detail. But what I loved most was the charm of Harris’ story, which he told in a letter to his mother. He was a young guy, and was clearly tickled to have gone through this nightmare and survived. I also very much liked Theodate Pope. She too left a detailed account. But I especially liked her backstory. She was one of the country’s first licensed female architects; she was an early feminist, at a time when the term itself was brand new; and she was deeply interested in exploring the mysteries of the mind and the possibility that there just might be an after-life. She was a character with a lot of nuance, and I love nuance. Heroes, frankly, are boring. 

In your telling, the Lusitania itself has a kind of personality, “conceived out of hubris and anxiety.” Are there things you learned about the ship that you found particularly compelling?
Everything. At heart I’m still a little boy. But, what I found most compelling was the sheer physical effort needed to power the ship—the volumes of coal, the innumerable furnaces, all fed by men with shovels, 24 hours a day. One of the amazing things about the ship, and the era’s emphasis on speed, was that with all boilers operating it could move at 25 knots, or nearly 30 miles an hour, and cross the Atlantic in five days—faster than a typical crossing on the Queen Mary 2 today. No wonder its passengers, and captain, believed it to be invulnerable. 

Walter Schwieger, who commanded the U-boat that sank the Lusitania, was beloved by his crew and ruthless in his willingness “to torpedo a liner full of civilians.” Was he typical of U-boat captains during World War I?
One of my favorite archival finds was a collection of interrogation reports done by British intelligence agents who had questioned captured German submariners. These reports convey a vivid sense of the dangers of U-boat life, and of the character of U-boat commanders. All U-boat captains were achingly young, with wide variation in personality. Some were ruthless, some chivalrous, some kind, some brutal. At least one was renowned for his inability to hit anything with a torpedo.

Your portrait of President Wilson in emotional turmoil was fascinating. To what extent do you think his grief over the loss of his first wife and his later passionate pursuit of Edith Galt colored his responses to international affairs? 
It’s hard to say. Clearly at the time the Lusitania was sunk, Wilson’s emotional self was in an uproar, thanks to his incredibly passionate love for Edith, and this doubtless contributed to a remark he made in a speech in Philadelphia that fell flat. Like dead. He said America was “too proud to fight,” which utterly missed the point, and drew ridicule from his opponents. 

Capt. William Thomas Turner, whom you wonderfully describe as a man “with the physique of a bank safe,” ends up being scapegoated by the British Admiralty for the Lusitania sinking. Seems pretty outrageous, doesn’t it?
Seems outrageous to me, but the Admiralty had ample incentive to try laying the blame entirely on Turner. Too many secrets needed protecting. 

Winston Churchill, as head of the British Admiralty, has a behind-the-scenes role in the saga of the Lusitania. Did your research into his role in any way change your opinion of Churchill?
Not really. I love Churchill as a historic character. Always have, always will. He was a brilliant man imbued with a reckless energy, and he was utterly ruthless. What I hadn’t fully appreciated, however, was his role in the disastrous Gallipoli affair. His mad energy and ego cost him dearly in WWI, but served him very well in the war that followed.  

Do you believe, as some have suggested, that the British Admiralty’s failure to protect the Lusitania in spite of its secret intelligence of the whereabouts of German U-boats, was a deliberate gamble to bring the U.S. into the war?
There’s no smoking memo or letter or telegram to confirm it. And certainly, at first glance, you’d have to be skeptical that any agency would deliberately allow 2,000 people to be killed. On the other hand, the fact the Lusitania was left to itself, without escort, and with only the most cursory of warnings, is utterly mystifying. For one prominent naval historian, whom I quote in my book, the circumstances were profoundly perplexing. Late in life he found himself forced to conclude that some sort of conspiracy likely occurred. But, again, that’s only speculation. I lay out a collection of evidence; readers can do with it what they will. 

Why was it important for your narrative to include the details of an autopsy that you warn squeamish readers about in your introductory note?
First of all, the mere fact that someone would want an autopsy done on a body that had been in the water for 75 days struck me as incredible—the likely artifact of deep, shattering grief. But the whole saga of finding that gentleman’s body, and all that happened afterward, struck me as something that offered a brand new view of the era and its customs. Further, it’s new; I stumbled across it by accident in files in the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Md. And new is good—though finding new things was certainly not my goal. Story was my goal. 

You write that false facts about the sinking of the Lusitania have sort of entered the DNA of the history of this event. What are the most egregious errors, and how have you tried to counteract them?
The most significant misapprehension is that the sinking of the Lusitania immediately dragged America into World War I. It did not. During my work on the book I would ask friends and family how long they thought it took for America to enter the war after the sinking. Estimates ranged from two days to several months. But in fact, America did not declare war for two full years, and when Wilson gave his speech to Congress asking for such a declaration he never once mentioned the Lusitania.  

Finally, what are the unresolved mysteries about the sinking of the Lusitania that plague you the most?
By the time I finished my research I was pretty satisfied with my understanding of the event. It’s very clear that one commonly claimed “fact”—that the ship was armed with naval guns—was utterly untrue. There were no guns aboard the Lusitania. Another body of rumor holds that there was a secret cache of explosives in its cargo holds, possibly disguised as shipments of cheese or oysters, and that this accounted for why the ship sank so quickly. There may indeed have been a secret cargo, but whether such a shipment existed or not is irrelevant. Explosive cargo had nothing to with the sinking. The Lusitania sank that fine May afternoon because of the chance convergence of a multitude of forces. A single variation in any vector could have saved the Lusitania.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Dead Wake.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Adept at spinning historical events into gripping narratives, Erik Larson couldn't resist the storytelling potential of the Lusitania.
NonfictionMemoirArt

Sally Mann

Interview by Alden Mudge

Does photographer Sally Mann really have a bulging file called “Maternal Slights,” as she writes in her courageous and visually ravishing memoir, Hold Still?

“Are you kidding? Oh my gosh. I can put my hand on it right now!” Mann says during a call to her home on cherished and much-photographed farmland in the small Shenandoah Valley town of Lexington, Virginia, where she grew up. Mann, who is widely regarded as one of America’s foremost photographers, lives there with her husband, Larry, an artist-turned-lawyer she met when she was 18 and married soon after. Their three children, subjects of Mann’s beautiful but controversial 1992 photography project Immediate Family, are adults now, living their own lives.

“I’m so mean-spirited,” Mann continues, “I wrote all my mother’s slights down. There were so many of them.” An example Mann recounts in Hold Still is that her mother planned a trip to Europe that began just days before Mann was to give birth.

Mann's stunning memoir is part family history, part photo album, part aesthetic manifesto.

“She was oblivious to the effect of things like that. Just oblivious. And that’s because she herself had been so badly injured. I knew she had had a rough time, but until I did the research for this book, I didn’t realize the full extent of what her childhood and her adulthood—I mean, being married to my father was no picnic—had been like. In the end, one of the main things that came out of writing this book was this profound regret that I hadn’t been a better daughter. It troubles me no end, even now.”

Mann’s revelatory investigation of the fascinating, wounded histories on both sides of her family—and the shocking tragedy of her husband’s parents—began with an invitation to deliver the Massey lectures at Harvard University. In preparation, she began opening boxes of photographs, letters, diaries, newspaper clippings and other papers that had been gathering dust in her attic—uncovering, as it were, family secrets—and found herself “wondering what part of these lives, this dolorous DNA, has made me who I am.” This is a central question of Hold Still, which is part personal memoir (a word Mann says she hates), part family history, part brilliant photo album and part aesthetic manifesto.

“I think we turn into what our genes tell us to turn into, to a large extent,” Mann says. What that means for her memoir is that each family story leads inexorably to a searching, vividly written examination of one of the obsessions that are the subjects of her sublime photographs, some of which are reproduced in the book.


Sally Mann and her husband, Larry, at their 1970 wedding in her parents’ garden.

An example? In the book’s fourth and final section Mann writes about her father, an emotionally distant but compassionate country doctor she describes as a man with an “air of solipsistic distraction,” a passion for art and a lifelong fascination with death. This leads to a profound discussion of the fearless work compiled in Mann’s book What Remains, which includes photographs she took of dead bodies at the University of Tennessee forensic research facility known as the Body Farm, and of the photographs she took of the body of her father, who committed suicide to end a long illness.

“I talk very cavalierly and confidently about photographing those bodies,” Mann says. “But the first ones I saw were a shock. It was hard. Once I got used to it, I found it helpful to accept that part of death, the physical decay. I’m more than fine with that. What I don’t want is to die until I’m ready to die. Like everybody else, I want to have everything tied up. I want my bed to be made. I want the perfect death.”

Similarly, a regretful consideration of all she failed to ask about the life of Gee-Gee, the African-American woman who raised her and who, more than her own parents, offered Sally unconditional love, propelled Mann into a photography project that explores the emotional and physical landscapes that are a legacy of slavery.

And Mann’s investigation of the hidden life of her mother’s family, especially the life of her sentimental grandfather and his nostalgic love of the land, leads her to write passionately about the place where she has lived all her life and the impulses behind her haunting photographs of Southern landscapes.

“I derive so much strength from being in the South,” Mann says. “It can be hideous in places, but there’s just something fundamentally gorgeous about the South.”

Still, as a young would-be artist from the South, Mann found it painful to be far from the cultural power of New York. She says she and Larry lacked the funds, and she herself lacked the courage, to move to New York. “I put my faith in my work, as I always have, and believed that if it was good enough it wouldn’t be ignored.”

Southern landscapes have been a key part of Mann's work (Ben Salem, Virginia, Copyright © Sally Mann).

Mann’s breakthrough came with the Immediate Family pictures, which catapulted her to international fame—or maybe infamy. The critical attention she received was clearly a mixed blessing. In some quarters she was vilified for a collection that included nude photographs of her young children. Her harshest critic called her a child pornographer.

In a riveting passage in Hold Still, Mann offers a kind of rejoinder. There, in wonderfully expressive pictures and text, she dissects the aesthetics of a sequence of photographs of her young son who stands naked and shivering in the river at the edge of the family property. One of these pictures found its way into the Immediate Family portfolio. Mann’s exposition offers an illuminating analysis of why she chose one picture over another, of what makes one photograph more beautiful than another. “When I see a good picture of my own,” Mann says, “when it comes up in the developer, my heart will skip a beat. I’ll have a physical reaction. It’s like, as some Romantic poet said, you’ve taken a mortal blow to your chest.”

Great pictures or not, Mann says one of her concerns about the publication of Hold Still is of “dredging all that up again. I didn’t want that to be the focus when the family pictures came out, and I don’t want that to be the focus now. One of the questions back then was, have I done something that is going to irremediably change the kids? It’s good to get to the end of that long tunnel and find that things are OK.”

In her early 20s, a few years after she had begun taking pictures with her first good camera, Mann got a master’s degree in creative writing. “Back then I thought it was possible to marry writing and photography artistically,” she explains. “Naturally that was a dismal failure. Because who can actually do that?”

Forty years later, Hold Still, a glorious marriage of words and pictures, will lead a reader to conclude that, actually, Mann has done it.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Does photographer Sally Mann really have a bulging file called “Maternal Slights,” as she writes in her courageous and visually ravishing memoir, Hold Still?
FictionLiterary Fiction

Jonathan Galassi

Interview by Alden Mudge

Legendary book editor Jonathan Galassi has been at Farrar, Straus and Giroux since 1986 and is now its president and publisher. So why is his rambunctious, captivating first novel, Muse, being published by a rival?

“Oh, I don’t think it would be kosher for us to publish it,” Galassi says during a call to his office in New York. “It would seem like a strange kind of nepotism. Besides, I’d like to feel that my book is legitimate, that it’s being published because someone liked it, not because they had to.”

Muse is certainly legitimate—and more than likable. In fact, it’s quite funny and revelatory about an almost-lost world of literary publishing. The novel tells the story of a clash of publishing titans—Homer Stern and Sterling Wainwright—waging long-term war over, well, just about everything. But especially over Ida Perkins, a poet as famous as Ernest Hemingway and as enigmatic as J.D. Salinger. The novel’s protagonist is Paul Dukach, a bookish young man who idolizes Perkins and becomes the foremost authority on her life and work and, eventually, a sort of adopted son of both publishers. 

Muse is, as Galassi writes in the preface, “a love story. It’s about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers, with beautiful or not-so-beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell. . . .”

“They say write what you know,” Galassi says regarding the origins of his novel. “The two old-lion publishers are based on people that I did know very well and admired a lot. They were both very engaging and witty people. And they did hate each other. I thought it was a good setup for a look at the publishing business as it used to be.”

“Big egos have big libidos. Having a big ego makes you insufferable in a way, but it also lets you do things, don’t you think?"

As portrayed by Galassi, publishers Stern and Wainwright are anything but madam-librarian type book people. They are operatic in their competitiveness and their libidos. “That’s all drawn from life,” Galassi says. “Big egos have big libidos. Having a big ego makes you insufferable in a way, but it also lets you do things, don’t you think? There’s something kind of heroic in a monstrous way about it.” His portraits of these publishers are, Galassi says, “part of the swashbuckling, lovingly satirical, comedic tone of the book.”

Although he doesn’t quite admit to it, the milder, more diplomatic character of Paul Dukach probably arises from Galassi’s own sensibilities. Galassi is often described as the most gentlemanly editor in the business. 

The poet Ida Perkins, however, is pure invention, a character that Galassi clearly loved imagining into life. Muse includes a puckishly inventive “concise bibliography” of Perkins’ work that will make an unsuspecting reading wonder why he has not read any of these inspired works of poetry. It also includes a selection from Perkins’ final collection of poems in which the novel’s protagonist discovers “an onion skin atom bomb” that will alter the balance of power among his contending father figures.

“There’s chutzpah involved in writing those poems,” Galassi admits. “But the thing about the book is that it’s not meant to be realistic. Of course those poems would not be the greatest poems of the century, but there is something that makes them plausible. I loved writing them. They’re not my poems. They’re her poems. They’re in her voice. Part of the fun of it was trying to ventriloquize. It’s all part of this pastiche of literary life, literary culture.”

Galassi, by the way, is a well-​regarded poet himself and an accomplished translator of Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. He was poetry editor of The Paris Review for a decade. His most recent volume of poetry, Left-handed, is a semi-​autobiographical exploration of the emotional disruption a middle-aged man experiences as his long-term marriage ends and he falls in love with a younger man.

Galassi says that after finishing Left-handed, “which has a kind of narrative arc,” he felt he should try writing a novel. “I’d always thought I could never do that. I work with all these people who write novels. I admire what they do, and I wondered, are they really a different species from me? So I thought it’s now or never; why not try. It was a challenge to myself.”

Thus in his mid-60s Galassi began to write fiction every day “for as many hours as I could. And then I’d put those pages away and never look at them. I did that for a month. And then I put it away for a year. And then I looked at it a year later and decided I had something to work with. I was going against my own editorial faculty that might have prevented me from letting loose.”

And then the editor got edited. “Robin Dresser, my editor at Knopf, was very critical and very demanding. I found that I had the most difficulty cutting. I didn’t want to let go of this; I didn’t want to let go of that. I had to go against my desire to have pages. But what matters is not how many pages you have but how good they are. This,” Galassi says with a wry laugh, “is what I tell my writers all the time.”

Toward the end of the conversation, the discussion turns to the future of the book, a topic of concern in Galassi’s novel and for Galassi himself. He says that the tsunami of eBooks once predicted to wash away printed books has abated. “eBooks are a big part of our business. But they’re not the whole thing. . . . Books are still books. Many young people really want books as physical objects because book culture is not just about content. It’s an atmosphere, a world of its own, with a physical component. People talk about the ‘erotics of books.’ If you came to my office, you’d see shelves and shelves of books that I’ve worked on and that we’ve published over the years in all their different colors and sizes. Books are beautiful things. They really do furnish a room.”

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Legendary book editor Jonathan Galassi has been at Farrar, Straus and Giroux since 1986 and is now its president and publisher. So why is his rambunctious, captivating first novel, Muse, being published by a rival?
FictionHistorical Fiction

Paula McLain

Interview by Alden Mudge

When her writing is going really well, when she is “all in,” Paula McLain, author of the best-selling historical novel The Paris Wife, calls herself “a head in a jar.” All brain, no body.

The feeling, McLain says, is “of being in a deep-sea diving bell. You go down, down, down until you hear those pings coming off the ocean floor. You’re not reachable. You’re not conscious of time passing. Whole hours disappear and you’re completely absorbed.”

That was the opposite of what McLain was feeling a few years ago when her brother-in-law, a doctor and pilot, forced upon her a copy of West with the Night, a memoir by Beryl Markham, the British-born Kenyan bush pilot who, in 1936, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. At that time McLain was writing a historical novel about Marie Curie. It wasn’t working. When she wrote The Paris Wife, McLain had felt a deep connection to Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, that allowed her “to believe absolutely, unequivocally that I understood her enough that I could follow her down a rabbit hole to Paris in 1922. But with Marie it was like being kicked out of heaven every single day of the writing.”

The Markham memoir sat on McLain’s bookshelf unread while she suffered. “Then one day when I was in the midst of despair, I picked it up and read one paragraph about her African childhood and thought: What have I been doing!” says McLain, who, when excited, speaks in a headlong rush. 

“There was nothing subtle about it. I just knew I was going to write about her. In fact I wrote my agent that day and said, I’m ditching the Marie Curie book and writing about Beryl Markham. And she’s like, oh, please let’s not tell Random House. So for months and months I had to lie to my editor, I had to lie to my publisher. How are things going? Still working, still working. And, meanwhile, I was just lighting up the African bush in my imagination, writing really fast and having a really good time.” McLain finished a near-final draft of Circling the Sun, her novel about Markham, in five months.

In addition to being an aviation pioneer, Markham was the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya. Her mother moved home to England when Markham was very young, and she grew up a wild child, running with the native Kipsigis children while her father built up his farm and stable of racing horses. As a young woman she was unusually tall and strikingly attractive. She was thrice married, unhappily, beginning at age 16. Because of her beauty, independence and adventurousness, she was a magnet for rumors about her romantic life, some of them undoubtedly true. Even today, almost 30 years after her death at age 83, Markham remains a subject of salacious gossip, as McLain discovered during a recent research trip to Kenya.

Writing a convincing, memorable novel about Markham and the society of that era in Kenya, as she has done in Circling the Sun, presented McLain with a host of challenges. First off was the fact the Markham had already told her own story in West with the Night. 

Re-reading the memoir and comparing it to biographies of Markham, McLain began to notice that “Beryl was very, very selective in what she chose to tell.” McLain examined the gaps and “thought, oh my god! This is a woman on the run. This is a sphinx. This is a woman like Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast who leaves all the pertinent stuff out. There are almost no women here. She doesn’t talk about her friendship with Karen Blixen. She uses a kind of dazzle camouflage. I wanted to figure out what created the engine of her psyche. I wondered, how does a person like Beryl get made.”

So Circling the Sun became a coming-of-age story that explored the emotional complexity of Markham’s personal and romantic life. The transatlantic flight bookends the novel as a near-death experience that permits Markham to acknowledge some difficult truths about her life. “Someone like Beryl would actually need to be at the verge of death in order to confess some of this stuff,” McLain explains.

McLain feels the reason she was able to write so vividly about Markham’s childhood is her deep sense of connection with her heroine. Like Markham, McLain and her sisters, who grew up in Fresno, California, were abandoned by their mother at an early age, a subject she wrote about in the 2003 memoir Like Family. “I believed I knew something about the wildness she was talking about. I felt I knew what it was like to be let loose to explore that really difficult world.”

Some of the best scenes in the novel are the horseracing scenes, where Markham proves herself in a male-dominated world. Here too, McLain attributes the success of these scenes to her connectedness with Markham. “I grew up sort of the way Beryl did, meaning that from childhood I was super physical with horses. Like saddling up the pony and launching over the landscape with my sisters and not coming back until dinnertime. I understand Beryl’s attachment to the physical animal and that sense of freedom, of flying along in an untethered, unbounded way.”

Developing the details of other sections of the novel—colonial and native life in Kenya during the early years of the 20th century, for example—McLain employed a sort of just-in-time research, gathering facts just ahead of composing the next section of her novel. Her biggest challenge, she says, was sorting through all the conflicting accounts and gossip about Markham’s life, especially her love life. “I had to let some of this stuff go,” she says, laughing. “It’s provocative, it’s scintillating, but I’m not writing Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Instead, the novel concentrates on dramatizing Markham’s most important relationships: her complex lifelong friendship with a Kenyan man named Ruta, the circumstances of her three unsatisfying marriages; and her emotionally fraught affair with the love of her life, pilot and hunting guide Denys Finch Hatton, who was at the same time in a relationship with her friend Karen Blixen, author of the memoir Out of Africa under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. 

Movie fans will remember Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Blixen and Robert Redford’s portrayal of Finch Hatton in the film Out of Africa. McLain admits, laughing, that it was impossible for her not to picture Redford as she wrote about this relationship. 

“It’s my favorite movie. All I have to do is watch two minutes in the middle of the night, and I’m reduced to tears. But I had to dismember and complicate it to tell my story. I know that there will be readers who will be really ticked with me for doing that. But telling the true story doesn’t mean that Denys and Karen didn’t really love each other. It just means that they were really, really intricate people.”

McLain pauses and shifts subjects to say that, in her view, Markham was sustained throughout her life by a warrior spirit she developed as a child. When her life went off the rails, as it did in many of her romantic relationships, it was because “she crosses her own lines and loses herself. She loses the connection with her personal power that came from that early childhood identity.”

Then McLain returns to the impact on Markham and Blixen of the death of Finch Hatton. “You know, there’s a line at the end of my book that goes, ‘This time with Denys would fade, and it would last forever.’ That’s something I actually believe about love. Sometimes we don’t get to keep the people we love the most and who change us the most. That’s an unromantic, uncommercial view of love. But to me it feels absolutely true.”

 

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When her writing is going really well, when she is “all in,” Paula McLain, author of the best-selling historical novel The Paris Wife, calls herself “a head in a jar.” All brain, no body.
FictionLiterary Fiction

William Boyd

Interview by Alden Mudge

Beginning with the 1981 publication of his first novel, A Good Man in Africa, winner of the prestigious Whitbread Award, William Boyd has been astonishingly prolific—14 novels, four story collections, four plays, countless film and television scripts, essays and reviews.

“I think it’s a very British thing,” Boyd says during an afternoon call to his home in London. He and his wife, formerly editor-at-large for Harper’s Bazaar and now a film writer and producer, are packing to escape overheated London for the house they have owned for 20 years in rural southwest France, where they spend roughly a quarter of the year. “You’ve got to write something every day,” Boyd says. “It needn’t be a novel. It might be a restaurant review or your diary. I think it’s because of the great Victorians—Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope—those tireless dynamos of writers who make us all look lazy. In the British literary tradition, it seems normal to be prolific.”

Over the last decade, in addition to producing a novel every three or so years, much of Boyd’s extracurricular writing has been devoted to a newfound interest in photography. That interest bodies forth in bold, captivating and mischievous ways in his sweeping new novel, Sweet Caress.

Subtitled “The Many Lives of Amory Clay,” the novel opens on a sparsely populated island off the coast of Scotland in 1977 with the title character, born in 1908, looking back over a tumultuous life. As a professional photographer, Amory has been a witness to many of the signature events of the 20th century: the return of emotionally damaged soldiers—including her father—from World War I; scandalous Berlin between the wars; the catastrophes of World War II and Vietnam. Amory’s romantic life has been equally turbulent.

“In all my novels I tend to steer my protagonists into areas of life or history that intrigue me,” Boyd says. “Amory’s journey is pretty amazing, but it’s not extraordinary. A lot of women photographers, especially between the wars, seemed to live interesting, emotional-rollercoaster lives. Photography is a very democratic profession. There was no glass ceiling for these women. So they had a kind of independence which other professions open to women did not have.”

As part of his interest in photography as an art form, Boyd says he also wanted Amory’s career to span “the many types of photography that the 20th century threw up. So she takes [action] photographs like Jacques Henri Lartigue in the beginning of her career, then she becomes a society photographer like Cecil Beaton, then a fashion photographer maybe like Richard Avedon or Irving Penn, and then a war photographer and a reporter.”

Boyd decided early on that merely describing Amory’s photographs wouldn’t suffice. So in a move that will surely stir comment, Sweet Caress is illustrated with photographs purportedly of and by Amory. Other novels, Boyd notes, have included photos. His own elaborate literary hoax Nat Tate (1998), a supposed biography of a tragic American painter, for example, included images of the fictitious artist and his paintings. But, with 73 images, few previous works of fiction have used photography on the same scale as Sweet Caress.

“The decision to make Amory a photographer in the 20th century made me think that maybe I should do the unprecedented thing and put a lot of her photographs in the novel,” Boyd says. “Once I had that idea, it seemed to me a really intriguing kind of parallel creative process. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could illustrate her life with photos that were purportedly taken by her but are in fact anonymous photographs and also give the anonymous people in these photographs new identities from the fiction.”

And so the search for la photo juste began. Already a frequenter of junk shops and “car boot sales,” from which he had amassed a large collection of found photographs, Boyd also searched through online catalogs for photos of the right era and style. Vietnam War photos were the most difficult to come by because most of the pictures from that war are press photographs. But France, he notes with a laugh, was a gold mine. “The French seem to throw away their family albums willy nilly. Because I live in France, I go to these brocantes—antique fairs—where I’ve bought many a family album. I used them in Nat Tate and I used them in Sweet Caress.”

At the outset, Boyd worried that the photographs might be a distraction. But his creative selection of photographs, many of them snapshots, has the opposite effect. Not only do the images aptly fit how a reader might imagine a particular character or situation, but they add a surprising vitality to the narrative. As Boyd says, “In a very curious way that I haven’t fully analyzed yet, the photographs actually enhance the fiction. It’s a most strange thing that happens.”

Maybe, Boyd speculates, the key lies within the nature of the snapshot. “What strikes me about photography is that it’s a stop-time device. And I think the snapshot is the quintessence of photography. Time is frozen, a moment is frozen, life stops. That moment frozen forever can be incredibly powerful.”

Which leads Boyd to a kind of epiphany. “Many people have read the novel now and there’s a consensus that the photos don’t detract from the fiction. Seeing the man Amory’s in love with or the house she lives in actually makes the novel seem more real. And that fits into this bigger plan I realize I’ve been working on throughout my writing life, which is to make fiction seem so real you forget it’s fiction, to push the bounds of fiction into the real world, the world of history and journalism and reportage. I never had this plan, but I can look back at the work and see, yes, this is something I consistently tried to do: to make people’s suspension of disbelief absolute.”

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Beginning with the 1981 publication of his first novel, A Good Man in Africa, winner of the prestigious Whitbread Award, William Boyd has been astonishingly prolific—14 novels, four story collections, four plays, countless film and television scripts, essays and reviews.
NonfictionHistory

Stacy Schiff

Interview by Alden Mudge

Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches, a brilliant, exceptionally well-researched account of the 1692 Salem witch trials, says her number one requirement when writing her prize-winning nonfiction books is “a big desk, an enormous desk!”

“You’re synthesizing massive amounts of raw material,” she explains during a call to her home just north of the grand, Beaux-Arts main branch of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, a favorite haunt. Schiff speaks rapidly and with enthusiasm. “For whatever reason, I physically like to have the maps, my notes, the articles and the books all on my desk while I’m working. I just can’t do that on a small-size desk.”

In fact, Schiff works at two enormous desks—one in Manhattan and one in Canada. Throughout her married life, Schiff and her husband, a Canadian businessman, have had a commuter marriage. “He’s the one who does the commuting. The kids [two sons, 15 and 24, and a daughter, 21] went to school in the U.S. So for the school year we’ve always been here. He goes back and forth. Then in the summer and holidays, when I get a huge amount of writing done, we decamp to Canada.” Her husband, she adds, is “an incredibly astute reader,” one of two trusted first-readers of her work.

Admiring readers of Schiff’s Cleopatra, her widely hailed 2010 biography of the Egyptian ruler, or Vera, her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, know her to be a remarkable researcher. 

“I like to feel documents,” Schiff says, when asked about her methods. “I like to touch them, I like to smell them, I like to read them in the original!”

Schiff’s passion for primary documents proved particularly important in piecing together the story of a disturbing chapter in early American history.

“This is an episode we go to over and over again and can’t quite seem to resolve. It gets under the skin and enchants,” she says. “It’s a chapter that everyone thinks they know well but truthfully have great misconceptions about. Most people think the witches were burned. [They were hanged.] Most people have no idea that it included 19 people. Or that it took place over nine months. Or that men were also victims, including a minister! People aren’t sure about when it took place. Halfway between Plymouth Rock and Paul Revere, there’s this sort of strange wasteland in American history. You forget that there was this very different early America.”

Much of what is so compelling about The Witches is how vividly Schiff brings this very different era to life. 

Schiff offers a nearly day-by-day account of the conflagration that is tactile in its detail.

The Puritans lived in near-constant dread of Native-American attacks. They contended with starvation during long, arduous winters in tightly enclosed spaces. Little wonder, Schiff notes, that it was in January and February that the overworked, sensory-deprived adolescent girls in the household of Salem’s minister were overtaken by fits of twitching and barking. The affliction spread.

Add to the mix the foreboding Puritan sensibility, and a skeptical modern reader can almost begin to understand the diagnoses of witchcraft. Of her four years of working on the book, of “disappearing into another century,” Schiff says, “It was a pretty dark and chilly place to live. This is a very bleak religion, in which you are meant to feel at all times off-kilter and inadequate. You are haunted by that horrible Puritan riddle—am I going to be saved or am I going to be damned? At some point I thought the first line should have been, ’This is a book about anxiety.’ ”

The Puritans were also a highly literate and highly litigious people. Neighbor sued neighbor for trespass or pigs in the garden seemingly at the drop of a hat. Carefully kept court records bloomed. And the Puritan elite—political leaders, court officials and ministers—wrote voluminous letters and kept personal journals. But the records of the nine-month witchcraft mania are curiously spotty, perhaps deliberately so.

Nevertheless, by keeping a careful chronology and uncovering “the interesting coincidences, the patterns”—by reading between the lines—Schiff offers a nearly day-by-day account of the conflagration that is tactile in its detail. Building on an account by John Alden, an eminent community member who was one of more than 100 people jailed in the widening gyre of accusations before finally being released, Schiff offers an astonishing description of the packed, smelly, raucous courtroom in which the teenage girls writhed and flitted between judges and accused, pointing to witches in the rafters. And she shrewdly reverse-engineers the hazy record to help us understand the charges against George Burroughs, the little-known, Harvard-educated minister who was hanged for being the supposed leader of this confederacy of witches.

Schiff’s account also draws deeply on Cotton Mather, a young, charismatic, spiritual and intellectual leader of the colony, who was often equivocal as events unfolded. “He’s so fascinating, so unctuous, so prolific, so all over the place and so desperate for the spotlight,” Schiff says. “He shouldn’t be blamed, but he’s at the white-hot center every step of the way. Looking at [the originals of] his letters, I was able to see where he crossed out, what he had trouble with, what he stalled on, what he emphasized. It gives you a strong sense of what everyone was listening to because he’s among the top authorities on the subject.”

Noting that earlier books about the witch trials “are very thesis driven,” Schiff felt her book “could only work if you just tell the story.” While she does sow seeds along the way, only in the final chapters of The Witches does Schiff offer her own fascinating analysis of the complex set of causes that probably underlie the witchcraft charges, the sudden passing of the storm and the years of denial about the persecution of innocents. In Schiff’s telling, this is an old story with contemporary implications.

This narrative approach works so well because Schiff just happens to be a superb and witty writer. Asked about her sometimes droll humor, she says that after reading an early draft of the book, one Yale scholar told her he didn’t know the Puritans could be this much fun.

“I do feel,” she explains, “that at some point you can only write in your own voice. I was aware that I had to be careful with this book—it’s a very sobering subject. On the one hand, you need to feel sympathy for all of these people, including the ones who are driving the prosecution forward for what they consider to be their own good reasons. On the other hand, you need to be interesting and you need to be vivid and you need to be lively. I decided that even while I told this relatively dark story, there was no reason why I couldn’t sparkle on the page.”

And The Witches definitely sparkles.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches, a brilliant, exceptionally well-researched account of the 1692 Salem witch trials, says her number one requirement when writing her prize-winning nonfiction books is “a big desk, an enormous desk!”
FictionDebut Fiction

Sunil Yapa

Interview by Alden Mudge

Sunil Yapa, author of the gripping, profoundly humane first novel Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, used to hide his laptop in the oven of the beach house he was renting in Chile.

“That was my security measure,” Yapa says with a bemused laugh during a call to Woodstock, New York, where he currently lives. “I’d put it in a baking tray and hide it in the oven!”

What Yapa was protecting was the 604-page first draft of his novel about the chaotic protest during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle that erupted into violence. In Chile, where he lived frugally while he was teaching himself to write, Yapa didn’t have access to a printer, the cloud or a backup hard drive. The novel lived only on his laptop. Maybe you can guess where this is going.

But first, a little more background: Yapa grew up mostly in State College, Pennsylvania. He knew from a young age that he wanted to write fiction. Libraries were his favorite haunt. And while he had many friends as a child, his mother often had to tell him to stop reading and shoo him out of the house to play. But as the son of an immigrant—his father is a recently retired Penn State geography professor from Sri Lanka; his mother is from Montana—“there was a sense that being a writer wasn’t a serious occupation or a useful use of your time. My father never said that to me, and in fact he’s very proud that I’m doing it. But it’s something that I absorbed and something I’ve heard reflected from other second-generation immigrant kids. It was very difficult to think about all he had sacrificed to get here and raise my brother and me in a middle-class life and take being an artist seriously.”

So from the age of 17 to 27, Yapa tried to follow in his father’s footsteps and get a Ph.D. in geography. But then he began to travel, “and I realized I didn’t want to be an academic; what I wanted to do was write fiction.”

Yapa also discovered a surprising way to support his writing habit. “I worked as a traveling salesman. A friend and I would travel all over the country to the biggest colleges and universities and sell posters. We would compress a year’s work into two intense months and make $10,000 or $15,000—not enough to live in New York or San Francisco or, really, anywhere in the U.S.” But with help from his grandfather, who encouraged his writing, he and his friend discovered that they could live on what they had made for a whole year in Chile or Guatemala without working. “We didn’t live the high life, but I was able to teach myself to write for almost seven years before I sent anything out.”

Yapa was eventually accepted to the Hunter College M.F.A. program, where he honed his talents with guidance from writers like Peter Carey, Colum McCann and Claire Messud. After graduating, he returned to his traveling-salesman gig to support the completion of his novel. One night on a sales trip to Chicago, the laptop containing the only copy of his book was stolen from his hotel room.

"I thought, oh god, I’m going to write this thing again because it’s not going to leave me alone.”

“I never recovered it. It was just gone. I was devastated, of course. I was depressed for three months. But I honestly think it was a moment when I knew I must be a writer because the story started bubbling up again in my brain, and I thought, oh god, I’m going to write this thing again because it’s not going to leave me alone.”

Yapa now thinks there were benefits to the loss of the first draft. The disappeared draft had more than 50 characters. The published book includes a streamlined and compelling cast of characters—fully realized personalities who dramatize the stories of the people who clashed in Seattle on the first day of the WTO meeting. These include Victor, an initially apolitical, homeless teenager with a connection to Police Chief Bishop; demonstrators Kingfisher and John Henry, who struggle throughout a brutal day to remain nonviolent; police officers Park and “Ju,” who are overwhelmed by the sheer number of protesters; and Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, a Sri Lankan diplomat caught up in the fray.

“I was thinking about the protest and about globalization,” says Yapa, explaining the inception of the book, “and I found this picture of a woman on the street in Seattle, almost wreathed in tear gas. She was on her knees and there was blood coming from her forehead. Someone, he looks like a medic, is tending to her scalp. Her hands are clasped together and it looks like she’s praying, but she might just be in pain. You can’t tell. I saw that, and I thought, wow, what would make a woman like that risk tear gas, pepper spray, beatings for a protest? Because this was a different kind of protest. It was about someone else’s rights three continents away. It wasn’t about an expansion of this person’s own rights, necessarily, but about a recognition of living in a globally connected world, where our lives overlap with each other. That, to me, was both inspiring and totally confusing.” 

Yapa, who lived in Seattle when he was 19—the same age as his luminous character Victor—did an enormous amount of research to bring a startling clarity to his narrative. “Almost everything that happens in the book happened, at some point, in the protest,” Yapa says. “I wanted the experience for a reader to be accurate, not sensationalized.”

So a reader will experience the incredible discipline of the nonviolent protesters; the utter confusion and fear of a police force of 900 at most trying—and finally failing—to maintain order when faced with 60,000 demonstrators; and the tension within all of Yapa’s characters between their public actions and their complex inner thoughts and emotions.

This ends up making Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist an absolutely compelling read. Many of the scenes are simply electrifying and some are quite violent. “I really, really wanted this book to be a page-turner,” Yapa says. “But I didn’t want to sensationalize the violence. And yet [violent acts] happened. I wanted a reader to experience what courage it must have taken for people to sit through this.”

In addition, Yapa is interested in the ideas behind the protests and the WTO. “I also wanted readers to experience the politics and economics of IMF deals and World Bank loans, structural adjustments and austerity programs. All that stuff is very academic and kind of boring.” In the novel, Yapa somehow manages to put human faces and human consequences on these abstractions.

The book probably succeeds so well because Yapa “tried to have no villains in the book. The whole book is a project to empathize with all the characters. I wanted a reader to think, yeah, it’s not just that this character seems terrible, he is terrible! And yet he has a history, and that history doesn’t forgive his actions, but it does complicate our view of him. I think the essence of compassion is to hold two contradictory feelings for someone at the same time.”

Asked how he arrived at such a view, Yapa points to his experiences as a biracial child. “I have double vision. In mainstream white culture, I felt kind of Sri Lankan. But I don’t speak the language and I didn’t grow up there. So when I was around Sri Lankan culture, I felt very white. I am always straddling two worlds. As a kid you struggle with feeling like an outsider. But as a writer that’s an excellent place to be.”

 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Sunil Yapa, author of the gripping, profoundly humane first novel Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, used to hide his laptop in the oven of the beach house he was renting in Chile.
FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

Han Kang

Interview by Alden Mudge

Several years ago Han Kang, the South Korean author of the beautiful and disquieting new novel The Vegetarian, gave up driving and sold her car. Why?

“To be honest,” she writes drolly during an email discussion about her life and her novel, “when I used to drive, it was sometimes dangerous because I had too many thoughts in my head.” 

Now, Han says, she walks a lot and commutes from her home in the “quiet city” of Gwacheon, South Korea, to the Seoul Institute of the Arts, where she teaches creative writing. On the bus or the train, she says, she can read or look out the window and let her thoughts go where they will.

Those wide-ranging thoughts end up coalescing into Han’s psychologically compelling fiction, including her first work to be published in English, The Vegetarian. The novel is concise and swift, its language often almost poetic. This is not so surprising, since Han worked as a poet before turning to fiction. She has earned several prestigious Korean prizes for her novels, including the Manhae Prize for Literature and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, and The Vegetarian was a bestseller—and adapted for film—in Korea. It also made waves when it was published in the U.K. last year.

 The novel sprang from an earlier short story, “The Fruit of My Woman.” Han describes this work as a story “about a woman who turns into a plant. The man who has been living with her places her in a pot in their apartment. During their time living together, he had trouble understanding her.” 

The man takes good care of the woman-plant, but at the end of the season she “produces a few tough fruits and shrivels up,” says Han. “[T]he man looks at the fruits in his palm and wonders whether the woman will bloom again the following spring.”

Immediately after publishing the story, Han says, “I had the inexplicable feeling that the story wasn’t over.” But when she started working on The Vegetarian, she realized the novel was becoming something “quite different . . . something much fiercer, more painful.”

At the center of Han’s novel is Yeong-hye, a woman who first gives up eating meat and then gives up eating altogether, taking a personally destructive path to avoid harming others. Her actions are shocking and intriguing to those around her and ripple outward to others. 

Han says the question that haunted her while writing The Vegetarian was about the nature of human beings, about human innocence and human violence. 

Han says the question that haunted her while writing The Vegetarian was about the nature of human beings, about human innocence and human violence. 

“Humans are creatures who sacrifice their lives without a moment’s hesitation to save a child who has fallen onto the subway track; they are also the creatures who did such things at Auschwitz,” she says. “The Vegetarian was sparked by my uncertainty about the spectrum of humanity—a spectrum that stretches from holiness to horror.”

Though she is the novel’s central character, Yeong-hye remains in many ways a mystery. She never tells her own story. Rather, we come to understand the outlines of her story from the people around her—her oafish husband, her artistic brother-in-law and her sister.

“I thought that the only way to represent the life of this curiously determined woman was to have readers discover her for themselves, at a certain point between three mutually contrary gazes,” Han explains. 

In Korea, the three sections were originally published as novellas, before being collated into a novel. “Each one took about a couple of months. I didn’t want to hurry to go on with the next part directly, so it took almost three years to finish the book,” says Han.

The section told by Yeong-hye’s artist brother-in-law is especially challenging, full of vivid and sometimes sexually charged descriptions. 

“I think the book’s second act more or less has the structure of a traditional tragedy,” Han explains. “I wanted to deal with the process by which a human being crumbles and crashes due to the fissure which arises within himself. I thought that that internal process needed to be described with the maximum of detail. That suffering was the core of this character.”

Han says the third section, narrated by Yeong-hye’s older sister In-hye, was the most difficult to compose. 

“Of the three narrators, In-hye is the character who approaches Yeong-hye’s suffering the closest. In a certain sense, you can say that this novel is a story of sisters. I wrote it in the present tense to separate it from the two preceding sections, and tried to get closer to In-hye’s suffering. But I absolutely didn’t want to exaggerate that suffering; on the contrary, I wanted to constantly moderate it. Maintaining that disparity wasn’t easy to do.”

Han attended a three-month program at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and her English is very good. Yet in emailing responses to BookPage’s questions, she turned several times to the novel’s translator, Deborah Smith, for help with her more nuanced answers.

“More than anything else,” Han explains, “I like the tone of the sentences which Deborah writes. The sense of moderation, of strong feelings perseveringly controlled, corresponds with the sentences I write in Korean. I think I am lucky to have encountered a translator who can render subtle emotions.”

Strong emotions perseveringly controlled is a most apt description of the experience of reading Han Kang’s haunting novel.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Several years ago Han Kang, the South Korean author of the beautiful and disquieting new novel The Vegetarian, gave up driving and sold her car. Why? “To be honest,” she writes drolly during an email discussion about her life and her novel, “when I used to drive, it was sometimes dangerous because I had too many thoughts in my head.”

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