Alden Mudge

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.”
FictionLiterary Fiction

Ethan Canin

Interview by Alden Mudge

On this winter morning, Ethan Canin seems more interested in talking bicycles than discussing his vivid, moving, finely crafted new novel, A Doubter’s Almanac.

That’s because he has discovered that the interviewer shares his love of bicycling. A couple of years ago, Canin and his wife purchased fat-tired bikes with studded tires, which means he can ride almost every day of the year in Iowa City, where he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Canin, his wife and their three daughters—ages 12, 16 and 19—“own a lot of bicycles,” including a tandem that hangs from the ceiling of his “writing shed,” a building behind his house that he converted from an old carriage house. Bicycling is one of the ways Canin offsets the anxiety and sedentary nature of writing.

But Canin’s desire to talk bikes also seems to arise from a deep reluctance to make any sort of big pronouncements about his book. “It’s all just discovery to me. I never set out to deal with anything,” Canin says during a call to his home. “Fiction can’t be intentional like that. Because anything you set out to prove is too simplistic, and the reader will revolt against that.” 

Canin goes on to quote E.L. Doctorow. “He said writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but in doing so, you can go the whole way. That’s the way I write. You just don’t know what’s next. When you’re five years out, that’s scary.” 

So scary, in fact, that Canin was reluctant to let his wife read the final draft of the novel. “I’ve been married to my wife for many years, and we were together for many years before that. I used to give her every paragraph and ask her to read it. I didn’t give her this book until I’d written the whole thing, and even then I almost couldn’t bear to give it to her. I thought I’d wasted five or six years.”

Readers of A Doubter’s Almanac will be astounded to learn of Canin’s fears. The novel is, start to finish, an emotionally and intellectually gripping narrative about a mathematical genius named Milo Andret. Born in the 1950s, Milo grows up a solitary child in a silent household in the woods of northern Michigan. In a lovely passage early in the novel, on one of his solo ventures into the woods, Milo finds a fallen tree, then conceives of and, over time, fashions an intricate wooden chain from the dead tree; still, his teacher thinks Milo’s claim to have made the chain is a lie. In a small way, this points to the doubts and competitive envy about Milo’s abilities that are one of the powerful currents that cascade through the novel.

Milo’s conceptual abilities—which he sometimes considers a form of idiocy—are astonishing. In his 20s he wins the Fields Medal, which is the mathematical world’s Nobel Prize. But Milo’s singularity comes with high emotional and professional costs. 

The second act of Milo’s life—his intellectual banishment and physical decline—is narrated by his alienated son, Hans, who tries to balance his father Milo’s “brilliance, his highly purified arrogance, his Olympian drinking, his caustic derision, his near-autistic introversion and his world-class self-involvement” against his mother’s “modest parcels of optimism and care.” It’s an unworkable equation. Hans also worries that he and his young children have inherited both the positive and negative sides of Milo’s unusual abilities.

Which leads one to wonder what traits Canin thinks children inherit from their parents.

Canin laughs. “My experience both from having children and knowing other parents is that before you have kids, you wonder whether it’s nature or nurture, but once you have kids almost every parent will tell you it’s 100 percent nature. Nurture has nothing to do with it. Maybe that’s a way of avoiding blame, but I see crazy things in my kids that come from my parents or my wife’s parents. I know I have the body type and the head movements of my uncle who I hardly know. I talk like him. I move like him. It’s just bizarre. And my daughter has these crazy similarities to my mother. So with no basis in research, I think all those things are heritable.”

Still, natural abilities aren’t the whole story. Canin, the author of four previous novels and two short story collections, is also a believer and practitioner of the daily habits of craftsmanship. “I teach wonderful students here” at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he says. “I don’t have to teach anything academic. It’s all craft-based, which I love.”

Not only that, Canin is a longtime woodworker and carpenter, experiences that inform sections of this novel in very tactile ways. Canin says he built a standing desk in his writing shed years ago. He is currently remodeling the small house next door in Iowa City that he and his wife bought from their elderly neighbor. And he’s rebuilding a cabin in the woods of northern Michigan where he and his family spend their summers. 

“I do a lot of hammer and nails,” Canin says, then adds, laughing, “I’ve always been a woodworker since I took shop in school. It’s about the only thing I learned in high school that I remember.”

Of course, Canin also graduated from Harvard Medical School and practiced emergency medicine in San Francisco, where he spent much of his youth. He draws on his medical background in his powerful descriptions of Milo’s alcoholism and Hans’ struggle with addiction. “Anybody who has worked in an emergency room will tell you that the alcohol problem in the United States is a thousand times bigger than the drug problem,” Canin says. “It’s the elephant in the room.”

More generally, Canin says of his career as a doctor, “there’s no place like it. If you’re interested in stories, you’d want to be a doctor. People tell you things that they tell nobody else. You see a side of the world that is crazy. It’s incredibly interesting. There’s a lot of side learning that goes into it—you have to learn anatomy and physiology and all that—but what could be better for people who are interested in literature? Other than being a priest or a cop or maybe a soldier, I can’t think of anything else that would show you the world the way being a doctor shows you the world.” 

Deciding to leave medicine, Canin says, “was very hard. Would I do it today? Never in a million years because I have kids and a mortgage and college tuition to pay. But at the time, I wasn’t able to foresee any of that. It was very difficult to walk away. It’s a huge amount of education. It was a steady job. It was an interesting job for the most part. But I realized that if I didn’t need the money from finishing a book I would never finish a book. I mean, writing is one thing, finishing a book is another. Leaving [medicine] was a motivation to finish writing a book.”

Finally, there is Canin’s lifelong interest in mathematics, which bodies forth in the novel in both playful and serious ways. “I’ve always been good at math,” he says. “I’ve always loved it. But not like Milo’s mathematics. I understand about 25 percent of that math. I adore math, and I’m helping my kids with their math, and of course they can’t stand it. It’s very dicey how you teach adolescent kids, how you have to lie low, but I keep telling them how beautiful math is and they’re like oh, right, Dad, you’re just saying that.” 

Canin laughs, then adds, “In some ways this novel really was a labor of love—in the sense that I love mathematics and I love the idea of trying something that is difficult in the world. Imagining myself into a character with Milo’s kind of devotion was one of the few pleasures of writing the book.”

 

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

On this winter morning, Ethan Canin seems more interested in talking bicycles than discussing his vivid, moving, finely crafted new novel, A Doubter’s Almanac.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Sunjeev Sahota

Interview by Alden Mudge

Sure, he gets more invitations to read his work. And he now has “a proper study” in his basement. But otherwise, Sunjeev Sahota says life hasn’t changed much since his superb second novel was named to the prestigious Man Booker Prize shortlist.

“I’m very conscious that the person sitting down to write in my basement is different from that person on the shortlist,” 35-year-old Sahota says almost shyly during a call to his home in the old steel town of Sheffield, England. “I just realize that it’s two different people; there’s the writer, and then there’s the person who has to go out and talk about the book. It doesn’t make any difference to how I write or what I write about. I don’t feel any greater sense of expectation, possibly because my expectations for myself are high enough.” 

But Sahota does acknowledge that the enthusiasm for The Year of the Runaways in the U.K., where it was published last year, and in the U.S., where it was just released, “definitely helps me to carry on living by my pen, which is all I’ve wanted to do for a long time now.”

Sahota’s first novel, Ours Are the Streets, the fictional diary of a suicide bomber, was published in 2011. His urge to write arose shortly after he read a novel for the first time at the age of 18. The novel was Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, purchased while Sahota was en route to visit relatives in Punjab in northwest India. Sahota’s grandparents and parents immigrated to England more than 40 years ago. He was born in 1981, not far from where he lives today with his wife, a government accountant, and their children, ages 3 and 1.

Sahota says wryly that he’s asked so often about his first tryst with fiction that it’s become “a bit of an albatross around my neck. It defines me in a way I’m not quite sure about. I don’t know how much I really understood on that first reading. But it did feel like a dam bursting. I felt quite overtaken by a sense of storytelling as a way of spending your life. And then I became a heavy, avid reader very quickly.”

That reading deeply influenced his conception of The Year of the Runaways. “I knew I wanted to write a big book,” he says, “partly because I wanted to do homage to the books that made me fall in love with reading, those big, immersive novels that I first got myself lost in.”

As the title suggests, the action of the novel takes place over the course of one year. It focuses on the lives of four fully imagined main characters and a host of well-wrought minor characters. Three of the main characters—Randeep, Avtar and Tochi—are young men from India who came to Sheffield with naïve plans for earning good incomes. Tochi is smuggled into the country, fleeing a terrifying family trauma. Avtar enters on a student visa. And the very immature Randeep arrives through a “visa marriage” to England-born Narinda, the pious daughter of Sikh immigrants, who is a mystery in the first part of the novel, and as time passes becomes, Sahota acknowledges, “the moral heart of the book. She’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to writing a heroic character. She loses her faith, but she doesn’t lose her sense of wanting to do good.”

Much of the emotional brilliance of the novel derives from its longer chapters, which illuminate—probably controversially—the circumstances that have led its characters to seek work illegally in Britain. Sahota is a stylistically and emotionally nimble writer. His almost too-vivid scenes occasionally provoke warm laughter, but overall the portrayal of the complexity of these immigrants’ lives is heartrending and calls upon a reader’s empathy.

“My family is from a very rural part of Punjab,” Sahota says when asked about the authenticity of these sections of the novel. “Their farm is still their livelihood. The conversation about immigration of people in this rural world who are desperate to make their way to the West is not a secret, underground thing. People discuss quite openly schemes and methods to make their way across. I speak Punjabi fluently, and I’ve spoken to dozens of people who have been to the U.K., the U.S., Australia or mainland Europe. As far as they’re concerned, there’s a world out there with lots of money, and they’d like a share.”

In constructing the captivating world of The Year of the Runaways, Sahota deploys a generous dose of Punjabi in the conversation of his characters. “It’s the background orchestra of the novel,” he explains. “This is an insider’s view, so it felt natural to include Punjabi in the book to give a flavor, to show this different world that exists inside England. If a reader doesn’t understand some of it, then ironically it puts the reader in the position of someone coming to England who can’t make much sense of this new world.”

Some laudatory British reviews have called The Year of the Runaways a political novel, since it explores the human side of what has become a hot-button issue. “I never started off thinking I was going to write a political novel,” Sahota says. “But I don’t have a problem with the term. It is about immigration, but I think that’s neither here nor there in terms of its politics. 

The Year of the Runaways explores "the ideas of sacrifice and the question of what it means to be good in the world."

“Maybe it’s called political because it concerns itself with ideas of sacrifice and the question of what it means to be good in the world where the line between people who have a lot and people who are desperate is so clear and stark. As someone who grew up in England, it’s an active question in my mind. I’m able to live a comparatively privileged life because I was born here. That’s luck. Why is it fair that my cousins in India are struggling and living a very difficult, challenging life? What do I and people like Narinda owe to those who are left behind? In that sense, it is a political book.”

Sahota sighs and then says with some frustration, “It’s a strange world we live in when being sympathetic is seen as a radical act.”

Author photo by Simon Revill
 

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

Sure, he gets more invitations to read his work. And he now has “a proper study” in his basement. But otherwise, Sunjeev Sahota says life hasn’t changed much since his superb second novel was named to the prestigious Man Booker Prize shortlist.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Chris Cleave

Interview by Alden Mudge

The biggest emotional challenge Chris Cleave faced in writing his scintillating fourth novel, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was the duty he felt to honor the memory of his grandparents.

Their experiences in the grim opening years of World War II, when Britain’s defeat by Germany was a distinct possibility, helped to inspire the book. 

“I didn’t feel a need to accurately portray their lives,” Cleave says during a call to the home in suburban London that he shares with his Paris-born wife, a chef turned nutritionist, and their three children, ages 6, 9 and 12. “In fact, I carefully didn’t. But I did feel the need to do justice to their memory. More than anything I felt my mother reading over my shoulder when I was writing this one. I felt a familial duty to deliver something my family would find beautiful. And they’re a tough crowd.”

"I felt a familial duty to deliver something my family would find beautiful."

Powered by crackling dialogue among his characters, Cleave’s novel is beautiful, though in a darkling sort of way. The story opens with teenage socialite Mary North fleeing her Swiss finishing school as soon as war is declared and signing on to be, she hopes, a British spy. Instead she’s assigned to be a teacher, replacing male instructors sent off to war. While her mother and her best friend, Hilda, think teaching is beneath her social station, Mary discovers she actually likes it. She develops a special bond with a black American child named Zachary Lee, whose father performs in a minstrel show, a popular form of entertainment in London at that time.

“I think 80 percent of London’s children were evacuated at the start of the war,” Cleave explains. “I was looking at all these evacuation photos, children getting onto trains in their duffel coats, looking very cute, and being taken to a place of safety in the countryside. Then I was looking at a lot of photos of street scenes of London in the 1930s, and there were a lot of black and mixed-race children in the East End. But the evacuation photos were almost universally of white kids. I became curious about where that was coming from.”

Readers of Cleave’s 2009 bestseller, Little Bee, know him to be a keen observer of political and social divides. Amid the devastating German Blitz, Mary falls for Tom Shaw, a middle-class school administrator, but she is also attracted to his more sophisticated apartment-mate, Alistair Heath, who enlists to fight in France, suffers from what we now call PTSD and later nearly starves to death during the siege of Malta. Mary’s dalliances put her at odds with her friend Hilda. As the novel progresses, Cleave’s portrayal of the ins and outs of these socially and psychologically complex relationships is gripping.

“I was very interested in competitive friendships. These are very young people—Hilda and Mary are 18 when the book starts—and they’re jostling for position. In a world of socialites, where the competition was all about who you were going to marry, I felt it might take a long time before their competition was transcended by the competition against the greater evil. By that, I don’t mean Germany. I mean that the enemy is the terror and the danger itself. I didn’t want to write a novel where my characters have great solidarity to begin with and then stoically face down the enemy threat. I wanted the threat to exacerbate the tensions that existed in the friendships and within the society they inhabit. I’m very interested in the fracture lines—between Hilda and Mary, between white and black, between high class and working class, between town and country. For me, the story lies in those tensions. I think there are two wars we have to win. One of them is against the enemy, yes, but the other one is against the tendency of our own society to divide, to polarize, to fracture.”

Cleave says the technical challenge in writing Everyone Brave Is Forgiven was getting the period details right. In his writing room, which he describes as “monastic,” he has a large aluminum suitcase to remind him that he needs to get out and do his research. “I have a rule for myself that I must physically visit the places I’m talking about. I sort of immerse myself in the worlds of the characters.” So he read novels by Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L. Sayers and others that his characters would have been reading at the time. He listened to the music and radio shows his characters would have heard. “I tried to learn what they would have done on a Friday night in wartime.” He collected census data and bomb damage maps. He researched in libraries instead of on Google. And he lost 22 pounds eating London war rations from that period.

“It was quite dramatic and not that much fun. One of the things I noticed was how much our eating behavior has changed since then. The things that were rationed were sugar, lard, butter, margarine and bacon, which are things I don’t eat at all. The biggest thing I discovered was not how hungry I felt, but how I didn’t want to eat that stuff,” he wryly notes.

"Cleave’s characters, both at home and on the battlefield, confront not just privation but shocking and unexpected losses."

In those early, difficult days of World War II, Cleave’s characters, both at home and on the battlefield, confront not just privation but shocking and unexpected losses, something Cleave brilliantly conveys to his readers.

“It was one of those things where I just woke up in the middle of the night and worked it out. I had particular points in mind where the characters died. Then I went back and just arbitrarily killed them 25 pages earlier. It was brutal. I gave myself huge problems because they had died at very inconvenient moments. But that’s war—horrible, brutal, arbitrary. Death comes unexpectedly. I just cut them off midsentence. It was a real nightmare to fix the book.”

Despite the self-inflicted challenges of writing the novel, Cleave says writing historical fiction was liberating. 

“You have to raise your game. The penny dropped when I went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform. I’m a big fan. Given that Shakespeare can conjure these brilliant, bloodthirsty tragedies, I wondered why so many history plays, why so many Henrys, Edwards and Richards? And I realized that because he’s talking about this platform of our shared history, because we know the great currents behind the play and we know the ending, what we are curious about is character. So by writing historical fiction, he gets to go straight to the heart of character. That’s what I loved about it. . . . I discovered with historical fiction that I can go straight in there and open with strong dialogue and do the thing that I love most of all, which is character and dialogue and letting the development of the characters inform the progress of the novel.”

Writing about war, Cleave says, surprisingly freed him “from having to have bad guys. I’ve discovered—it took me years to work this out—that bad guys make for terrible dialogue. Something that was really good about writing a wartime book is that the enemy is evil itself. There’s no need to have a bad character in order to create the tension in the story. And that means that you have dialogue between people for whom dialogue is a realistic possibility.”

And the dialogue in Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is excellent—sharp and witty. “A novel for me is a fight to give the characters more space to talk in. I like to win space for my characters to talk in a way that advances their character rather than the plot. If I’m doing my job well as a storyteller, then I can keep the story going where it needs to go and still give my characters space to breathe and be themselves.”

Asked if writing this novel was different from writing his previous books, Cleave says, “For the first time I felt that writing the book was its own reward. I was really loving the process of writing it, and I was learning a lot about myself. I didn’t mind what happened as long as I was happy to show it to my mum.”

 

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

The biggest emotional challenge Chris Cleave faced in writing his scintillating fourth novel, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was the duty he felt to honor the memory of his grandparents.
FictionDebut Fiction

Yaa Gyasi

Interview by Alden Mudge

Yaa Gyasi sounds a bit unnerved by the prepublication buzz surrounding her stunning first novel, Homegoing, and the changes its enthusiastic early reception portend for her life.

“I’ve wanted to be a writer my whole life, so this is really the fulfillment of a long dream,” she says during a call to her home in Berkeley, California. She and her boyfriend, a writer she met when they were both at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, have recently moved to the Bay Area.

“I feel fortunate not only that my dream came true but that it’s coming true in such a huge way,” Gyasi continues. “On the other hand, the stakes feel really high in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I find myself being a lot more anxious than when I thought no one would read the book. I feel a lot of outside noise has come in now in a way that it never had before. I had always been writing for myself. And now it’s becoming more public. That’s definitely an end goal of a writer, to share their work with readers. But it is a little nerve-racking.”

Gyasi, who turns 27 in late June, spent seven years developing her first novel. Homegoing is a sweeping, emotionally and morally complex epic that begins in the 18th century in the British African colony that is now Ghana. There, two half-sisters—Effia from the slave-trading Fante nation and Esi from the Asante warrior nation—are born and live nearly intersecting lives without ever meeting. Effia is born during a violent fire. As a young woman, she is married off to a British official as a local wife and lives in the upper realms of the Cape Coast Castle, seat of British colonial power. Esi is sold into slavery and imprisoned in the bowels of the castle to await a harrowing journey over the ocean to the American South.

From there, in beautifully textured alternating chapters in which water imagery represents Esi’s line and fire imagery is linked to Effia’s, the novel explores the lives of these women’s descendants. Esi’s progeny live in the U.S. as slaves and then as free people under Jim Crow laws. Effia’s descendants remain in Ghana and experience the effects of British colonialism and bloody internal African warfare. In the end, in the 21st century, the two lines of descendants experience a poignant kind of “homegoing.”

“People in the present have a tendency to believe that we are necessarily better, smarter or more moral than the people who lived before us.”

“The thing that I was most interested in was the question of what does it mean to be black in America today,” Gyasi says. “So I was very much focused on those last two chapters. I wanted to get to the African immigrant and the African American today. When I first thought of this novel all those years ago, I thought I would toggle back and forth between the characters that make up the first few chapters and the characters that make up the last few chapters to show a then-and-now thing. But then at some point I realized that I was more interested in being able to see the way something moves over a long period of time, in this case slavery, how slavery dovetailed off into this colonialism and institutionalized racism depending on where and how you were looking.”

The novel is propelled by a profound and wrenching sense of history. Yet its characters are emotionally compelling rather than didactic. This is partly because of Gyasi’s “exploratory” style of research. “I didn’t want to feel stifled by the research or the need to get everything exactly, exactly right,” she explains. “I just wanted to have it be this atmospheric thing that was in the background, so that the characters were foregrounded and they were just reacting to a moment in history, as we do now. You know, things are happening around us, but they don’t feel like they always explain our actions and our choices.”

The novel is also shaped by Gyasi’s deep imagining of events and by her family’s experiences. Born in Ghana, she came to the United States when she was 2 years old. Her father is a professor of French and Francophile African literature, and her mother is a nurse. She is the middle of three children and the only girl. Before settling in Huntsville, Alabama, when she was 9, the family also lived in Ohio and Illinois. She went to Stanford University and won a Chappell-Lougee scholarship to travel to Ghana and research her novel.

“I’ve only been back [to Ghana] twice,” Gyasi says. “The first time was with my entire family at age 11. And the second time was when I was 20. I had just a very thin idea for a novel in mind. I had never been to the central region where my mother is from. So I wanted to spend some time there.”

Her visit to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle was the revelation that inspired the novel. “The tour guide started talking about the fact that a lot of British soldiers would marry the local Fante women, and the children from these marriages were sometimes sent to England for school and then came back and started to form the region’s middle class. I’d never heard much about the Cape Coast Castle or about Ghana’s participation in the slave trade. All of this was really new to me. And then the tour guide showed us the majesty of the upstairs level of the castle. It’s beautiful. Then after showing us this upstairs level, he takes us down to see the male and female dungeons. That was also a very striking experience for me—kind of the literal upstairs downstairs thing. And I thought, OK, this is where I’ll start.”

Interestingly, Gyasi says it was reading Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that gave her permission to write her hugely ambitious novel. “That’s such a great book to read, especially if you are about to write a big, messy novel with a lot of family. Just the idea that a reader can look back at the family tree and that doesn’t totally mess up their reading experience was something I got from that book. [Homegoing has a helpful diagram of the characters’ family tree at the beginning of the novel.] I heard from people who had grievances about how many years it was covering or that there are too many characters. But having read Márquez, I could always say he did it, and it was fine.”

Gyasi adds, “People say that first books tend to be more quiet. They tend to be a lot more autobiographical. But I grew up in Alabama. I was a Ghanaian immigrant. When I was in Ghana, I didn’t feel Ghanaian. When I was in America, I didn’t feel quite American. I was kind of living on the edges of these two identities. I’d always been interested in that, and in what we had in common—the African American and the African immigrant. In that way, this book feels incredibly personal to me.”

Asked about the legacy of slavery that Homegoing explores, Gyasi says, “When we talk about slavery today, there’s a sense that it’s this thing that happened a million years ago, so why do we feel like it has any effect on our life today? And I always think that’s a ridiculous way to think about it.

“People in the present have a tendency to believe that we are necessarily better, smarter or more moral than the people who lived before us. We wouldn’t have done this awful thing. We would be the ones who stand up and say, ‘Not me.’ But in the moment I think that is a much harder thing to do. So I was really interested in the people who could say that or who tried to say that, whether they were successful or not. I did want to have their voices in the novel as well. Hopefully, this book is an addition to the conversation about why we still need to think about it today.”

 

Author photo credit Michael Lionstar.

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

Yaa Gyasi sounds a bit unnerved by the prepublication buzz surrounding her stunning first novel, Homegoing, and the changes its enthusiastic early reception portend for her life.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Jeffrey Toobin

Interview by Alden Mudge

Patty Hearst? Jeffrey Toobin was skeptical when his Doubleday editor suggested writing about the sensational 1970s kidnapping saga that Toobin would eventually recount in riveting detail in American Heiress.

“The first thought that came to me was that there must be a million books about Patty Hearst,” Toobin says during a call that reaches him in Washington, D.C. Toobin, whose bestsellers include The Oath and The Nine, is a staff writer for The New Yorker and senior legal analyst at CNN. His wife is an assistant secretary of education in the Obama administration. Their two children are recently out of college and on their own, so as an empty-nester, Toobin says his work is portable. Although he has offices at both The New Yorker and CNN, his real desk, he says, is the dining room table in their apartment in New York City—or his laptop just about anywhere.

To his surprise, when he looked into the Patty Hearst case, he found that “nothing had been written about it for decades. For decades! I was a young teenager when it happened, so I was vaguely aware of it but not really following it. Just a bit of preliminary research suggested that it was an amazing story that had not been told in any detail.”

For those who don’t remember, on February 4, 1974, Patricia (or “Patty,” as she disliked being called) Hearst, a 19-year-old U.C. Berkeley student and the granddaughter of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by a shadowy group of revolutionaries known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Two months later, Hearst publicly declared she had joined the SLA and taken the nom de guerre “Tania.” She appeared heavily armed on a videotape taken during a bank robbery in San Francisco. Months later, she and fellow SLA members Bill and Emily Harris were out buying supplies when police surrounded the SLA’s Los Angeles hideout. A fiery shootout, the first such news event to be broadcast live nationwide, left all the SLA members at the house dead.

Over the next year, Hearst and the Harrises joined with others, including Kathleen Soliah and her brother, Steve, and continued their revolutionary crime wave with bank robberies and bombings. Hearst was finally captured in September 1975, but the drama continued during her trial on bank robbery charges, where she was defended by the blustery F. Lee Bailey.

With great clarity, Toobin takes readers through all the perplexing twists and turns of the SLA’s misadventures. The SLA, for example, was led by a plum-wine-drinking escaped convict named Donald DeFreeze. His leadership was tactically proficient but strategically hapless, almost comically so.

“There was an element of theater to what they did,” Toobin says. “Guerilla theater can be effective. But every time you think of the work of the SLA, it’s imperative to remember Marcus Foster and -Myrna Opsahl [two victims of the SLA’s murderous rampage]. That quickly takes their behavior out of the realm of funny. . . . DeFreeze attracted a small cross section of an extreme of the counterculture.”

Toobin excels in giving readers a sense of 1970s-era counterculture, the petri dish in which the SLA  was spawned. “One of the things that I found so fascinating researching this book was how insane the ’70s were. I mean, there were dozens of bombings in Northern California alone. Can you imagine what cable news would be doing with dozens of bombings?”

Two big research scores allowed Toobin to add texture, detail and a sense of the complex interpersonal dramas that play out in his narrative. After Bill Harris was released from prison, Harris collected all the material about the case he could get his hands on—court documents, FBI files, private investigators’ notes. Toobin found out about the materials while interviewing Harris and arranged to purchase what turned out to be 150 boxes of documents. “For a journalist/historian looking at the era, this was a gold mine,” he says. Even more interesting was the acquisition of the jailhouse love letters exchanged by Hearst and Steve Soliah. Passed through their lawyers so they remained protected by attorney-client privilege, the letters speak loudly about Hearst’s state of mind after her arrest. 

And Hearst’s state of mind is a central question of the book and was the question at her trial. Toobin offers a balanced portrait that is surprisingly complimentary of her courage and strength. And in some ways he believes her behavior was entirely rational given the circumstances.

“One of my goals in portraying anyone is complexity,” Toobin explains. “People are not one-dimensional. Their behavior is not accurately defined in black and white. I think that is especially true for Patricia. She was kidnapped, and it was a horrible experience. But she also was a willing participant in a lengthy and extensive crime wave, long after she had the opportunity to walk away. I certainly understood why the jury in her trial convicted her. And frankly, she was fortunate that she was not prosecuted for the other two bank robberies that she participated in, or shooting up Mel’s Sporting Goods and setting off bombs in Northern California. That is very serious stuff. If you want to evaluate her conduct, you have to take all that into account.”

Toobin’s portrait of Hearst is nuanced enough that readers are likely to hold different opinions about the extent of her culpability when they reach the end of the book (just as people in the 1970s differed, often vigorously).

“I always thought this was bigger than just a legal story,” Toobin says at the end of our conversation. “It is really about this era and these people. It would have been a mistake to see Patricia Hearst’s experience as simply that was she guilty of a bank robbery. This is really about the question of who this woman was, why she got involved with this craziness, and how did this all happen.”

American Heiress offers compelling answers to these questions.

 

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

Patty Hearst? Jeffrey Toobin was skeptical when his Doubleday editor suggested writing about the sensational 1970s kidnapping saga that Toobin would eventually recount in riveting detail in American Heiress.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Amor Towles

Interview by Alden Mudge

Entering a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, for an annual investment conference some years ago, Amor Towles suddenly envisioned the premise for his inventive, entertaining and richly textured second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow.

“It came to me in a flash,” Towles says during a call that reaches him in his study—“a 19th-century library” with windows overlooking the street, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a fireplace—in the townhouse near Gramercy Park in Manhattan that he shares with his wife and their children, ages 14 and 11. “I was looking at the people in the hotel lobby and having this eerie sense that I had seen them before. And I thought, what would it be like to live in a hotel like this for the rest of your life?”

Towles rushed upstairs to outline the book. Within the first hour, he knew that his character would not be in the hotel voluntarily; he would be held by force. “And I thought if a guy has to be in a hotel by force, Russia is the perfect place.”

So the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov—a Russian aristocrat arrested by the Bolsheviks during the Revolution, saved from execution because he had written an influential revolutionary poem in his youth, and then sentenced in 1922 to permanent house arrest in the servants’ quarters of Moscow’s grand Hotel Metropol—began to take shape. 

But it would be a number of years before Towles actually sat down to write the novel. Now 52, the author says he’s been writing since he was a kid. At Yale, his mentor was Peter Matthiessen, with whom he remained friends until Matthiessen’s death in 2014. And during his graduate writing fellowship at Stanford, he was close to novelist Gilbert Sorrentino. But when he moved to New York City at the age of 25, he found that he “wasn’t ready to be alone in my apartment writing all day.” Nor did he find the bartending, table-waiting and fact-checking jobs of his artistic contemporaries appealing. So he joined a friend who was starting Select Equity, an investment-advising firm, and for the next decade he worked to build a successful business. In his late 30s he began writing again, and in 2011, he published his first novel, the bestseller Rules of Civility. Its success allowed him to retire and devote himself to fiction writing. In 2013, he began to work in earnest on A Gentleman in Moscow.

The action of the novel unfolds over the course of roughly 35 years. A central question the book explores is how we adapt to difficult circumstances over which we have little or no control. Towles’ Count Rostov becomes a kind of model of how to live well within very constrained circumstances. He is an educated, affable, kind man who has a passion for food, music, literature and love that seems to grow out of Towles’ own sensibilities. Towles’ evocative descriptions of food, for example, will definitely make a reader’s mouth water. “I don’t mind using the novel to sweep in many things that I enjoy,” Towles says, laughing. “That was part of the fun of it for me.”

A parallel challenge here is how a novelist makes such a confined life interesting over the course of many decades. In this regard, Towles is remarkably inventive. The Count develops surprisingly deep relationships with guests in the hotel, has an ongoing romance with a beautiful, aging actress, eventually becomes a head waiter because of his expertise in organizing social occasions, and finally becomes a loving, overly protective adoptive father to a musically talented girl whose parents disappear in the Russian Gulag. All of this happens within the confines of the hotel. And through all these changes, the seemingly narrow life of the Count lives large in our imaginations.

In addition, the location of the Count’s soft-cuffed imprisonment, the Hotel Metropol, becomes a fascinating character in and of itself. It makes an interviewer wonder, could such a place actually exist in the early years of the Soviet Union?

“The short answer is yes,” Towles says. “It was seized by the Bolsheviks because they needed office space for the government. Moscow, after all, had not been the seat of government for centuries. But when European nations recognized the Soviet government at the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks realized pretty quickly that the first thing foreign diplomats and businessmen would see when checking in was a crappy hotel, a signal that the revolution was failing. So they restored the hotel to its former grandeur and it became the place, not only for foreigners, but for all of Russia, who dreamed of dining and dancing there.”

Towles’ knowledge of Russian history and literature is deep, which adds a pleasing and provocative texture to the novel. But he says adamantly, “I am not a research-oriented writer. A premise gets brighter and sharper the more it’s tied to an area of existing fascination for me. That happened here. I love Russia. I’ve read all the Russian writers and admire them. I think Russian history is fascinating.”

Instead of facts and research, Towles says he thinks of his writing in musical terms. “I think the closest cousin to the novel in the art realm is the symphony. A novel has movements and leitmotifs. It has moments of crescendo and diminuendo. You feel a growing emotional force and then it backs off for reflection. A work must feel cohesive and organic and the beginning and end inform each other in a way that we can hold in our head.”

It’s an apt observation. Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow often reads like it has a song in its heart.

 

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

Entering a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, for an annual investment conference some years ago, Amor Towles suddenly envisioned the premise for his inventive, entertaining and richly textured second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow.
Poetry

Billy Collins

Interview by Alden Mudge

Is there anything Billy Collins misses about being the U.S. poet laureate, a post he held from 2001 to 2003?

“Not really,” Collins says genially during a call to his home in Winter Park, Florida, where he lives with his fiancée, the poet Suzannah Gilman. Collins, 75, retired recently from a long teaching career at the City University of New York. “You’re never completely disconnected from it,” Collins says of being poet laureate. “I compare it to being Miss America. Even though you might have been Miss America in 1973, it’s always part of your identity.”

Collins, who was an unusually popular American poet even before he became poet laureate, calls himself one of the “gateway poets.” These, he explains, are poets who write very readable, nonacademic poetry that can connect with people who leave the form behind after miserable experiences in the meaning-hunt of high school and college. “The key reason for the smallness of the audience for poetry is that people associate poetry with school. . . . I wrote an essay some time ago where I mention six or seven pleasures of poetry—things like the pleasure of rhythm, the pleasure of sound, the pleasure of metaphor. The last pleasure was the pleasure of meaning. The search for meaning has dominated the classroom experience of poetry to the exclusion of all these other pleasures.”

As his many fans know, Collins is a poet of what we’ll call deep playfulness. “I like to play with the reader,” he concedes. “I tell my poetry students that earnestness and sincerity are not the only tones you can take with a reader. In fact, wanting always to be emotionally sincere eliminates a lot of the possibilities for play.”

And so we get the slyly funny “On Rhyme,” whose 13th line provides the title for Collins’ delightful 11th collection of poems, The Rain in Portugal. “It’s supposed to be a kind of blunder,” he explains, laughing. “Because no word comes easily to mind that rhymes with Portugal. Portugal is contiguous to Spain, but it just doesn’t present the same rhyming opportunities as in ‘the rain in Spain.’ Some readers might think the poem is about a rainy day in Portugal, but it’s really an ironic admission to the reader—a kind of trigger warning—that if you’re looking for rhymed poetry you won’t find it here. The real admission is, I’m just not very good at rhyming.”

This sort of self-deprecation in conversation, as well as in his poems, is one of Collins’ most appealing characteristics. But that’s not the only tone he takes in his wide-ranging new collection.

In a poem called “The Present,” for example, he good-humoredly challenges the popular idea of how great it is to live in the present. “It’s questioning how you can live in the millisecond that is always vanishing before your very eyes,” he says. “And it talks about the pleasure of regretting and the pleasure of the mind’s ability to envision a future. I guess that’s what distinguishes us from cows, for example. Probably cows tend to be in the moment. They’re not thinking about what happened yesterday or when they’re going to be milked tomorrow. One of our human abilities is to imagine a future and recreate the past or fall into nostalgia.”

And then there is the darkly beautiful line in the poem “Greece”: “Is not poetry a megaphone held up to the whispering lips of death?” A number of poems in this collection seem to be meditations, often wry meditations, on death. Is mortality a particular concern these days?

“Well, no one’s getting any younger,” Collins responds. “But mortality is so engrained in lyric poetry that the inclusion of death in my poems doesn’t so much reflect my own trepidation or concerns about my own personal mortality as it is a recognition of a convention. I don’t mean to be too professorial about this, but I’ve said this before: If you major in English, you’re majoring in death. The shadow of mortality commonly falls across the page. Thumb through The Norton Anthology of Poetry and you’ll find a lot of death in there. That’s the lens through which we see things.”

I think good poetry gives you the impression that it’s being written just for you.

Collins remains an energetic and engaging presenter of his poetry, which he reads aloud at public appearances across the country. But performing a poem and writing or reading a poem, Collins says, are very different things. “Poetry intensifies one’s aloneness. . . . I don’t show my poems around to other poets [before publication]. Ever since I was an adolescent, the appeal of poetry for me is that you did it by yourself.”

Expanding on the subject of aloneness, Collins says, “If you’ve read my poems, you’ve probably noticed that there are very few other people in them. No aunts or uncles or family members; no Uncle Charlie, no ex-girlfriend. I want to be alone with the reader. I don’t want the reader to be distracted by others. That intimacy clearly gives poetry, well, if not superiority then a least a large difference from public or political language. I think good poetry gives you the impression that it’s being written just for you.”

Add a profound sense of intimacy to the lengthening list of pleasures in reading Collins’ new collection of poems.

 

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

Is there anything Billy Collins misses about being the U.S. poet laureate, a post he held from 2001 to 2003?
NonfictionHealth & Fitness

Gary Taubes

Interview by Alden Mudge

Yes, Gary Taubes, the “prosecutor” in the provocative, eye-opening book The Case Against Sugar, took his 8-year-old son trick-or-treating in his Oakland, California, neighborhood on Halloween.

“Clearly I don’t think any of us should eat sugar, and I try to stay away from it,” he says during a call to his home (built by the founders of the Clorox Bleach company) in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood that he shares with his two boys and his wife, the author Sloane Tanen. “But it would be foolish to deny my experience as someone with children and as someone with a sweet tooth.”

Which brings us to the perplexing question raised in his opening chapter: Is sugar a food or a drug? Taubes reports on some astonishing scientific studies of newborns’ first responses to sugar that strongly suggest sugar has addictive properties that are quite different from other carbohydrates. Taubes himself seems to regard his own sweet tooth as an addictive response to sugar (as well as to high fructose corn syrup, a cheap sugar substitute). “I realized that in thinking about the history of sugar, I had to keep in mind that you might be thinking about the history of a drug,” says Taubes, who speaks rapidly, softly and with passion.

Taubes’ historical account of the rise of the consumption of sugar, covered in the early chapters of the book, is fascinating. For example, this reader had no idea that the addictive power of blended tobacco in cigarettes—beginning with Camel cigarettes in 1912—was created by the introduction of sugar.

“It’s an amazing story!” Taubes exclaims. “It turns out that increasing the sugar content of tobacco leaves—or marinating the leaves in a sugar sauce—has the effect of making the nicotine much more inhalable so that you can bring it into your lungs, which is much harder to do with cigar or pipe tobacco. As such, it made it much more addictive and allowed the carcinogens in smoke to get to this huge surface of the lungs.”

Almost every page of The Case Against Sugar resounds with such revelations. But the heart of Taubes’ prosecution of sugar challenges contemporary beliefs about the underlying causes of obesity and diabetes. His question is this: Why has sugar not been more directly implicated in the dramatic rise of obesity and diabetes? Citing a study of Arizona’s Pima Indians, whose sudden increase in diabetes occurred as they adopted a Western diet early in the 20th century, Taubes says, “The question was, what was causing that? Sugar should have been a major suspect. In the 1920s very influential public health authorities were blaming the epidemic increases in diabetes and obesity on the prevalence of sugar. And then it vanishes from the conversation. The question is, why did it go away?”

In a chapter called “The Gift That Keeps on Giving,” Taubes documents how the sugar industry was let off the hook when medical and nutrition sciences decided that obesity caused diabetes, and that obesity was caused by an updated, scientific Puritanism that blamed sloth and gluttony—overeating and a sedentary lifestyle.

"The book is basically saying that the prime suspect of what’s causing insulin resistance is sugar."

“We are seeing worldwide epidemics of obesity and diabetes, and the diseases associated with them—heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s,” Taubes says when asked about our ingrained belief in the sloth-gluttony narrative. “It’s undeniable that as populations begin to eat Western diets, you see these epidemics come along. We now know that both obesity and diabetes are disorders of what’s called insulin resistance . . . and that is a fundamental disorder in what we now call metabolic syndrome. . . . The book is basically saying that the prime suspect of what’s causing insulin resistance is sugar.”

If that’s true, why did medical and health researchers get it so wrong? Taubes, who has at least once refused the food industry’s monetary support for his journalism, is surprisingly agnostic on the ethical issue of who pays for the research. “The industry needs people who are critical of the data,” he says. “And the only way they’re going to get them is to pay them. Nobody is ever going to do this for free.”

Nevertheless, Taubes is vigorously critical of the ethical and scientific standards of current nutrition research—often funded by the food industry—as he has been in the previous bestsellers Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories. He says that in earlier books such as Nobel Dreams and Bad Science, he cut his journalistic teeth by looking at experimental scientists in physics, chemistry and nuclear physics. “I was taught by these exquisite scientists how to think about these issues critically and skeptically,” he says.

Turning to contemporary health research, he was shocked to find a lack of similar rigor.

“Critical aspects of the methodology of public health and nutrition research are incapable of establishing reliable knowledge, which is the goal of science. Because they can’t do it, instead of being hypercritical as they’re supposed to be, they sort of take this philosophy that it’s the best they can do, therefore it’s good enough. The counter to that is—and I’ve actually given lectures where I’ve said—if that’s the best you can do, get out of the business! Sell shoes, take guns away from gang members, do something useful.”

Taubes says his approach in this book is deliberately prosecutorial. “I really want to get the facts across,” he says. “I’m synthesizing massive amounts of data. It’s based on hundreds of interviews that might spread over years, and it’s invariably based on an unconventional take on the evidence.”

Given his unconventional take, The Case Against Sugar seems destined to be controversial. So does he expect pushback? 

“I expect this book to give everybody something to dislike,” he says with a laugh. Then again, New York magazine has recently asked him to write an article. The working title? “How I’ve Been Vindicated.”

 

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Yes, Gary Taubes, the “prosecutor” in the provocative, eye-opening book The Case Against Sugar, took his 8-year-old son trick-or-treating in his Oakland, California, neighborhood on Halloween.
Photography

Jack Spencer

Interview by Alden Mudge

When Jack Spencer began the 13-year, 80,000-mile odyssey that would result in his ravishing book of photographs of the American landscape, he was in a very bad mood.

“It was the jingoistic, flag-waving, let’s-go-bomb-everybody stuff after 9/11 that was excruciating for me,” Spencer says during a call to his 8,000 square foot studio “right in dead center Nashville,” where he has lived for the last 28 years.

Spencer’s photographs of vast American landscapes and iconic wildlife are beautiful and strangely inspiring.

“I was absolutely and totally against going into Iraq, and I thought America was going nuts. The terrorists had accomplished what they wanted to, which was to throw us off our base. I had a show in Sun Valley, and I decided to drive there, take my 4×5 Polaroid camera and just take off. I drove this gigantic loop across America, 9,000 miles in a six-week period. I was a little bit on the bitter side. But I wanted to photograph the land and try to get some bead on what America really was.”

In the ensuing years, Spencer’s mood has mellowed. “It’s been a transitional journey,” he says, in a gravelly, Southern-accented voice that reminds one of Waylon Jennings. “I was making a collection of images that were about an awareness of this land that we live in, this planet we live on, actually. It’s deeper than just America. We live on this beautiful planet, and we take it for granted.”

     5 HORSES  2005, Montana

Spencer’s route to this book and to a remarkably successful career as a fine art photographer has been circuitous. He was born in Mississippi in the early 1950s but grew up “mostly in Louisiana.” Sounding somewhat mystified, he notes that he has always been interested in art, in making things, even though no one in his family had a similar interest. So Spencer went to Louisiana Tech “for about a year and a half,” majored in art, “but mostly learned how to drink beer.” He dropped out and headed west to work as a musician. Then in the 1980s he returned to the South, Mississippi at first, and, with renewed eyes, “dove head first into photography and worked really hard at it,” with the result that his first book of photographs, Native Soil, made a big splash.

“Basically, I taught myself photography,” he says. “I tell people all the time that I don’t understand why people go to school for four years to learn how to be a photographer because I can pretty much teach you everything you need to know in about 15 minutes. It’s a fairly simple process that really has nothing to do with the mechanics of it. It’s just about seeing, getting what you’re seeing and what you’re feeling. It’s a very strange process.

“Any kind of artwork asks questions of the artist in every step of the process. The piece itself lays out the guidelines. As an artist, I just pay attention to what the piece is asking of me. Of course, this is not a conscious thing. It could better be described as a sort of trance-like process, though that is not a very good description. But it is the best way for me to describe it. The work reaches its own conclusions.”

Well, yes. A great photograph is not about technicalities; it’s about vision. But that vision has to be supported by technical proficiency. So the gorgeous photographs in the new collection This Land have been carefully, digitally rendered according to Spencer’s artistic intuition.

CLOUD / TREE  2008, South Dakota

“I think I’m more influenced by painters than I am by photographers,” Spencer explains. “In this [book, I think] one can see Rothko, Hopper, Bierstadt and others if you look closely enough. But you’re unlikely to see many photographic influences. As an artist, I’ve never really liked the literal. I don’t care for the perfect exposure. I don’t allow my camera to do my work for me. Ansel Adams talked about the negative as the score, and then he goes into the darkroom and interprets that score. I see it the same way. Whenever I make an exposure, it’s just the starting point for me.”

Thus, the 150 or so stunning photographs in the book often evoke mixed feelings about life and about America. “It’s certainly not a Hallmark card presentation of America,” Spencer admits. “There is a certain kind of loneliness and desolation in some of the photographs.” But his photographs of vast American landscapes and iconic wildlife are beautiful and strangely inspiring.

Notably, This Land has very few photographs of people. “The people in the photographs are relatively anonymous,” Spencer acknowledges. “As well they should be—because the book is not really about Americans. It’s trying to explore what America means to Americans.”

Spencer says he has lost track of how many forays he made into the American countryside for this book. In a succession of Denali SUVs he refers to as his mobile living room, he traveled through all lower 48 states, deliberately avoiding the interstates. “I kind of equate it to fishing,” he says. “Some days you catch way past your limit. Some days you don’t even get a nibble.” Spencer caught enough past his limit that he believes he could fill three books of photographs. For Spencer and his editors at the University of Texas Press, deciding what to include was excruciating.

Spencer also says that his travels left him unsurprised by Donald Trump’s electoral victory, but he worries what it might mean for the land. “I knew that this is a beautiful country, but I didn’t know how deeply beautiful this country is. There are plenty of things that can be done to make money. You don’t have to despoil beautiful landscapes just to get some oil. In some ways that’s the point of this book, to say to people go out and take a look at this beautiful land, this beautiful planet we live on. People need to pay attention.”

Photography from This Land copyright © 2017 by Jack Spencer

Author photo via

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When Jack Spencer began the 13-year, 80,000-mile odyssey that would result in his ravishing book of photographs of the American landscape, he was in a very bad mood.

FictionLiterary Fiction

George Saunders

Interview by Alden Mudge

George Saunders, the prize-winning short story writer, waited a long time before he showed the beginnings of his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, to his wife, writer Paula Redick.

“She reads my stuff and knows where on the emotional spectrum it lies. So if I do something clever, she’ll go, yeah, yeah, it’s clever. Or she might say, you typed this, you really typed this!” Saunders says, laughing, during an early morning call that reaches him near Monterey, California. Saunders teaches in the esteemed writing program at Syracuse University, and for much of the year, the couple lives outside of Oneonta, New York, where Saunders writes in a converted toolshed that is just far enough from the house to “send a message about what my priorities are.” A light spring-semester teaching schedule, the desire to escape snowbelt winters and the success of his remarkable short stories (which earned him a MacArthur “genius” fellowship) led the couple recently to buy a winter place in California. At the time of his conversation with BookPage, their daughters, age 26 and 28 and also writers, were visiting.

“We’ve been married a long time,” Saunders continues, “and—I’m never trying to phone it in; but sometimes you can inadvertently phone it in—and she knows when that’s happening.” That wasn’t her impression of the new book. “She was like, this is really good. All I needed to know was that she was on board, and it was worth polishing.”

Lincoln in the Bardo is good. In fact, astonishingly good. Yes, it is strange—part ghost story, part historical novel, maybe a little sci-fi-ish—but in the end, it’s an incredibly inventive and deeply moving book that often reads like an epic, elegiac poem. Saunders says he applied the same standards to this novel as he does to his short stories: “Be efficient and brisk and do whatever you’re trying to do as quickly as you can.” Cross this novel’s threshold and a reader will be entranced, magnetized by the beauty of its language and the brilliance of its conception.

“During the Bill Clinton administration we were up in D.C.,” Saunders says of the initial impulse behind the novel. “We drove by Oak Hill Cemetery, and my wife’s cousin pointed out that Lincoln’s son Willie had been temporarily housed in one of the crypts there. And then she offhandedly added that the newspapers of the day reported that Lincoln had gone to the crypt on several occasions to hold the body. I had this idea of Lincoln with his son’s body across his lap on a dark night, kind of like the Pieta. I wondered what were the mechanics of him leaving the White House, why would he do that, and then why would he stop? That was really interesting to me.”

But for many years, Saunders felt the story was beyond his capabilities. “I was like a mountain climber who every day walks by a mountain and goes, nah, no, can’t do it.” Later, in his early 50s, Saunders decided to give it a try. “I’d never written a novel before. I kind of liked the idea of being the defiant short story guy who was getting more attention than is normal for stories. But this idea just kept coming up and sitting on my porch and going, OK, I’m here and I want you to take care of me. You can only walk away from that so many times.”

“But I thought, Lincoln? Sheesh! I might as well write a novel about Jesus. It’s just so daunting. You don’t want to be disrespectful and you also don’t want to rehash the same old clichés.”

Still, there was the problem of writing about Lincoln. Saunders, who was born in Texas, jokes that he has “almost a fashion interest in the Civil War. I love the look of it and the idea that it happened a relatively short time ago. And of course this last election kind of showed that the war is still being fought.” Over the past 20 years, “as a hobbyist,” he has wandered the Lincoln/Civil War section of any bookstore he’s been in, and his research for the novel has benefited from an impressive collection of Civil War books and documents donated to Syracuse by conservative journalist and presidential speechwriter William Safire.

“But I thought, Lincoln? Sheesh! I might as well write a novel about Jesus. It’s just so daunting. You don’t want to be disrespectful and you also don’t want to rehash the same old clichés.”

Saunders resolved his Lincoln issue by limiting the number of occasions Lincoln is actually present in the novel. And even when present, Lincoln is revealed through the eyes of others—which has the eerie effect of making his grief over the death of his 11-year-old son—and his increasing distress over the growing carnage of the Civil War—even more palpable.

Most of the novel’s action takes place in Oak Hill Cemetery on a single night at the end of February in 1862. The story is narrated by a weird and raucous medley of voices. Saunders says that in making the audiobook, he discovered that there are 166 different personalities in the novel. These voices also include a beguiling weave of quotations from actual and invented historians describing—in conflicting accounts—the Lincolns’ growing alarm during a February 1862 White House party while Willie lies upstairs dying. For most of the novel, there are three main narrators, and at some point a reader will likely become skeptical about them. They seem stuck between life and whatever comes next, the transitional place that Tibetan Buddhists call “the bardo.”

Saunders was raised Catholic, but he and his wife have practiced Buddhism for many, many years. “I was really happy to be writing this book because I felt the things it is about are the things I am thinking about: one’s own mortality and the question of how you persevere with a loving heart in the face of the harshness of the world,” he says. Later he adds, “The notion of the bardo is not fake to me. I think in some ways my whole life has been spent trying to get into some relation with death. . . . I love the idea that there are people who are trying to get a little behind the veil. And there’s evidence from really advanced spiritual people that the end is not the end.”

Saunders is quick to add that he tries “not to have too many thematic thoughts because I don’t want to derail the story with simplistic answers.” Instead, his entry into prose has to do with sound. In revising his fiction he says he is “trying to make the sound distinctive, which in turn makes the sense more precise.”

The sounds—the voices—of Lincoln in the Bardo are indeed distinctive, often funny, sometimes bawdy, despite the fact that the novel is about death and grief, good and evil, the nature of human existence.

“I really love writing contemporary voices, or imitations of contemporary voices. This book was a struggle because I usually go out of my way to be funny and funny in a contemporary way. Wondering how I would be funny in a 19th-century way was a constraint I really enjoyed. In writing, the use of humor at its highest level is trying to mimic the comic nature of the universe. We’re trying to imitate the mind of God, and the mind of God doesn’t work like a human mind. You have to remember that the universe runs on its own timer.”

Summing up, Saunders says, “I didn’t want to write a historical novel. I find myself averse to anything pro forma. I didn’t want a reader to [think], oh, I see, he’s going to milk the juice out of the night Lincoln went to the grave. “The trick was to find the means to shake it up a bit. Going back to it after a few months away, I think, wow, it’s a strange book. A little deformed. But it’s deformed because it’s trying to get to the emotional core more directly. This book was kind of a weird blurt. I can stand behind that because I know it’s efficient and I know that its heart is in the right place.”

 

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

George Saunders, the prize-winning short story writer, waited a long time before he showed the beginnings of his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, to his wife, writer Paula Redick.

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