Ellen Kanner

Barbara Kingsolver was a little girl of seven when she and her family left their Kentucky home to spend two years in the Congo. When she returned, the world looked totally different to her. “I understood the way we lived in my little corner of Kentucky was just that,” says the author. “One little corner where we had certain things we did, possessed, believed in, but there was a great big world out there where people had no use for many of the things my community held dear. I came home with an acutely heightened sense of race, of ethnicity. I got to live in a place where people thought I was noticeable and probably hideous because of the color of my skin. These weren’t easy lessons,” says Kingsolver, “but they were priceless.” She has not forgotten what the Congo taught her. It made her the person, the writer, she is.

“I’m extremely interested in cultural difference, in social and political history and the sparks that fly when people with different ways of looking at the world come together and need to reconcile or move through or celebrate those differences. All that precisely describes everything I’ve ever written, Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven, all of it.” It also describes Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a novel of post-colonial Africa which brings to bear all she observed as a child in the Congo and all she came to understand of it as an adult.

“Given that this is what we did as a nation in Africa, how are we to feel about it now?” asks the author. How do we live with it and how do we move on? Given that this is our history, what do we do with it? One thing is very clear, there isn’t a single answer, there’s a spectrum of answers. Representing that spectrum is Nathan Price, a Baptist missionary, his wife, and their four daughters. The Prices arrive in Africa believing God is on their side. That changes quickly. “I always believed any sin was easily rectified if only you let Jesus Christ into your heart,” says Nathan’s daughter Leah, “but here it gets complicated.”  Indeed. A stranger tells Nathan, “I do not think the people are looking for your kind of salvation. . . . they are looking for. . . the new soul of Africa.” But in his eagerness to save everyone’s soul, Nathan is deaf to the truth, just as he is deaf to the nuances of the Congolese culture. “We sang in church, Tata Nzolo! Which means ‘Father in Heaven’ or ‘Father of Fish Bait,’ depending on just how you sing it,” recalls Nathan’s wife, Orleanna, who returns from her time in the Congo marked and stricken by loss.

Leah, on the other hand, embraces Africa in the 30-year course of the book, even at the risk of rejecting the cornerstones of her past. ” I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to sink or swim.” Leah’s bookish twin, Adah, is a darker presence, a witness to the country’s horrors. Rachel the eldest Price daughter, is vain, contemptuous of her new life and full of comic malapropisms, given, as she is to feminine tuition. Ruth May, the youngest, is the Price always in a hurry, propelled by a child’s innocence and enthusiasm. The Price girls and their mother narrate The Poisonwood Bible in alternating chapters. Kingsolver chose multiple voices to portray the enormity, the complexity of her subject. That choice, however, created complexities of its own.

“I wasn’t very far into this book when I realized what I set out to do was impossible.” The author laughs. “Or at least extremely difficult, much harder than anything I ever did it before. The most difficult thing was to fine tune the voices five narrators, all in the same family, most of them about the same age. How do you make each voice distinct enough that the reader could open to any page and know who’s speaking? It led to many quiet little fits of flying paper in my office. But it was also great fun. What I love best about being a novelist is I get to do something different every time. When you’re flying by the seat of your pants, you’re never bored.” Writing is Kingsolver’s passion, but she’s no artiste. “I consider myself a writer of the working class, I’m a little bit smug about it, have so little tolerance for writers who have elaborate three-hour rituals before they even get down to work. I think, oh, please. My idea of a pre-writing ritual is getting the kids on the bus and sitting down.” The years she worked as technical writer taught her to produce “whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writers’ block, oh I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

“I love revision. Revision is where the art really happens, when you begin to manipulate, shift things around so your theme begins to shine through.” While Kingsolver was revising her novel, the Congo itself began its own revision. Mobutu, the Congolese dictator in power for over 30 years, died and his regime fell. The new president, Laurent Kabila has clashed with Tutsi rebels, and the Congo is once again in the throes of bloody strife.

“It’s very odd,” says Kingsolver. “This book is in some way timely, and nothing could surprise me more. When I began writing, I thought my primary task would get my readers to believe there was a dictator called Mobuto, that all these things really happened somewhere far away and they should care.” As America and the United Nations study the Congo and analyze strategies for intervention, Kingsolver hopes governing bodies will heed some of the lessons she learned as a child, the lessons of The Poisonwood Bible. “We can never know, never look at history with anything but a narrow and distorted window, says the author. We can never know the whole truth, only what’s been recorded for us and what our cultural and political predisposition understands. Leah says history is never much more at a mirror we can tilt to look at ourselves.”

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami, Florida.

In Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel, Broke Heart Blues, headlines scream SUBURBAN TEEN TRIED IN SHOOTING DEATH OF MOTHER’S LOVER. That teen, John Reddy Heart, is the book’s mysterious, romantic central figure and the source of endless speculation. Though Oates is neither murderer nor teen idol, she knows what public scrutiny feels like. One of America’s most innovative and prolific literary writers, Oates maintains a low profile, causing fans and critics to wonder who she really is and how she does what she does.

Not only does she write great novels, Oates has written a lot of them, 30 to date. In addition, she’s been teaching at Princeton for the past 20 years, and is releasing this month both a new collection of criticism, Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going and Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon, a psychological thriller written under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith.

Oates may be a brooding figure of intrigue to others, but her creativity is no mystery at all, just hard work. “I do only one work at a time. I tend to be obsessive and haunted by the work,” said the author, speaking from Princeton. “I don’t work fast but I work a long time every day. I start fairly early in the morning and go till about 1:00. I take time off in the afternoon and I teach two days a week, but then I can sometimes work again till midnight.” But attempts to demystify herself have done no good. Like John Reddy, Oates is often a figure onto whom others project their own personal myths.

The difference between how things appear and how they really are is Oates’s lifelong literary focus. Oates has never indulged her favorite theme with the playful sweetness and humor of Broke Heart Blues. Set in the 1960s, it “deals with murder and a family idealized and ostracized — ” familiar Oates turf — “but mostly it’s about kids and innocence,” said Oates. “I wanted to write about the American infatuation with high school life, of collective nostalgia. It’s not satirical, not cruel. It’s a sympathetic look at these powerful, genuine emotions we forget about when we get older.”

Articulating those volatile emotions are the assembled voices of 40 Willowsville High students Oates crafts to speak as a single, impassioned narrator. They all love John Reddy, but “Most of us at WHS, even guys who’d played varsity basketball with him . . . even the few girls who claimed to have gone out with him, would have to admit we’d never had an actual conversation with John Reddy Heart.”

“That was the most exciting part of writing the novel, putting the voices together in a kind of chorus,” said Oates. “There’s the disparity of what they imagined and what is.” The book’s middle section, written in omniscient third-person narration, is where readers find out “what is.” The real John Reddy can hardly compete with his classmates’ elaborate perceptions.

Similarly, the truth about Oates doesn’t live up to the image of her as an intense, bookish creature. She is not like Broke Heart Blues‘s Evangeline Fesnacht, who, the book tells us, grew up, left Willowsville, and became the author “E.S. Fesnacht, a voice of disturbing but penetrating insight into the tragic human condition.” The line sounds like every Oates review, but the author created Evangeline Fesnacht “as a gentle satire of my own self as I’m perceived by other people. I know my image is different, but I was captain of the basketball team, I played field hockey, I was very athletic. I belonged to many, many clubs.”

Nostalgia implies sentimentality, something of which the author could never be accused. Rather, she evokes the cauldron of adolescent yearning as though still stinging from it. “It’s a time of great excitement and imagination. All kinds of emotions are unleashed. You can be blissfully happy one day and the next really melancholy. These kids in my novel could be plunged into extremes.”

Though she calls Broke Heart Blues her happy novel, it involves strong emotions, “preppies, hoods, jocks, geeks” and other high school cliques, and murder, themes which seem to presage the high school violence of Littleton, Colorado. “Littleton has always been coming,” she said. “There have been school shootings in past years. I certainly hope there won’t be a larger one, but there will probably be other shootings. The emotions of adolescent boys have always been volatile. Now instead of getting into a fight, they get a gun.”

Boys may always be boys, but the times they live in change. Oates notes a loss of innocence in America. Compared to a generation ago, American youth is “much more catapulted into adult life, but they’re not ready for it, not emotionally.” Maybe no one ever is. Oates believes that at our core we remain the awkward, insecure people we were in high school. “That side of American men, the boyishness, is very touching,” she said, “the way they look back to the school years and still feel inadequacy. That makes them human.”

The last section of Broke Heart Blues, a 30th reunion at Willowsville High, reverts to the collective voice of the students, some settled, some bitter, all very much older. Hoping John Reddy, the mysterious outsider of their youth, will somehow appear, they discover the welter of powerful emotions they thought had died.

Thirty years on, Willowsville High students still obsess about John Reddy Heart, and 30 novels since she began writing, Oates still has the ability to surprise. “There are writers who basically write the same book, but some of us as we get older get more playful and experimental,” she said. “Broke Heart Blues is not a form I would have dreamed of using 20 years ago.”

Freewheeling with form, Oates is still driven by the same core content, probing the dark, unknowable heart, piercing the veil of appearance. She has started work on a new novel about Marilyn Monroe — someone who was, like John Reddy and his creator, an outsider. “I’ve been haunted by her image. I wanted to write about Norma Jean Baker, not Marilyn Monroe, the real person rather than the icon. In America,” she added, “we make our journeys from the outside to the inside.” Her new novel will end as Monroe’s life did — tragically.

But that’s not what Oates wanted for Broke Heart Blues. “I end it with the words, ‘we love you.’ It’s like saying we love America, and we love youth. It’s a valentine to that experience.”

Ellen Kanner has interviewed many authors for BookPage.

Jane Smiley doesn’t do autobiography. You won’t find her in Ginny, the narrator of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, or in any of the ensemble cast of her wicked academic satire, Moo. "I don’t write to investigate my own life or sensibility," says the tall, elegant author. "I write more to investigate the world."

Specifically, Smiley investigates America, both its inner and outer landscapes, and never more so than with her new novel, The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. The author calls this book a look at "the intersection of ideology and violence in America." It’s a daunting subject, but as always, the author gives it a very human face. The face belongs to Lidie Newton, a gangly young widow who recalls all that happened a year ago, in 1855.

It begins when Lidie meets Thomas Newton, an abolitionist passing through on his way to his claim in the Kansas Territory. Lidie has no strong moral feelings about slavery but is intrigued by Thomas, who declares it to be "evil incarnate." When he proposes marriage, she agrees. "He’s appealing and he likes her," says Smiley. "She doesn’t have many prospects and so she sets off the way we all do — why not?"

Lidie’s sense of "why not" defines her. Marrying a man she barely knows and moving to a strange, dangerous place seems no more to her than an adventure, and Lidie loves adventure. She is, after all, the only woman in her home town of Quincy, Illinois, to swim the Mississippi River. She isn’t, however, the first wild spirit in fiction to do so. First came Huck Finn.

"I was conscious, of course, of Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn grows up in the same period she does, grows up across the river, and they swim in the same river. But I was also conscious of Uncle Tom’s Cabin," says Smiley, who in her 1995 Harper’s article, "Say It Ain’t So, Huck," asserted Beecher depicted slavery more realistically than Twain. Smiley sighs. "The American myth is that things work out. But if we look out on American history, they didn’t work out. The real typical slave escape is that [the slave] doesn’t get away and everybody has to deal with that."

For Lidie, her stand on slavery, which people slyly refer to as "the goose question," is only one more part of the complicated life she finds in Bloody Kansas. She and Thomas face hardship, hatred, and violence as the free-staters clash with the slave-holders of Missouri.

Smiley, who immersed herself in research, is encyclopedic on the subject. "Ideology and violence came together with pioneers and getting rid of the Indians and making claims and claims jumping — all the forces of American history are present in Kansas," says the author. "All along the Kansas-Missouri border was something we would recognize now — Bosnia and Rwanda and guerrilla-type wars."

Bloodshed and hate, believes Smiley, are part of American heritage. Though they’re nothing new, they’re always devastating. The week Smiley began her book tour for Moo, she found another link between the past and the present, another manifestation of American ideology and violence — the federal building in Oklahoma City blew up.

Such random slaughter occurs midway through Smiley’s novel, when Thomas is gunned down, leaving Lidie alone in a wild place. "I had lost every single thing, including . . . my very name and history. . . ." says the narrator. "I was a new person, one I had never desired or expected to be."

Grieving and in shock, Lidie discovers that like Thomas’s murderers, she, too, is capable of rage. "I wanted to kill something, preferably a Missourian, preferably more than one." She cuts off her hair, dresses like a man, and sets out into hostile Missouri to avenge her husband’s death. But Lidie’s plans unravel when she falls ill and is taken in and cared for at a beautiful southern plantation.

Lidie, who has never paid much attention to slaves before, meets Lorna, a strong-willed slave, a woman rich in humanity. Though the plantation owner treats his slaves well, "the mere fact of being a slave is galling and appalling to Lorna, and it should be," says Smiley. "That’s why I didn’t do a Simon Legree sort of thing — we don’t have to ponder the worst case in order to ponder the moral outrage." When Lidie decides she must move on, Lorna announces, "Well, you is takin’ me wid ya."

Just as Lidie assumes disguises, The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton is a call for freedom and tolerance dressed as page-turner, a ripping good read. "Every novel I write is political," says the author. "It’s not possible to suspend your critique of the world and enter into some sort of pure apolitical realm. Your political views and your moral views connect you in a responsible way to other people, to society."

Connection to others, to what is real, resonates with Smiley. Winning the Pulitzer, she admits, was nice, but it didn’t change her life. "It made me famous, but that’s something that exists in other people’s minds. Becoming a mother at 43, buying a horse at 42, that changed my life." Indeed, Smiley’s affinity for horses comes through in the novel with Jeremiah, Lidie’s own beloved gray.

Being a mother and a raiser of horses has taken Smiley away from working in her head to an awareness of herself. "I went from being a teacher of literature and a writer to being a student of a whole different set of life questions — a student of riding, a student of [the] body, a student of fear, of horse psychology, horse care. I went from being in the advanced class back to being in kindergarten, which is not what I thought was going to happen," says the author, still surprised. "It has been wonderful and it has been painful. It opened me up. It changed who I was."

This is where Smiley, who does not do autobiography, turns out to have something in common with lanky, guileless Lidie. They share the same why-not attitude. "I think her voice is similar to mine. I certainly felt comfortable writing in her voice," admits Smiley. "And I’m tall."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami, Florida.

In The River King, ghosts appear in photographs and people are knocked out by an overwhelming smell of roses "though the weather was dismal and no flowers bloomed." This isn’t the real world, it’s the world of Alice Hoffman, whose 13 novels sparkle with enchantment.

"There are people who write fiction to come to terms with their own lives. I’m much more interested in creating alternate universes, not everyday reality," said the author, speaking from her home outside Boston. Hoffman, who has peopled her novels with witches (Practical Magic, 1995) and giants (Illumination Night, 1987) and armed her merely mortal characters with charms and spells, never outgrew her love of fairy tales. She thinks at heart, no one has. Everyone wants to believe.

As a girl, Hoffman adored Mary Poppins and stories by the Brothers Grimm and Ray Bradbury, but more than that, she believed in them. "I believed anything can happen. It was a huge escape for me as reader. I loved anything that could remove me from reality and make me see possibilities," she said. "Fiction in general gives you the freedom of exploring the truth without boundaries, to get to a deeper truth, and fairy tales have always been my model."

The River King, with more than a whisper of fairy tale to it, takes place in Haddan, Massachusetts, at a school haunted by the ghost of Annie Howe. "Most newcomers are apprised of Annie’s fate as soon a they come to Haddan. . . . The house is called St. Anne’s, in honor of Annie Howe, who hanged herself from the rafters one mild evening in March. . . ."

Once Hoffman envisioned this gothic image, the rest of the story unfolded. "It’s a strange process, writing fiction," she said. "Here, the town kind of appeared for me, then the school and the river, and people moved in and filled it up." Among the people filling up Haddan are new students Carlin Leander and Augustus Pierce, new teacher Betsy Chase, and Abel Grey, the town’s policeman who has lived there all his life. They meet as strangers, but the mysterious death of one unites the other three. While uncovering the truth, they each discover some truths about themselves. Hoffman writes, "It was the truth that was always as clear as water until it had been broken; shatter it and all that’s left is a lie.""More important than the story you tell is the voice you have," said the author, who achieves that voice by not thinking about it too much. "I’ve always tried to go directly from sleep to the computer, before I have the time to start censoring myself. I like to get up at 5:00. I do my best work early in the morning before the world’s awake. For the kind of fiction I write, which is emotional fiction, you have to let go. Let the walls down, the defenses down. Don’t worry about what people are going to think."

She tries to work quickly and never looks over her first draft until she has told the whole story. Then she burnishes her prose. "I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite," she said. It took three years before she was satisfied with The River King.

Though Hoffman may have the most in common with the book’s impulsive, exotic Betsy Chase, she feels the most protective of the teenagers, Carlin and Gus. The author’s children are 12 and 17, but Hoffman didn’t use their behavior for the book. She didn’t have to. Her own teenage years still feel achingly fresh. "It stays with you like no other time does. Falling in love for the first time, succeeding for the first time, failing for the first time — it’s intense. I remember how important, how dire everything seemed. Everything seemed so life or death. I think it’s still that way."

Adolescent angst may be eternal, but some things have changed since Hoffman’s high school years. The killings at Colombine High School occurred while she was writing The River King. "I felt like changing the book because of Colombine, but decided to leave it the way it is. There seems to be so much intolerance about sexual orientation, so much bullying, more people getting guns," said Hoffman. "It’s harder to be a teenager now."

Harder, even than when she wrote about New York gang life in her first novel, Property Of. The book came out in 1977, when Hoffman was in her early 20s, barely out of her teens, herself. "I was a baby, I knew nothing, I had never heard of Farrar Straus [her first publisher] when I started," she said, laughing. "Back then, you got no money, no publicity, but they took more chances. It was much easier to get published. [Her current publisher] Putnam’s stayed with me in a way I’m not sure publishers do anymore. If you’re not having huge sales, they don’t want to see you."

Hoffman doesn’t think about sales, huge or otherwise, when she works. "I always feel you’re writing the book you couldn’t find, so you have to write it yourself." Though she confessed, "Some people pressure you to write the same book over and over again," Hoffman doesn’t pay much attention. She’d rather stretch herself as a writer and keep her own council, something she learned to do as a girl. Back in elementary school, her "very, very smart" older brother was the teachers’ darling. Hoffman, who was not, wasn’t above filching his old papers and resubmitting them under her own name. "His would get an A and mine would get a C or D. I realized it didn’t matter what anyone else thought and whatever judgment I got was going to come from myself. You have to have faith in yourself."

The author of The River King also has faith in the power of myth and the power of literature. Though reading and writing may seem like solitary acts, she believes books bring people together, providing "that feeling of community, of what feels true for you feels true for me, the sense you’re not alone and somebody knows how you feel. I believe literature can change things," Hoffman said. She believes it the way she used to believe in fairy tales — with all her heart.

Ellen Kanner writes from Miami.

Author photo by Jake Martin.