Stephenie Harrison

While reading any Jasper Fforde novel, the rule of thumb is to expect the unexpected. In his eighth novel, Shades of Grey, the British master of devilish plots and ingenious wordplay proves that rule once again.

Shades of Grey catapults readers into a weird new world where we are all made strangers in a strange land. The novel takes place in the distant future, one in which humans are pretty much the same as they have always been, but with one crucial difference: rather than being able to see the entire spectrum, individuals can only see one color, and the color you can see foretells your destiny. If you’re lucky enough to see Purple, you’re royalty, sitting at the very top of the social order. Just hope you see something other than Grey, which is so low a social standing, you may as well be kneeling.

Eddie Russet, the novel’s unlikely hero, has it slightly better. He’s a Red—just one level above Grey in the grand scheme of things—but a very good Red. He hopes that upon coming of age and taking his Ishihara (the test which determines just how much vision you have of a particular color), he’ll have enough Red vision to qualify for a job working for National Color, the highest governing agency in Eddie’s world. All this changes, however, when he’s sent to East Carmine due to bad behavior and finds himself falling madly in love with a surly serving girl named Jane Grey.

Desperate to win Jane’s friendship, Eddie goes out of his way to impress her every chance he gets. Under her guidance, he begins to push boundaries, and even worse, to question the world around him. Eddie starts to realize that the world may not be quite as rosy as he had previously believed. Sometimes ignorance truly is bliss.

Apart from his dazzling Red abilities, there isn’t much that’s extraordinary about Eddie, but according to Fforde, it’s Eddie’s utter unremarkable-ness that makes his story so important.

“I didn’t want to make him too special,” Fforde muses, speaking from his home in Wales. “When you look at great conflicts like the World Wars, the most interesting characters for me are not the frontline heroes who have been born into a ruler society and could make things happen there, but the people who are basically lower middle class. I think it’s far more interesting for someone like Eddie because he’s only a notch above Grey, so he’s really quite low down, and it would be very, very easy for him to do nothing. And I think that’s really important, because the most extraordinary heroes, I think, of any great conflict or any huge sort of social upheaval are the people who could have done nothing and it would have been okay, and no one would have held it against them.”

Of course, those who have even a passing familiarity with Fforde’s other books know that social satire cloaked in the extraordinary is his bread and butter—his first series features a literary detective, Thursday Next, who can enter works of fiction and frequently goes up against a mega-conglomerate named Goliath that seeks to control the entire world.

Comparing the new series in scope to his previous works, Fforde remarks, “In Shades of Grey, I wasn’t trying to get too serious, because it’s not really a serious book at all.” He continues, “The Thursday series or the Nursery Crime series, they’re kind of silly whimsical books.”

Still, these so-called “whimsical” novels often have a darker tone. Fforde explains that his fiction is all about “being outside of that comfortable area, and tackling the things you don’t really like to write about.”

He says, “With Shades of Grey, I try to start off the book with a slightly Utopian feel, but an uneasy one, so that you might say, ‘Okay, this is not terrific, but maybe it’s the best we can get,’ but then of course as the story progresses, we realize there is a much darker side to this. Also, when you’re creating a story that you want to progress into an adventure story, you’ve got to have a fantastically good baddie, and you have to make things pretty bad for your characters to try to battle against.”

Even if he may have “inadvertently written a serious book,” Fforde is still Fforde here. Shades of Grey is fantastically funny in all the ways Fforde fans have come to anticipate. “Mostly it’s about trying to make the words dance a bit on the page,” he explains. “I think comedy is so important. I think there are so many serious books out there that are not real books because they don’t have comedy in them. Even in the darkest times of human endurance, there will always be comedy.”

All laughing matters aside, with Shades of Grey, it’s obvious that Fforde is breaking new ground. Perhaps the biggest change here is that for the first time, rather than borrowing from pre-existing literature, Fforde created all of his characters and the entire world from scratch. This was a crucial step for him as an author.

“No one will argue when I say it’s a departure,” he says, “but I think it’s a very necessary departure. I think authors have to stretch themselves from time to time to avoid becoming stale. I’ve been stealing other people’s characters for seven books now, and there’s a huge amount of fun to be had there, but it’s not something that can be mined forever, so you have to move either on or sideways or back, but you have to keep moving or else it all goes nasty.”

Is he worried that this departure may leave some fans behind? Fforde acknowledges that he’s taking a risk with his new book, but also says, “Writing without risk is not writing, as far as I’m concerned. . . . Although Shades of Grey is a very different idea from my previous works, I’m hoping people will read it and say, ‘Yeah, it’s not Thursday but it’s definitely a Jasper book.’ ”

A novel containing adventure, romance and a conspiracy involving missing spoons? Even with Thursday Next nowhere in sight, readers will be hard pressed to categorize Shades of Grey as anything other than a “Jasper book”!

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Read a review of Shades of Grey.

Canadian-born author Emily St. John Mandel burst onto the literary scene in 2009 with her debut, Last Night in Montreal. Her second novel, The Singer’s Gun, is May 2010’s #1 Indie Next Pick, and praise is mounting from booksellers and reviewers alike. BookPage spoke with St. John Mandel about the inspiration behind her novels, immigration issues and the worst job she’s ever had.

There are a lot of heavy issues (ranging from immigration fraud to human trafficking) in The Singer’s Gun. Where did you get your inspiration for the book, and why did you feel you needed to tell this story?
I've always had an interest in immigration. My father emigrated from the United States to Canada, and then 30 years later I emigrated from Canada to the United States. Human trafficking is immigration’s dark shadow.

Around the time I began the book I was thinking a lot about marriage, having spent the previous months planning my wedding, and there was a story I'd recently heard that stayed with me—it concerned a man who’d realized on his honeymoon that he’d made a mistake. The feeling was apparently mutual; the couple divorced amicably about six months later. I feel that it should be possible to base a novel on just about anything, so I began with that premise: What if a man left his wife on their honeymoon? The entire novel unwound from there. Various interests (immigration, passport fraud, figureheads, container ships, the idea of holiness) adhered themselves over time, and after a few years of concentrated effort I had a book.

This might of course change with future books, but for my first two novels it hasn’t really been a matter of needing to tell any particular story—it’s more that I start with an image, or a sentence, or some vague premise, and the final book is the story I end up with at the end of the process.

One of the main characters in The Singer’s Gun is a Canadian whose lifelong dream is to live in New York City, even if it means living there illegally. You also happen to be Canadian and live in Brooklyn—how did you wind up there? Are there any other parallels between you and your Canadian literary counterpart?
I gave my Canadian literary counterpart an unpleasant work environment that had aspects of one or two of my least favorite jobs, and when I first came here I thought I was an illegal alien—it was a happy surprise to discover that because my father was born and raised in California, I’d actually been an American all along—but the similarities end there. None of my characters are based on anyone in particular.

I took a circuitous route from Canada to Brooklyn. Living in New York City wasn’t my lifelong dream—I actually never thought when I was younger that I’d end up living in the United States. I grew up on the west coast of British Columbia, and went to school in Toronto, so that was what brought me over to this side of the continent. A year or so after I graduated from the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, I had a boyfriend in New York, so I moved down there to be with him. After five months or so we ended up moving to Montreal together, and then after a few months in Montreal I missed New York City so much that I moved back here on my own. I’ve been in New York for about seven years.

Before you broke into publishing, you studied dance, which seems like an unconventional warm-up to becoming an author. What made you switch paths?
I was home-schooled as a child, and one of the very few requirements of my somewhat haphazard curriculum was that I write something every day. So I’d actually been writing for almost as long as I can remember—I was in the habit of writing short stories and poems from a very early age. Even when I was a dancer, I used to take notes for stories all the time. At a certain point in my early 20s, I found that dance was beginning to feel like more of a burden than a joy, and I started taking fewer and fewer dance classes, going to fewer auditions, and writing much more seriously than I ever had before. It was a very slow and gradual progression from thinking of myself as a dancer who sometimes wrote to thinking of myself as a writer who used to be a dancer.

There’s a very international scope to your fiction. Do you attribute this to your own experiences of having lived as an immigrant in a foreign country?
Yes, I think it’s probably fair to say that my experience of having lived in more than one country has shaped the way I write. Living in a country other than the one you grew up in is an experience that I think everyone should have at some point in their lives, if at all possible—it changes the way you see the world.

The issue of identity theft and escape comes into play in this novel. If you could be anyone else, who would you be and why?
Good question . . . there are certain aspects of other peoples’ lives and careers that I admire—it would be nice to be able to play the piano like Horowitz, for example, or to have enough money to travel the world and spend concentrated amounts of time in southern Italy—but I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather be. I think I’ve been very lucky.

One of the interesting similarities between The Singer’s Gun and your first novel, Last Night in Montreal, is that both novels deal with issues of identity. Is this a topic that you’ve personally struggled with?
Not really, although it’s certainly a topic that I’ve thought about a lot. At a certain point in my life I acquired a second passport, and suddenly having citizenship in more than one country of course somewhat complicates the way you think of yourself. I also changed my name when I got married, and changing your name forces you to consider questions of identity—I took my husband’s last name, Mandel, and dropped my maiden name altogether. (St. John is my middle name; it was my grandmother’s surname.)

Anton has many secrets that he’s willing to risk his life for . . . what about you?
There are a few people I’d risk my life for, and possibly even a cause or two, but I can’t say that I have any secrets that fall under that category.

Some of the characters in your novel have some pretty terrible jobs—what’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
I think the worst job I ever had was probably my two-week stint as a cocktail waitress in Toronto. I liked making martinis and I thought the bar where I worked was beautiful, but I got yelled at a lot, the pay was terrible, the manager’s 70-year-old dad kept hitting on me and the management stole most of my tips. There was another job where I had to unload trucks outdoors at 7 a.m. in Montreal in the wintertime, which was difficult only because it was so breathtakingly cold and it involved getting up at 5:30 a.m.

In general, the worst jobs for me have been the ones where I’ve had to work for unpleasant people, or where the work environment has been generally tense, and I’ve had three jobs like that over the years—the waitressing job and two offices that I worked in. But in case my boss is reading this, let me hasten to add that I very much enjoy my present position.

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Read a review of The Singer's Gun.

A boy with keys for fingers. A woman who gives birth to her own mother. Imps and mermaids falling in love. If all of this sounds too strange—even for fiction—then you’ve obviously never read anything by Aimee Bender. 

But now, with the publication of her second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, it’s clearly time that you should.

In her latest literary confection, Bender introduces readers to perhaps her most dazzling creation to date: a girl named Rose who can taste the deepest feelings of others, just by taking a single bite of the food they prepare. As the flavors of the food flow over her tongue, Rose is inundated with the underlying emotions of the person who cooked the meal, even if it’s something as simple as a peanut butter sandwich. All of a sudden, Rose is privy to an onslaught of sensations that aren’t her own, and she realizes that nothing will ever be truly simple again.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake focuses on Rose’s formative years, from the age of nine through her early 20s, as she struggles to form meaningful connections with her family and her peers. Intimidated by her austere and deeply intellectual brother, Joseph, Rose tries to understand what makes him tick. It is only with George, Joseph’s best friend, that Rose feels she can truly express herself without fear of misunderstanding or judgment: the two share great tenderness, their relationship tinged with the poignant melancholy that pervades most of the novel.

Unable to stop the feelings that stem from the food she eats, it is up to Rose to discover a means of coping with her unwanted ability. Through much trial and error, Rose discovers there are alternatives to simply cutting herself off from others. With time she comes to see that her “curse” might actually have the potential to set her free, but first she must make peace with herself.

Speaking from her home in Los Angeles, Bender recalls where the ingenious idea for the story originated. “I think I was primarily interested in the food at first,” she says. “I kept going back to the idea of ‘what if food was carrying more than just food?’ [So] the idea was sort of floating in my mind for years, and then when I hit on that character [Rose] it was all about developing her.”

Although Rose’s story plays center stage, if readers dig deeper, they will see that her brother Joseph’s extreme reclusiveness, her father’s intense aversion to hospitals and her mother’s newfound obsession with carpentry all tell their own stories, each filled with pain and longing. The family is like a concert of tops, spinning together, but each ultimately orbiting its own axis. And yet, Bender balks at the idea that she has depicted a dysfunctional family. “I can see how some would think about this as a dysfunctional family,” she allows, “but it’s not a term I would pick because it can be a kind of catchall. My hope is that the family is experiencing a unique unhappiness.”

When it comes to the author’s own family, however, nary a storm cloud is in sight. Bender credits her mother, a modern dance instructor, as a critical influence on her willingness to defy convention. She recalls, “[My mother] would always take me to these concerts, and modern dance can be so bizarre! She also pointed me toward theater of the absurd writers when I was in junior high and high school; I loved that they were funny and weird and this was literature, and there was some feeling of permission in all of it that felt very good to me.”

Perhaps her mother’s gift of promoting the bizarre is something Bender is passing on to her readers. The wild and fanciful worlds of her imagination have been showcased in two short story collections, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures, and in her acclaimed first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own. Asked about her ability to ground the outlandish in a place that is real, Bender says that writing this way is the only way she knows how. “My impulse is always to take an idea that is a little off-center, which means I can kind of get my hands in it, and then I can use that to climb into the character,” she says.

Although The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is liberally frosted with the foreign and the fantastic, the emotions at its center are undeniably real. Readers who like to give their imaginations a workout are in for a satisfying treat that is both bitter and sweet.
 

Author Lily King is known for her sensitive exploration of family ties. In her third book, Father of the Rain, she follows the tumultuous relationship of a father and a daughter. She answered a few questions for BookPage about her work, the place and ideas that inspire it, and the dangers of falling in love with your characters.

You published your first book just a little over 10 years ago. In that time, how would you say you have evolved as a writer?
Great question. So hard to answer. Each novel seems to demand a different voice, a different structure, a whole different ethos, really. It doesn’t feel so much like evolution as just responding to the different circumstances in each book.  When I finished this new novel, Father of the Rain, I was surprised to notice how much dialogue there is, and how little exposition. I hadn’t really been conscious of that. But I don’t feel like I’m evolving into a writer who uses more dialogue at the expense of the kind of description I used in The Pleasing Hour, for example. It’s just that these particular characters had a lot to say to each other, and they needed so little narration to tell their story.

I would like to think that I’m getting better at getting the words on the page with less angst. I used to revise everything I wrote previously before I went on. But I’ve learned that it’s better to just keep moving, and put on your editor’s hat much later in the process. When I’m writing a first draft, I have to imagine a white canvas, how a painter does not go from left to right filling in every little detail, but makes a rough outline in blue and then begins putting on the colors, sharpening the shapes, layer upon layer. I’ve taught myself to trust that this is how a book is made, too.

In your last novel, The English Teacher, you focused on the relationship between a mother and a son. In Father of the Rain you focus on the relationship between a father and a daughter. In what way do you think the dynamics are different between these two types of fundamental parental relationships?
I am no psychologist, and I have no support for this statement, but I do think that a person’s relationship with his or her mother tends to shape the way that person feels about him or herself, and the relationship with the father has more of an effect on the way that person feels the world is responding to that self. Peter, in The English Teacher, really struggles internally, with his own personality, whereas Daley, in Father of the Rain, doesn’t wrestle with who she is but has to overcome the assumption that people don’t want her around, the she is not valuable in this world.

One of the problems Daley struggles with in this novel is finding a compromise between her romantic life, professional ambitions and family obligations. Do you think this conflict is still one that affects women more than men?
I do, though I think that is changing, and more men are making career decisions with partner and family in mind. But Daley’s own dysfunctional role in her family is what really stagnates her in this situation. She is really unable to pursue her goals because she feels her father’s life is far more important than her own.

Are you an author who draws from experience when you write, or do you see a very clear line between yourself and the characters you write?
I think that line is always changing, from book to book, and from scene to scene. There are entirely fictional elements in all my novels, and a few autobiographical elements that drop in, usually unexpectedly. The narrators and other characters are very distinct from me and my experiences. With Daley, the narrator of Father of the Rain, the line blurred slightly. She is probably the closest of all my characters to who I am, especially in the first and third parts—the impulses she has in Part II are not part of my personality.

One popular and vibrant niche in American fiction is Southern fiction, but some might argue that another salient pocket is East Coast fiction. What do you think are hallmarks of this type of novel (beside the obvious geographical element!)?
The first thing that comes to mind is claustrophobia. The characters tend to spend more time indoors, in small rooms, sort of gnawing on each other. Money is a character, and the alcohol flows freely. The talk is often cerebral and the characters entirely self-conscious, and most of the conflict is roiling far below the surface.

Father of the Rain is an intensely powerful and emotional read. As an author, do you ever find yourself overcome by the feelings and experiences of your characters, or do you keep yourself tightly reined?
This one was very emotional for me to write. Writing that first part, and I suppose the second part, too, could really bring me low for weeks at a time. I had to take many breaks.  I’m sure I could find a few notebook pages of the first draft that are buckled from tears. It was hard to be in that world. And pretty much every time I’ve read over the last section I’ve cried, too, at different moments for more joyful reasons.  Not to mention I think I was as in love with Jonathan as Daley was. I’d get into bed at night and sigh, “I just love Jonathan.” My husband was worried. But he knows the things I love about Jonathan are the qualities I love in him.

As an author, do you write the kind of books you like to read, or do you find yourself indulging in reading material that is quite different from the books you write?
My reading is all over the map. I read for beautiful sentences, for rich characters, for a great story, for an original voice, for an unfamiliar setting, for new ideas. It’s hard to find all that in one book, so I spread myself thin.

I’m not sure I know what kind of books I write. People always say my children look alike. But I can’t see that, just as I can’t see the similarities between my books or their styles. What kind of books do I write? I honestly don’t know. I think there is still a great gap between what I’m aiming for and what I reach. But that’s what keeps it exciting.

What are you working on next?
I’m working on a collection of short stories. Something that sells even less than a literary novel—just what my publisher wants to hear!