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All Literary Fiction Coverage

Every so often, you come across a book so spectacular that from the moment your eyes fall upon its first sentence the rest of the world ceases to exist. E-mails go unanswered, family members and household chores are neglected—everything is put on hold until you have seen your affair with this book through. Novels like these are reminders not only of why we read, but also of just how vital and downright magical storytelling can be. Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees is such a novel. Books like Yanagihara’s are to be treasured, for they are all too uncommon—about as rare as the turtles that hold the secrets of immortality in her dazzling debut.

Written in the form of a memoir, The People in the Trees is the story of Norton Perina, a young medical researcher who joins a 1950 anthropological expedition to the remote Oceanic nation of Ivu’ivu in search of a lost people who are rumored to have discovered the secret of eternal youth. Perina’s mesmerizing tale recounts his journey deep into the jungle, a living Eden, where he makes a discovery so revolutionary, it stands to change the very face of human existence: By consuming the flesh of a particular turtle, it is possible to arrest the body’s natural decay, resulting in lifespans that stretch across centuries. However, Perina’s discovery is not without its own monstrous consequences—not just for himself, but for the island and its people, who may have been better off never having been found.

Part medical mystery, part anthropological adventure thriller, part meditation on the devastation that often results when worlds collide, The People in the Trees is an exhilarating tour de force that is practically perfect in every way. Yanagihara’s past experience as a travel writer serves her well: Her storytelling is so convincing that readers will find themselves debating which elements are based in fact rather than the author’s vivid imagination. The People in the Trees is flawlessly paced and deeply nuanced—a gorgeous, meaty novel that is spellbinding, scandalous and supremely satisfying.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Hanya Yanagihara for The People in the Trees.

Every so often, you come across a book so spectacular that from the moment your eyes fall upon its first sentence the rest of the world ceases to exist. E-mails go unanswered, family members and household chores are neglected—everything is put on hold until you have seen your affair with this book through. Novels like […]

Nora Marie Eldridge, the protagonist of Claire Messud’s taut and psychologically astute fourth novel, is an angry woman, a fact she reveals in its first paragraph. For her, “to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive.” Over the course of the story, Messud excavates the roots of that anger with sure-handed patience, creating a complex narrative that painstakingly interweaves themes of obsessive love, feminism, creativity and the nature of art.

Putting aside her dreams of an artistic career, unmarried and childless Nora has settled, in her late 30s, into a pedestrian life as a third-grade teacher in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, public school. Her outwardly placid routine is upended when Reza Shahid, the son of a Lebanese father and an Italian mother spending the academic year in Boston, arrives from Paris and enters the class. Nora’s affection for the 8-year-old boy deepens when he’s victimized by playground bullies, but that’s nothing compared to the intensity of feeling that surfaces when she discovers his faintly exotic mother, Sirena, is an accomplished artist.

The two women’s decision to rent a shared space where Nora can work on dioramas featuring Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, the troubled artist Alice Neel and Andy Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick, while Sirena constructs a career-defining installation based on Alice in Wonderland, both strengthens and complicates their relationship. That web becomes more tangled when Nora senses her growing fascination with Sirena’s husband, Skandar. Nora’s account of these multiple attractions slowly reveals how she is transformed by the role she plays in this intricately choreographed dance.

If there’s any shortcoming to this artful story, it’s that Messud is better at ratcheting up the tension among these characters than she is at resolving it. But through the psyche of its complicated protagonist, The Woman Upstairs effectively raises serious questions about how we come to live the lives we do, and how we respond when our dreams of how those lives might be different are thwarted. When a novelist of Messud’s talent invites us to consider such questions, we can be certain they’re ones worth pondering.

Through the psyche of its complicated protagonist, The Woman Upstairs raises serious questions about how we come to live the lives we do, and how we respond when our dreams are thwarted.
Review by

Hilary Mantel sets a new standard for historical fiction with her latest novel Wolf Hall, a riveting portrait of Thomas Cromwell, chief advisor to King Henry VIII and a significant political figure in Tudor England. Mantel’s crystalline style, piercing eye and interest in, shall we say, the darker side of human nature, together with a real respect for historical accuracy, make this novel an engrossing, enveloping read.

Wolf Hall is set in an England on the brink of disaster. It is 1520 and Henry VIII, desiring a male heir, wishes to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon and wed Anne Boleyn, despite the opposition of half his kingdom, the Pope and much of Europe. Meanwhile, the Yorks are plotting to put one of their own on the throne. Into the middle of this turbulence walks Thomas Cromwell, lowly born but protected by the king’s advisor, Cardinal Wolsey. Cromwell was a financier with a brilliant grasp of international politics. Multi-lingual and self-taught, both ruthless and generous, he quickly surpassed even Wolsey as close confidante to the king and built up a coterie of followers that equaled any modern Mafia don. In the novel—as in his life—as Cromwell grows in power, the danger and intrigue does as well. Knowing the trajectory of his career, familiar to many from Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, in no way interferes with the deliciousness of the unfolding tragedy.

The Tudor period has been over-romanticized in books and films, especially lately, but Mantel keeps her focus less on the heaving bosoms and changing bed partners and more on the corruption, the scheming and the petty cruelties. She writes in the present tense, a device that in lesser hands might seem showy and self-conscious, but here propels the action forward while providing great insight into Cromwell’s personality. With a generous cast of characters and meticulous descriptions of castle, town and countryside, Mantel evokes the era with an unfussy ease. Despite the length and the intricacy of the story told, there is a freshness and rigor to this compelling novel that will delight and engage any reader. 

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

Hilary Mantel sets a new standard for historical fiction with her latest novel Wolf Hall, a riveting portrait of Thomas Cromwell, chief advisor to King Henry VIII and a significant political figure in Tudor England. Mantel’s crystalline style, piercing eye and interest in, shall we say, the darker side of human nature, together with a real respect for historical accuracy, make this novel an engrossing, enveloping read.

Buell, Pennsylvania, is a dying town. Though it was once home to a thriving steel industry, the mills have closed, the workers have been laid off and the remaining residents are just trying to get by.

Or get out, in the case of Isaac English and Billy Poe. The young men missed their chance to leave after high school. Isaac, the smartest boy in town, was expected to follow his sister Lee’s footsteps to a prestigious college. He instead remained in Buell, caring for his disabled father. Poe is left languishing, jobless, after turning down offers to play college football. They seem unlikely friends—the brain and the jock—but in high school the boys were both the best at what they did.

When Isaac decides he can’t take any more, he takes his father’s money and his friend on his way out of town. But an unintentional murder stops the boys and becomes the impetus for all that follows.

In American Rust, debut novelist Philipp Meyer employs the voices of the boys and four others as narrators to reveal the ensuing action. It’s a tactic that has been used by novelists many times before, but it is amazingly effective here. Meyer captures personalities with each depiction; instead of merely stating that Isaac was the smartest kid in his grade, Meyer reveals Isaac’s intelligence in the distinction between his words and Poe’s. Poe’s rambling, run-on sentences capture the energy with which he must have played high school football. When the reality of the murder sets in, Isaac’s narration becomes less coherent, dissolving into a frantic internal monologue.

As the story unfolds, layers are revealed. These are unraveling lives in a town that’s long since unraveled as steel mills closed and industry left the valley. Meyer’s tale reminds us there’s so much more below the surface of what we see—more to the smart kid, the jock, the parents who raised them, the good cop and the little steel town.

 

Carla Jean Whitley writes from Birmingham, Alabama, a steel town that has adapted to include new industries.

 

Buell, Pennsylvania, is a dying town. Though it was once home to a thriving steel industry, the mills have closed, the workers have been laid off and the remaining residents are just trying to get by. Or get out, in the case of Isaac English and Billy Poe. The young men missed their chance to […]
Review by

From the first page of Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream, you can tell that her protagonist, Thomas (known as T), tends toward obsession. He studies the faces of dead presidents on dollar bills with an intensity and reverence unusual, to say the least, in a six-year-old. He keeps his money close often in his mouth, to his mother’s consternation. But to T, the faces of Jackson and Hamilton are neither figureheads nor simple currency. Idealized in green, they represent the sublime potential in humankind.

T’s almost religious view of the institutions of government and finance, especially the latter, defines his young life. Reserved, purposeful and never distracted by the social dramas that afflict his classmates, T subtly and successfully maneuvers in various markets to surround himself with money. After college, his first big project is a fast-and-cheap retirement community in California. He falls in love with the perfect woman, and they cruise the manicured streets of the project in T’s pristine Mercedes, the future sure and bright.

But uncertainty creeps in. T’s parents drift away, his colleagues seem offensive. Then disaster strikes, and his world cracks open. Mourning a tragic loss, T begins to notice other irreplaceable losses. Slowly, his obsession turns from those who direct the making of the concrete world to those who are made extinct by it. Fixating on animals that are the last of their kind, T starts breaking into zoos at night to ponder the cosmic loneliness of the almost extinct.

It’s to Millet’s credit that the reader’s sympathy never flags, that the suffering of a selfish, greedy fortune-builder remains heartwrenching. The intelligent, sharp-humored charm of her narrative voice aligns the reader with T from the start. In lyrical passages that trace T’s deeper musings, Millet makes the personal universal, raising the stakes so that each realization has the weight of a revolution. And, like all revolutions, it’s an untidy process, leaving the future uncertain.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in New York City.

Mourning a tragic loss, T begins to notice other irreplaceable losses. Slowly, his obsession turns from those who direct the making of the concrete world to those who are made extinct by it.
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Born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Adam Ross was a child actor who appeared in the 1979 film The Seduction of Joe Tynan with Alan Alda and Meryl Streep. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in English, he completed an M.A. in creative writing at Hollins University, followed by an M.F.A. in creative writing at Washington University.

From 1999 to 2003, he was special projects editor and staff writer at Nashville’s alternative weekly newspaper, the Nashville Scene, and after his stint there, he taught English at the Harpeth Hall School, a private Nashville girls school.

Ross spent 13 years writing his first novel, Mr. Peanut, in which an apparently loving husband fantasizes about the death of his wife, only to see his horrific dreams come true. With its layered storyline and allusions that range from Hitchcock to Escher, Mr. Peanut is being hailed as one of the season’s best debuts. BookPage asked Ross to elaborate on the novel’s inspirations and themes.

The premise behind the book—a woman’s death at the hands of a peanut—is both absurdly comic and extremely tragic. Where did the idea come from?
In 1995, my father told me about the suspicious death of my second cousin, who was morbidly obese, struggled epically with depression, and also suffered from lethal nut allergies. According to her husband—who was, conveniently, the only witness to her “suicide”—he came home from work to find her sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of peanuts before her. They had an argument, which she interrupted by taking a fistful of nuts in her hand and eating them. She’d also hidden her Epi-pens, and died before his eyes from anaphylactic shock. I was stunned when I heard this story—I was sure she’d been murdered—and immediately afterward wrote three chapters in one sitting that closely resemble those that begin the novel now. But then I pulled up because I’d written myself into something I didn’t fully understand yet. Looking back, I think what’s so compelling about the situation is that it’s a moment of terrible privacy between a husband and wife. Maybe she was sick to death of her life, both on earth and with him; maybe he rammed the nuts down her throat. We’ll never know.

Readers often say they need likeable characters in order to connect with literature. Few, if any, of your characters are objectively likeable, yet Mr. Peanut is almost compulsively readable. Do you find your characters likeable and, if not, how do you at least bring enough humanity to them to make them real?
I find them terribly and, at times, hysterically recognizable, and I’d like to think that’s what makes the novel so readable. Numerous couples have told me that they’ve thought the very things these characters have about their spouses but were afraid to admit; that, and their marriages have been through versions of the same situations, both the ruts and redemptions. I think that part of what we’re drawn to when we read fiction is whether or not the characters bring us news about our world—spiritual, emotional, literal, or otherwise. Humbert Humbert, Nabokov’s famous pedophile, isn’t “likeable,” but the story he tells is enchanting and we’re certainly happy to follow him anywhere, no matter how perverse a place he takes us, because he writes so powerfully and believably about obsession. So it’s not, I think, a question of bringing enough humanity to make them real as much as what Keats demands: beauty and truth, no matter how dark.

Mr. Peanut incorporates a real story—the Sam Sheppard murder case of the 1950s—into its narrative. Was it always your intent to fictionalize this event and how did you negotiate the ‘cold facts’ with your imagining of what occurred?
No, he appeared several years into drafting, again a gift from my father. Initially, the book’s two detectives were allegorical constructs, one assuming all suspects guilty from the get-go, the other the opposite, and after a while I realized I needed a grey-area figure. After my dad and I watched The Fugitive and he told me a brief history of the case, so I read about it and, bingo, there’s my guy: I wanted to rescue the true story from the Hollywood version, because in the remake, Harrison Ford is the paladin knight of marriage, its redeemer in a struggle to regain his good name, whereas what I found so captivating about the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case was its mystery and muck, what with Sheppard’s serial womanizing, his narcissism, and the way his relationship with his wife anticipated so many moral hazards of the sexual revolution, not to mention the fact that his guilt or innocence remains in question. It’s just a juicy, albeit tragic, mystery, and it required extensive research because I wanted to take Sheppard’s testimony and imagine it from the point of view of the primary suspects—Sheppard, Dr. Lester Hoversten, and window-washer Dick Eberling—as well as Marilyn, the victim. The cold facts are directly incorporated into the novel because you can’t get around them. They’re out there, and so I used them as the plot’s scaffolding.

Hitchcock figures heavily into both your plot and themes. So does Escher and, of course, the iconic wrong man detective story. What other writers and artists inspire you?
The writers who had the biggest impact on me while I was drafting were first Milan Kundera, whose novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being also has overlapping chronologies and is told from different points of view that, taken together, deliver a huge emotional charge at the story’s end. Italo Calvino, the great Italian fabulist, writes formally complex and wildly inventive narratives, like The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which he generated using tarot cards. When it comes to dark tales, I regularly returned to John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, which is about very bad men and women doing very, very bad things, and you can’t put it down. As for artists, music-wise give me Beethoven’s heavy metal any day along with Miles Davis’s lightness; throw in Calder’s subtraction of weight from giant structures, Rothko’s emotionally super-charged color combinations, and the purity of Brancusi’s abstract sculptures.

In many ways,  Mr. Peanut resists traditional chronology and narrative arc. Was this a conscious choice, or something that emerged naturally as you wrote?
It emerged naturally though I wish it were otherwise since it might not have taken so long to write, about 13 years of off-and-on work. I’ve got nothing against classic Aristotelian structure, though I believe you can achieve Aristotelian catharsis by countless other means, but the truth is this: the games the novel plays with chronology, arc, Hitchcock allusions, and names demand the reader be the detective, which I think we all have to be when it comes to identifying both the good and evil that lurk in our hearts.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
Husbands and wives of America: do good housekeeping! Take care of your spouse! Nurture your marriage and be very careful what you wish for when it comes to things like, oh, freedom from it: you might just get it, and the attendant tragedy, loneliness, and guilt that come with it—see Dr. Sheppard above or your neighbor’s recent divorce—are potentially horrible.

We have to ask: what does your wife think of all of this? 
She read it for the first time last year and hasn’t spoken to me since. No, seriously, she was very moved by it because she hung tough while I labored to finish and recognizes moments in it from our marriage that make us both happy: like David and Alice in the novel, we met in a Hitchcock seminar at Hollins University and spent our first months together falling in love with his films and each other. Years into our marriage, we went to Kauai, again just like the main characters, but whereas that trip marks the beginning of the end of their relationship for us it was where we learned we were pregnant with our first daughter. Our life is the Escher-obverse of the book. Plus the Detective Hastroll section cracks her up. And sometimes she wants to kill me too.

What’s up next for you?
I’m adding several new stories to my collection entitled Ladies & Gentlemen, due out next summer, and they’re dark and comic too, but nearly all of them are traditionally chronological with classic narrative arcs. No more crazy outlines for me.

Related content:
Review of Mr. Peanut.

Born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Adam Ross was a child actor who appeared in the 1979 film The Seduction of Joe Tynan with Alan Alda and Meryl Streep. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in English, he completed an M.A. in creative writing at Hollins University, followed by […]
Interview by

In her spellbinding debut novel, The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara drew on her life as a well traveled woman and editor at Conde Nast Traveler to compose stunning, visual descriptions of place. In these fictional memoirs of a scientist who has fallen from grace, readers find themselves seduced by a remote jungle setting and all the mysteries it holds. BookPage spoke with Yanagihara about her experiences as a travel writer, the love of reading and the joy of exploration.

The story that you’ve woven is utterly captivating, but one of the things that truly makes The People in the Trees shine is the writing. How have you developed your craft? Are there any authors that you turn to for inspiration or that have been particularly influential for you in terms of shaping your own authorial voice?

Thank you for the kind words. I don’t know that I’ve done anything to consciously develop my voice, but some of my favorite living fiction writers are John Banville, Jonathan Coe, Hilary Mantel, Jennifer Egan, J.M. Coetzee, Anita Brookner, Margaret Atwood, Paul Theroux, Aatish Taseer, Mohsin Hamid, Rose Tremain, Peter Rock, Anne Tyler, Steven Millhauser, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zoë Heller, Michael Cunningham . . . and, well, I know I’m forgetting lots of people.

Prior to writing The People in the Trees, you worked as a travel writer. If your next assignment saw you heading off to Ivu’ivu, what would be the three items you’d be sure to pack?

I actually still am an editor at Conde Nast Traveler (unasked-for tip to first-time novelists: For a variety of reasons, don’t quit your day job); I’m on the road about a fourth to a third of the year, but the rest of my time is spent in our offices in Times Square, assigning and editing pieces. But if I were going off to Ivu’ivu—hmm. I actually think the characters do a pretty good job of packing. So I’d bring a knife (to kill one of the turtles); a cooler (to bring back orchid cuttings); and a wider diversity of food than I allowed my characters.

"Travelers, like readers, are united by our sense of curiosity, as well as a willingness to have our most closely held notions—of a people, of a place, of human behavior—be dispelled, sometimes crushingly."

As someone who has primarily written nonfiction previously, what prompted you to shift your focus to literary fiction? Do you feel that your previous experience as a travel writer was a natural stepping-stone to writing novels?

I don’t really consider myself a nonfiction writer: I mean, I do it for work, but that’s a very specific type of writing—less essayistic and more practical, and more about the whats and wheres (as opposed to the hows and whys) of a given destination. I worked on this book for so long—I was in book publishing, not magazines at all, when I began it—that I can honestly say that the writing I do at work is something I was simply lucky enough to tumble into.

However, I can also say that working as a magazine editor has helped me enormously as a writer. When you’re publishing a magazine story, the editor has the final say. When you’re publishing a book, the author has the final say. Being a magazine editor has taught me to be more ruthless about my own writing—it’s made me more aware of repetition, for example, and the importance of pacing—but it’s also taught me when and how to not compromise, which is an underrated skill but one every writer must develop.

Given all that you’ve seen throughout the world, do you believe the old adage that “truth is stranger than fiction”?

It always is. In fact, there’s only one specific incident in the book that I took from my own life—and, of course, it was the one incident that my editor found unconvincing. But I kept it anyway.

After finishing your book, many readers will wonder whether places like Ivu’ivu truly exist. Based on your own rather extensive travels through Asia, what destinations would you offer up as real-world substitutes for those with a taste for untouched paradise?

Although much of Ivu’ivu’s history—from discovery through the ruins of Christian colonization—is borrowed from the history of Hawaii, I found its physical contours in Angra dos Reis, which is an archipelago off the coast of southern Brazil. When I went there for work—this was probably in 2008—I was still trying to decide how I wanted Ivu’ivu to look and feel. I knew I wanted it to be densely, lushly tropical, but Hawaii itself wasn’t quite florid enough for my imaginings to be an appropriate visual reference. But when I stepped onto my first island in Angra, I knew that this was Ivu’ivu: I had never before been to a square of land so intimidatingly green, so suffocatingly overgrown.

I stayed at a hotel on one of the islands, but the next day I took a speedboat and did some island-hopping, including to a number of rocks that’ve remained untouched by construction and are still as wild and untamed as they probably were a thousand years ago.

Would you say that travelers tend to be pretty voracious readers? If so, why do you think this might be?

Travelers, like readers, are united by our sense of curiosity, as well as a willingness to have our most closely held notions—of a people, of a place, of human behavior—be dispelled, sometimes crushingly.

There’s also something about the act of travel itself, its sense of suspension, that pairs beautifully with the sense of suspension that reading, especially reading fiction, encourages. One of the most exhilarating states of being is to find yourself in a strange place, surrounded by strange scenery, reading about places both familiar and not. Whenever I travel, I like to take a book that’s set in a location far different than the one I’ll be in, so that the foreignness of one experience plays against the foreignness of the other: it makes every sensation seem sharper and more vivid. I’ll always associate the Nigeria of Half of a Yellow Sun or the Mumbai of Maximum City with Tokyo, for example, which is where I read them.

When you travel, do you go paper or digital when it comes to your reading material?

Only paper. Last year, I took a 51-day trip through Asia for work and brought along 27 books: galleys, mostly, so I could discard them as I went (I like the idea of someone coming across a book I’ve left behind in a hotel room night table drawer and being drawn to it as they lie awake with jetlag). I always figure a book per every two days, plus a book for every 15-hour-plus long-haul flight.

What are you working on next?

Last month I finished a novel about male friendship that spans 30 years. Unlike The People in the Trees, which took almost 16 years [to write], this one took 18 months; but it was a book I’d had plotted in my head—down to the last lines—for years. And that period between selling your first book and its actual publication is, I learned, a wonderful, singular year and a half or so in which to write: you have all the validation you need, and none of the disappointments.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The People in the Trees.

In her spellbinding debut novel, The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara drew on her life as a well traveled woman and editor at Conde Nast Traveler to compose stunning, visual descriptions of place. In these fictional memoirs of a scientist who has fallen from grace, readers find themselves seduced by a remote jungle setting […]
Interview by

The Last Days of California centers on a family preparing for the end of world. If you knew you had one week left on earth, how (and where) would you spend it?
I would need more details. Am I sick? Is a meteor about to crash into the earth, i.e. are there a bunch of really great parties going on? I wouldn’t want to spend any of that precious time hungover, though. I’d stay close to home, maybe take a quick trip down to New Orleans. I’d eat whatever I wanted, see the people I love most in the world and tell them how much I love them. Things I would not do: worry, read, watch TV, remain a vegetarian. If the world’s going to end, I’d definitely want a cheeseburger.

This is your first novel, but you have previously written and published short stories, including the collection Big World. What made you make the leap to longer fiction and did you find that the transition presented you with new challenges as a writer?
I’ve tried to write novels in the past, but The Last Days of California is the only one I’ve completed. This book surprised me. I drafted it quickly, over the course of one summer, and it was fun and fairly easy to write, as I was interested in the characters and what would happen to them. I didn’t know if they’d make it to California, or if the rapture would occur, so I wrote my way toward these things.

 "If the world’s going to end, I’d definitely want a cheeseburger."

Because it’s a road-trip novel that takes place over the course of four days, the structure was inherently more manageable than the other novels I’ve attempted. When the story begins, the family has already fallen behind schedule, so there was an immediate tension. They have to keep moving! They must push on! And I felt that push, as well.

There are a lot of pop culture references in this novel that very concretely ground it in the present era and current moment—did you ever worry that by so explicitly dating your novel might also give it an expiration date?
I don’t think I could have written a road-trip story without using these references, and I have a feeling that we’ll have Targets, Taco Bells, and Burger Kings for a long time to come. Same with snack foods—I don't see the Snickers bar going anywhere. Of course, there are also a lot of TV, movie and pop cultural references that will date it. My goal was to try to fully capture a time and place—to ground the novel in the everydayness of these characters’ lives.

Is it possible for a work of art to be unambiguously of a time as well as timeless?
That’s an excellent question—I think so. I really appreciate specificity in fiction, whether the book is set in 1890, 1955 or 2013. I want to know what they’re reading, what they’re eating, what their home décor is like. I want to know everything because these details allow me to fully inhabit someone else’s world, and this makes for timeless literature.

Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” To what extent do you think this is true? Is there room in modern fiction to explore the domestic family life through a lens unmarred by dysfunction and melancholy?
All families, even the happy ones, are unhappy in certain ways. Whenever you have a bunch of people living together in a house, there are going to be problems, tensions. There’s just no way around this. As beautiful as Tolstoy’s sentence is, it’s a flawed idea. Every happy family is unhappy in its own way. And most unhappy families have many happy moments. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I believe there will always be some level of dysfunction and sadness within the family unit. As a writer, this is a good thing; domestic fiction would be very dull, otherwise.

Like Jess, you grew up and lived most of your life in the South, an area of the country with an incredibly rich and distinct literary tradition. In your opinion, does Southern fiction have its roots in a physical state (or group of states) or is it defined more by a state of mind?  To what extent do you feel like living there has shaped your authorial voice?
I don’t think the physical place can be separated from the state of mind. I’ve spent the majority of my life in Mississippi, and there are still parts of it that remain virtually untouched by modern life. As a largely rural and sparsely populated state, we don’t get many visitors and almost no one moves here unless it’s for the military. I once dated a man who came to Jackson from California to run his family’s business. Everywhere we went, people asked where he was from. He couldn’t walk into a gas station without someone asking him this question. We’re also constantly reminded of our history here. As a teenager, my friends and I used to drink daiquiris while running the hills of Vicksburg’s National Military Park. My mother and father grew up in a place where blacks and whites couldn’t eat together at a lunch counter, couldn’t drink from the same water fountain at the zoo. There’s so much to remember here, things and people we can’t forget: James Meredith, Emmett Till, “Freedom Summer.”

Except for a year in Nashville and three-and-a-half in Austin, my life has been spent in Mississippi. The people I know and the culture I know are integral to who I am. It’s also hard for me to describe what this culture is like—how it’s different from other places. My father hunts and fishes; there’s always deer sausage in the freezer. My parents go to church every Sunday. There is meat in all of the vegetables (except the corn). We say y’all. Growing up, we sang “Dixie” in choir. As an undergraduate at Mississippi State, we rang cowbells at footballs games. It’s nearly impossible to get a direct flight anywhere. How many of these things are typical of the South and how many are simply a part of rural life?

It’s fair to say that about as much goes wrong as it does right during the course of the Metcalfs’ road trip—what are your top tips for guaranteed success on long haul car journeys?
Travel with people you like, preferably non-family members. Make sure your AAA membership is active. Stay in a decent hotel at least one night if you can afford it, and eat six-dollar mini-cans of Pringles. It’s also nice to have some audiobooks to distract you—nothing overly literary—think suspense, horror, crime.

Writing wise, what’s next for you: another novel, more short fiction or something else entirely?
I’m currently working on short fiction and essays. This past summer, I started another novel—a historical novel loosely based on the story of Typhoid Mary—and I liked the idea of it, but had no idea what I was doing. When the time came to make some major decisions, I balked. I was scared to mess it up, or that it wasn’t good enough, or I had forgotten what story I wanted to tell. I’m not sure. I’m definitely going to revisit it at some point; perhaps I just need to spend a few months researching communicable diseases and islands in order to become inspired again.

author photo by Doris Ulmer

Former BookPage intern Stephenie Harrison is currently writing from Asia. She blogs at 20 Years Hence

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Read our review of The Last Days of California.

The Last Days of California centers on a family preparing for the end of world. If you knew you had one week left on earth, how (and where) would you spend it?
I would need more details. Am I sick? Is a meteor about to crash into the earth, i.e. are there a bunch of really great parties going on? I wouldn’t want to spend any of that precious time hungover, though. I’d stay close to home, maybe take a quick trip down to New Orleans. I’d eat whatever I wanted, see the people I love most in the world and tell them how much I love them. Things I would not do: worry, read, watch TV, remain a vegetarian. If the world’s going to end, I’d definitely want a cheeseburger.

Interview by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview by

Here’s the first thing you should know about Helen Oyeyemi: She’s got a soft spot for twisted fairy tales. Her widely acclaimed first novel, The Icarus Girl, drew from both African and Western mythology to tell the story of a biracial 8-year-old and her wicked secret friend.

Her next two books, The Opposite House and White Is for Witching, address Cuban mysticism and Gothic horror, respectively. Mr. Fox, which she penned in 2011, recasts the classic Bluebeard folktale as a story about an English writer with a nasty habit of murdering his female characters.

Here’s the second thing to know about Helen Oyeyemi: She wrote all four of those books before the age of 27.

The award-winning British novelist (and daughter of Nigerian immigrants) shows no signs of slowing down, having just published her fifth book, Boy, Snow, Bird, a sly retelling of Snow White.

Oyeyemi has particular sympathy for one type of literary scapegoat: the wicked stepmother, whom she believes gets a bad rap.

“I never really set out to rewrite fairy tales,” she told BookPage during a recent telephone conversation from her home in Prague (where she moved last year on a whim). “I just get really interested in them. Perhaps it’s because there’s something about the retelling that exposes the teller. You have this very old frame that’s been used by various other storytellers through the generations—an anchor, if you will. But there’s also room to show your own thoughts and feelings, to insert yourself into the narrative.”

Oyeyemi certainly brought her own experience and wild imagination to bear in Boy, Snow, Bird, which examines the trope of the notorious evil stepmother—but with a racial twist.

The novel begins in 1953 when the beautiful, troubled Boy Novak leaves her abusive father (a snarling, wild-eyed “rat-catcher”) for a small town in Massachusetts. There, she meets and marries a handsome widower, Arturo Whitman, whose daughter Snow is indisputably beautiful—the fairest in the land, if you will. As if Snow’s looks weren’t trouble enough, Boy soon gives birth to her own daughter, Bird, who is shockingly dark-skinned. Thus is uncovered the Whitmans’ deep, dark secret: They are a family of light-skinned blacks desperately trying to pass as white. Once this shame has been revealed, Boy banishes one child, while embracing the other—and all three characters are forced to confront their own identities.

What’s interesting though, is how unfixed the concept of identity becomes over the course of the book. Not only are characters repeatedly miscategorized (by race, by gender) and misnamed (“Boy” is a girl, the Whitmans are not “white men”), some of them aren’t even positive they actually exist. How else could Snow and Bird explain the fact that they generally don’t show up in mirrors? Or the fact that neither can recall meeting the other in person? Even Boy’s father, the abusive rat-catcher, isn’t what he initially seems, revealing himself to be neither completely bad, nor exactly Boy’s father.

If all this sounds confusing, fear not. As with her earlier novels, Oyeyemi’s prose can be cyclical and demanding—she’ll never be the type to spoon-feed takeaways or wrap things up in a pretty bow—but she’s also never out to full-on befuddle. If anything, she aims to please.

“I just want readers to care enough to turn the page,” she admits. In other words, she writes characters who may be complex, but are both relatable and sympathetic.

Oyeyemi has particular sympathy for one type of literary scapegoat: the archetypical wicked stepmother, whom she firmly believes gets an unfairly bad rap. “Wicked stepmothers disrupt the values of a story in a way that interests me,” she says. “They disrupt the notion that a woman should be dutiful or beautiful or sweetly tempered, and in that way, they become real people. In fact, the fairy-tale villain or wicked stepmother has a spark for life that a character like Snow White just will never have.”

"To be honest, I’ve always found Snow White to be quite menacing."

OK, you might concede, so maybe Snow White is a little boring. But surely Oyeyemi can’t deny her fundamental goodness, right? Wrong.

“To be honest,” she says, “I’ve always found Snow White to be quite menacing. She was always so placid and just accepted everything terrible that happened without any anger. I mean, she’s been thrown out of her home. She’s frightened. She has to go and live with these weird dwarves. And yet . . . she’s just this complacent blank slate. I find that much more terrifying than her wicked stepmother.”

Such irreverence is fundamental to Boy, Snow, Bird which, it’s worth noting, is often surreally funny; Even the nastiest characters have moments of levity (the rat-catcher certainly plays for laughs), and particularly harrowing scenes are tinged with lightness—as when a thick clump of hair is found in the cranberry sauce during an emotionally fraught Thanksgiving dinner.

But overall, Oyeyemi’s irreverence serves to disrupt fairy-tale convention, which typically relies on strict black-and-white dichotomy. No character, she seems to say, can be defined by race or gender, let alone moral good or evil.

“Sure, it’s easier if you stick to absolutes,” she admits. “This is a man. This is a woman. This is what a white person does. This is what a black person does. This is what a black person looks like. This is what a white person looks like. And so on. But what I wanted to do was create characters who connect on other levels, who overcome the obstacles that might otherwise make them enemies.”

Another absolute that drives Oyeyemi crazy is the concept of “happily ever after” or “closure,” both of which she resists in Boy, Snow, Bird. “What does ‘closure’ even mean?” she demands, laughing. “I don’t know if I should confess this, but I’ve been obsessed with this TV show called ‘Pretty Little Liars,’ and every episode it seems like somebody needs ‘closure.’ What psychobabble!” Then, with a hint of mischief: “The only real closure is death, right?”

This interplay between the funny and the grim, the refreshing banal and the fantastically unknowable is perhaps what makes Oyeyemi so likeable—both as a person and as a writer. She’s wise beyond her years, but never pompous or intimidating. She gushes about Lydia Davis’ new short story collection, but also admits to crying during trashy airplane movies. And then of course there’s her fiction, which is at times difficult and dense, but always full of humor, joy and good old-fashioned plotting.

About this balance, Oyeyemi is remarkably humble. “The things I write are so disobedient. I never know what they’ll turn out to be.”

OK, fine. But in that case: She’s one darn good disciplinarian.

 

Here’s the first thing you should know about Helen Oyeyemi: She’s got a soft spot for twisted fairy tales. Her widely acclaimed first novel, The Icarus Girl, drew from both African and Western mythology to tell the story of a biracial 8-year-old and her wicked secret friend.

Interview by

California-born author Maggie Shipstead returns with a dazzling second novel, Astonish Me. The story of a ballerina that spans decades, it's as sharply observed as it is entertaining—and was our April 2014 Top Pick in Fiction. We asked Shipstead a few questions about the book.

Where did the inspiration for this book come from? Do you have a personal history with ballet?
I’m not a dancer, but I’ve been going to the ballet since I was five. My mom, who’s a lifelong ballet fan, took me about four times a year until I left for college, and now I go whenever I have the chance. Back in 2010, I wrote a short story about a disappointed ballet dancer and her academically gifted son and their conflicts with their next-door neighbors. It jumped through 20 years in short sections and didn’t really work. I liked writing about dance, though, and as I tinkered with revising the story, it seemed to want to expand. So I just kind of went with it, and once I came up with the defector character of Arslan Ruskov, the shape of a book started to become clear.

Given that Astonish Me focuses on the world of ballet, did you ever worry that your subject matter might get the book prematurely dismissed by readers?
You’d think I would have learned my lesson after writing a first novel set at a wedding. The short answer is yes, although the whole conversation about what is and is not chick lit is unappealingly thorny and fraught and difficult to engage in without trashing other writers. Inevitably, lots of people will assume Astonish Me is a fluffier book than it is. I had to work pretty hard to keep a woman in a bathing suit off the jacket of Seating Arrangements (a book that’s primarily about a 59-year-old man), and even so, there were newspaper reviews that started out “I thought this would be chick lit, but . . .” which was honestly really galling. It’s an old chorus, but I think male authors get the benefit of an assumption of seriousness that their female counterparts don’t.

"I think male authors get the benefit of an assumption of seriousness that their female counterparts don’t."

For me, writing a novel is such an epic grind that, in order not to be miserable, I have to write about what fascinates and moves me, even if that brings me to subjects and settings that aren’t immediately identifiable as weighty. And, of course, subject matter doesn’t determine the value of a piece of fiction. You can write about something as heavy as, say, the horrors of war without necessarily generating any worthwhile prose or thought. In the end, all I (or anyone else) can do is try to build a story and characters I find compelling and write as attentively and thoughtfully as possible and revise my face off and hope for the best.

There is a lot of discussion in the novel about how ballerinas are vessels for creativity—do you feel this is also true for authors? Are there any other parallels you would draw between dancers and writers?
I’m fascinated by the practices of artists of all kinds and by the relationships they have with their own talents and limitations. The idea in the Astonish Me of a dancer as a vessel has to do with how a choreographer will make a dance “on” a dancer or dancers and use the bodies of others to explore and realize a personal vision. Dancers, I think, have vastly different lives than writers. Their medium is the body and their work is dynamic and almost always collaborative, while writing is solitary and rooted in the mind and is, unless I’ve been going about things all wrong, best done while stationary. Dancers peak when they’re very young; writers have at least the possibility of continuing to work into old age. But I think there’s a common experience among writers and dancers (and probably most artists) of what it’s like to spend all your time trying to do something that’s extremely difficult, something that requires a massive amount of practice and dedication and might give you a rush of satisfaction one day and then leave you feeling utterly defeated the next. It’s a precarious way to live.

"Dancers, I think, have vastly different lives than writers. Their medium is the body and their work is dynamic and almost always collaborative, while writing is solitary and rooted in the mind and is, unless I’ve been going about things all wrong, best done while stationary." 

What made you decide to tell this story in a linear, but recursive, way?
The early drafts were actually slightly weirder, structurally, than the final version. The narrative jumped forward and back in time according to an internal logic I thought made sense but that my editor gently informed me was confusing. So I eventually had to simplify somewhat by not skipping around so much, combining some sections, sticking with particular arcs longer. The book is written in present tense, but covers almost 30 years, from 1973 to 2002, and isn’t quite sequential. The earliest years fall in the middle of the book. From the beginning, I knew I wanted a structure that let me dip in and out of the story, creating questions and then answering them. The book is meant to have a strong sense of movement and, in some ways, to mimic the feel of a ballet, how small vignettes come together and build toward a dramatic, even breathless, ending.

It seems like a lot of younger authors today hold advanced degrees in creative writing. How did your own time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop shape you as a writer, and what is the best lesson you learned there?
Before I went to Iowa I had no idea that I could be a writer. I’d taken a couple writing workshops in college but didn’t think fiction was at all a viable career. Then I graduated and was having a hard time coming up with any better ideas as far as viable careers, and I applied to Iowa as a shot in the dark. Being there—being exposed to those teachers and all the writers who come through and being part of a community of people who all care passionately about words—that’s what made me get serious. Learning how to write confidently, and how to fake it when necessary, was probably my most important takeaway. The endless debate about whether or not MFAs are worthwhile honestly baffles me. Of course not every writer needs or should want a graduate degree, and no program is perfect, but, for me, going to Iowa was a no-brainer. It meant time and money to try to become a better writer. What’s the downside?

Many of the characters in this novel are on a never-ending quest for perfection, a plight that seems to afflict many artists. As a writer, are you concerned with achieving perfection or is there some other goal that motivates you?
It’s funny—I was definitely one of those little kids whose elementary school teachers are always like, “Maggie, do you know what a perfectionist is?” I’m very competitive; I don’t like making mistakes. But, perhaps oddly, I’m also pretty accepting of the inherent imperfection of my writing. I’m concerned with writing the best book I can squeeze out of myself at any given time. If I held out for a perfect book, I’d never publish, and I’d be miserable. I do wish my books were better—nothing I write down will ever quite be what I want it to be—but when I’m done, I’m done. And then I move on. The prospect of starting something new is actually a big source of motivation for me. Maybe it’s that my impatience is stronger than my perfectionism.

 "I’m concerned with writing the best book I can squeeze out of myself at any given time." 

Readers who have read your first novel will likely remark that Astonish Me is very different. As an author, were you consciously trying to push yourself with this new novel? Is there anything that you feel like you did more successfully here than in your previous book?
I’ve published maybe 12 or 13 short stories, and I tend to write about wildly disparate things from one to the next. Like I have a Montana cowboy story and a story set on a guano-mining Pacific atoll in the 1910s and one about an actress who marries into a Hollywood cult and one about a couple honeymooning in Romania in the early 70s. So, to me, it seems natural to seek novelty in my novels. I’m also not starting from an autobiographical place and then branching out: the WASPy world of Seating Arrangements interested me but wasn’t any more my world than ballet is. I hope I always try to push myself. I think I would be bored if I didn’t. Because my two novels are so different, though, it’s difficult to compare them. Astonish Me is a more compressed book as far as length but ranges more broadly in terms of time and geography and variety of characters. It also has more momentum than Seating Arrangements, I think, and that momentum builds over the course of the book, which is hopefully a good thing.

Even readers who don’t have an interest in ballet will probably find themselves utterly engrossed by this book if they give it a chance—have you ever found yourself astonished by a book, initially assuming it wouldn’t appeal only to find yourself incapable of putting it down?
That happened to me all the time as a child. I would read more or less at random. I’d find myself up late with my flashlight under the covers reading something unlikely like, say, a novel about aerial combat in World War I. I was never put off by being a little confused. I think I was a very trusting reader, too. I had the idea that all books were good, and if I didn’t like one, it was my fault. These days my reading is more constrained by time and by the need to do research for what I’m writing or to read galleys or to keep up with books my friends publish. I’m also less game than I used to be because I’ve become critical. Still, sometimes I’ll get talked into reading something I’d been resisting (usually for no good reason) and love it. That happened with The Art of Fielding, actually. I hadn’t read it because, paradoxically, I’d heard too many good things and didn’t think it could measure up. Then someone gave me a copy when I was traveling alone, and it became my new best friend.

In Astonish Me, one of the characters posits that if you really connect with a story, it is possible for things to be true even if they never really happened. Would you say that this is the goal of fiction, to take universal truths and make them personal?
I don’t really know if there are universal truths, but I do think fiction can absolutely be true while also being entirely invented. When I read, I’m after that feeling of recognition, like, “Yes, that’s exactly how it is.” Which I might get just from an especially apt word or incisive sentence or which might come from a character who’s particularly alive or a plot that feels entirely unforced and organic to the characters. Fiction doesn’t have to mimic exactly how life is, but spectacular things happen when fiction captures how life seems. I also believe, as does the character you mentioned, that if a story is important to you and feels real to you and alters how you see the world in some small way, it’s immaterial that it didn’t really happen. We dwell in our imaginations more than we realize, I think. Unreality helps us process reality.

"We dwell in our imaginations more than we realize, I think. Unreality helps us process reality."

What is your favorite part of the writing process: starting a new project or finishing one?
Far and away finishing one. Starting can be exciting and full of high hopes, but the early stages are also fraught with anxiety, especially since I don’t outline. I start with a vaguely formed idea and cross my fingers that the rest will follow. I don’t get comfortable until I’m midway through a draft.

What are you working on next?
I have a handful of stories I’d like to finish, and I’ve started a third novel. 

Photo of Maggie Shipstead by Michelle Legro

California-born author Maggie Shipstead returns to fiction with a dazzling second novel, Astonish Me. The story of a ballerina that spans decades, it's as sharply observed as it is entertaining—and was our April 2014 Top Pick in Fiction. We asked Shipstead a few questions about the book.

Interview by

As a investigator who specializes in death penalty cases, Rene Denfeld had a wealth of real-life material to draw on when she wrote her first novel, The Enchanted, which is set on death row in a crumbling prison. A mute inmate narrates this mesmerizing story in which love and unimaginable horror coincide, making for a uniquely powerful page-turner.

What was your first spark of inspiration for this novel?
This novel was inspired by my work. I'm hired by the attorneys representing men and women facing execution. It's my job to investigate the life story of the client. I find their relatives, long-ago neighbors, teachers who taught them in grade school—anyone who can offer insight. I also spend time with the clients making them feel safe so they can tell me their secrets. It can be a very hard job full of pain and sadness, and yet it can be a wonderful job too as I get to learn why—why they became the way they did, why they did such terrible things. I feel honored that people tell me their truths—I think it is something we all hunger for, to be seen and understood. 

"I am often stunned by the courage in people, in their ability to transcend their circumstances—the prisons we all live inside, whether actual or in our fears." 

What initially drew you into your work as a death penalty investigator?
To tell the honest truth, I needed a job. I was a single mom to three kids I had adopted from foster care. I had met death penalty investigators before and was fascinated by their work. They seemed like the only people who really get to understand the roots of crime and violence. In 2008 I got licensed and quickly moved into the work in 2009. I love the job. 

What is a typical day on the job for you?
Every day is different. I spend a lot of time on the road tracking down long-ago witnesses. I drive deep in the woods, into failing timber towns. I visit tenements in the roughest areas of the country. I go into prisons, finding witnesses. I dig up ancient records in old courtrooms and hospitals. I also spend time on death row with the clients. Some days are very tough, such as when people confess to me the terrible things they have done or how they have been hurt by others. Other days can be absolutely beautiful. I am often stunned by the courage in people, in their ability to transcend their circumstances—the prisons we all live inside, whether actual or in our fears. 

What do you love most about the narrator of this book?
He has such a stunning, poetic grasp of language. He truly sees the enchantment in the world—the way life can be so magical, so beautiful, no matter where we are. 

What, if anything, surprised you the most while writing this novel?
I didn't know how joyful it would be, to be immersed inside this story. The characters seemed very real. I was rooting for the lady to find love, for the priest to become absolved, for the warden to continue in his goodness—and for the others to find their own redemption, no matter how, even in the execution chamber. 

The narrator has a very deep affinity for James Houston’s novel, The White Dawn. Do you have a favorite “comfort book” that you find yourself re-reading and re-discovering in a similar way?
I've loved books since I was a young child, when they became my solace and escape. And so there are lots of books like that! 

You’ve written three previous nonfiction books—how did you find the transition to writing fiction?
I love it. It is like discovering what you were always meant to do. There are so many layers of truth in fiction, so many other people—and their lives—to explore. 

What are you working on next?
I feel like I have many stories to tell, but I will have to keep as magically silent as the narrator of this story on the process.

Author photo courtesy of Gary Norman

As a investigator who specializes in death penalty cases, Rene Denfeld had a wealth of real-life material to draw on when she wrote her first novel, The Enchanted, which is set on death row in a crumbling prison. A mute inmate narrates this mesmerizing story in which love and unimaginable horror coincide, making for a uniquely powerful page-turner.

Interview by

Hawaiian author Kaui Hart Hemmings returns with The Possibilities, the story of Sarah St. John, a woman struggling to return to life after the death of her adult son in an avalanche. We asked her a few questions about the new book and what she’s working on next.

Though The Possibilities is a book about grief, it also deals with the way that parents and children’s relationships change as they reach adulthood. What interested you in this topic?
It’s a process that involves a lot of loss and a lot of gain, a lot of nostalgia, hope, mystery, and miscalculations. You can know your family so well, but only in terms of that particular relationship. You don’t know them as friends or colleagues. I’ll always be interested in this topic. I don’t think I’ll ever be writing about wars or someone in an office coming to terms with his or her identity. I like small relationships—minor wars.

"I don’t think I’ll ever be writing about wars or someone in an office coming to terms with his or her identity. I like small relationships—minor wars."

What is the significance of the title?
The novel explores freedom and choice, and I want to show that there are so many variations, opportunities and possibilities for all choices and directions. There are so many ways our lives can go—it’s exhilarating and scary.

You couldn’t have chosen a more different setting for your second book—what inspired you to set this novel in Colorado?
I went to Colorado College then moved to Breckenridge after graduation. It’s a place I love and try to return to as much as possible.

How much pressure did you feel writing a follow-up to a book as successful as The Descendants?
None at all. The Descendants as a novel, despite great reviews, didn’t really get read until the film was made.  I don’t even think of it as a great success. It’s just a book, and I’ve written another book, and I’m just going to keep writing what I’m interested in and hopefully, it will get read. There’s my own pressure, but I’m not a big enough writer to feel anyone’s expectations. I’m still new at this.

Like The Descendants, The Possibilities has been optioned for film, to be directed by Jason Reitman (Labor Day). Do you have a dream cast? How do you feel about seeing your work on the big screen?
I have ideas about who would be great in the roles of these characters, but you can’t really cast things in your mind—you need to see auditions. Who would have thought Matthew Lillard could be George Clooney’s rival? I didn’t—until I saw his taped audition.  I loved seeing my work, and Alexander Payne’s work, on screen. What’s not to love? It’s another layer, dimension—a second act.  It keeps your book alive, and it’s so much fun. 

The relationship between Sarah and Billy (Cully’s dad) is so realistic and touching. Where did that come from?
Maybe it’s something I wish I had, or do have with my own parents. It’s a great privilege to feel annoyance, frustration, love and joy with your loved ones. I hug my family and yell at them all the time.

Losing a child is certainly a parent’s worst nightmare. As a parent yourself, did you find the scenes that describe Sarah’s grief difficult to write?
It’s difficult because you never know if you’re getting it right, but then I think to myself: there is no “right.” Your character is going to grieve and express this grief the only way she can. And so I just stay in character and write.

What are you reading right now?
I’m reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. She writes in a way I never could.  I’m rather spare.

What’s next for you?
A YA book called Juniors, to be published Fall 2015, I think.

 

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Possibilities.

Hawaiian author Kaui Hart Hemmings returns with The Possibilities, the story of Sarah St. John, a woman struggling to return to life after the death of her adult son in an avalanche. We asked her a few questions about the new book and what she’s working on next.

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