Sara Baume’s first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, the story of a lonely Irishman who takes to the road with his dog, won several awards, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. She follows that stellar debut with A Line Made by Walking, a richly nuanced portrait of a young artist who suffers a breakdown and withdraws to the Irish country home of her late grandmother.

Baume, like her protagonist, studied art and once lived in her grandmother's vacant house. We contacted the author at her home in Cork to ask about the genesis of her novel, the difficulty of functioning in a fractured world and the similarities between her character's retreat and Thoreau's move to Walden Pond.

Can you tell us a little about how you chose the title of your novel, A Line Made by Walking, and why that phrase is central to the story?
The novel is named after an influential and important artwork by Richard Long. "A Line Made by Walking" was an "action" undertaken in 1967 when Long was still a student in St. Martin’s School of Art in London. He caught a train out of the city, and in a field, walked up and down and up and down in a straight line until his footsteps had worn a visible track through the grass, then he documented the site in photographs. This is one of roughly 70 artworks which are described in the novel. Frankie, the narrator, is a young graduate struggling to establish an art practice. At intervals, she impels herself to recall the works she learned about in college, as an attempt to find meaning, and to continue to learn in spite of the fact that her formal education has come to an end. "A Line Made by Walking"—the artwork—has particular resonance because Frankie understands it to be about searching, about repetition, about what we leave behind.

Did you draw on your own experience as a fine arts student to portray Frankie's state of mind?
Yes, certainly. Line started several years ago as a short piece of creative nonfiction about a period of my life spent living alone in my dead grandmother’s empty bungalow in rural Ireland. This was during Ireland’s most recent economic depression, about two years after I finished art school; I was unemployed and increasingly disillusioned and Frankie’s voice draws heavily from those feelings of confusion and despair.

Throughout the novel, Frankie lists works of art that reflect her situation as a way to test herself as an artist. How did you go about picking these perfectly fitting works?
I’ve always been as influenced by art and artists as literature and writers. In my late teens, my mother gifted me a book called Art Since 1960 by Michael Archer and ever since then I’ve had a strong interest in conceptual and contemporary art. It was important to me, when picking works, that if I couldn’t call them easily and naturally to mind, then they shouldn’t be there. In the final stages of writing the novel, I cut out a lot of works which I felt I’d tried too hard to find.  

Frankie's fascination with animals, dead and alive, is central in the book. What does this obsession say about her state of mind and her way of looking at the world?
The novel begins with Frankie stumbling across a dead robin lying in the ditch outside the bungalow of her dead grandmother, where she is staying. She is—suddenly, deeply, unexpectedly—moved, and decides to take a photograph. As the novel continues, she comes across another dead creature, a rabbit, and then a rat, and so the photos become a series, and each of the 10 chapters are named for the creature discovered, and photographed, therein. Frankie considers them to be both beautiful and strangely prophetic; they make her feel as if she has reached the momentous end of something. "And because my small world is coming apart in tiny increments," she thinks, "it seems fitting that the creatures should be dying too."

Sometimes it’s hard to separate Frankie's disappointment in herself from her disappointment in how the world functions. How did you manage to intertwine the two?
I guess in my mind, the two are necessarily, inextricably intertwined. How do we find a way to function, cheerfully, in a world we believe is intrinsically malfunctioning? Frankie is stultified by both the responsibility of her future and the amorphous guilt which comes attached to privilege. "The world is wrong," she thinks, "and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed." 

Does Frankie achieve something akin to what Thoreau experienced at Walden Pond? Or is her retreat something entirely different?
Certainly she sets out to escape conventional society and to live "deliberately," but her motives are no way near so noble. Frankie is essentially afraid and seeking to evade responsibility. The natural world as solace is something I also explored in my first novel: I grew up in rural Ireland, but then spent several years studying and working in Dublin city. Returning to live in the countryside again in my mid-20s, I was disappointed to find how much I’d forgotten—the names of birds and trees and flowers I’d known as a child—so many details which had been squeezed out by all the years of academic study. So I set about learning them again, and this soon became a significant part of my writing process. In Line, Frankie is doing something similar, though she is only barely aware of it.

How has being Irish influenced your writing?
That’s so hard to answer! It’s almost the same as asking how being human has influenced my writing . . . 

Do you think despair comes with the territory of being an artist?
Yes, certainly. But it’s a great motivator. And there can be a decent share of joy, too.

What new projects can your fans expect in the future?
The next projects will be visual, and there’s a very good chance no one will ever see them.

Author photo © Patrick Bolger

Elizabeth Strout is both a maker and a master of messes, and seemingly, the bigger the better. On the phone from her Manhattan apartment, she discusses the close connections between her new book, Anything Is Possible, and her acclaimed 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton.

In the latter, during hospital visits in New York City, patient Lucy Barton and her mother gossip about people from their rural hometown of Amgash, Illinois. Anything Is Possible contains nine short stories about many of those characters (including Lucy herself and a family named Nicely). As is the case with Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, the thickly interwoven strands of these stories lend the collection the emotional weight of a novel.

Asked about a genre label for her work, Strout says, “I think—” and after a pause, continues, “they’re books of fiction.”

The author lets out a wonderful laugh, which she does often, adding, “You know, the truth is, I don’t really care what they are. That’s what’s so funny. They’re just—they’re books.

“I do think my brain works in this certain way,” she says, explaining that as she jumped back and forth from book to book and story to story, “I realized this was a big old messy tapestry.”

As in literature, as in life. In a story called “Mississippi Mary,” the title character observes: “But this was life! And it was messy!”

The complexity and disorder intrinsic to both life and art are precisely what drives Strout, who with the stroke of her pen paints sharp portraits of the intriguing divides between an individual’s public facade and his or her inner thoughts and private actions. (You might even call this the Olive ­Kitteridge Effect.)

“When you think about it,” Strout acknowledges, “we don’t ever know what it’s like to be another person. Oh, my God, that kills me so much.”

And you can tell it does, deeply. “Seriously,” she says. “We don’t know. We never know. We can only be in our own head and see things through our own set of eyes our entire life. I recognized that when I was young. I think I’ve spent my life trying to imagine what it would be like to be another person.”

Her quest has by no means been easy. “I listen and I watch and observe and I do everything I can. Everybody has that inner piece to them that’s their private view of the world, and I’m always trying to get in there.”

At one point in her youth, Strout toyed with the idea of being an actress, yet another form of inhabiting another persona. Her mother, a high school writing teacher, frequently gave her notebooks as she grew up in Maine and New Hampshire. An avid reader, Strout studied English at Bates College and got a law degree at Syracuse University. But practically on her first day of work as a lawyer, she knew she’d made a mistake.

“I was just so bad at it,” she remembers. “It was horrifying.”

Strout lasted six months, then began teaching English at a community college in Manhattan and writing in her spare time. A full-time writer now for a number of years, Strout wrote many of the stories in Anything Is Possible at the same time that she was writing Lucy Barton.

“I’m always making a mess on my table,” she explains, “just writing different scenes and pushing stuff around. I’m a very, very messy worker. There were times when I would think, ‘Oh, here’s the Pretty Nicely Girls; let’s see what they’re up to.’ And I would pull a piece of paper toward me and put some scenes down about them.”

Before committing words to computer, Strout begins by writing longhand, explaining, “It gives me the sense of earning the sentence, and what I mean by that is the physicality of it. Writing has always seemed to me to be a very physical job.”

Because Lucy is a writer, Strout contemplated having her be the author of these stories, perhaps having them appear in the same book as Lucy’s story. She abandoned the idea, however, realizing that Lucy’s distinctive first-person voice is too different from the third-person omniscient narration of the stories. Meanwhile, Strout simply continued to write.

“I don’t write anything in order,” she admits, “I don’t write a book in order; I don’t write the story in order. I never ever write anything from beginning to end.”

At some point, of course, there has to be order. How does that happen?

“You know,” she answers, “that’s a really good question. How does the book itself finally take shape? And oh boy, you know, the truth is I don’t really know. After I have so many scenes, I begin to see connections between the scenes, and I think, ‘Oh, OK. Here we go. This is this, and this is this. And now let’s start at the beginning, and figure out what the reader needs at the beginning.’

“What I do remember about every book is a sense of—not panic—but, close to panic at some point for a few weeks or even a couple of months—of trying to figure out how do I pull it together? Where’s the line going to be to connect the entire thing?”

To make the connections, Strout doesn’t use aids like timelines or family trees. While writing her second novel, Abide with Me, she tried putting packing paper on her wall and charting the book’s progress with a magic marker. “It just didn’t work,” she remembers. “I thought, this is foolish, so I took it down.”

What seems to help is walking around her apartment and talking out loud, saying things like “I get it, I get it,” or “No, no, no.”

Strout concludes, “I’m not a writer who goes, ‘Oh well, these voices come to me, and I just write them down.’ I’m perfectly aware at all times that I am writing a story and that I’m making these people up and that I have to figure things out.”

Unlike her first four books, mostly set in Maine, Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible focus on an imaginary Midwestern town. “It never occurred to me that they would be in Maine,” Strout notes. “As I was playing around with Lucy, I right away saw that she would be in the Midwest. I just saw that there was sky, sky, sky. There’s sky in Maine, but it’s a different kind of landscape altogether.”

In the story “Sister,” Lucy returns to Amgash for the first time in 17 years, reuniting with her sister Vicky and her brother Pete. As Strout and I discuss these characters, it feels as though we’re catching up on mutual friends. I note, for instance, how fastidiously Pete cleans his filthy house, waking with nightmares in anticipation of Lucy’s arrival.

“Poor boy,” Strout says, her voice filled with compassion. “Poor man. He’s a man, but I think of him as a boy.”

The story is mesmerizing, with siblings provoking each other as only siblings can. When Lucy announces that she hasn’t visited for so long because she’s been “very busy,” Vicky snaps back: “Hey, Lucy, is that what’s called a truthful sentence? Didn’t I just see you on the computer giving a talk about truthful sentences? ‘A writer should write only what is true.’ Some crap like that you were saying.”

As we delight in Vicky’s spot-on jab, I remark that all kidding aside, Strout is masterfully adept at creating believable characters.

“I’m so glad to hear that,” Strout responds. “That’s my aspiration, always—to try and convey a truthful emotion.”

Her secret? Whenever she sits down to write, she takes note of whatever she happens to be feeling and attempts to instill that emotion into her fiction. “I finally realized that if I take this and use it on any level, then my writing will hopefully have a heartbeat.”

Later she comments, “One of the really fun things for me when I write—it’s one of the best things in the world—is that I love my characters. I don’t care what they do; I really do love them. And I feel for them. I don’t have the judgment for them that other people would—and should—because I’m just making them up. So, I love them.”

She laughs, adding, “They’re just people.”

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

Rakesh Satyal’s second novel is the ambitious and universally relatable tale of three Indian Americans—Harit, Ranjana and Prashant—who set out on individual journeys to carve a space in their lives where they feel they truly belong. Timeless and true, No One Can Pronounce My Name provides a new voice and a 21st-century face to great American fiction.

Unsurprisingly, given the title of the book, your characters are constantly encountering people who butcher and mispronounce their names. What’s the worst/oddest way your own name has been pronounced (outside of a Starbucks)?
This is a tie: I was once called “Raquel”—I wish the person had at least had the presence of mind to append “Welch” to it—and another time, I was called “Rafiki,” as in the monkey from The Lion King. Can you feel the “oof” tonight?

It seems like most American novels featuring immigrants are either set in New York or California, as though foreigners only ever land in one of two places when they settle in America. No One Can Pronounce My Name largely takes place in a rather generic Midwestern city in Ohio, the state where you grew up. Why did you feel it was important to set your novel here? Did you feel that this particular setting allowed you to explore certain themes or ideas that—perhaps somewhat ironically—a larger, more cosmopolitan city would have stifled or restricted?
There is a certain decorum, one might even call it politesse, to living in the Midwest, a kind of geniality tempered by manners, and I find that it often makes it harder to parse out the subtleties of human interaction. There is not necessarily the straightforwardness of being on one of the coasts or the kind of performed grandeur of being in the South, for example. This, to me, makes an ideal setting for challenging what we think of as “ethnic” literature because it almost forces a writer to mine the base-level reactions of people in ordinary social situations, from dining out to driving to attending a religious gathering. Since I was dealing with a collection of characters that has had a hard time navigating tricky social structures, it felt all the more fitting to set the book in the Midwest and have them trying to solve their particular problems as well as the obstacles posed by such an environment.

Another thing that sets No One Can Pronounce My Name apart from many other novels featuring immigrant protagonists is its nuanced and multifaceted exploration of sexuality and gender identity. These are topics that you also explored in your Lambda Literary Award-winning debut novel, Blue Boy. How do you believe your newest novel advances the discussion of these issues?
A key theme of this book is the idea of what society prescribes for people’s understanding of their sexuality versus what they themselves believe to be true. In the case of Harit—one of the main characters—he’s had assumptions made about his sexual identity by other people but has largely avoided such self-introspection, even though he has the benefit of middle age. What I wanted to show in this novel was his journey to exploring that identity—but not defining it in any conventional way that would play directly into the established gender binary. And I wanted to be certain not to recklessly conflate issues of gender with issues of sexuality—a common problem in fiction. What I think/hope that I’ve accomplished here is a nuanced approach to explicating those topics but in a compassionate and humorous way.

Your new book features three main protagonists, each at a different stage in his or her own life. Of the three, which character did you relate to the most and why? Which character did you find the most challenging to write?
Ranjana is quite possibly the closest to me, mainly because she loves writing but isn’t sure to what extent her writing is exceptional or necessary. But Harit was a real challenge. He is based loosely on a man that I met several years ago who was the “uncle” of a high school friend—“uncle” used here, as it often is, to describe a tenuous social connection that may or may not have been familial. This man was in his mid-40s and unmarried and lived with his mother, and there was this unspoken assumption by the community that he must have been gay because of these circumstances. I was fascinated and somewhat disheartened by this assumption because it didn’t allow for how he himself felt about his life and how he saw the world. So, trying to examine the innermost thoughts of a person like that became both my mission and my greatest challenge.

What’s one of the biggest stereotypes that you believe exists about Indian Americans and their families that you hope your book addresses and may help readers to think differently about?
One of my main goals with this book was to take the common tone of an “ethnic” or “Indian” book—which is often tragic or grief-stricken—and instead, to show a lot of humor and joy and farcical misunderstandings. There are a lot of struggles inherent in the process of immigration—and we are certainly seeing that in our current political mome—but I didn’t want to overlook the genuine moments of levity and jollity because there are so many of them, and they more accurately define people’s day-to-day lives, I think.

And indeed, although No One Can Pronounce My Name tackles some very serious and sad topics, there are many moments of levity and throughout the book. Can you talk a bit about your approach to including comedy in your writing?
One thing that I came to learn about myself as a writer in working on this book is that my writing is often about who is happening moreso than what is happening. That is, I love creating characters who feel very true-to-life but who are almost so specific as to be mysteries to themselves as they are to other people. In this book, people from disparate backgrounds who hold very different worldviews bump up against each other, and that, to me, leads to an ideal comedic state, even if some of the things that the characters have experienced are harrowing. It is only through meaningful interaction that people sort out their differences, and I believe that this thinking forms the core of the humor in this book.

In addition to writing fiction, you have also worked in publishing for many years and currently work as a senior editor for a major publishing house. Given the number of manuscripts you’ve worked on, what’s one literary trope or trend you feel has been done to death and hope to never see again?
I know that this may seem like a cop-out, but I really don’t think that anything is off-limits as long as you try to bring a fresh perspective to it. For example, including a narrative about a writer was a very intentional choice I made in this book, and although that is a trope that has occurred many, many times in literature, I saw it as a particular challenge that I wanted to take on and try to tackle in a unique way. I think that I’ve succeeded, but that’s not really for me to say. What I do think I did, however, was bring to that challenge all of the warmth and willingness to understand that I could.

Readers may be surprised to hear that you have quite the set of pipes on you and that you occasionally perform cabaret and even went so far as to sing your acceptance speech at the Lambda Literary Awards. If you’re heading out for an evening of karaoke, what’s your signature song?
The number of times that I have sung George Michael’s “Father Figure” in public likely exceeds the number of pages in this book.

What are you working on next?
I’m already halfway through a new novel, and I’m very happy with it. Just kidding. I have a very murky premise for a new book and am terrified at even trying to get it down on the page until I’ve stopped hyperventilating from seeing this current book into our turbulent world. . . .

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of No One Can Pronounce My Name.

Throughout her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dina Nayeri wrote draft after draft of a second novel, and with each revision her editor would say, no, that’s not it, it doesn’t have the Dina magic.

“I remember thinking, what the hell is the Dina magic? I don’t know what that is!” Nayeri says, laughing, during a call to her home outside of London, where she now lives with her partner, the writer Samuel Leader, and their 16-month-old daughter, Elena.

Finally, her editor told her to shelve the project and write instead about whatever popped into her head when she thought about her life and what she had experienced as a displaced person. Nayeri fled Iran with her brother and mother, a Christian convert persecuted by Iran’s morality police, when she was 8 years old. She ended up, improbably, in Oklahoma as a refugee. Her father remained in Iran. What popped into Nayeri’s head were the four occasions when she had seen her father, a dentist from Isfahan, after she left the country.

These four visits, fictionally reimagined, of course, but also “pretty closely autobiographical,” are one of three beautifully braided narratives in Refuge, a revelatory novel about the lives of uprooted people. One of the narrative threads concerns Dr. Bahman Hamadi, a vibrant, poetry-loving, opium-addicted dentist who remains behind in Iran and runs afoul of the Iranian authorities during the Green Movement’s protests of 2009. Another focus is his daughter, Niloo, a high-achieving, assimilated immigrant now in her 30s. She is in a listless marriage with a sweet man named Guillaume and living in the Netherlands, where despite its progressive politics, anti-immigrant furor is rising, with shocking results.

Nayeri’s 10-page fictionalized treatment of her visits with her father, submitted at the last minute, earned her a residency at the MacDowell Colony, a “sacred space” for artists in New Hampshire, where in a burst of creative energy she completed a full draft of Refuge. At MacDowell, Nayeri also met Sam, who like her had married his college sweetheart and then divorced after 10 years. “It’s an experience that’s hard to relate to unless you’ve been through it,” she says. “We kind of realized we were each other’s person very quickly. This book is deeply tied into my relationship with Sam.”

Refuge is also deeply tied to Nayeri’s profound experiences as a young refugee. “We escaped from Iran and then spent a couple of years in a refugee camp before coming to the U.S.,”she says. “There were two years when we were completely without a home. And when we arrived in Oklahoma, we were suddenly very poor. I don’t even know the words to describe the sense of loss I lived with for those first few years. I developed this kind of crazy determination to find a place for myself in the world, to have a kind of security that won’t disappear in an instant.”

Drawing on these experiences, Nayeri creates in Niloo a character who is very tightly controlled. Niloo fashions, for example, what her husband names the Perimeter, a fiercely protected corner in every place she lives that is for her alone. Unhappy at the beginning of the novel, Niloo’s journey is toward finding some sense of belonging and happiness.

“Once you’ve lost everything and there’s no going back,” Nayeri explains, “you have this sense of panic that nothing is under control. You develop these OCD-like symptoms. You want some small space that you can control—a space just small enough so you know that whatever happens you can huddle over it and it isn’t going to change.”

Nayeri is quick to emphasize that the character Niloo is not her. “I think the child Niloo is very much based on who I was. But as an adult, Niloo is not at all like me. It was so tempting to just pump in all my own feelings and experiences and reactions. Reining that in was something I had to go through a lot of iterations to do.”

"I don’t even know the words to describe the sense of loss I lived with for those first few years."

Likewise, Nayeri makes a distinction between her real father and her character Bahman. “I just love that character. He’s this other version of my dad. My dad was in his early 30s when I said goodbye to him, and Bahman in his 30s is very close to that person. Then my father and this fictional father branch out in different directions. I think I captured the voice of a real, true person and at the same time gave him a balance that maybe my father’s real life hasn’t had. Bahman is a person who has kept his capacity for joy through all his adversity. He represents to me a kind of wild, animal enjoyment of life, a quality that can’t be stamped out.”

Nayeri says she has not gone back to Iran because “it never feels safe enough.” Her visits with her father were in other countries. But she remains deeply connected to Persian culture.

“I moved away from my Iranian roots for a while in my late 20s when I was very lost and trying to become something different. But as I was becoming a writer, I jumped back in. I immersed myself in Iranian communities. I made sure my Farsi speaking and writing skills didn’t deteriorate. I listened to the music, cooked the food and celebrated the holidays. I recaptured my culture for myself.”

Her immersion in Persian culture, in addition to her experience as a refugee, enables Nayeri to create a nuanced and remarkably textured narrative about a world few of us experience.

That was apparently also the opinion of her editor when on the final day of her MacDowell residency, Nayeri and friends hit the send button on the first complete draft of Refuge.

Nayeri recalls, “Of course we went through a long editing process. But the first thing she said was, ‘This is it! This is the Dina magic!’ . . . And I still don’t know what that is.”

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

Author photo credit Anna Leader.

Jonathan Dee’s keenly insightful, gently humorous seventh novel, set in a small town in western Massachusetts, was scheduled for publication in 2018. Then came the 2016 presidential election.

“Obviously the book reads a certain way now that I couldn’t have foreseen when I started writing it,” Dee says during a call to his home in Syracuse, New York. The Locals is a novel with an enticing ensemble of vivid small-town characters with many stories to tell. But the narrative thread that vaulted the book to the front of the publication queue has to do with Philip Hadi, a somewhat mysterious and very wealthy New York money manager who owns a summer place in Dee’s fictional Berkshires town of Howland. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Hadi receives secret intelligence through the elite circles he travels in that more attacks are imminent and moves his family to their summer home in Howland. He eventually is elected first selectman of the town and through a blend of generosity and paranoia begins to reshape the town in his own image.

“The idea that the extremely wealthy not only possess a special skill set but a sort of moral purity has been around for a while,” Dee says, talking about his conception of Hadi. “That only the really rich can lead us seems like a very American idea. I was thinking of Michael Bloomberg and Ross Perot. What fascinates me in terms of the role of class, class conflict and class aspiration in American society is the idea that if you get a little bit rich, you’re venal and corrupt, but if you get really rich, you’re a special kind of human being.”

Then there are Mark Firth, a less-than-rich local contractor, his wife and young daughter, and his increasingly disorderly brother and sister. By chance, Firth, a victim of financial fraud, is in New York for a lawsuit during the 9/11 attacks. The Firths have deep roots in Howland, and simply because Mark returns safely from the 9/11 disaster, he is greeted, to his consternation, as a hometown hero. Firth is soon hired by Hadi to improve the security of Hadi’s home. After a casual conversation with Hadi about his middle-class American aspirations to better himself, Mark decides to buy foreclosed properties and flip them, with increasingly mixed results. From there, this smartly observed story moves forward without looking back, presenting the love and small betrayals of family and village life, and playing out on a small-town scale the bitter conflicts that plague the nation.

“I wanted to find some way to write about what I felt had happened in American life in the first 10 or 15 years of this century, the mainstreaming of the once-radical idea that your problems are not my problems,” Dee says of his early musings on the novel. “When I thought about what had happened to our discourse about government and the social fabric, I had the idea that it begins with 9/11—technically the book begins on 9/12—with that intense reaction to what had happened: the coming together, the selflessness, the collective pride. That was real but it was also a reaction to something specific. I feel that gave way to an equal and opposite reaction over time, and a sort of panic about collapse and an every-man-for-himself mindset resulted from that.”

“The book reads a certain way now that I couldn’t have foreseen when I started writing it.”

Dee, who is best known for his fifth novel, The Privileges, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, began working on The Locals in 2013 in his tiny Manhattan apartment. He finished the book in the old house in Syracuse that he shares with his partner, novelist Dana Spiotta. Both now teach in the Syracuse University writing program. “It’s a tonic just to be around very talented young artists who are struggling with the same things that you struggled with and continue to struggle with,” he says of teaching. Dee says he grew up in a town not far from the location of and not unlike his fictional Howland. He clearly draws heavily on his personal experiences in creating the novel’s sharply drawn characters and locale. “There was a summer population that really changed the character of the place, particularly economically,” he says of his hometown. “And when the summer ended, the place changed or reverted. That dynamic of both depending on and somewhat resenting the temporary population is a really interesting one.”

Curiously, another source of inspiration for The Locals was George Eliot’s Middlemarch. “One of the models I very modestly had in mind was Middlemarch,” Dee says hesitantly in response to a question about the novel’s portrayal of neighborliness and small-town society. “The surprise for you as a reader is that when you get really far into this long book, you realize that the characters you have grown to know so well and who live in a very confined space don’t know each other all that well, and that’s because they occupy different social realms.”

The action of The Locals unfolds during a span that on the national scene roughly parallels the time between the 9/11 attacks and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Not the most cheerful of eras.

Asked if he thinks his novel is pessimistic or hopeful, Dee points to the character of Mark First’s daughter, Haley, who we meet when she is in second grade. “Ten years in the life of Mark First is momentous, but he’s still Mark First,” Dee says. “But 10 years in the life of somebody who starts the book so young is a much, much bigger deal.”

Dee continues, “I gave a copy of this book to a friend to read. One of the things she said was, it’s interesting, your last three books have been similar in that they’re about well-meaning parents screwing up. But they manage to end on the hopeful figure of the child. Honestly, that would not have occurred to me in a million years. But when I thought about it, I thought she was right. And that seemed like a good reason to dedicate The Locals to my own hopeful child, Claire.”

(Author photo credit Jessica Marx.)

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

At first glance, Celeste Ng may look unassuming, but make no mistake, this bright-eyed writer is a veritable fireball. She starts her books with a bang.

Ng’s narratives reveal families plagued by delicately interwoven secrets and misunderstandings that ultimately yield tragedy. Her debut bestseller, Everything I Never Told You (2014), begins with devastating news for a Chinese-American family. Her latest novel, the mesmerizing Little Fires Everywhere, starts with an equally provocative lead: “Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.”

“That was fun,” Ng says with a grin, referring to her new novel’s incendiary beginning. “In literary fiction, you don’t often get to have explosions. If you think about action movies, Michael Bay gets to blow everything up. And then there are the quiet indie films, and that’s what literary fiction is. So it was fun to get to do that.”

As we talk on a hot summer morning, Ng sits in the corner of a dark cafe near Harvard University, her alma mater. She lives near Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and soon-to-be 7-year-old son. The initial idea for Little Fires Everywhere was sparked by a church fire in Cambridge in 2009. “That gave me the idea of a literary fire that might burn everything to the ground,” Ng recalls. She speaks crisply and quickly, her mind overflowing with ideas and enthusiasm.

While Everything I Never Told You takes place in 1970s small-town Ohio, Ng sets her latest novel in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a wealthy, planned community that prides itself on educational achievement and diversity. Ng spent most of her childhood there, experiencing “that kind of blissful childhood that people think of, where you ride your bike and there are lots of parks and everybody has a front lawn.”

It’s hardly a haven for family arsonists, however.

“I had the idea of a dysfunctional family,” Ng explains. “I started thinking that there’s this one black sheep who is at odds with everything that the family and the community are aligning themselves with. What’s going to happen? How far is that tension going to go?”

Ng’s saga takes place in 1997-98, when Ng herself was a senior in high school, making her the same age as her studious, Yale-bound character, Lexie, the oldest of the four Richardson children. Lexie’s siblings include handsome athlete Trip (a junior); quiet, reflective Moody (a sophomore); and wild Izzy, the fire starter.

Both of Ng’s novels focus on the roles of mothers and daughters and the relationships between the two, but her new book includes a twist. “A lot of times I feel that mothers are supposed to be peacemakers who put out all of the fires,” Ng says, “but in this book, they’re inciting all of the fires.”

At center ring of these mother wars are Mrs. Richardson—a frustrated career woman, local reporter and busybody—and Mia Warren, an artist and single mother who lives hand to mouth and moves into a rental property belonging to the Richardsons. Mia and her teenage daughter, Pearl, soon befriend and infiltrate the Richardson family, with everyone helping to stoke the oncoming firestorm. Ng sees no heroes or villains in the story, just women acting “out of fear of losing their children, especially their daughters.”

The result is a deftly woven plot that examines a multitude of issues, including class, wealth, artistic vision, abortion, race, prejudice and cultural privilege. While all of this could be handled in a heavy-handed way, rest assured that in Ng’s talented hands, the issues arise organically.

“In literary fiction, you don’t often get to have explosions. If you think about action movies, Michael Bay gets to blow everything up. And then there are the quiet indie films, and that’s what literary fiction is. So it was fun to get to do that.”

Ng’s parents, both scientists, emigrated in their early 20s from Hong Kong to the United States, where they married, pursued graduate studies and raised two daughters. The family moved from Pittsburgh to Shaker Heights just before Ng turned 10, when her father began working at NASA’s Lewis Research Center and her mom began teaching chemistry and conducting research at Cleveland State University. The move proved to be transformative for Ng.

“It was the first time that I had been in a place that wasn’t basically completely white, where I was the only nonwhite person,” Ng says. “Before, in my elementary school, there was one black girl, one girl who was Jewish and one Asian girl, who was me.”

A woman ahead of her time, Ng’s mother tried to broaden her daughter’s cultural perspectives through books. “If there was a book that came out in the ’80s or ’90s that has to do with anything in East Asia, I probably had it,” Ng says, laughing.

While race was at the forefront of her first novel, it’s also an important subplot in Little Fires Everywhere, concerning a legal battle between a young Chinese immigrant mom who abandons her baby and a white couple who tries to adopt her child.

Ng, who describes her husband as a “tall white guy,” says she didn’t plan to write about this topic. “But because I’m in a mixed-race marriage and have a biracial child, these issues are just things that are on my mind,” she says. “In Little Fires Everywhere, I wanted to write about it from a different angle. I wanted to show the ways that race is not just an issue for nonwhite people; it’s an issue for everybody.”

As for her next novel, Ng is contemplating two “wildly divergent ideas” and has yet to settle on one. “The best analogy I have is that if you’re walking around a big walled city, you need to keep going around it until you can find a gate. I’m kind of walking around and trying to find where the gate is.”

No doubt she’ll find it, and readers will follow her in.

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

Author photo credit Kevin Day Photography.

“I wanted to tap into that feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music and it feels as if it moves your very soul.”

Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, her first novel since 2012’s National Book Award winner Salvage the Bones, is the story of 13-year-old Jojo, who lives with his black grandparents, his toddler sister and his drug-addicted mother in rural Mississippi, while his white father serves a prison sentence. We spoke with Ward about her lyrical and challenging novel.

Upon reading Sing, Unburied, Sing, I couldn’t help noticing parallels between this work and the books of William Faulkner. But the parallels a reader detects may differ from an author’s intentions. Which books or fellow authors, if any, were your biggest influences in writing this novel?
I was definitely thinking of Faulkner when I wrote this novel. Specifically, I had As I Lay Dying on my mind. There’s so much to admire in As I Lay Dying, but I am in awe of how Faulkner volleys back and forth between multiple first-person POVs and still tells a coherent, moving story. I thought I could try to mimic that in the structure of Sing, Unburied, Sing. I’m also impressed by the way the characters go on a journey through the Mississippi of their time, so I think I was trying to rewrite that journey in a way.

Not surprisingly, music plays a large part in this novel, not only the cadences of your prose but also the role of singing in the narrative. Jojo sings to Kayla; Stag, Pop’s older brother, “walked all over Bois Sauvage every day, singing, swinging a stick”; Jojo says that the songs were the best part of his birthdays. Did you have particular styles of music or certain songs that inspired you as you wrote this book, or that inspire you in general as an artist?
I was thinking about the blues as I wrote this, and when I wasn’t writing, I listened to some old-style blues by artists such as R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford, Junior Kimbrough and Jesse Robinson. I thought it only fitting since Parchman is in the Delta, the birthplace of blues. My editor also gifted me with a CD and book titled Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings: 1947-1959, so I listened to those as well. The chorus of those singing voices is transcendent; there’s something in those songs that moves me. I wanted to tap into that feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music and it feels as if it moves your very soul. That resonance we feel when we listen to music is a sign of something larger than ourselves, I think, and that's part of what I was exploring in Richie’s experience of the afterworld.

In the middle of the novel, Jojo says, “Pop always told me you can trust an animal to do exactly what it’s born to do. . . . That no matter how domesticated an animal is, Pop say, the wild nature in it will come through.” To what degree do you think Pop’s maxim explains the behavior of your characters?
The characters, Jojo and Pop and Leonie and Mam and Michael and Richie, are all struggling to live through very human quandaries, through illness and hunger and torture and grief. I think this is the parallel Jojo is understanding: that human beings react in very instinctual ways when dealing with very human ordeals.

Matters of race are very much part of the American experience. And they are very much at the center of this novel, especially in the tension between Big Joseph and Leonie and her family. Every author who writes sensitively about race has a message he or she wants to impart about the subject. What messages about the African-American experience do you hope readers, both white and people of color, will take away from this novel?
I would like readers to realize that at the heart, we are all human beings. We all love and grieve and struggle and hunger and yearn, regardless of our race. I think if we are able to recognize the humanity in each other and empathize with each other, we might be able to see past our preconceived notions about each other and realize that everyone deserves to live with dignity and be accorded kindness.

Your two most recent novels are influenced by Greek mythology. In Salvage the Bones, Esch is enamored of Greek myths, and Sing, Unburied, Sing has similarities to The Odyssey. To what extent, if at all, has Greek mythology influenced your outlook on life? Do you think it has also had an effect on your writing?
The Greeks were frank in their assessment of humanity, in their stories about their heroes and heroines: All are flawed. They were equally frank about life: It is fraught with tragedy. If Greek mythology has informed my work and my outlook on life, it has taught me that.

Was your approach to writing Sing, Unburied, Sing different from that of Salvage the Bones? If so, in what way?
It was very different because Sing, Unburied, Sing required research. I knew nothing of the history of Parchman, and I knew little of Mississippi history, which I last studied in seventh grade. So I read several books on Mississippi history and the history of Parchman Prison before I began writing the first draft of Sing, Unburied, Sing. While I wrote the first draft, I continued to research as the story demanded, because I knew little about Voodoo spirituality and herbal medicine. I then had to incorporate the research into the story so that it was organic to the characters and their world. This was a challenge.

What are you working on now?
I am currently working on a novel set in New Orleans during the height of the domestic slave trade (the early 1800s). I’m at the very beginning of the first draft, and I’m still researching: I’ve read several books on the history of slavery in the United States, on the slave markets in New Orleans, and now I’m reading slave narratives by women from the WPA projects. All of this is allowing me to give this world some texture and give the characters authenticity. I’ve found that it’s a hard world and experience to write about: The stress and grief of the characters’ lives feel very present and real. It’s all very heavy, but I guess readers expect that of me by now.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Cristina García’s Here in Berlin is a hypnotic work that, through the effective use of multiple oral histories, creates a portrait of the former East German city, the effect its past still has upon residents old and young, and the fallout from Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union. We spoke with García about her haunting new novel.

Other authors have used oral histories in their works, although most of them, such as Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich, have written nonfiction. Did you think about the works of these authors as you wrote this novel, and, if so, to what extent have their achievements influenced Here in Berlin and your work in general?
For me, the compelling first-person voice is one of utter persuasion, not just for the listeners, but for the storytellers themselves. Yet narrative, it seems to me, is always in competition with other narratives—official, familial, political, you name it. What interests me is not just what people remember but why, psychologically and emotionally, they need to remember specific events and details in the particular ways they do. How self-aggrandizing (or self-effacing) are the stories? What’s being left out? Who’s being protected, or vilified? It’s the stories not told in the telling that interest me most.

One assumes you decided that the use of oral histories was a good way to explore the themes you wanted to address. What was it about that type of narrative structure that made it seem the best choice for the story you wanted to tell?
The structure dictated itself through the voices that fought their way to inclusion. I wanted every voice to be individually nuanced and tell a story that no one else could tell, at least not in the same way. And yet the voices as a whole had to work in concert with the others, forge an insistent if dissonant chorus.

Continuing on the topic of the book’s themes, one of the obvious concerns of the book is an investigation into, as you put it, “the human fallout from Cuba’s long association with the Soviet bloc.” I imagine you did a lot of research into the subject as you wrote the book. Did you discover facts about that long association that you didn’t know before? How did those facts shape or alter the novel as you had originally conceived it?
My original idea about illuminating the complexities of Cuba’s political allegiances with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was pretty quickly eclipsed by Berlin itself, which had its own tales to tell. My work, as I saw it, then became to listen, listen, listen to the city’s whisperings, to read and wander, eavesdrop and absorb, to get out of my own way and eschew any preordained conclusions about what the novel should be. I became less a journalist/researcher than an observer. It was only when I became passive—not an easy things for me—that the stories began to surface.

Did you travel to Germany to conduct interviews for this book? If so, what did you learn from these interviews?
I lived for three-plus months in Berlin during the spring and summer of 2013. But I spent over three years immersed in the history and literature of the city and World War II. I conducted no formal interviews for the book.

Parts of Here in Berlin are grimly humorous. I’m thinking of people like Horst Galbrech, the minor official in the Ministry of Culture whose superiors asked him to come up with a dance craze that would “give the West a (managed) run for its money.” Was this based on an actual incident? And, in conducting your research, did you learn of other stories that were surprisingly humorous or otherwise unconventionally revelatory?
For me, humor is the ultimate coping mechanism. How else could anyone survive difficult times? In that particular story, I was eager to lift the skirts of East Germany’s notorious grimness and show the ambition, sensuality, desperation, and exultation cohabiting the same terrain.

As a framing device, you used the character of a woman known only as the Visitor, a twice-divorced woman who returns to Germany after an ill-fated job in Frankfurt 31 years earlier. Why did you choose this framing device?
The Visitor became a way to guide readers around Berlin, to introduce them to parts of the city not in the tourist books, and to meet a few of its unlikely citizens. I felt that the Visitor’s initial disorientation then growing familiarity with the city might ultimately mirror the reader’s. That was my hope, anyway.

Several characters in this book are unapologetic about their complicity during World War II. One former Nazi soldier bluntly tells the Visitor, “We were soldiers. We followed orders.” And Anna Wildgrube, a lawyer, defends her job representing war criminals with, “a cog is not the machine.” And yet you also show acts of tenderness, such as the German seamen who were kind to the young night watchman Ernesto Cuadra, whom they had captured onto their submarine. One assumes from past histories of World War II (The Sorrow and the Pity is a notable example) that these stories are rooted in fact. What perspectives on the war, if any, surprised you?
Yes, I wanted to hold the gaze on complicity—something the Germans have done exceedingly well in recent years, if not right after the war—and try to get inside the possibility that we all, under the right circumstances, might become perpetrators. This acknowledgement, I believe, is the beginning of a deeper understanding of the how and why of violence and war. One of the biggest surprises for me was the extent to which German women supported the Nazi war effort, both at home and abroad.

Authors often write about the past to warn about the future. What do you hope readers will take away from the experience of reading your novel?
My hope is the same as it is whenever I pick up a novel: to have a long, engaging conversation with another sensibility that will take me to places that, in retrospect, will seem absolutely necessary to have gone.

What are you working on now?
Presently, I’m working on theater—an exciting new venture for me. My adaptation of King of Cuba, my sixth novel, will be produced at Central Works Theater in Berkeley next summer, starring solo performer Marga Gomez as Fidel Castro. I’m also adapting my first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, for the stage with producer/director Adrian Alea, and we are in conversation with the Public Theater about it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Here in Berlin.

Author photo by Isabelle Selby