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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dana Spiotta explores the complexities of female friendship, the nature of seduction and the challenges of living as an artist in her dreamy and beautifully astute fourth novel, Innocents and Others. In the heady days of 1980s Los Angeles, childhood friends Meadow Mori and Carrie Wexler are both making strides as genre-defying filmmakers—of searing indie documentaries and mainstream women's comedies, respectively—while struggling to find the balance in their private lives. Meanwhile Amy, known on the phone as Nicole or Jelly, searches for belonging, intimacy and identity as an "unremarkable," aging woman who doesn't see her place in a city obsessed with the Hollywood ideal. When these three characters collide, pointed questions about the moral and social responsibilities of artists come bubbling to the surface.

We asked Spiotta a few questions about the irresistible magic of film, the constraints of the novel, pre-Internet "catfishing" and more. 

You write very compellingly about the language of film in this novel. What do you find most striking about film as a medium?
Film is gloriously overwhelming, especially when you are in a theater in the dark in front of a huge screen. What can you do but put away your ordinary life and submit? The combination of images, music and long looks at giant human faces gets right into our dream life. It is so seductive; I find it irresistible. And I like how the storytelling happens in the editing: the juxtapositions, the analogies it draws between things by intercutting. But the novel is better—much better—at getting our interior life, our consciousness. When we watch a film, it interacts with our own thoughts and feelings. A novel can describe that experience, that interaction of a mind with a film, the experience of watching.

Innocents and Others is mostly set in LA in the 1980s, well beyond Hollywood’s Golden Age, but very singular and celebrated in its own way. What drew you to this era?
I think it is because I grew up in the 1980s, and I feel very sure of the cultural markers of that era. You remember your own childhood and adolescence more than other times in your life. I remember those days very well—and it was not a time of quality entertainment. Maybe because Reagan was president, it had a kind of reactionary tiredness to it. Seventies overindulgence followed by 80s cynicism. In any case, I am attracted to writing about the recent past because I think it enables us to understand the present better. It is just far away enough to be both familiar to us and estranged from us. 

Jelly and Meadow share some of the allure and mystique of the classic film femme fatale, but they are both imbued with great power and humanity. What inspired you to shift this traditionally anti-feminist trope?
Interesting. Jelly is both a victim and a player of the idea of the seductive female. I think Meadow’s allure is more incidental. She has a lot of privilege, and she isn’t even aware of how others perceive her. I think all the women in the book push back at how value gets applied in a complicated and unfair way. At one point Meadow says to her best friend Carrie that “everything is so easy for you, an unbroken line.” Which could easily be said of Meadow. At another point, Jelly says to Meadow: “Some people—you for instance—are very lucky in this life.” By the end, Meadow does try to respond to that and to see herself more clearly.

Throughout the book, you touch on the power of the visual and oral traditions of storytelling and their abilities to seduce an audience. What did you discover about the intersections between these two modes and the written story during your writing process?
I love the constraints of the novel and how it uses language to create everything. The miracle of language (if it is precise and concrete) is that it can create in the mind all kinds of seductions, including sound and vision. I love how reading is interactive. My favorite novels leave room for the reader to put things together, to connect things. That is a deep level of engagement. And the novel is such a sustained and concentrated experience. At its best it is intimate and it resonates long after you finish the book. This book does make meaning in a cinematic way—connecting through the structure rather than using a lot of figurative language. I didn’t realize I was doing it in a self-conscious way. It just felt right as I was working. 

Your portrayal of the long friendship between Meadow and Carrie, two women with similar creative passions but on divergent paths, is refreshingly honest. In an era when films rarely pass the Bechdel Test, was it important for you to make this a centerpiece of your narrative?
At some point I was aware that the three main characters were all women, and although that happened organically, I admit that I was pleased on some level. Maybe one of the things I was interested in was that Meadow and Carrie do not have “careers” in men. Their lives are not built around romance. Meadow’s “love story” in the beginning turns out to be her love for cinema. But how much happiness does that bring her? She needs people, not just art. All the characters want to connect, and want to love. Jelly is kind of a slave to the allure of romance (for many complicated reasons). But there is purity there too. Is one better than the others? I don’t know. I think sacrifices (and joys) lie in all directions.

How did you stumble upon the history of “phone phreaking,” a form of pre-Internet hacking?
I had read an obituary of one of the phreaks, and I thought it was so fascinating. So it has been an interest of mine long before I wrote this book. I am, I think, attracted to people who do subversive things. And sure, they did it for free phone calls, but also they did it because they could. They did it for the sheer joy of transgressing on a huge corporate entity. And the joy of outsmarting the system.

Nicole, or Jelly, seems to be loosely based on Miranda Grosvenor, a real-life woman who cold-called Hollywood industry types in the 80s. What was it about her that sparked your imagination?
A few years ago there were a bunch of “catfishing” stories on the Internet (people pretending to be someone else).  It fascinated me because it was such a doomed pursuit. Eventually the person wants to meet you in real life and it will fall apart. I then remembered reading about Miranda and how she was a pre-internet version of that. She was apparently very seductive on the phone without actually being overtly sexual. So I wondered about that, what would that actually be like? Could I create someone who is convincingly seductive on the phone? And why would she do that? I became interested in the phone as a kind of outdated technology, so I turned her into a kind of phone fetishist. I made her partly blind and imagined her previous boyfriend as a phone hacker. But he loves the machine while she loves the thing the machine gives you: connection, a mysterious and very specific intimacy.

If Innocents and Others were adapted for film, who would be your ideal director?
I really like Nicole Holofcener and how her films deal with women and their friendships with other women. I loved Please Give.

Do you have any new projects on the horizon?
I do, but nothing I can talk about yet. (The embryonic novel has to be protected.)

Author photo by Jessica Marx.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author photo by Simon Revill
 

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

More than 20 years after exploring the high-spirited hijinks of the small community of North Bath, New York, in the bestseller Nobody’s Fool (1993), Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo revisits the town and his now-iconic characters.

Everybody’s Fool takes place over a very eventful two-day span in the lives of North Bath’s residents. Donald “Sully” Sullivan is staring down some bad health news and wondering how to break it to the important people in his life. But in the background, the intrigue and drama of small-town life—romantic affairs, financial struggles, gossip—rumble on. Russo’s comic ability and his nimbleness when it comes to laying bare the human heart have never been more powerful. We asked the author a few questions about his new work and why he can’t stop writing about Upstate New York, the “place [he] left behind.”

What made you want to revisit the character of Donald "Sully" Sullivan 23 years after you created him in Nobody's Fool?
My pal Howard Frank Mosher, to whom Everybody’s Fool is dedicated, has been after me to write another Sully novel for over a decade and I finally gave in. But the book’s real genesis was a great story somebody told me several years ago about a local cop. In his wife’s car he found a garage door remote that didn’t open their garage and he leapt to the conclusion that she must be having an affair. The guy actually went around town with the remote, hoping to find out whose garage it would open. Thinking to myself, “Who would do such a thing?” I remembered Office Raymer, Sully’s old nemesis from Nobody’s Fool. And I was off to the races.

Did you have any trepidation about doing that, especially after any Academy Award-nominated performance by Paul Newman that might fix him in the mind of some readers?
I had all manner of trepidation, and not only about Newman, who was not just fixed in the reader’s mind as Sully, but also in my own. There was also Jessica Tandy as Miss Beryl and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who played Raymer (and who I thought of the whole time I was writing this novel). But it’s a book about memory—the whole thing takes place over a Memorial Day weekend—and writing the book was a way of keeping not just my characters alive but also the talented actors who brought them to life in Robert Benton’s great movie.

You apply a comic sensibility to subjects that include aging, illness and death and what seems like the irreversible decline of the town of North Bath, New York. What were some of the challenges as you tried to make that mood and subject matter work together?
I learned from Twain that if you’re going to go to dark places, you’d best go armed with humor. The dead in Bath are in open revolt, their caskets lurching up out of the ground, whole sections of the local cemetery coming untethered. Both the town and its inhabitants appear to be circling the drain, the result, often, of some broken faith, some mistreatment of the earth. Among the citizens, Chief Raymer’s descent is both the most alarming and, I think, the funniest. From the moment he faints into an open grave, his trajectory is pretty scary.  His choices seem guaranteed to deepen the fix he’s in, but he tries so hard to do the right thing that we have little choice but to sympathize with the poor guy.

Much of your fiction has been set in small, struggling upstate New York towns not unlike your childhood home of Gloversville. Though you've lived elsewhere most of your life, what is it about this territory that has so captured your imagination as a writer?
It’s true that my imagination has been captured by these struggling towns, but in the end it’s more the people than the setting. As a young man I left Gloversville determined to find my destiny in some finer place. I loved the University of Arizona and my life in Tucson, loved the idea of living the life of the mind among people who shared my newfound values. But summers I returned home to work road construction with my father, and gradually it came to me that, while I was attracted to my new friends and my new life out West, the people I loved most—my grandparents, my father and his pals, my cousins, some old friends—were all in the place I’d left behind. The larger world was ignoring these folks, the lives they led, their struggles to find dignity in hard work and family, their kindness and modesty.

After your highly praised memoir, Elsewhere, how did it feel to return to novel-length fiction?
I never wanted to write Elsewhere. It just felt necessary to do so. Returning to novel writing, though, was exhilarating. Unfettered by facts, my imagination could once again slip its leash. That said, the new book offers up a very large canvas with a lot of characters, all of whom wanted their say, their moment. Trying to fit all their stories and backstories into that two-day time frame just about drove me crazy. For about six months I was ready to shoot myself, convinced there was no way to make it all work. But then, as usually happens with novels and novelists, just when you’re ready to give up, some solution occurs to you and the pieces begin to fit and you see the pattern that’s previously eluded you. The scary thing about writing novels is that they’re all different. What worked last time, won’t this time, and there’s always that little voice that whispers to you that this time you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, located the very story that will show you who’s boss (not you).

This novel is nearly 500 pages and in the past you haven't avoided writing lengthy novels. Do you have any concern about doing that in an age when readers' attention spans are supposed to be shrinking to the size of tweets?
I suspect it’s true that people’s attention spans are shrinking, and it’s also true that the world is noisier than ever before. But people still love to dream deeply. Throughout the ages Art has always demanded that we slow down, and the faster our lives go, the more we seem to appreciate the reprieve that Art—good writing, good paintings, good films, good photographs—offers. Do tweets offer real, lasting satisfaction to anyone? Does Instagram?

Are there any writers who serve as literary role models, or works that you return to for inspiration for your fiction?
Like many readers I was deeply saddened to lose Kent Haruf last year. He was not only a great writer, but also a great man. He went about his work with great seriousness and modesty, caring not one iota about fame or fortune, but only the work, always the work. It, not him, was the important thing. He felt fortunate to be the one holding the tools and was ever grateful for the opportunity to wield them. I’ve never known a kinder man or a more honest one.

How do feel about the current state of American fiction and who are some of your favorite writers working today?
I couldn’t be much more bullish on American fiction, especially the young writers in the pipeline, the ones just beginning to make names for themselves. I say this with great confidence, having fairly recently judged a first novel contest and been a guest editor on Best American Short Stories, where I discovered writers like Hannah Tinti, Karen Russell, Rebecca Makkai, Michael Dahlie, Lauren Groff, Tea Obreht and Maggie Shipstead. What I’m less optimistic about is the state of American publishing. Digital platforms continue to erode and undermine the economic model for print, and large publishing houses are now often part of even larger entities that sell lots of other stuff at much bigger margins, causing publishers to wager big money on what they believe to be the most commercial books, often at the expense of “smaller” more important ones. The result is diminished careers, especially for emerging writers. Today’s young writers may be as talented as any that have come before them, but what good does that talent do them if their opportunities are seriously diminished? And in the end, of course, readers lose out as well.

Can tell us anything about your next project?
Next up is a collection of short fiction, and after that a selection of essays about imagination, destiny, and the writing life. My daughter Kate and I are also hoping to collaborate on a screenplay based on the last few years of Shirley Jackson’s life, when she was writing We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

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

Colson Whitehead’s sixth novel may be his best yet. An ambitious, imaginative tour de force, The Underground Railroad is the story of Cora, a slave who escapes from a plantation in Georgia via an actual underground railroad. The novel has achieved almost universal praise since its release and became an Oprah Book Club selection. It’s also our September Fiction Top Pick. We gave Whitehead a call to talk about Oprah, historical research, Donald Trump and writing truth vs. fact.

First and foremost, congratulations on the buzz that The Underground Railroad has been receiving! When I checked the Amazon bestseller list earlier today, the only book that is outranking you in Literature & Fiction is the new Harry Potter book, so that must be kind of exciting for you.
Yeah, definitely. There’s no hope of ever beating Harry Potter, but I think the book is doing pretty well. It’s definitely been a crazy week—very happy and gleeful—with everything that’s happened.

Obviously the other big news is that Oprah just announced that she has selected The Underground Railroad for her book club, her first selection in nearly a year and a half. Can you tell me a little bit about how you reacted when you found out that the book had been picked?
It was something that was pretty wild because I had handed in the book four months before, so I wasn’t even thinking about reviews or what would happen to [the book]. But I was doing a reading at Duke University, and I was checking my email on the plane right as it was landing and there was a voicemail from my agent and she just said one word: Oprah.

I immediately started cursing. I was trying not to curse because I was on a plane and people were looking at me, but I couldn’t hold it in. And then that started this whole crazy ride where I couldn’t tell anybody [that she had picked it], and I had to lie to people’s faces . . . when she mentioned [The Underground Railroad] in her magazine in June, and people said to me “Wouldn’t it be great if she picked it?” I was like, “Huh, yeah. But that will never happen, though.” So I’m really glad that the news is finally out there.

Is it weird knowing that now when people Google your name that Oprah’s name comes up in conjunction?
Well, I was a teenager when she first came into the cultural landscape so she’s always been this huge cultural figure to me, and her book club started around the time that I started publishing. But when you’re writing about elevator inspectors, you don’t necessarily think you’re going to have a lot of mass appeal. I’ve always loved giving my weird takes on the world and writing books that sound a little oddball and maybe even turn some people off, so with Oprah giving her endorsement, that really cuts through the odd description on the book cover and will hopefully help the book make its way to more readers.

“When you’re writing about elevator inspectors, you don’t necessarily think you’re going to have a lot of mass appeal.”

In an article about the craft of writing, you wrote: “Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration.” With that in mind, can you share how this book found you?
Just to clarify, that was for a parody article about writing advice, but like any writing cliché, there is a bit of truth in it.

I had the idea for the book about 16 years ago, recalling how when I was a kid, I thought the Underground Railroad was a literal railroad and when I found out it wasn’t, I was disappointed. So I thought it was a cool idea, and then I thought, “Well, what if it actually was a real railroad? That seems like a cool premise for a book.”  But I had just finished up a research-heavy project and wasn’t up for that kind of ordeal again, and I didn’t feel mature enough or up to the task. But every couple of years, when I was between books, I would pull out my notes and ask myself if I was ready. And inevitably I would realize that I wasn’t really up for it. It wasn’t until about two years ago that I really committed to the idea. I had the idea for a novel, but the narrator was very similar to the narrator in my previous book, The Noble Hustle, a sort of wise-cracking depressive. And rather than repeat myself, I decided to challenge myself and do the book I found scary to do. When I floated the idea out to people, they seemed really excited about it in a way that was new, so I thought that seemed like it was an idea worth pursuing.

Given that The Noble Hustle was about your real-life experiences competing in the 2011 World Series of Poker, would you say that it had you in the mindset to take a gamble?
I guess you could say that! But really, every book is a gamble. Can I pull it off? Will the idea defeat me? Am I up to the task? There’s always that kind of fear about what you’re about to take on. Figuring out how to overcome it and sidestep the danger and fear is important.

“Every book is a gamble.”

After sitting with this idea for 16 years, is there anything you can point to as the catalyst that made you feel like you were ready to tell this story?
Honestly, so much time had passed that I finally asked myself, “Why am I putting this off? Why am I afraid to do this?” Slavery is a daunting concept to contemplate, and it’s daunting to put your characters through the kind of brutality that telling a truthful story about the topic requires, so those things definitely gave me pause. But I’m older now and I have kids and both of those things pulled me out of my 20-something selfishness and gave me a new perspective on my characters and the world. I think that becoming a better writer, becoming a more well-rounded person and wanting to present a real challenge to myself all played a part as well.

Do you feel that becoming a parent has played an important role in your evolution as a writer?
There is a different kind of empathy that I have for my characters now. I used to joke that after my daughter was born that instead of shooting someone, now it would maybe just be a flesh wound. It’s a lot harder to kill characters off, though I have gotten over that. You come to empathy in different ways and writing this book now as opposed to 16 years ago made a big difference in how the characters turned out.

The Underground Railroad is rooted in historical fact and captures the brutal and painful realities of what it was to be black in America during the time of slavery. What kind of research did you do when writing this book?
Primarily I read slave narratives. There are a few histories of the Underground Railroad; one of the first ones I read, which proved the most useful was Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich. That gave me an overview of the railroad, but the main thing was just reading the words of former slaves themselves. There are the big famous slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, but in order to get people back to work, the government in the 1930s hired writers to interview former slaves. We’re talking 80-year-old and 90-year-old people who had been in bondage when they were kids and teenagers, and that provided a real variety of slave experiences for me to draw upon. It gave me a real taste for the expansiveness and breadth of plantation life as well as the slang and small details that help make the world rich.

Even though this is a work of historical fiction, I don’t think there will be a single reader who makes it through The Underground Railroad without drawing parallels between Cora’s world and our modern reality. As a writer, how much did you lean into and draw energy from the present-day and current events when writing this book?
Well, the country is still pretty racist, so it doesn’t take that much of a leap to draw parallels between black life 150 years ago and now. For example, the parallel between the slave patrollers 200 years ago who had the power to stop any black person—free or slave—and demand to see their papers and “stop and frisk” policies now. You don’t have to work hard to see the continuum of oppression in this country.

How does it feel having this book published in the same year that we could conceivably see Donald Trump elected as the next president of the United States?
It’s scary to contemplate a Trump presidency, whether you’re black or white! Seeing some of the rhetoric at his rallies, it reminds me of when I was writing the book in 2015 and wondering if I was going too far in some of the lynching scenes or being a bit too extreme. But the answer is no: the lynch-mob mentality is still around, as is the demonization of the other whether it’s the African, the newly arrived Irish immigrant, or now the Muslim immigrant. Fear and prejudice is a constant in American life. It’s gotten better by degrees, of course, but the world of Cora is not that far removed from our own.

“Fear and prejudice is a constant in American life. It’s gotten better by degrees, of course, but the world of Cora is not that far removed from our own.”

You chose Cora, a female protagonist, as the book’s core and you largely explored the parameters of the slave’s world from the perspective of women. Why did you decide to do this?
I guess I like to change it up from book to book and I had had a certain kind of meditative “dude narrator” for my last three books, so it just seemed time to mix it up. The narrator of my first book was a woman, and I like that people think that my female protagonists work, though I also think that if you have a plumber come to your house, you wouldn’t commend them for getting your drain clean. I think as a writer, it’s your job to present realistic protagonists and a supporting cast.

But you have mentioned that when you initially conceived of the book, you had a male at the center, so was there a moment when you felt that the story worked better with a woman protagonist?
Over the 16 years, the protagonist migrated: I’ve had it as a man, a man looking for a child, a man looking for his wife. When I finally committed to the book, I hadn’t explored a mother-daughter relationship before, and it seemed time to take that on.

Also, the black female experience in slavery was so terrible and different from the male experience that it seemed important to illuminate some of the specific history of African women in slavery

What was it about the character of Cora that you found the most compelling as a writer?
When you drop a character into the midst of slavery, they’re going to endure a lot of brutality and hardship. I was certainly rooting for Cora as she goes farther and farther north, and I admire her gradual awareness of the world and that she gets wiser and wiser with every step. There are certainly a lot of reversals of fortune that occur, but she keeps fighting, and that’s very admirable.

When we look at the American literary canon, there are already some incredibly powerful and moving classics about slavery and the pre-Civil War black experience like Beloved, Kindred, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Known World. What do you think The Underground Railroad brings to the table when it comes to contributing something new to the black slave narrative?
It’s not really for me to say what it brings that’s new; that’s really something that other people can say, or not say. For me, I just try to bring my own perspective to whatever I’m writing about, whether it’s a coming of age novel or a nonfiction book of immersive journalism. You can’t worry about what people have done before, you just have to trust that you have something new to say and execute your vision as well as possible.

When you think about the book, do you think about it uniquely as a slave narrative or, in your mind, it’s about more than the black slave experience?
To me, it’s a novel about slavery, “Americanness” and perseverance.

This is your first explicitly historical novel. Did working within a fixed historical context challenge you in ways that your previous novels didn’t?
It’s always a challenge to figure out different forms. Since I do change genres and forms a lot, that’s always a big part of the task early on.

The first chapter in Georgia I tried to make realistic and stick to the historical record, and then after that, I wanted to stick to the truth of the black experience but not necessarily the facts. As we go to South Carolina and Indiana and the different states that Cora goes to, I am playing with history and time, moving things up to talk about the Holocaust, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the eugenics movement. So in some sense, it’s not really a historical novel at all because I’m moving things around. Once she gets out of Georgia and starts on her journey, I didn’t feel that I had to stick to the historical record, and that gave me much more latitude to play in terms of the themes and different concepts to work with.

“I wanted to stick to the truth of the black experience but not necessarily the facts.”

Although you have an incredibly eclectic back catalog that includes a zombie apocalypse novel and a book about coming of age in the Hamptons, one overarching theme in your novels is the issue of race and the black experience in America. In your own words, how does The Underground Railroad fit into and expand upon your oeuvre to date?
I think it fits in with some of my books because it deals with race and American history, which are two things that I’m interested in, along with technology and pop culture. With some of my books, like John Henry Days, I can get a lot of my preoccupations in there, and then sometimes I’m finding different ways of talking about some of my favorite subjects. While I’ve written about race in most of my books, if you’re actually going to the original sin of slavery, it requires a different tactic. I think the ironic voice of Sag Harbor that Benji has provides one way of talking about race, and then a clear-eyed view about the true brutality of slavery requires a different kind of voice and tactic.

As a follow-up to that last question, although you’ve made a name for yourself by picking wildly disparate subjects and adopting very different styles with each novel is there a topic or genre that you’ll never touch as a writer?
Never say never, but I’m probably not going to write a book about football or yoga . . . but you never know!

Do you believe that there are benefits to tackling difficult topics like slavery and race through the medium of fiction (and perhaps film) as opposed to newspaper articles and nonfiction pieces?
Each form is different and has its advantages and disadvantages. As a novelist, I get to make up stuff; when you’re a historian or a nonfiction writer, you have to stick to the facts, but making up things is the fun part for me.

The Underground Railroad clearly pays homage to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, with Cora’s journey to each new state analogous to Gulliver’s voyage to strange new lands. Do the similarities end there or, like Swift’s novel, do you also view your novel as a satire?
It’s not a satire. Once I thought about making each state its own place with its own set of rules, the first analogy for me was Gulliver’s Travels. I’m not a Gulliver’s Travels fanatic, but . . . I think it’s a good structure: It’s episodic—much like The Odyssey and Pilgrim’s Progress, where a person is on a journey and they’re being tested along the way with different episodes that have different allegorical freight. The structure itself has been around for a while. Early on it seemed like a good way of framing it and it became my default way of describing the book.

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about white privilege in America and systemic racism that is propagated by whitewashed media and entertainment. As a black writer, why do you believe it is so important for readers to actively diversify their reading?
I’m not going to tell people what to read, and I haven’t said that it is important for us to diversify our literature. Publishing as an institution in the world is racist because the world is racist. I do think you are probably a more well-rounded person if you read books by men and women and people with different-colored skin. But I don’t care if you do or not.

For readers who are interested in checking out a more diverse array of authors, can you recommend any that you think are particularly worth their time?
Sure. There are a lot of authors that I like: Toni Morrison, ZZ Packer, Junot Díaz, Adam Johnson and Kelly Link all come to mind. I’m excited to pick up Elena Ferrante and I also like Gish Jen.

Given the subject matter, what has it been like trying to pick passages of this book to read aloud to an audience as you prepare for your upcoming tour?
I really enjoy readings, and I usually read the funny parts because people enjoy them and I remember writing the jokes. But this book has very few jokes compared to my other work, so I’m trying to find bits that are self-contained. Right now I’m reading the part when the slave masters interrupt the birthday party on the plantation, which covers a bit of ground, and it’s the first time I mention the Declaration of Independence, which plays a big role in the book. I also choose between the short biographical sections with Dr. Stevens, Ethel and Caesar; right now I’m reading the Ethel section because it is so different from Cora’s experience.

One of the most vital messages in The Underground Railroad is about the power of the written word and the ability to read. What’s the most important book you’ve ever read that you think should be considered required reading?
It’s hard to pick one, but in terms of my evolution as a writer, I would say One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I read it when I was in high school, and I read it again before I started this book. As a teenager, it broadened my idea of what a novel could be and as a 40-something it gave me an idea of how a novel could be organized.

Now that you’ve finished this huge, emotionally draining book, what are your plans and what are you working on next?
I am busy all fall promoting the book, so come January I will take stock. Right now, it’s going to be a novel that takes place in Harlem in the 1960s. I’ve still got a lot to research, so that’s all I can say about it!

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Underground Railroad.

In his electric second novel, Peter Ho Davies unravels the complicated relationship between the U.S. and China through four immigrants’ stories that span more than a century and a half.

Your previous novel, The Welsh Girl, was set in Wales and England during the Second World War. This book makes a leap to the United States and also with its timespan, which covers a century and a half. What interested you in exploring the Chinese in the United States?
Oddly enough, and despite the differences you rightly note, the initial impetus behind The Fortunes is very similar to the one behind The Welsh Girl. I’m half-Welsh on my father’s side, half-Chinese on my mother’s, and both books are driven in part by a desire to understand those different heritages. I’ve also now lived half my life in the U.S., after growing up in the U.K., so I was also drawn to the immigrant experience of Chinese Americans.

What kind of research did you do?
Lots of reading, of course, to try to get a handle on the historical materials, and lots of time in museums, but I also got to visit several important settings for the novel in person. I travelled the route of the Central Pacific across the Sierra Nevadas, both by train and car, to get a feel for the terrain. I was also able to go to China and see many of the same sights as a couple of my protagonists.

This novel tells four distinct stories in four very different voices. Yet there are similar themes and even things like jokes that show up in more than one segment. It works brilliantly. What made this form interesting to you and what were you hoping to accomplish with it?
I’m glad you liked it. In truth the form came as something of a revelation to me too as I worked on the book, evolving over the course of several years in response to the material. I think of it now as a kind of multi-generational novel about a community, Chinese Americans, whose history (from the “bachelor society” of the Gold Rush to the recent influx of baby girls adopted from China) is one of broken or discontinuous lines of descent. The characters in the four sections of The Fortunes aren’t related by blood, but they are bound to one another in some essential sense. The recurring themes, the jokes, the images, the echoes and “call backs” in the language are all there in place of those bloodlines, to suggest those affinities. My background as a short story writer, particularly in putting together a couple of collections of stories (and talking with my MFA students over the years about how to do that) was a touchstone too. Stories in a collection I’ve found are often in conversation with one another or linked in subtle ways.

The Welsh Girl also had some historical figures in it—Rudolph Hess, for one. What are the challenges of mixing real-life people with characters you’ve imagined?
That’s a great question, and the answer tends to vary depending on the historical figure involved—how well known or well documented they are primarily.

In the case of Hess, a notorious figure in the Third Reich, there’s a great deal of information known, but also a notable historical “gap” in regard to his motives and mental state after he crash-landed in Britain in 1941, and subsequently claimed amnesia for much of his time in Allied hands. That “gap” where the factual record is obscured or not agreed upon provides a space for fictional speculation which I explore in The Welsh Girl (though it’s a license I’d have been wary of taking in regard to any other figure in Hitler’s inner circle given the ethical stakes involved in fictionalizing such figures).

In The Fortunes, a principal character, Ah Ling, is a manservant to Charles Crocker, one of railroad barons who built the Transcontinental. Even though he fills a pivotal role—his example is supposed to have inspired Crocker to hire thousands of Chinese to work on the railroad—Ah Ling is only ever mentioned in passing. Essentially, history says such a man existed (though there’s the possibility that he’s an apocryphal figure, part of an anecdote made up by early hagiographers of Crocker), gives him a key moment on stage . . . and yet says nothing more about him, leaving him a kind of blank slate. I found myself fascinated with this mystery man—a figure who inspired an early wave of Chinese immigration—and what he might have thought about his role.

By contrast, The Fortunes also features the early Chinese-American movie star, Anna May Wong as a character, someone who’s much better documented. There are several fine biographies that I consulted, and a wealth of other material, not least a lot of interviews Anna May gave in her own lifetime. And yet, even in her case there’s some license to be had. Should we believe everything she said in interviews, say? These after all are celebrity interviews, often exercises in self-promotion, and not necessarily revealing of her true self. So again, there’s a possibility of a “gap,” a space into which fiction can flow.

Can you talk about the final segment, Pearl? By the end, I was sobbing. Without giving too much away, can you talk about John’s emotional relationship to his own identity and what the journey to adopt a child symbolizes for him?
It’s heartening to hear that. I confess I like to make readers laugh, but also to move them to tears, and I enjoy books and movies that do both (reflecting their mixture in life, of course). In fact, I suspect those responses often work in tandem. Laughter, after all, is often a release of tension, and frequently depends on surprise.

As for John . . . he’s a mixed-race writer, as am I, and so there’s a natural temptation, a kind of invitation even, for readers to think of him as an autobiographical character. I do share things with him—not so much the specific events that befall him (I’m the godfather to an adoptee, but my own son is not adopted), but certainly much of his angst about identity. The earlier figures in the book, Ah Ling, Anna May and others, are all in their own ways struggling with the burden of representation—they are examples, or models, or icons—and in that regard they all reflect a certain writerly anxiety of how we represent others in fiction. I figured with John I could come out from behind the curtain a little and fess up to the writerly version of that burden . . . even while John himself is only a very partial representation of myself. The upshot is that John is me and he’s not me, neither one nor the other, but both in a sense, just as my Anna May is partly the historical figure, partly a fiction built on her . . . all of which is analogous to the way I think about Chinese-American identity. The phrase implies a duality, an either/or—and I think a lot of so-called hyphenated Americans feel at some point a need to choose—but it’s the “bothness” than I’m interested in, and which I think is both richer and truer.

You currently live and teach in Michigan. Are there things that you are still getting used to about the United States? Things that you miss from Britain?
One of the early seeds of The Fortunes, and my interest in the Transcontinental Railroad, was a cross-country train trip I took from Boston to San Francisco, 20 years ago. That was a couple of years after I’d come to the U.S., and what struck me powerfully then—and has stayed with me— was the sheer continental scale of the country. It’s almost as if the very word “country” means something subtly different in the U.K. and the U.S. It was typical back then, say, for friends from home to ask me how I was finding America. But that train journey impressed on me how simply impossible it would be to try to speak about the U.S. as a whole when my experience was only of one region of it (the Northeast where I’d been living and working to that point). To have asked me about Texas, say, would have been akin to asking a Londoner about Berlin! I don’t mean to say there are no regional differences in Britain, of course—The Welsh Girl is very much about such differences—but the size of the country and its long history have tempered them, as have institutions like national newspapers and the BBC. And indeed, when I go home to the U.K. now it can feel a little claustrophobic at times—everyone reading the same paper, watching the same show—albeit I also like the way the nation “stops” for certain events—an England soccer game at the World Cup, say (woeful as the team has been of late).

Of course, the short answer to the question is that I’m still getting used to the idea of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. And what I miss about Britain, post Brexit, is the sense of my own claim on Britishness as a non-white.

What kind of kid were you? A big reader or writer?
Both, and as a teen, at least, a big reader and writer primarily of sci-fi. This was back in the day when blockbusters like Star Wars were typically released several months later in the U.K. than the U.S., and we’d deal with our impatience by reading the novelization first! I might still be devouring movie-tie-ins if it weren’t for a great book of Paris Review-style interviews with science-fiction writers by Charles Platt (Dream-makers) which turned me on to some more challenging writers in the genre, including Kurt Vonnegut who turned out to be my “gateway drug” to literary fiction.

At the same time, the interviewees in Dream-makers made writers seem cool but also accessible. Many of them, Vonnegut included, had science or engineering backgrounds, and my father was an engineer. Back then, Martin Amis was probably the most famous young writer in Britain, but his dad was Kingsley Amis and being a writer seemed something you were born into, like the royal family. It was hard to imagine how to become one. But I could imagine becoming an engineer (indeed, I majored in Physics in college), and those writers allowed me to imagine taking the next step to becoming a writer.

As a creative writing professor, what is some of the advice that you give your students? What is the some of the best advice you’ve been given?
I love teaching and have been lucky to have wonderful students most everywhere I’ve taught. My MFA students at Michigan, in particular, are exceptional—so good and often at such a young age (I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gotten in here when I was starting out!). They’re all very different as writers and people, as you’d expect in a field of individual expression, so it’s hard to offer generalized advice, but one thing I often talk about is patience, since it’s maybe the only thing, young, talented writers tend to lack . . . by virtue of their very youth and talent. Youth is a traditional “enemy” of patience, after all, but talent can be too since we expect talent to be an accelerant, expect it to make things come easily. I like to give them that Flaubert quote, “Talent is long patience,” a line that seemed cryptic to me when I first came across it at their age (it almost seems like a bad translation from the French) but which has come to make more and more sense to me.

Like many contemporary writers, a lot of the best advice I’ve been given myself comes from Charles Baxter. I’m a great admirer of his essays on writing, but I was also lucky enough to be his (very) junior colleague when I first started teaching at Michigan. I’m going to forget his exact words, but I can recall him—in that spirit of patience, I mentioned above—encouraging me not to publish something too soon, not to let it go until I’d done my best with it.

What are you working on next?
I’m always a little uneasy about talking about new work—it’s less out of superstition than the more practical consideration that whatever I’m working on tends to change so much over time before it appears (if ever). Still, it’s a perfectly natural question, and I hate to have nothing to say . . . so I confess to occasionally inventing projects just to have something to answer! When The Welsh Girl came out I used to claim to be writing a kids’ picture book called “A Child’s Christmas in Whales” featuring—naturally!—a lobster called Santa Claws. In the same spirit, I can confide that right now I’m at work on a zombie novel (first line: “The dead were getting quicker”). And holding out hope for my invitation from Marvel to pen a superhero comic (it’s high time for a new—Asian!—Captain Britain, I think).

Author photo by Dane Hillard Photography.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Fortunes.

“How are you with dogs?” Ann Patchett asks as she holds back two curious greeters behind the front door. She ushers me inside her roomy red brick house to a comfortable living room drenched in morning sun. After she tries to convince me to adopt a deaf Border Collie from her sister (if only), her own rescue pup, Sparky, a tiny ball of black and white fur, makes himself comfortable on the couch between us.

Patchett is both a champion for and veteran of the literary world. She’s published six novels and three works of nonfiction, won numerous awards and owns Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore in Nashville. For her, being active in both the artistic and commercial side of the publishing industry is important, and at this point in her career, inextricably intertwined.

This fall, in true rock star fashion, she’ll set off on a 30-city book tour. It’s difficult and draining. “An entire day could go by, and you don’t get the peanut butter sandwich you want because it’s just thing to thing to thing,” Patchett says. But she recognizes the importance of connecting with her readers, both as an author and as a bookseller. “I love going to the bookstores. These people are my friends.”

As long as the journey ahead may be, the road to her new novel, Commonwealth, has been a much longer one. In her previous novels, Patchett has bucked the traditional wisdom of “writing what you know,” opting instead to immerse herself in research. Recently, however, she experienced an aha moment that led to her latest novel.

“I read an essay by Jonathan Franzen where he said that it’s important for the novelist to always do the thing that scares him the most. For me, nothing was more terrifying than writing a novel that had to do with my family. I’ve always thought it’s so much braver and more honorable to just make everything up. But now that I’m in my 50s, I thought hey, I can do whatever I want,” she says.

Aside from checking off the box of crafting an autobiographical novel, Patchett was also aiming to further explore her own obsession with time. She explains that Bel Canto deals with the suspension of time, Run is a story that takes place in real time, but what she really wanted to do was challenge herself by writing a birth-to-death novel. “I didn’t make it. But [Commonwealth] is very much bookended by birth and death. Sometimes you just get as close as you can get. I felt like [with my previous novels] I had been sprinting for a long time, and I just thought: I need to stretch and open up.”

“Nothing was more terrifying than writing a novel that had to do with my family.”

Commonwealth focuses on 10 main characters from two very different families and follows them across 50 years. The story begins on a sweltering Southern California day at a christening party for blue-collar cop Fix and Beverly Keating’s second daughter, Franny. Amid the clamoring, cheek-pinching relatives, friends and coworkers, uninvited lawyer Bert Cousins and Beverly, emboldened by the party’s generous flow of gin, share a passionate, stolen kiss, setting off a chain of events that leads to the breakup and blending of their families, complete with six children.

The young stepsiblings spend verdant summers together in Virginia, forge alliances, run free of adult supervision and commit shocking misdeeds. (You’ll never look at Benadryl the same way again.) It’s kids versus the world, until a sudden death carves a deep divide between them.

Yet time marches on, and we are reunited with Franny as an unmoored 20-something working as an upscale cocktail waitress. When her literary hero, Leo Posen, a lothario 32 years her senior, sidles up to her bar, their instant connection leads to a passionate affair. Years later, with a bit of a wink from the author, Leo is moved to craft a novel around Franny and her family’s tragedy, enraging some of her relatives and leading to some unexpected reunions.

If you’re wondering whether Patchett identifies with a character, the answer is yes, but it may not be the one you expect. “People who have read this book go, oh, you’re Franny! But I’m Leo,” she says with a laugh. “The things that happened in this book didn’t happen. But, it’s all true. . . . The emotions are very close to home. Bel Canto is the same book: a story about not being able to go home and being trapped in a house with people that you don’t know who are scaring you, and forming alliances with them and loving them. That’s what this is. That’s my story.”

“The things that happened in this book didn’t happen. But, it’s all true. . . . The emotions are very close to home.”

Her experiences with her own blended family and her move from California to the South serve as the most obvious blueprint, and readers familiar with Patchett’s nonfiction will recognize autobiographical details aplenty. But the real question is, why tap into this wellspring now, after three decades of writing?

Patchett is aware that while she was drawn to play with her personal narrative, family members may not be as game to become fictionalized. “Writing things that are too close to home can work for some family members and not for others, and I think this book would not have worked for my father,” Patchett says. While she was working on the novel, however, she knew her father would not be alive to read the finished manuscript. He died of Parkinson’s disease in 2015.

Fix does share vague similarities with her father, but some of the most personal plot points are found in the later passages that deal with caring for a terminally ill loved one. “The Roz Chast memoir [Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?] had such an impact on this book. She takes a lot of ownership for her life and her past and says this is the way it is—this was hard and heartbreaking and exhausting.”

Patchett insists that waiting to write her most personal story was one of the best career choices she’s made, and after reading the novel, it’s hard to disagree. Commonwealth is an all-American family saga, but her touching and even-handed approach to themes such as family politics, love, the role of literature and the acidic nature of lies is buoyed by a generous sprinkling of matter-of-fact humor. It just might be her best novel yet, an assessment that Patchett agrees with.

“I feel like what I’ve been doing all my life is not writing Commonwealth. So now I have, and I’m hoping it will bring freedom.” She admits she already has an idea for another novel, and while she hasn’t started writing quite yet, she has made some notes.

“I just think it’s interesting to think about all the things we might be wrong about, all the things we were sure of. I was sure that I wasn’t going to write anything that seemed autobiographical. And then I did, and it was great. And now I’m thinking, what else are you sure you’re not going to do? I’m sure that I’m not going to write a first-person novel again. Well, why not do that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margot Livesey’s new book, Mercury, is a story of love and obsession—but not in the way you’d expect. Don, a Scottish optometrist living in suburban Boston, is too immersed in mourning his father’s recent death from Parkinson’s to notice that his wife Viv has utterly fallen for Mercury, a new horse at the riding stables she manages. Viv’s obsession with Mercury spins out of control, leading to an act of violence that nobody could have predicted. Mercury is Livesey at her best: a subtle investigation of a family coming apart, of secrets and separateness, of blindness and blinkered sight.

I think we all know someone who is besotted with horses. Are you that person? 
Between the ages of 9 and 14, yes. I rode the Highland ponies at the nearby farm as often as I could and read endless books about girls and gymkhanas. Nowadays I seldom ride but I do remain fascinated by the world of horses. Or should I say the worlds of horses. There’s a big difference between a professional riding stables, where most of the horses are being trained to compete, and the kind of stables Viv and her friend Claudia run.

What kind of research did you do for this book?
A friend let me accompany her to the stables where she rode. I would follow her around, observe her lessons, visit the horses and talk to the other riders and the people who worked in the barns. And then, being a writer, I also read omnivorously. Three books that were particularly helpful were Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet, Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven and Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. Each gave me wonderful insights into horses and into the relations between horses and humans.

I also spent a good deal of time questioning my optometrist, talking to blind people and reading books about vision and blindness. I read several illuminating memoirs by men who had gone blind as adults; each recorded a long period of passionate denial when, although the author could see less and less, he was continuing to act like a sighted person—bicycling, going to films, carelessly crossing roads. Eventually each had to admit his failing vision and learn how to be blind.

Do you think there was a moment when Don could have intervened, before Viv’s feelings for Mercury went from interest to obsession?
I find that line between interest, which seems like a good thing, and obsession, which seems questionable, fascinating. I am not sure if Donald could have intervened—Mercury is a fantastic athlete, a fantastic opportunity—but that he is oblivious to Viv's unhappiness, to her feeling of being stuck, does help to propel her across that line.

I find that line between interest, which seems like a good thing, and obsession, which seems questionable, fascinating.

This is your first book to take place completely in the United States. Was that something you had planned to do?
Yes. I do spend a lot of time here and I did want to write a novel set here, to make use of the New England landscape. Although a version of the plot could take place in Britain, the actual details, to my mind, could only happen in the States.

As a novel, Mercury is very open-ended. Have you thought about what happens to the characters after the novel ends?
I have, and I hope the reader will too.

As a married person, I found this novel very unsettling. There is a mystery here, but it’s the mystery of ever really knowing another person. As a novelist, how do you decide what to show and what to keep secret?
I think my husband found the novel unsettling too. For me one of the questions that propels the novel is what happens in a long relationship when one person changes their opinions, their worldview if you will, and the other doesn’t. I was very interested in exploring how this change can become a kind of infidelity. As a novelist, I wanted to suggest how just keeping something secret can turn an innocent activity—spending more time training Mercury—into something more toxic. Both Viv and Donald are keeping secrets not just from each other but from themselves. I tried to hint at some of those secrets but also to allow the characters, like the people around us, a certain amount of mystery.

For me one of the questions that propels the novel is what happens in a long relationship when one person changes their opinions, their worldview, if you will, and the other doesn’t.

Viv had success as a hedge fund manager, and yet the incident with her previous horse was still motivating her decades later. Do you think we all have those kinds of losses that, unresolved, can direct our actions? 
I hesitate to make a general claim but I’ve gradually come to realize that the loss of my mother—she died when I was 2 and a half—has played a much larger role in my adult life than I realized. Many people, I suspect, have a sense of understanding some aspect of their own behavior, or motivation, only long after the fact.

Gun control is a very timely topic. Did your own feelings about firearm laws change at all as you were writing the book? 
No, in that I remain convinced that better gun control would save many lives. Yes, in that I did get to know people who oppose new legislation. For the most part there’s a huge gap between the two sides: people who support new laws and those who oppose them. Visiting gun shops, talking to gun owners, gave me new insight into that world and the pleasures of shooting for sport, and for food. While I met no one who openly supported assault weapons, several of the people I spoke to did seem to fear that any restrictions on guns would lead to a total ban.

What does it bring to the novel to have Viv tell her side of the story?
If we saw Viv only from the outside, from Donald’s point of view, we wouldn’t understand the depths of her feelings—how, despite friends, work, a husband and children, her life feels over until Mercury arrives. And how her fears for him, which seem to her completly justified, lead her to take first one step and then the next to protect him.

This was a very intense read and I’m sure equally demanding to write. What did you do for pleasure when it was over?
I visited my family in Scotland and went to France with my husband. We spent a lovely week in Sancerre, a medieval town in the Loire valley.

What are you working on next?
I am finishing a book of essays about the craft of writing and working on a new novel which is still at the very early stages.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Mercury.

When people talk about multicultural fiction, Zadie Smith’s name is usually first up. The British author burst onto the scene at the tender age of 24 with the brilliant novel White Teeth, a multigenerational story of two London families—one Bengali, one British and Jamaican. In three novels and countless essays since, Smith has explored identity, race, gender and class, and has proven herself  one of the most readable and thought-provoking writers of her generation.

In Smith’s sophisticated and ambitious new page-turner, Swing Time, an unnamed narrator tries to make sense of her life and choices after being fired from her job as a personal assistant to a world-famous pop star, seeking answers in memories of a pivotal childhood friendship gone awry. 

“When I talk to women, childhood friendships are dominant in their minds and their imaginations. I didn’t have such a friend myself and I don’t have a sister, so part of this is curiosity . . . it is a part of life I missed out on,” Smith explains during a call to her Greenwich Village apartment, where she and her family—husband and fellow writer Nick Laird and their two children—live during the school year. 

The narrator meets Tracey at dance school in the early 1980s. Both girls are biracial, both are keen on dance and both are brought to class by their mothers. Tracey’s sassy white mother is content with vicariously living through her gifted daughter, while the narrator’s intellectual Jamaican mother betters herself with books and night classes. The girls supplement their classes by learning dance steps from music videos and VHS copies of old musicals. Smith, who admits to a “love-hate relationship with musicals,” says with a chuckle, “The passions in this book are definitely autobiographical.”

Tracey is the more dominant of the two, and through the ups and downs of their relationship, the narrator remains enthralled by Tracey’s physical grace and unshakable self-confidence, things she herself lacks. Yet as the girls grow older, they drift apart. Tracey attends a dance high school and books chorus roles in West End musicals, while the narrator goes to university and becomes a personal assistant to Aimee, an Australian pop star (think Madonna meets Angelina Jolie) whose celebrity and wealth extends to various do-gooder projects in an unnamed West African country.

The title Swing Time refers to the 1936 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie, a favorite of the narrator’s. But it also refers to the rhythms of the novel itself, where the action swings from London to New York to the African village where Aimee hopes to build a school for girls, and across the narrator’s relationships with Tracey, her mother and her employer, each echoing the complex power dynamic of the one before. 

Swing Time is Smith’s first book to be narrated in the first person. “I didn’t really understand the first-person form, but I was curious about it,” says Smith. “It’s really a new way of looking at other people. 

“People want to control how they are perceived,” Smith continues, growing passionate as she makes her point. “On Facebook or Instagram, you show others what you want them to see. My experience, though, is there is a lot more going on in the interior. You find out who you are by the things that you do, and it’s not always a pleasant discovery.”

Swing Time also features a change of tone from Smith’s previous work. “It’s as if all black life were squished into one story,” she says, explaining the novel’s almost parable-like feel. “I wanted it to be open that way, to feel very specific but almost as if when you were reading it, you could convince yourself that you were that person, that these things happened to you, that you too were having these childhood memories.” 

In adulthood, Tracey’s wasted potential leads her to become increasingly paranoid and interested in conspiracy theories, a plot thread that was inspired by Smith’s volunteer work at a London homeless shelter. She found many of the people she encountered there to “be very intelligent, very knowledgeable, but what can happen to smart people when their minds aren’t formally trained is that the mind goes elsewhere,” Smith says.

"Novels are about trying to swim in a certain mental climate and depict and understand it.”

“Almost every conversation I had would end up [being] about conspiracies, the illuminati. Instead of dismissing it, I wanted to know what it was about that concept that was so engaging. Novels are not about showing how people are wrong or right—novels are about trying to swim in a certain mental climate and depict and understand it.”

Smith’s writing has often sought to bring this sort of understanding to characters whose backgrounds are far from her own, such as Alex-Li Tandem in The Autograph Man, Howard Belsey in On Beauty and the African villagers in Swing Time. She is aware that doing so is a risk—one that can carry a cost.

“The first time I read from White Teeth, a man came up to me with a letter from ‘The Bengali People’ and it was a long list of things I’d got wrong in the novel,” she says. “I’m sure there were many, many things. But I just don’t believe there is a kind of expertise in a people. There are costs, no doubt. But I’m hoping the gain is there as well.”

The gain is certainly there for the reader. Like Smith’s earlier novels, Swing Time is rich with ideas. Her intellectual fearlessness keeps the story moving forward, even as the novel jumps back and forth in time. A deeply literary story of friendship and identity, Swing Time is the satisfying work of a seasoned author.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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