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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author photo © Patrick Bolger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author photo credit Anna Leader.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Author photo credit Jessica Marx.)

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