The 12th novel from Richard Powers is magnificent and troubling, a symphonic tour de force with both human and tree characters that leave readers with a new reality. We asked Powers four questions about The Overstory. His answers are appropriately epic.

To what degree (if any) do you consider your work to be a moral or didactic project? Am I mistaken in feeling that The Overstory isn’t just a novel, but maybe a blueprint for being inducted into the “shimmering council” of the trees—something like a viable evangelism? Or does this idea just piss you off?
Goodness—what better way to start an interview than plunging into one of the most highly charged questions in the history of literature! Centuries of great writers have filled volumes exploring the proper position of the literary author along the spectrum of moral detachment and commitment. In the mid-19th century, the warring camps had their spokespeople in Tolstoy, who advocated for fiction that would raise consciousness and make readers into better people, and in Flaubert, who preached a moral detachment, urging writers to be like a remote, objective, hands-off God—“present everywhere and visible nowhere.”

In the last century, when I was growing up, the American version of this war was playing out between John Gardner and Gore Vidal. Vidal was the champion of aesthetic, belletristic freedom—the author who was above the fray, committed only to the free play of exploration and possibility. Gardner, in his controversial and influential book On Moral Fiction, wrote that fiction ought “to test human values, not for the purpose of preaching or peddling a particular ideology, but in a truly honest and open-minded effort to find out which best promotes human fulfillment.” Here’s the interesting thing: Don’t both these positions sound attractive and defensible?

If I were to name the prevailing aesthetic of the present concerning literary fiction, I’d say it leans toward the belletristic. Moral passion hasn’t been cool for some time; much better to gird yourself in irony and fatalistic detachment. Or to put it more sympathetically, contemporary literary fiction strives for the dialogical, where the conflicting moral positions of all the characters in the story are both defensible and flawed. But look at the standout books—the great war novels and postcolonial novels and novels of politics, social showdown and human abuse—and you’ll see a different story. These books know what’s wrong with the world and what it would take to better minister to the human condition.

“I believe that vital, vivid fiction can play a unique role in producing that shift in consciousness.”

In short, novelists are always trotting across a swaying, pencil-thin tightrope. How to be “moral” without being “didactic”? I happen to believe that collectively, we humans are deeply, dangerously deranged, and that only a profound shift in consciousness and institutions regarding the significance and standing of nonhumans will keep us viable in this place and lift our awful sense of moral abandonment and species loneliness. More than that, I believe that vital, vivid fiction can play a unique role in producing that shift in consciousness. But my challenge is precisely the one faced by my character Patricia Westerford as she stands up in front of an auditorium that has hired her to talk on sustainable human futures. She looks out on her audience as she makes her points, feeling them turn restive with the desire to “kill all the preachers!”

The trick to evangelism, in this case, is to make induction into “the shimmering council” of the nonhuman seem like a startling, mysterious and compellingly desirable thing. And the way to do that, it seemed to me, is to tell all kinds of very specific, vital, surprising and unusual stories about a wide variety of people discovering how the spectacular depth and richness of the nonhuman world surpasses our understanding of it, many times over. We humans are deeply, passionately addicted to ourselves. We think we’re the only game of interest in town. The stories that will do us some good, this late in the day, are the ones that can direct our attention, for a moment, to all the astonishment that isn’t us.

Ultimately, the long battle for the heart and soul of fiction may depend less on an author’s willingness to explore a prescriptive moral position than on that author’s willingness to break out of merely human stories into a celebration of wonder and astonishment and humility and awe. If people come away from my book with a new appreciation for the giant Methuselahs to whom we owe our existence, I will be happy indeed.

Each one of your characters suffers a deadly ordeal of some kind. Olivia literally dies for 70 seconds. Others come very close to dying or bear witness to the violent death or near-death of a loved one. We can only be redeemed if something traumatic happens to us—this feels like an ancient and abiding truth, almost a religious reckoning. Does it ring true to you?
The grim truth: Something traumatic is going to happen to us, both privately and collectively, whether we are smart enough to be redeemed by it or not! But death and destruction, in our own private understanding of things as well as in the wider, living world, does have a way of preparing the ground for redemption and renewal. There is a great deal of “religious reckoning” in The Overstory, if you count the green gospel of nature as a religion. In the moral vision of the book, the true terror and violence to the soul start in our alienation from the rest of creation. Contemporary consumer/humanist culture is convinced that if we just hold out long enough and surround ourselves with the best state-of-the-art technologies and biomedical interventions (from apple cider vinegar all the way up to the uploading of souls), then we will never have to die. Consequently, the prospect of death has never been more debilitating. We are all rushing around in a state of hysterical denial, because our central conviction—that meaning is personally generated—is utterly incompatible with the central truth of existence: Everything dies.

But what if we were part of some larger, living reciprocity, where the death of individual speculations is less of a disaster and more of a recombination, a return to new possibilities? In other words, what if meaning were outside us, in what the brilliant and beautiful Loren Eiseley called “the immense journey”? Then our own individual deaths would cease being an annihilation of everything there is and would become, in Wallace Stevens’ deeply mature words, “the mother of beauty.” That would be living in the world, rather than living against it. People used to live that way, in the premodern era.

This attempt to think differently about death is at the heart of The Overstory’s dark green religion. In a forest, where all parts live inside a reciprocating whole, death isn’t a bug—it’s a feature! As Patricia Westerford discovers when researching her beloved nurse logs, a “dead” tree contains thousands of times more life than does a living one. If that doesn’t quite console you as you contemplate your own mortality, it’s because you are still colonized by the idea that only individual humans matter and nothing else has agency or purpose or community or real significance.

I’m 60 now, and much more accepting of my own death than I was when I started writing novels at the age of 23. Also, I’m much more convinced of the imminence of my death! Saying as much may sound like an obscene trespass against one of our last taboos, but in fact, it’s a hugely liberating thing. It has given me the freedom to go anywhere I want in my stories, even into the heart of the woods.

I’m having both fun and difficulty with your novel’s section headings—Roots, Trunk, Crown, Seeds. It’s not always obvious (I know it shouldn’t be) how these images work in a narrative way. I could understand if you tell me that it’s the reader’s job to figure this out! So let me ask a technical question: Was this idea (the tree rising and then disseminating) something that affected the writing of the novel, or even determined its shape?
My first hope when I began to think about The Overstory was to write a novel with nonhuman characters that did not in any way try to anthropomorphize them (as almost every novel with a nonhuman character I have ever read ends up doing). It’s relatively easy to create reader identification with a creature who resembles us—a horse or a dog or a chimp or some other eager-eyed mammal. It was less easy for me to think of how to tell a gripping story starring creatures who didn’t move, operated under entirely different principles of survival and lived on a totally alien time frame. The myths of indigenous and pretechnological people all over the world never shied away from plant heroes, but people in those cultures knew how to listen and interpret these tales. We left the garden a long time ago.

Ultimately, I had to give up the hope of hooking readers with the tales of heroic sycamores and beeches! Yet in between my nine very human and flawed and changeable human characters, quite a few woody protagonists still steal the spotlight at frequent intervals. There’s Mimas, the gigantic and ancient coastal redwood in whose branches Nick and Olivia make their home for more than a year. Then there’s the Hoel Chestnut, which generations of an Iowa farming family photograph over the course of a century, as if it’s just another, slightly long-lived distant family relative. The Hoel Chestnut starts the whole novel in motion, and it comes back 500 pages later to help bring about the book’s finale. Then there’s the village-size banyan that saves Doug Pavlicek’s life after he falls from a plane and his chute doesn’t deploy cleanly. Throughout the book, trees and human characters link together in all kinds of metempsychosis and telepathic connections.

Alongside these individual trees in their starring roles, I cast several groves and forests as supporting actors and group choruses. There’s the experimental forest in the Cascades where Patricia Westerford makes her discoveries, and the stand of ponderosa pines whose sneaky destruction radicalizes Mimi Ma. These groups of trees have their own personalities, and their natures produce actions and consequences in the human characters. Groups of trees also appear in cameo roles, like the vanished Montana town that Douglas stumbles on, now empty of all human presence except for the cottonwoods, planted to line the now-vanished streets.

These trees play central roles in the novel for a simple reason. At the heart of the book is a rejection of human exceptionalism—the idea that we’re the only things on earth with will, memory, flexible response to change, agency or community. Research has shown in many amazing ways that trees possess all these things. The ability to see trees—which we’ll need to recover if we hope to stay on this planet much longer—means learning to appreciate how our private stories are never totally independent from the stories of trees. Trees are significant characters in every human life. They deserve to be characters in their own stories as well.

“Trees are significant characters in every human life. They deserve to be characters in their own stories as well.”

I did know, early on, that the nature and shape of trees—that brilliant solution to survival that evolved many independent times over the eons—would come to inform the entire book. Those section names (which you are still thinking about) give me lots of leeway to play with the traditional, conservative structure of a novel and stretch it out a bit. For instance, a classical novel will generally open with one exposition (which can be long or short) before proceeding to the development of “rising action.” My book begins with eight independent sequential expositions, the backstories of characters who seem unrelated. A reader might be forgiven for thinking that she is reading eight different standalone short stories! And she might even find herself becoming disoriented or restless after a hundred pages, waiting for the novel to begin. But by calling the section “Roots,” I reassure readers that these separate, snaking, underground, independent structures are going to converge before too long. And the slowly unfolding tree anatomy also suggests that the story as a whole—which includes all eight mini-novels that you read, one after the other—is being incorporated into one, large coastal redwood-size whole.

Is it a brutal fact that some folks just can’t or won’t ever hear the trees? For example, those tree cutters, and all the folks who rely on the money that comes from clear cutting. Is it really, finally, just “us and them”? The goodies vs. the baddies? In the current political climate, such a clear-cut (sorry) reckoning feels both accurate and hopeless. But I don’t feel that The Overstory is without hope. It seems that Neelay finds a way to lure his game players into a new way of thinking, a new state of enlightenment.
Oh, I would never presume to say what any real human being can’t or won’t “ever” do! That is our naturally selected, highly adaptive superpower: to remain capable of change until the very end. That’s what story is about: the surprising (but sometimes inevitable) changes in people, when confronted with situations that break down who they are. And The Overstory is itself about a wide variety of people—many of whom shouldn’t be able to—coming to hear the trees, quickly or slowly, in different ways for different reasons. Patricia might have been born communing with the nonhuman world, but Olivia needs to die and come back to life before she can hear the trees, quite literally, talking to her. Or look at Adam: He goes up the trunk of Mimas feeling a barely disguised disdain for the tree-sitting activists, and he ends up getting converted 200 feet up in the air. It takes Ray and Dorothy their entire lives to understand why they have been so miserable, alone and afraid, but they die like Baucis and Philemon, having opened their doors to the godlike visitors who live just outside. Even the tree-cutters, the ones you call the “baddies” (I sure don’t think of them that way), end up with their moments of doubt, confusion and empathy.

The novel tells another conversion story as well, one drawn from real life. It’s the story of the conversion of an entire field: forestry. At the beginning of Patricia’s life in the field, all the old white men have a pretty strong idea of what a healthy forest is and how to keep it healthy. By the end of her life, New Forestry has had its revolution, and old, bad practices have given way to new and stronger ones. Nor is the revolution in human consciousness complete; there will be others in the years ahead. But a new ethos of ecological thinking has taken hold. “Us versus them” gets shaken up and rearranged. . . .

This fluidity that the book describes does fly in the face of our current reality, here in the States. The in-group loyalty that Adam studies now has us by the throats. People are doubling down on rabid tribal allegiance, and the deciding factor in belief seems to be not evidence or consequence or internal values but group ideology. This, too, will pass, as changing technologies and our tenuous position on the earth will force new kinds of accountability and new forms of allegiance.

For all the darkness that the book depicts, it does, indeed, end up remarkably hopeful. Patricia chooses life and strikes her blow against “unsuicide.” Mimi has her moment of enlightenment on a hilltop above San Francisco. Nick slogs on, making his art for an audience he can’t yet imagine. And Neelay’s AI “learners” become that audience! Even Adam and Douglas have their prison epiphanies and redemptions. I am, by nature, hopelessly hopeful. But my hope is no longer for the status quo of humanity, for life as we now live it. I have a better, stronger, larger hope these days, one that Walt Whitman puts perfectly:

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Overstory.

Author photo by Dean D. Dixon.

Michael Farris Smith, author of the gritty, riveting novel The Fighter, credits two big influences for his decision to become a fiction writer after returning to his native Mississippi.

The first, he says in a call to his rented writing studio in Water Valley, Mississippi, was his decision to leave Mississippi and work in Switzerland and France after college. “It’s a cliché to say it changed me, but it changed my life,” he says. “I was just sort of drifting around. I didn’t have any passion for anything. But there I felt connected, and it got me out of old habits.”

In high school and college, Smith was not much of a reader. His interest was in competitive sports. But in the cafés of Paris and on trains riding to work, he began to read the classics of modern American literature—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and, later, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers. He saw connections between his own experiences and the internal experiences described by those writers.

For Smith, who now lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, who works as a social worker, and their two school-age daughters, the other big influence was “when I discovered Larry Brown, the Oxford firefighter-turned-novelist. What I found was many similarities between him and myself. His characters, the things that drove them, the choices they made. I knew the back roads he was talking about. I knew the problems those characters were having, and the thought occurred to me that I have plenty to write about if I want to write.”

The setting for The Fighter, Smith’s fourth work of fiction, is the vividly described poor, rural towns and back roads scattered throughout the Mississippi Delta. In the opening section—“Round One”—Jack Boucher is driving alone on one of those roads in the dark, planning to repay his large debt to an unforgiving fight and vice promoter named Big Momma Sweet. Jack, well into middle age, is past the tail end of a long career of cage fighting, a brutal, bare-fisted full-contact sport.

Jack is filled with a sense of urgency to save the land that his foster mother Maryann, the first of several real and imagined guardian angels, entrusted to him but which he has allowed to pass into foreclosure. In a lovely preamble and throughout the novel, we learn how Maryann took in and nurtured Jack, who was abandoned as an infant and spent years in and out of miserable foster homes before coming to Maryann. She is now near death, and Smith describes the visits between Jack and Maryann with great empathy.

“I think the relationship between Jack and Maryann is the most tender relationship I’ve written in my novels,” Smith says. “I came upon emotions while writing the novel that I was really surprised by. My first instinct was to back away. But then I just really wanted to embrace it. There is something of a miracle for both Jack and her in that relationship.”

Also on the road that dark night is a beautiful 23-year-old carnival worker named Annette. She is traveling with the Outlaw Carnival, a group of mostly ex-cons and grifters. Her particular talent is cheating customers who bet on the strange configurations of her tattoos. She is a lost and searching young woman, or as Smith says, “Annette is using this church of coincidence in her own theology to help herself believe that there is an answer for her somewhere.”

The fateful coincidence that really launches the convergence of these two lost souls is when Annette and the carnival boss happen upon the steaming wreck of Jack’s truck and an envelope of money, but no Jack. From there the story unfolds with velocity.

“I came upon emotions while writing the novel that I was really surprised by. My first instinct was to back away.”

“Writing The Fighter was the most momentum-filled experience I’ve ever had writing a novel,” Smith says. “I sat down in September or October, and in March it was done. It was a bullet train. I just never looked up. And I loved it. It taught me about what work ethic and consistency can do. I just couldn’t wait to get there in the morning. It had that propulsion and that energy. But it also absolutely exhausted me. The issues I dealt with in The Fighter—the subject matter and the intensity of it—really drained me emotionally.”

For a reader, a singular pleasure of this novel is Smith’s use of language. It is both hard-edged and lyrical. “My father is a Southern Baptist Preacher,” Smith says. “I think the lyricism of the language had a lot to do with growing up in the church and being around gospel music all the time. The power and imagery of that music really influenced me.”

Also because of his father’s work, Smith “lived in a bunch of different places in Mississippi,” and his previous novels explore some of those places. More recently, he’s “gotten to know the Delta. It’s such an interesting place. When I had that image of Jack Boucher driving through the night, I thought, I know where he’s going. He’s going to the Delta.”

In The Fighter, Smith writes about a violent and unforgiving world. And yet there is also grace and, in the end, the possibility of mercy. “I know people talk about my work as dark and being about the downtrodden,” Smith says. “Well, there are a lot of downtrodden people walking around. There’s a tremendous divide between the rich and the poor, and it’s growing. But we are all looking for an answer. I know The Fighter is fierce, but I think the book is about hope. I always respond to dark and bleak nature with the idea that there is hope.”

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Meg Wolitzer is the mentor we’ve always wanted. Since 1982, her novels and short stories have explored friendship, romantic love, sex, money, feminism, family and just about every emotion you can name.

Her 10th novel, The Female Persuasion, is an absorbing story of ideals and ideas, betrayal and loyalty. It’s a tapestry of relationships: parents and children, employers and employees, husbands and wives. But at the novel’s core are the winding paths etched by close friendships. “The maxim is to write what you know,” muses Wolitzer from her New York apartment. “But for me, it’s write about what obsesses you. I am so absorbed by my friendships—they have been the sources of such deep, deep pleasure and meaning in my life, how could I not write about it?”

The star of The Female Persuasion, Greer Kadetsky, is a shy freshman when Faith Frank comes to speak at her college in 2006. Frank has been a pillar of the women’s movement since the 1960s and created the Loci Foundation, a speaker’s forum dedicated to sharing women’s stories. During a chance encounter in a restroom, Greer introduces herself to Frank, who, much to Greer’s surprise, responds warmly. Their encounter sets Greer on a new path, and a few years after graduation, she is offered a job working with Frank. As Greer starts to establish her own voice as a speaker and a writer, she grows distant from her boyfriend and comes face-to-face with her ambitions.

For Greer, working for Frank signifies the first time she’s felt both seen and heard. Like her young protagonist, Wolitzer benefited significantly from adults taking an early interest in her creativity.

“I’ve always looked up to certain older people who knew what they were doing, who I admired,” Wolitzer says. “I don’t think I thought of them as mentors at the moment, but of course they were.”

She found one of her earliest mentors at home: her mother, the novelist Hilma Wolitzer, who encouraged Wolitzer to take chances without worrying about the outcome. With her mother’s support, Wolitzer began writing at a young age.

“I just always wanted to be a writer,” she says. “There was a brief moment when I wanted to be a psychiatrist, but given that my math and science skills were subpar, it probably wasn’t something I should have pursued.”

When she was 12, she sold a story to Kids, a national magazine for young writers. “I even went into their offices in the city to be a guest editor,” she says. “It was so exciting to be taken seriously.”

From grade school through college, she continued to benefit from the positive ways in which women influence and mentor one another. The Female Persuasion is dedicated to a group of such women, one of whom was her English teacher, Mrs. Kidder. “She treated the students with deep intellectual respect,” Wolitzer says. “It turned out later that her son was Tracy Kidder, the [Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction] writer. It is wonderful to see that as she was nurturing her students, she was nurturing a writer right at home.”

In college, Wolitzer studied writing under John Hawkes, John Irving and Mary Gordon. She later encountered writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron, who directed an adaptation of Wolitzer’s book This Is Your Life. “Nora invited me into the process,” Wolitzer says. “I went to casting sessions with her, and we went to comedy clubs to hear women comics around the city. I saw the way Nora took such care and love for what she did.”

“Fiction allows you to ask more questions and not have the answer, to . . . move away from the fire of the burning moment.”

Mentorship is not the only hot-button topic in The Female Persuasion, which shines a gentle, probing light on ambition and power—and on the question of when to walk away. But these are not new issues for Wolitzer, whose earlier novels The Wife and The Ten-Year Nap touch on many of the same themes. “I have been struggling with questions about power, gender and misogyny for a very long time, both as a writer and as a person,” she says.

The novel’s opening chapter deals with an assault on a college campus, a topic that feels as if it’s taken from today’s headlines. But as Wolitzer is quick to point out, “A novel is not written in a 24-hour news cycle. It’s more like a three- to five-year news cycle. I was writing, and the world was moving fast. . . . Fiction allows you to ask more questions and not have the answer, to listen to people and move away from the fire of the burning moment.”

Although Wolitzer has focused on women’s lives before, the characters of Faith and Greer offer thoughtful insights into second- and third-wave feminism, and the intersectionality that continues to positively influence the women’s movement today. The introduction of Kay, a skeptical but spirited teenager, at the end of the novel is a reminder that political movements remain meaningful only when allowed to evolve.

When asked if different generations of feminists can learn from one another or are destined to battle it out, Wolitzer chooses to embrace the former vision. “I think the media embellishes the idea of a constant catfight between women. Yes, there are differences, but when I look, I see commonality, overlapping issues and a genuine desire to work for a fairer, more equitable world.”

Wolitzer’s novel acknowledges that people are working together to find unity and fuel change.

“One of the things that I loved about writing this book was that I could stand on my own little rock and look at the world through the eyes of the older generation and the younger generation. . . . I am genuinely moved by people who legitimately want things to be better, even if they are going about it in different ways. I wanted to capture that in my novel no matter what age my characters are.”

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Nina Subin.

“Spirit is a word I like because it suggests something deeper and weirder than joy, a sort of wellspring of life-force.”

Rachel Kushner lives in Los Angeles and is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba. Her extraordinary new novel, The Mars Room, is set largely in the California prison system. Here she answers a few questions from BookPage about her new book.

Why did you decide to title the book The Mars Room?
To me this title suits the book really well and also enhances it, brings it something “extra,” which is what a title should do, I suppose. But it didn’t come easily. I had another title that was simple and bold but a bit crude, or lacking in nuance. I ran it by a trusted adviser who read the book and suggested The Mars Room. At first I was unsure because it’s the title of a workplace in the book, a sleazy club on Market Street in San Francisco where the narrator had worked before her life dramatically changed to what it is as the book opens. I didn’t want to reduce the title to that club. But I began to see that it had other associations, just from the words alone, and how they can’t blend but are forced to. Mars is mysterious, red, distant, and also, it’s not just a planet but the god of war. “Room” suggests, at least to me, something solitary, plain, limited and confining. Mars and room: a strange combination that to me suggests an otherworldly place, not necessarily in a nice way. There is something gloomy and menacing about it.

What was the most significant discovery you made in doing your research for the book?
Maybe I’m a stickler for semantics, but I feel like I didn’t really do any research for this book. I had decided, six years back, to try to learn everything I could about the California prison system. I made that decision as a person, a woman, and not as a writer looking to research. Eventually, I ended up with this novel, but I also ended up forming bonds with people in prison and out of it whose lives had been touched by the criminal justice system, and that work continues, despite having finished the novel. I thought about class and how it affects pretty much everything and about people I’d known who had gone to jail and prison, and I embarked on a journey that resulted in this book.

I’m racking my brain for a significant discovery, but I strangely don’t think I discovered anything that was exactly a surprise to me, but I went into this phase of life without any judgments or set ideas about what I would see, which I think is crucial for a writer, to observe finely and without reaction. Maybe the discovery was how painful it was to write certain parts of the book, to think into destiny and try to answer, on behalf of someone doomed, the question of how she could attach meaning to her life. Another totally different discovery was how easily I could inhabit the mind of a rogue cop/contract killer named Doc, who has nothing to live for but his memories of the Harleys he once owned, the bars he went to, the streets he terrorized, the people he killed.

Many of your characters, even those on death row, seem to be serious readers of fiction. Why are books such an important under layer for your characters?
Well . . . only the narrator and one other character really read. Certainly none of the characters on death row in this book are readers. Betty LaFrance seems only to read newspapers articles about her murder conviction. Geronima Campos prefers to paint and draw than to read. Candy Peña knits baby blankets and is probably illiterate. And no one else in the prison is what I would consider a “serious” reader of fiction. Sammy reads Danielle Steel. The narrator likes to read, but she’s not educated, not beyond high school, and she’s not an intellectual. She reads for escape. My character Kurt Kennedy has been trying to read the same trashy Vietnam War novel for three years and talks about the problem of reading, how relentless it is (you get through one paragraph, he says, and then there’s another, and they just keep coming).

There is one character who is a serious reader of fiction, Gordon Hauser, but he’s truly an exception and meant to be, in a way. He’s not in prison. He is a failed academic who ended up teaching in the women’s prison, and is also someone who feels a deep connection to literature and, in a naïve and possibly problematic way, believes that his own love of literature can be cultivated in the students in his prison class, and that they can nurture some kind of mental freedom through intellectual engagement. This is a beautiful idea, but it is thwarted on many levels. He teaches the women children’s literature, and most of them don’t bother to read it, and they make fun of him instead of internalizing his own values, and he comes to understand that even as he knows things they don’t, the reverse is also true. They know things he will never be able to grasp, not even remotely, and not even Dostoevsky can instruct him when he is faced with the moral ambiguities at the heart of the book.

You include adapted excerpts from Ted Kaczynksi’s coded diary here. What do you think these add to the shape of the story?
They are basically straight excerpts, I just rearranged a few things. My friend James Benning, an artist and filmmaker, owns and decoded the diaries and allowed me to use them. James Benning built exact replicas of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond and Ted Kaczynski’s cabin in Montana (both are located on his property in the Sierra Nevada), and he has done a lot of work into thinking about solitude, anger and the nature of an American transcendentalist thought, the darker direction it can go in.

Gordon Hauser, my character, was meant to write a dissertation on Thoreau, and is given, as a joke by a friend, Ted Kaczynski’s diaries (in the parallel universe of my book, they are published and readable by a general public). Gordon begins to read them in his cabin. They appear after each of his chapters, and perhaps one effect is that what is Gordon’s thought and what is Ted K’s bleed together a little, on the edges, because these words of Ted K’s the reader understands to have been read by Gordon Hauser. How did he react to them? What did he think? What Gordon reads becomes part of how we regard him.

But in terms of what they add, sometimes a writer makes instinctive decisions that aren’t straightforward or obvious. This was one of those decisions, and yet I was sure it was the right thing to do. I could imagine someone looking into this someday, attempting to account for the inclusion of those diaries, examining how they function, but I think the person who will do that will not be me, but someone else.

Surprisingly, the novel, while often grim, is also darkly funny. Was that humor difficult to achieve?
I felt even before I’d written a word of this book that it had to be funny. Not for the reader, who I wasn’t really thinking of, but for me, for the whole experience of taking into my interior life a grim, existent world full of despair and violence and trauma. It’s still a world, and people live in it, meaning there is also energy, absurdity, joy and spirit. Spirit is a word I like because it suggests something deeper and weirder than joy, a sort of wellspring of life-force. A will to subvert. If I could not find that will, the subversion of humor, I felt it would be a sign I hadn’t thought deeply enough into my material, my characters, the scenes they inhabit. The humor—it’s pretty nasty and louche humor, but that’s my sensibility to some degree—anyhow, the humor came pretty easily, it turned out, and buoyed me that I was on the right track.

As in The Flamethrowers, you write in The Mars Room with affection and knowledge about cars and motorcycles. What do you drive these days?
A 1964 Ford Galaxie two-door hardtop coupe. I’ve had other cars, but this was my very first car. I’ve had it for 25 years, so the sentimental attachment is deep. I can never get rid of it. And I’m paranoid someone will steal it. Then again, in this plastic world of planned obsolescence a lot of people don’t care about classics and don’t even notice them or know anything about them. As my character Jimmy Darling points out in The Mars Room, One Cadillac Plaza, former headquarters of GM, in Detroit, is now a lottery disbursement office. Which kind of tells you everything you need to know (about the transition from manufacturing to finance capital). If we can’t go back to earlier times, and we cannot, some of us can at least cherish and maintain certain relics, and drive them, too.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Mars Room.

Leif Enger is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Peace Like a River (2001) and So Brave, Young, and Handsome (2008). His works offer rich and nuanced depictions of rustic Midwestern living, an experience that is far too often reduced and dismissed in our popular culture. His skilled and imaginative storytelling addresses themes of family, love, myth and self-discovery, as well as humanity’s persistence in the midst of strife. Enger is a native Minnesotan, and the Land of 10,000 Lakes functions as both the backdrop and central role in his novels. His latest novel, Virgil Wander, tells the story the eponymous Virgil Wander, who is attempting to rediscover and reinvent himself after a near-fatal car accident. Virgil’s journey intersects with the struggles of his fellow townspeople of Greenstone, Michigan, and results in a beautiful depiction of collective healing in this delightful yet meditative novel.

Your previous books have garnered much critical praise, and your last novel was released 10 years ago. Did this make you feel any pressure while writing Virgil Wander?
For a while there was pressure—an urgency to follow up—but it took a long time to tell this story in a way that made me happy, and eventually the anxiety began to crumble. Nothing frees you up like anonymity, and 10 years is long enough to be properly forgotten.

The Midwest is both a backdrop and, in many ways, a character in your work. What makes the area so special?
The easiest answer is simply the region’s generous beauty—treed pastures, woodlots, lakes full of fish, plowed fields where you can still find arrowheads after it rains, places on the shore of Superior where waves bash the cliff sides. It’s like being in a gothic novel. Alongside all this, we tend to be complicated citizens, mostly polite, with a subfrequency of gloom or injury, as though we are continually being bypassed in the race for approval, and for which we compensate by drumming up a sense of moral rightness. My reporter friends used to joke about printing up T-shirts with the slogan, “We’re Not Bitter,” which seemed hilarious to me.

“I’ve lived in or near a bunch of small towns, every one with its own big characters, war heroes, rebels, Boo Radleys and geniuses of mayhem.”

You worked as a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio for almost two decades. How did this experience influence your writing?
Radio journalism is great training for fiction because it throws you among people you’d otherwise never encounter, and they are bravely telling you what’s important to them. In this situation, everything is magnified—their distinctive voices, underlying melancholy, their ambitions realized and thwarted. I had the everyday arrogance of the young man with a microphone, and it was a jolt to realize that five minutes into an interview, I was completely on the side of whomever was talking. Their politics, race, religion didn’t matter—once you start listening to people, you mainly start to like them.

On top of that, MPR had (and retains) a great staff of editors who are happy to strip out the flashy adjectives you worked so hard to employ. This was a blow to my pride, followed by the humbling realization that my writing was far better after an edit, not just occasionally but every single time. This is still the case, and now I’m lucky to have a couple of razor-sharp editors at Grove Atlantic who kindly call out my exuberance and inform me when only I think I am funny.

The characters in Virgil Wander feel very real. This is certainly a testament to your imagination and writing ability, but I’m curious: Are there parts of Leif Enger in Virgil Wander?
Since at least my mid-20s I’ve dreamed of owning a small movie theater, one of those jobs that’s always on the lip of extinction, yet here and there persists. I fly kites at every chance, which turns off the clock and unhooks the imagination like nothing else. I’m drawn in all seasons to Lake Superior, our achingly gorgeous, profoundly dangerous inland sea. And I love baseball—my dad and uncle played in various North Dakota town and semipro leagues. Both were pitchers, and I based Alec Sandstrom’s particular talent on what Dad said about his brother Clarence: He threw the hardest fastball I ever saw, and never once knew where it was going.

Alex Sandstrom’s disappearance was the central lore of Greenstone. Can you talk about the power of myth and lore in small towns? And to what extent has such town folklore influenced your writing?
When I was in junior high there were two local guys, six or eight years older, who drove across the frozen lake in early winter. These two were legendary for escapades of all kinds (stealing police cars, falling from rooftops without injury) but especially this perilous one—they’d wait until late November or early December when there was a fragile skim of ice over the water, and they’d climb in a car and go roaring across. Now, I wasn’t an eyewitness. I don’t know if they actually did this, or whether it happened just once, or whether it was a yearly event, as certain as winter itself, as we seventh graders insisted was the case. All I know is that even now when I think of a certain kind of elevated foolhardy courage, it’s still those two who come to mind. It was important, growing up in Osakis, to know we had wild men who could match anyone else’s wild men throw for throw. We were proud of them, embellished stories about them and made up new ones, too. Since then I’ve lived in or near a bunch of small towns, every one with its own big characters, war heroes, rebels, Boo Radleys and geniuses of mayhem. Setting a novel in such a place, it’s natural to start with those local touchstones. They’re like points on a map, or physical landmarks—if you spend a little time with Alec Sandstrom, whose baseball career fell apart after his perfect game, what else can you see from there?

Virgil Wander is full of tragedies, but there is an undercurrent of hope. Is it difficult to negotiate darkness and light in your writing?
A few years ago, I became an intermittent insomniac, the result of middle age and its common discouragements—illness, dying parents, the usual cornucopia of personal failures. Two in the morning is an unforgiving time to take stock of yourself, so I started getting up and reading books that reminded me of goodness. Over time, certain authors emerged as reliable songbirds whose work seemed written in the voice of friendship. It’s hard to feel despondent when you’re sharing the world with Ann Tyler or Montaigne or Melville or Hornby or Chabon. Often I will read for half the night. Eventually the sky lightens, and the crows start talking. Then I go to work.

What are you trying to tell readers about life in small-town America through your work?
Mostly I’m just trying to tell an entertaining story, but if something sticks, I hope it’s the idea that people out here are more intriguing, funny, curious and broad-minded than they often appear in the media. That would be enough for me.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Virgil Wander.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Robin Enger.

When Barbara Kingsolver starts writing a novel, she identifies an intriguing, vital question, one without a clear answer. What question, it seems natural to ask, did she ponder for her latest novel? Her response is somewhat startling.

We speak by phone from her home in southwestern Virginia, where she’s “happily in my beautiful office, looking out the window at trees.” Her voice sounds relaxed and gracious, and when I confess that I originally hail from a small town in southern West Virginia, not too far away, she says, “Well, you and I could talk in our native tongues if we wanted to.” As a bit of twang from her Kentucky roots creeps into her voice, she notes that her accent “depends on where I am in my book tour, whether I’m the nice radio Barbara, or if I’ve been home lately, then my vowels will shift a little.”

When it comes to the key question that prompted her remarkable new novel, Unsheltered, Kingsolver responds with no trace of a Southern accent: “WTF?!”

Here’s what prompted her expletive outburst: “I was watching so many things that we’ve mostly spent our lives trusting in—such as, if you work hard, there will be a job at the end of the college degree. There will be a pension at the end of your career. There will always be more fish in the sea. The poles will stay frozen. Every single one of those is now up for debate.”

She quickly corrects herself. “No, not even up for debate—wrong! What are the rules of civil governance? What does it mean to be a patriot, to be a good American? What does it mean to be president? You know, everything that we’ve spent a long time believing in as the correct way to proceed is looking less and less true.”

In a nutshell, Kingsolver explains her “WTF moment” as rough shorthand for, “What do we do and why, when it looks like all the rules that we’ve believed in are no longer true?”

She takes a breath and asks, “Is that an answer?”

The result of Kingsolver’s latest search for answers is yet another tour de force of fiction, a riveting successor to novels like Flight Behavior and The Poisonwood Bible. In alternating chapters, Unsheltered tells the stories of two families inhabiting the same address, the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vinewood, New Jersey—one family living in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the other in the 1870s.

“There have been many moments in history when civilizations started to unravel,” Kingsolver says. “So, I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to look back at some others, set up a contrast and then try to make these two stories into one story?”

Both families are teetering on the brink of financial ruin in the midst of a societal shift. Modern-day Willa Knox is an unemployed editor whose magazine has folded; her husband is a professor whose college has closed. Their free-spirited adult daughter has suddenly appeared on their doorstep after a long absence, and a tragedy upends the life of their Harvard-educated son, bringing a newborn baby into the fold.

In the 1870s, a science teacher named Thatcher Greenwood is chastised for teaching the principles of Charles Darwin. He also befriends a brilliant scientist living next door. She is Mary Treat—a real-life, little-known naturalist who corresponded with Darwin.

“I’m always writing about this dynamic conflict between individual expression and communal belonging.”

“The fiction that I most admire is ambitious in its scope,” Kingsolver admits. She grew up reading “great, globally ambitious writers” like Melville and Doris Lessing, “people who were not content with household drama. They wanted to tackle conflict on a larger scale. . . . That’s the kind of novel I love to try to write. And I would much rather write it in fiction because I love creating character, and I love painting with those brushes.”

Kingsolver always imbues her fictional worlds with plenty of fascinating factual backbone, and this book is no exception. “I love delving into a completely new subject with each book,” she says. “They say every writer is just writing the same book again and again, and if that’s true, I’m always writing about this dynamic conflict between individual expression and communal belonging. But the settings and the specifics are always changing. . . . I love that, because I was one of those college kids who wanted to major in everything.”

Once Kingsolver decided to use Mary Treat as a fictionalized character, she traveled to Vineland, New Jersey, to study her writings. A treasure trove awaited, including letters from Darwin. In her acknowledgments, the author describes holding one such missive as “one of the most electric moments in my life.”

Even more surprises were in store. Kingsolver discovered that Vineland was a Utopian community created in the mid-1800s by an eccentric real-estate mogul named Charles Landis, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain modern politician. Landis, she says, “wanted to steal every scene because he’s a loud mouth. If he’d had a cell phone, he would have been tweeting. He was just the perfect sort of narcissist bully antihero that I needed to anchor my other story.”

Kingsolver quickly discovered other “uncanny and chilling” parallels to modern politics. For instance, in 2016, one presidential candidate—whom she alludes to but never names in her novel nor this interview—famously suggested that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing voters, while Landis actually shot a man in the back of the head right on Vineland’s Main Street.

Landis’ target was a newspaper editor with whom he disagreed. After the editor succumbed to his injuries several months later, Landis was—shockingly—found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, perhaps among the first uses of this defense in America.

“I’m writing about the bleakest things,” Kingsolver acknowledges. “As I see the two-sentence summaries of this book starting to come out, I say, ‘Who would want to read that?’”

Fans needn’t worry. As always, Kingsolver has worked hard to ensure that her novel is enjoyable. “That’s my contract with the reader.” Despite their immense struggles, these characters experience numerous comic, uplifting and revelatory moments.

One of the most magical parts of Unsheltered is how Kingsolver skillfully blends her two narratives into one unified tale, with past and present repeatedly mirroring each other. For instance, Willa stares at a portrait of Landis, studying the “famous autocrat, with his ruddy cheeks and odd flop of hair.” Years earlier, Mary Treat says of Landis: “The man is like his hero Phineas Barnum, with the gilded offices in Manhattan Island.”

“I really invested a lot of the craft and elbow grease—whatever you call hours in the chair—into making [the earlier] story fully as engaging as the modern story and making it feel seamless.” Kingsolver began writing in the fall of 2015 and finished in January 2017, the month of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. “While I was writing,” she says, “part of me thought this will be completely history by the time this novel is published, and no one will even remember this guy.” She calls the unexpected election results “bad for the world, good for the book.”

After the election, Kingsolver took stock of her almost-finished manuscript, saying, “I understood that this book that I had thought could be important was going to be important. It made me feel even more strongly that I wanted to get this book into the world.”

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Annie Griffiths.

Alexandr and Christine, Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met after college. Thirty years later, Alexandr and Christine are spending a quiet night at home when they receive a life-changing call from Lydia. She is at the hospital, and Zachary is dead. Over the next year, the loss destroys the friends’ easy camaraderie, exposing old wounds and exacerbating grievances. With Late in the Day, our Top Pick in Fiction for January 2019, author Tessa Hadley explores some of our deepest feelings—lust, jealousy, despair—with visceral perception and emotional resonance.

Your novels and stories have been published in the United States, but I think our readers may not know much about you. What can you tell us about yourself?
I was born in 1956 in Bristol, England. My father was a schoolteacher and then much later had a shop, selling first jazz and pop records, then ironmongery. (I’m not sure what you call that in the U.S.—paraffin and nails and brushes and kettles and a thousand more things you didn’t know you needed until you saw them.) He also played jazz trumpet. My mother was a dressmaker and a housewife, elegant and arty, went to art school and drew and worked in pastels. I have one brother. I was painfully shy, very bookish, but happy as a child—at least until I was 11 and went to a rather bleakly academic school, which intruded too far into my private thoughts. I studied literature at university, but I’ve never completely fitted inside formal education, though I enjoyed it more later, when I came back to it in my 40s. I’ve been married for nearly 40 years and have three sons and three stepsons, all grown men now—and an accompanying crop of daughters-in-law and grandchildren. Big family, sociable, close, maddening, essential.

You didn’t start to publish until your mid-40s. Was there something that stopped you from sharing your work, and if so, how did you overcome that obstacle?
It wasn’t the sharing that was the problem, it was the work. I was always writing. I’ve never been able to do anything much else. But I was writing the wrong books. I think I was always an impressionable person, molding myself to be like other people I admired. In the long run, this is a form of imagination, and perhaps it stands a writer in good stead eventually. But in the beginning it means you don’t write out of your own perceptions with sufficient force. So I was a pale imitation of the writers I adored. I can’t explain why it got better eventually. Middle age? Working through all those imitations? Taking a writing course, getting competitive? At any rate, when it happened, it felt like coming home with the right key and letting myself into my own house. What joy.

Did you write as a child?
Yes, always. I can remember the physical delight of learning to make a letter “a.” And I remember my uncle, who was only 10 years older than I was, telling me that it was not a good idea to begin every sentence with “and.” My first lesson in style. For some reason, as soon as I read books, I got the idea that I could also make books of my own, to my own desires. Then I learned that between the wish and the execution there are oceans of difficulty. Still, it was always a joy—each fresh new vision, which then got bogged down after a while in lifelessness. There seemed to be a connection between the stories I wrote and the imaginary games we played as children—actually, these games seemed richer, more freely inventive, wholly satisfying. Whereas I knew that the books I wrote weren’t quite the real thing.

Late in the Day is about two marriages, two couples who are intimately connected and what happens when one of the partners dies. What lead you to that subject?
First of all, I wanted to write about long marriages. Marriages last longer than they’ve ever done in history, because we live so long. It’s extraordinary to hang on to the same individual through youth, middle age, beyond. My parents have been married over 60 years. There’s such a lot of story in that idea. So my first idea was to follow my two couples chronologically through time and see them change, watch them getting together, swapping partners, having children and so on. There an element of comic accident in how our lives end up, with whom we spend them. Of course there’s choice, but there’s also change, and unintended consequence, and error. I’m not romantic, I think. I believe in love, but not true love, not the one and only one. I think the comedy of accidents, the friendliness of adjusting to circumstances, is more interesting in the long run than single-minded adoration and fixation. But still I weep over Jane Eyre when I read it.

The novel moves back and forth in time, from the moment of Zachary’s death to decades before when the couples were still young and just beginning to connect. What lead you to choose that over a more straightforward chronology?
I thought at first that Zachary’s death would come fairly late on in the story. But then as soon as I knew he was going to die, his death swamped everything else. I didn’t even know whether I could make it work, structurally, if I suddenly sprang this death on readers after they’d got very used to his being alive. The finality of his death, if it was a sheer surprise, might have torn fatally through the fabric of the book, changed its tone too entirely. So I realized I needed to begin from that—everything begins from his death, and is seen in the light of the knowledge that it’s going to happen.

Christine is a successful contemporary artist. Do you have a sense of what her work looks like? Did you have to research the London art world at all?
I thought I would have to research it. But I always want to write first, research afterwards. Guess first, correct afterwards: It’s more likely to feel alive. And then while I was writing, I soaked up without thinking everything I read or came across to do with the visual arts. I do love paintings, and I used bits of detail from here and there about careers and prizes and attitudes, and actually when I’d finished I thought I’d done my research without noticing it. I had to dream what it would feel like, to need to express yourself in images instead of words. I’m not sure you could research that—you have to imagine it. I think I know what Christine’s work looks like, but in a groping kind of way that it would take an actual artist to fulfill and embody in visual art form.

Place is such a vital part of your fiction. Your last novel, The Past, was set in the country; Late in the Day takes place mostly in London and Venice. How does landscape shape and alter your storytelling?
I think we are porous animals, intensely responsive to our surroundings, taking our cue from them in terms of mood, action, imagination. We don’t stop at the edge of our skin: Our sensibility encompasses sky, surround-sound, cultural suggestion, built environment, music. So if I take my contemporary middle-class English arty types and put them down in Venice, something happens to them. They soften and blur around the edges in response to some dream of the place they’re in. The beauty of the streets and buildings, the warm sun and light on the water—this makes them dreamy, too. And they’re sophisticated and aware of the whole history of tourism and Venice and art, and some of the awfulness of it, and all this complex positioning stretches them and strains at their ordinary selves, makes rash things possible, makes it possible for them to act themselves differently, at least for an hour or an afternoon, or a week. Everyone who knows about Venice or London or New York or the Sahara desert, and feels it, has a little bit of its sensibility inside them—even if they never go there. Imagination is a rich map of possibilities, light and dark. It’s a terrain, an inner landscape, whether we visit in actuality or not. Sometimes I think we ought not.

Your novels bubble over with details of relationships, of intimacies, thoughts, places, the natural and the sensual world. How do you keep the plot moving forward?
Writing a novel, you have to be aware of two very different drives working at the same time. At one level, sentence by sentence, you are following every unexpected development and suggestiveness, very few of which you will have imagined in advance. You know approximately what Lydia is like, but you don’t know what she’ll do—you don’t know the sequence of her thoughts and gestures, you don’t know her embodiment, her movements and appearance—in a given scene, until you’re writing it. That’s the joy and freshness of the daily writing. But behind this energy of the “present” of the novel, with all its cornucopia of possibility, the writer feels the deep hum of the engine down below: The story inches its way forward; certain inevitable developments are preparing themselves. (I’m making it almost sound like Thomas Hardy’s Titanic and the iceberg here.) The writer is probably more aware of the story driving forward below the surface than the reader is, if everything’s working well. Then it’s a nice surprise for the reader, when something unexpected happens, takes everything to a new place.

You look at your characters without judgment, even when they act in petty ways or commit acts of selfishness or unkindness. The four people in Late in the Day hurt each other in terrible ways, and yet, they aren’t bad people, are they?
I’m so glad you say that. That’s what I feel, though I know already from some early readers that they are angry with Alex. I keep on writing this kind of man: clever and attractive and rather arrogant, very free, very separate from conventional forms and roles. Often right, but not always, and not invariably kind. I have a feeling this kind of man cast spells over my generation, young in the ’70s—and that this is no longer the case, men aren’t made like that any more. Probably a good thing. Whenever you find yourself writing the sentences that close down on judgment of your characters, those sentences read less well, they’re less interesting stylistically—which is a really difficult conundrum. Because it can’t mean that novels don’t judge what’s right and wrong, can it? They begin at least from a premise that right and wrong are real; all the novels I’ve ever cared for begin from that. But they begin from it and work from there. They watch the unfolding of right and wrong, which is often opaque, though not always. They describe its coming about, they don’t arbitrate or preach. It’s not the Day of Judgement, it’s the Garden of Earthly Delights, with all the devils in it.

Without giving anything away, I felt that Late in the Day was really about a middle-aged woman committing to her identity as an artist. Would you agree?
Yes, that’s what I think. My heart was in that last chapter, those last pages.

You write from the point of view of so many characters and so many generations in this and in earlier novels like The Past and Clever Girl. Is there any age that you aren’t comfortable inhabiting?
I can’t remember ever writing from the point of view of someone in their 70s or 80s. It’s a time of life particularly bedeviled, in representation, with stereotypes and clichés. Takes a strong push to write past them, I suspect. I feel rather ashamed, now I come to think of it, that I haven’t tried. My own parents are in their late 80s now. I’m learning a lot about it.

What books are on your bedside table?
A biography of Clement Attlee, the Labour Prime Minister who oversaw the extraordinary transformation of Britain into a welfare state after the Second World War. It’s good time to be remembering him and that inspired undertaking. Four sublime novellas by Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg: Valentino, Sagittarius, Family and Borghesi. One of the books about physics I perennially buy and fail to finish. But I dip into the universe from time to time, uncomprehending.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of Late in the Day.

Author photo by Mark Vessey