As a blizzard blows through New York City, 60-year-old NYU professor Richard Bowmaster faces a series of surprises. His car slams into the back of a white Lexus. The young Latina driver emerges, tries in vain to shut the trunk lid that is popping open, and speeds away as Richard hands her a card with his contact information. Baffled by the suspicious event, Richard heads home to end his hectic day, but soon finds the driver of the other car on his doorstep needing help.

More surprising twists are in store, as readers of Isabel Allende's delightful and deeply moving new novel, In the Midst of Winter, will soon learn. Richard's journey is enriched and entwined with two women who enter his life: Evelyn, an immigrant from Guatelmala, and Lucia, a visiting professor who lives in the downstairs apartment of his home. This beautifully told story—a blend of mystery, romance and historical fiction—embraces the personal histories of these three unique characters, uniting them in unpredictable ways.

Allende, who lives in Northern California, has written more than 20 books since her international bestseller, The House of the Spirits, was published in 1982. We asked her about the inspiration for In the Midst of Winter, the origin of the title, the novel's three fascinating central characters and more.

You said in a TED talk, “All stories interest me and some haunt me until I end up writing them.” What was it about this story that haunted you?
At the beginning I really didn't have a story, I had a time, a place and a snowstorm, and then the characters came to me. They were hiding somewhere, waiting for me to find them. Each one of them had a traumatic past, especially the young Guatemalan immigrant, who was inspired by real cases like hers that I have seen in my foundation. Those stories haunted me and still do, months after I finished the book.

Can you tell us a bit about the quote from Albert Camus that inspired the book’s title: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” When did you first read it and why did this passage stick with you? 
I heard the quote at a conference in the Omega Institute, a spiritual retreat upstate NewYork, which the characters in my novel end up visiting. It resonated with me because I was going through one of those apparently endless winters that sometimes happen in life. I was getting divorced after 28 years of marriage, my beloved agent and three close friends died, also my dog had died. I felt that I was stuck in a grey and cold place, but the quote reminded me that I have an invincible summer in me. That summer has saved me from many dark periods, except the illness and death of my daughter. That was the longest winter in my life.

In the Midst of Winter skillfully combines three personal narratives, the beginnings of a love story and an evolving mystery. While writing, how did you work to blend all of these elements into one cohesive story?
I imagined the structure of the novel like a braid. My job was to blend three strands evenly and neatly. Each piece of the braid represented one of the stories. The characters were very different but they had something in common: they were emotionally wounded by events of their past.

“I have to admit that, like Lucia, I am vain, bossy and impulsive; I get in trouble and fall in love easily.”  

Lucia seems similar to you in many ways—she’s passionate, romantic and eager to get the most out of life as she grows older. Do these personal similarities between you and your character make it easier, or harder, to write about her?
Although Lucia resembles me, I was not thinking of me when I developed the character.  I based Lucia on a couple of Chilean journalists who had similar experiences. One of them was a feisty, powerful, sentimental, smart and generous friend who unfortunately died of recurrent cancer some time ago. But I have to admit that, like Lucia, I am vain, bossy and impulsive; I get in trouble and fall in love easily. 

In contrast to Lucia, Richard appears to be a taciturn and distant loner. What are his redeeming qualities?
Lucia likes Richard because he is very smart and quite handsome, but mostly because she guesses that under his cautious and cold appearance he has a kind heart. She was right, as is proven in their common adventure. Also, she believes that he is a wounded man in need of a good woman. That has irresistible appeal to most Chilean women. We love projects. Richard is a long-term project, a challenge that would require a lot of work. Perfect for Lucia.

You’ve been a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay area. Why did you decide to set this novel primarily in Brooklyn? As a Californian, what’s your attitude toward New York City?
The closest people in my life are my son, Nicolas, and Lori, my daughter-in-law. She is from Brooklyn and every year we all come from California (my grandchildren included) to spend the holidays with her Italian family.  Brooklyn has become my second home and I am blessed to be part of Lori's noisy and sentimental extended family. I like New York City . . . for a week or two, when I visit for work or for the theater and restaurants, but it is too intense for me, I can't handle it alone. In California I live in a cottage by a lagoon, in silence and in nature, in the company of a silly dog, ducks, geese and some insane swimmers who train in the cold waters of the lagoon.

Snow, cold, blizzards, wind—how do you react to winter weather? Love it or loathe it?
I love my Northern California weather, but if I was forced to choose, I prefer cold winter. I do very badly in the heat. In winter one can always add layers of clothing and survive, but there's no escape from humid heat. How can you look good and think straight if you are sweating? Also, when placing my characters in a novel, winter is way more dramatic than summer. I can't imagine Anna Karenina in Jamaica, can you?

You are known not only as a writer, but as a feminist. How do Lucia, Evelyn and/or Richard exemplify the message of women’s rights and liberation? 
I never try to give a message in my fiction. When I see that an author is trying to preach to me in a novel, I feel insulted. If I find a message, it should come between the lines; I will discover it if it resonates with me. The ideas, feelings and experiences of the author appear unavoidably in the writing. Why does the author choose those stories and no others? Because he or she cares about those issues. Why those characters and no others? Because they speak for the author. I write about strong women who overcome great obstacles and manage to do so without bitterness. I don't invent them, I meet them in my life and in my foundation. Those women don't preach feminism, they live it.

Your account of Evelyn’s experiences in Guatemala and her journey to the United States is harrowing. What was your research process for that storyline?
Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazarios gave me a detailed account of the crossing of Mexico and the border with the United States. Beatriz Manz, from the Center for Latin American Studies in UC Berkeley helped me with the research about the genocide of Indigenous people perpetrated by the government in Guatemala in the '80s and its legacy of violence, corruption, poverty and gangs. Of course, I have been there a couple of times. I have traveled extensively for many years and I can testify that Guatemala is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The character of Evelyn and her story is based on cases I see in my foundation, as I said before. We work with refugees.

Lucia and Richard show true compassion and empathy for the undocumented immigrant Evelyn. Do you believe this is a timely or a timeless message? 
The world is experiencing a refugee crisis, not the first or the last. After the Second World War there were millions of refugees in search of a place to plant roots. Now that refugees have reached the shores of Europe, it is called a crisis, but really the great migrations of refugees happen in Africa  and Asia. Most refugees are escaping from a situation of life and death, they are escaping from extreme poverty, violence, war or natural disasters, yet they are seldom received with compassion, quite the opposite, they usually face hostility and discrimination. Compassion is always timely and timeless. Why do we forget this essential truth?

You’ve written more than 20 bestselling books and won countless awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. What inspires you to keep writing? 
The loyalty of my readers keeps me going in those rare moments when I suspect that I may have reached the age of rest. I love writing, I love storytelling and I love the innumerable messages of encouragement and gratitude I get from my readers. I suppose I will keep on trying to write for as long as I have a brain.

Author photo (c) Lori Bara
 

Asked what he’s reading now that work on his psychologically compelling fifth novel is complete and the book will soon arrive in bookstores, Olaf Olafsson says he is rereading the novels of his father, the award-winning Icelandic novelist Olafur Sigurdsson.

“My dad passed away in 1988,” Olafsson explains during a call to his home in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hill neighborhood, where he and his wife—now parents of two adult sons and a teenage daughter—have lived since 1989. “We were very close. It’s strange, in that his voice is so clear in his writing. It’s like he’s here again.”

Those close paternal ties are certainly not shared by Magnus, the central character of Olafsson’s latest novel, One Station Away. Magnus, a New York-based neurologist, grew up in England, the only child of a narcissistic mother who believes the world has ignored her great talents as a pianist and a hustler father who lovingly caters to and promotes his wife’s injured ambitions. Without musical talent or creative interest, Magnus is largely rejected by his parents, whom he is expected to call Margaret and Vincent, rather than Mom and Dad.

No wonder then that Magnus’ research interest involves another kind of alienation, the separation of mind from body. Magnus and his scientific colleagues search for consciousness in people who are believed to be brain dead, with unexpected repercussions.

“I came upon an article years and years ago about a British neuroscientist who had begun to search for consciousness in people who were believed to be ‘vegetables,’” Olafsson says of the origin of the novels. “To me this state of being fully conscious but unable to communicate at all is the definition of hell.”

Olafsson, who seems to be drawn to conjoined themes and multiple plotlines, also read about a British pianist named Joyce Hatto, “who got involved with her husband in a fraudulent exercise” to pass off the recordings of other musicians as her own work. Olafsson used quite a bit of Hatto’s story to fill in the love-deprived background of his nonmusical central character. The result is a novel that braids together these seemingly disparate themes and thus raises as many profound questions about personal relationships and love as it answers.

“Needless to say, I like gray,” Olafsson says. “Everybody will come to different conclusions. I want my characters to be complicated.”

Olafsson wrote his first work of fiction as an undergraduate studying physics at Brandeis University in an international scholarship program. “I grew up reading a lot of literature, so when I came here, I wanted to study something else.” His first collection of stories was published in Iceland in 1986 to critical acclaim.

“My physics professor had a higher opinion of me as a physicist than I do,” he says with a laugh. “And he wanted me to finish my Ph.D. I said I didn’t think so because I didn’t have the passion for it, and I was writing my first book. To make a long story short, he introduced me to a former student of his who was supposed to persuade me to continue in physics. That gentleman had just left science and was the CEO of Sony. When he couldn’t help my professor convince me to spend my life doing physics, he offered me a job.

“It never occurred to me that I would go into business. I thought I’d try it for a couple of years. At least I’d learn something that I could use in a book.”

“Needless to say, I like gray. . . I want my characters to be complicated.”

To his surprise, Olafsson became an exceptionally successful businessman. He worked first on a brand new technology called the CD-ROM, and then led the introduction of the Sony Playstation in 1995, for which he is viewed as a sort of demigod in some quarters.

About this gaming legacy, Olafsson demurs, “Back then there was the hope that this form of storytelling would mature and develop and stop being a toylike activity. I don’t follow it very closely now, but I think it’s still pretty rudimentary. It just looks better. And sounds better. I’ve always looked at technology as a set of tools. It serves a purpose, but you can’t be a slave to it. What I was interested in then was introducing a new product and building a business, which I enjoyed back then. And then I left it.”

Since 1999, Olafsson has worked as an executive at Time Warner. Yet he has somehow continued to write fiction. “If there’s one thing I’m decent at, it’s discipline with time,” he says. “If I can write two or three hours before I go to the Time Warner offices, I’m happy.” He writes mainly in an office at the top of his house in Manhattan, but also in outbuildings at the family retreats in Iceland and on Long Island.

Today Olafsson, who along with his wife remains an Icelandic citizen, is executive vice president of Time Warner. “I have a green card. I’m what you call a resident alien,” he says, laughing. “At Time Warner, I’m in charge of corporate strategy. Time Warner has a lot of different businesses so my job is basically to figure out the right composition of assets within the company. So I guess my work is predicting how the world is going to evolve.”

So how is the future looking?

Olafsson laughs. “The media landscape is changing enormously. At dinner with my wife and my publisher last night, we were saying that we’ve been through all kinds of technology changes. But the smartphone? The only thing to call it is a revolution, because of the behavioral changes it has brought through the years. But my hope is that the future is also looking good for books. Needless to say, for me personally, that’s the thing I care about most.”

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

(Author photo by Johann Pall Valdimarsson.)

It’s fitting that Chloe Benjamin was born on All Soul’s Day, a religious festival remembering those who have died. Her latest novel, The Immortalists, explores the eternal mysteries of death and the boundaries of science, religion and magic.

“The Immortalists felt like the book that I was always meant to write,” Benjamin says during a phone call from her home in Madison, Wisconsin. “If I died now, at least I would have written this. I don’t think I’ll ever have a book like this again.”

That’s a somewhat startling statement coming from a young writer, but at just age 29, Benjamin is well on her way to being an established author. Her first novel, the award-winning The Anatomy of Dreams, explored another intangible—the surprising power of lucid dreaming.

Benjamin says of her two novels, “The Anatomy of Dreams is a more internal look at the conscious and the subconscious, and an almost claustrophobic exploration of the central relationship. With The Immortalists, I wanted to cover more ground socially, culturally and historically, as well as interpersonally. It felt important to challenge myself to write a book with greater scope and diversity.”

“It was really one of the hardest writing experiences I’ve had.”

The premise of The Immortalists is immediately gripping: In 1969, the four siblings of the Gold family (Varya, age 13; Daniel, 11; Klara, 9; Simon, 7) live in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where their father owns a tailor shop. When Daniel gets wind of a mysterious fortuneteller, the children track her down and have an encounter that will forever change their lives. The soothsayer predicts the exact date of each of their deaths.

The four sections of the book address each sibling’s life in order of their predicted demise. Simon was told he would die young, while Varya seems destined to live until a ripe old age. Or is she? One of the book’s central questions is whether the fortuneteller is clairvoyant, or whether her prophecies simply become self-fulfilling.

“I wanted to leave this open to interpretation, to see what the reader thinks,” Benjamin says. “I’ve always really been drawn to books with multiple perspectives or books that show how different people can interpret the same event in such varied ways.”

The book’s beginning brings to mind the four siblings who step through the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What’s more, at one point in The Immortalists, Klara’s daughter cries out, “It’s like Narnia!” when it begins to snow.

Benjamin laughs at the reference, explaining, “That was actually something I said when I arrived at college on the East Coast. Everyone made very prompt fun of me, because I was coming from California.”

As for parallels to the C.S. Lewis classic, Benjamin says they were unintentional, although she admits, “I think those books were in the petri dish that created this one.”

The Gold children all take strikingly different paths: Daniel, the oldest Gold boy, becomes a military doctor, while Varya ends up a scientist. Simon and Klara run away to San Francisco, where Simon dances, both ballet and in a gay bar. Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, following in the footsteps of her namesake grandmother. She even takes to performing her grandmother’s act, the Jaws of Life, in which she hangs from a rope by her teeth, calling herself “The Immortalist.”

Benjamin, who initially knew nothing about magic, modeled the Jaws of Life trick after a real act she stumbled upon during her research. A Hungarian immigrant who called herself Tiny Kline once performed this extraordinary feat over Times Square and later played a flying Tinker Bell in Disneyland. “I think she just held on with her teeth,” Benjamin says. “It was so dangerous and unbelievable.”

It’s not surprising that showmanship is at the forefront of so much of the novel. Benjamin’s mother is a stage actor, and as a child Benjamin was involved in theater and active in ballet until college.

“I miss those things a lot,” she admits, “but I don’t feel brave enough to perform at this point in my life. I’m more comfortable writing something where I can make it as perfect as I can and then put it out there for consumption. But that level of risk and uncertainty and vulnerability—and also a kind of flash and dazzle—was a part of my childhood.”

Benjamin did substantial research for each section of the book, adding: “I don’t make it easy on myself. There’s an adage to write what you know; I’m more interested in writing about what I want to know.”

The research for Varya’s section proved most vexing. At first Benjamin had Varya study a species known as the immortal jellyfish, which seemed to be a perfect thematic fit­­—although the subject had its own challenges.

“I had to read so much molecular biology,” Benjamin recalls, “and that is not the way my brain works. So I’d be practically crying, sitting with this stack of academic journals that I couldn’t possibly understand. I worked on that section for years.” Ultimately, she ended up starting it over. “It was really one of the hardest writing experiences I’ve had.”

The completed novel spans decades, explores a variety of philosophical questions and addresses everything from gay life in 1970s San Francisco to the ethics of scientific research on animals.

As for her next novel, Benjamin is already at work. “I get an idea maybe once every five years,” she says, “and it’s like, OK, well I guess that’s what I’m writing. So as much as it’s driving me crazy, I have faith.”

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

Tayari Jones’ first name is a Swahili word that means “she is prepared.” It’s a powerful declaration that holds true, as the groundwork for Jones’ moving, emotionally complex new novel, An American Marriage, can be traced to seven years ago.

But it truly all began in Jones’ closet, where she wrote her first novel, Leaving Atlanta (2002), on a manual typewriter during her time in grad school. “It wasn’t like an empty closet that I made into an office. It was my closet!” Jones exclaims during a call that reaches her in Las Vegas, where she has a yearlong fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “I never had any trouble writing in that closet, because with your first book, you’re like a cup that is full to the top and overflowing onto the page.”

Jones tells this story to explain why she can write anywhere: in Brooklyn, where she usually lives; in Atlanta, where she grew up and where her mother still lives; at Rutgers University–Newark, where she teaches writing as a founding member of its MFA program; or at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where, during another fellowship in 2011, she felt the need to research the mass incarceration of black men, which would eventually form the backstory of An American Marriage.

“The word in my head was ‘bigger,’ ” Jones says. “Most of my books are about the family, the way people interact. But I felt I needed to write about big issues, and mass incarceration has always been nibbling at the edges of my mind because of its collateral effects. So on this fellowship, I read and read and read and read. I learned all kinds of statistics that would blow your mind. But this did not engage me as a storyteller. . . . So I went home to talk to my mama in Atlanta. And when I was in the mall there, I heard this couple arguing. She said, ‘Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, because this wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.’ I know I have a novel when I’m intrigued by two people’s conflict and when I feel they both have a point.”

On its surface, An American Marriage tells the story of the marriage of Roy Hamilton and Celestial Davenport. Roy is a poor, ambitious boy from small-town Louisiana. Celestial is from Atlanta’s black upper class. When the two first meet, he is going to Morehouse College and she to Spelman. They are introduced by her “bone-deep” friend and lifelong neighbor Andre, who becomes the third leg of this story. Celestial and Roy connect again in New York, where she is an exceptionally talented art student and he is a rising business consultant. The two marry, and a year and a half into their marriage, he takes her home to Louisiana to visit his parents. While staying at a local motel, Roy is arrested for rape. Readers will have little doubt of his innocence, but he is convicted and sent to prison. The exchange of letters between Roy and Celestial while he is in prison is heart-rending. After five years, Roy is released, and the remainder of the novel is a wrenching portrayal of the love, anger and moral dilemmas—the collateral damage—these characters are left with as a result of injustice.

“It is a question of modern African-American life. What is the balance between your desires and your responsibilities?”

“All of these characters are trying to figure out the extent to which they are allowed to be self-interested in the face of this larger cultural crisis,” Jones explains. “In many ways, it is a question of modern African-American life. What is the balance between your desires and your responsibilities? For Celestial to say, ‘I want happiness’ when her husband is a hostage of the state is very different from a novel where the wife seeking happiness is at home, bored, and her husband is a stockbroker.”

Like any good novel, An American Marriage lives in its particular details. Jones presents readers with a richly evocative cultural moment, and each of her characters has a complicated past that raises as many questions about life as it answers. Especially compelling are her depictions of black urban professional life in Atlanta.

“I’ve lived a lot of places since I finished college in 1991,” Jones says. “But I haven’t lived long enough in those places to feel I have enough authority to write about them. I need to know the layers of a place. Atlanta is my hometown, and I know all its layers. Furthermore, it is important to me as a Southern writer to write about the modern urban South. When I tell people in Brooklyn that I’m from Georgia, they act like I got there on the Underground Railroad. They have no concept of the modern South.”

Readers of An American Marriage will discover a bold, big Southern story to match its ambitious title. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” Jones says. “And I have accepted that my niche is this quiet space. I’ve never been one of those writers who says writing is the hardest job in the world. Look at the jobs my grandparents had. Can I really say a job I’m able to do in my pajamas is the hardest job in the world? This is not a quiet title. And this is not a quiet story. I was a little intimidated by claiming this title for myself. But this novel caused me to challenge myself. I feel really good about it now.”

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

Author photo by Nina Subin.

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.