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

Valeria Luiselli, author of The Story of My Teeth and Lost Children Archive, discusses storytelling, road trips, creating realistic characters and the “beautiful machine” of fiction.

Your novels don’t follow typical rules of storytelling and structure, but they’re also different from each other. Lost Children Archive is told in vignette-like chunks, with photos and other nontraditional media mixed in. Does the story determine the structure and tone of a book for you?
The story, as it grows, always determines the structure of my books. And vice versa. I see story and form as two tightly interwoven components of a book which need to grow together organically. I don’t ever have a prefixed plan when I begin a book. All I have is a bunch of intuitions and questions. In some cases, like The Story of My Teeth, I pay more attention to procedure itself as generative of form and content. (In that book, the procedure was weekly installments of a story, delivered to factory workers, and both the form and the story derived directly from that.) 

In Lost Children Archive, procedure was less of a thing. Or rather, it was completely at the service of the story. And the procedure basically boiled down to collecting—collecting notes, scraps, photos, books, audio, anything. This novel implied so much collecting that at some point I decided to get archival boxes and reproduce the fictional family’s archive in them. (I still have those boxes in a closet and feel somehow that I can’t open them or move them. As if they didn’t belong to me.) 

"I don’t ever have a prefixed plan when I begin a book. All I have is a bunch of intuitions and questions."

I had a particularly good time with the Polaroids—taking the photos, of course, but then picking which ones could go into the text, arranging them and thinking of the narrative they themselves told on their own. And especially thinking about the way they would interact with the text and in what kind of creative tension they would be inserted there.

Your descriptions of the places and landscapes along the drive from New York to the Southwest are so vivid. Is this a drive you’ve taken yourself?
Kind of. But that’s probably not relevant to the novel or its possible interpretations.

Without giving too much away, there’s a section told from the point of view of a child who’s separated from his parents and navigating the desert alone. The child is much less apprehensive about this than the adult reader! Was it hard to put yourself in the mindset of a 10-year-old and see this kind of journey as an adventure?
Well, I guess that imagining what a particular person (not a generic 10-year-old or 90-year-old) might do in a given situation is my job. I don’t know how to do anything else. I don’t even know how to cook properly. But I spend all my time thinking about what my characters would do or think or say. Now, to be honest, I had a lot of help in this novel. I had help from a little army of children in my family. I’d spend long whiles asking them all sorts of questions. I’d ask them what they would do if they were lost, what they would fear the most, what would make them feel safe. I’ve also spent many hours talking to kids who migrate alone to the U.S. I interviewed undocumented children in court between 2014 and 2015 and now give a creative writing workshop in an immigration detention center for minors. So I spend a lot of time around children and am always trying to understand how they look at the world, how they try to make sense of it and how they interiorize it through narratives.

On the trip, your narrator observes, “The more I listen to the stories he tells about this country’s past, the more it seems like he’s talking about the present.” As someone who has lived in many different countries, do you feel that the past has a stronger echo in the U.S.?
Not particularly. I think the past is always present, everywhere. And it comes back to haunt us when we try to ignore it or shut it off. In every community or country, there are wounds—historical wounds—that remain wide open because society as a whole hasn’t properly addressed them enough. I certainly think that the U.S. has not yet done what it takes to address the violence inflicted (then and now) on indigenous and other minority communities.

"In every community or country, there are wounds—historical wounds—that remain wide open because society as a whole hasn’t properly addressed them enough."

Lord of the Flies is one of many literary touchstones in this book; the family reads it on the road. The mother pushes back against Golding’s view of human nature as war, saying “that’s not necessarily the only idea about human nature.” Do you agree with her, or do you take something closer to Golding’s view?
That’s a very good question. I studied Philosophy at UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico) and specialized in political philosophy. Basically, that means that for a long while I understood these issues through the somewhat artificially neat-and-tidy lens of ideas such as the social contract and teleology, etc. I’m not sure that any of those things explain the baffling chaos we live in today. I don’t think there is any such thing as “human nature” either. That idea presupposes that there is something before it actually exists—that we are one way or the other before actually manifesting any traits that suggest that way of being.

There’s a somewhat sinister encounter the family has with a man who is suspicious of them because of their non-U.S. origins—until they profess to be writing a Western. This felt like such a parallel to the immigrant experience: If you swallow our myths, we’ll accept you. It’s also a reminder of how travel can be a frightening experience for anyone who doesn’t look “American.” How do you see this encounter?
Yes, “if you swallow our myths we’ll accept you.” I like that way of putting it. It’s all respectability politics, right? Always having to demonstrate that, despite being Mexican, or despite being black or despite being a perceived minority of any kind, you will comply with dominant ideologies, values and practices.

This novel touches on serious issues: the genocide and displacement of Native Americans, and of course the current-day internment of asylum-seekers, including children. What role do you think fiction has to play in addressing issues like these?
Fiction brings together things that might usually be seen as disconnected—it suggests parallels and comparisons by juxtaposition rather than by explicitly relating things. But storytelling is also quite simply the way we come to know the world and the communities where we live and form a nexus with them. Between your mind and mine, the only connection is these words—and the way we make meaning with them. Fiction is like a machine for producing meaning. A beautiful machine. More like an old, noble beast.

As a bilingual writer, what is your writing and translation process like? Do you write in English or Spanish?
I write in both, dream in both, breathe in both. When I begin writing a book, I usually take notes in both for a long while—sometimes for a year or so—until one day I’m able to find the right language, the right tone, the exact voice I need.

What five things would you say are necessary for a successful road trip?
Not that I’m an expert in successful road trips, but . . .

– good music & books
– good company . . .  or no company
– the exact balance of silence and conversation
– no fixed plans
– a medium to document things that force you to look/listen/think differently

Children being held in detention at the border has become a national news item in the last year, but many readers might not realize it’s been going on for much longer than that. What would you suggest to readers who want to do or learn more about this issue?
I think that self-education on these matters is a responsibility we all have towards each other, especially in times like these. But not only in times of crisis. Committing time every day to educating ourselves on issues that are usually ignored or only brushed over in mainstream media is, I think, the only chance we stand against increasingly xenophobic governments that cater only to the economic and political elite, against social media authoritarianism, and against the increasing power of private companies.

What are you working on next?
I’m doing research on mass incarceration and immigration detention. But I’m still in very early stages of the process, just taking notes, reading a lot, thinking. (Still in two languages!) I have no idea what will come of it and am not in a hurry.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Lost Children Archive.

Author photo by Diego Berruecos-Gatopardo

Max Porter discusses his new novel, Lanny, in which a mythical creature known as Dead Papa Toothwort lurks over a small village, luring a young boy from its safety as a strange tale unfolds, mixing contemporary life and eternal myth in a masterful blend.

My guess is that to embody Grief or Nature as an objective being would be a tricky thing for an author. (My musical-dramatic version of Lolly Willowes will be premiered next month, so I know something about this.) It would be so easy to “explain” Crow or Dead Papa Toothwort as symbols or Jungian archetypes or even just as pathological hallucinations. How important is it to you for the reader to understand these beings as real? Not just as products of your fictional imagination (like your human characters), but as genuinely true things in the world?
To get to genuinely true things in the world seems the main objective always, certainly, and so far I’ve found the best way to do that is to go straight to an apparently preposterously unreal device which carries the risk of interpretive closed doors, but should from the get-go be the heat of that project to describe truest things. One important thing for me is to do no pissing about, no explaining, no patronizing or boring your reader with a handbook or a gently-gently contextual run-in. Crow walks straight in, and we begin with (inside, alongside, complicit with) DPT. And even if there is sweetness (or related effects), there shouldn’t be any coyness on my part. If you’re a reader who needs to know, who dislikes ambiguity, who needs a metaphor locked into the metaphorical arena, then these books will annoy you.

For a lifelong reader of English supernatural fiction like myself, Lanny is a basket of Easter eggs. Machen and Grahame, Kipling and Blackwood, Forster and Warner—these daemons lurk in the understory as I read your novel. Am I mistaken in feeling that Dead Papa Toothwort is meant as a variation on this grand literary theme? Either way, I’d love to know who your own favorites might be (if any) among these folks, who have their own panicked tales to tell.
That’s good to hear, thank you. He’s a variation as well as a humble nod, as well as a contemporary (as in post-ummm-post-modern-mythic? Anthropocene?) gesture beyond these influences because he is self-aware, and in that self-awareness (very naïve and natural but also very accomplished) lies the secret of his identity, which we shan’t give away. I like a literary device that knows they’re an homage, knows they are loaded up with symbolic power and can play. I want to set a knowing and loving literary vandal loose among their predecessors as an act of affection for what’s come before as a well as to try and revitalize the sometimes lazy or boring flattening of the function in our current environment. I hope DPT is as much revisionist historian as he is kitsch.

Much of it is hidden to me and revealed by readers. I have never read the legendary chapter seven of Wind in the Willows, but it sounds like a branch on the same tree as Lanny. I realize now, all these months after finishing, that in here is Carter, and Fungus the Bogeyman, and Riddley Walker, and Garner, and many more besides. In the greenwood there’s no naming of names, but there’s many things I don’t realize I’m replying to until someone tells me.

Toothwort feasts on the babel of human voices, nourishing his implacable need for connection with those benighted village souls, fueling the crescendo to the crisis he must bring on (as part of the inevitable cycle of things). Is Lanny offering us a vision of the natural world as possibly a redemptive force for our suffering, as long as we are able to accept the merciless suffering it also willfully inflicts as the necessary terms of its sovereignty?
Again, only after finishing the book does any of this fall into place, but Lanny is fairly classically druidical in his thinking. He could be said to exemplify (unknowingly) an accomplished post-industrial Celtic metaphysic. Which is painful, in these times, which is why he’s sad, why he worries.

The awful and inevitable turn against Mad Pete by both the village and the media intensifies the luminous trauma of your narrative. In this case, Pete is innocent; in other cases (Eric Gill, most notoriously), the artist is hideously guilty. At the heart of your storytelling, therefore, seems to be a parable on the fragility of goodness (especially for artists), the rarity and sanctity of kindness and trust and uninhibited affection, so easily ruined by abuses of power of any kind. The awesome power of Dead Papa Toothwort strikes me as nothing more or less than a fully embodied accusation of humanity’s sinfulness in this regard. The succession of tableaux in the village hall gives shattering evidence for this claim. Each individual is weighed in the balance; each person is found wanting. Would it bother you if I said to you that both your novels, with due unorthodoxy, present themselves as trials-by-ordeal, tests of spiritual wholeness, designed for this perplexed historical moment, precisely because they insist upon the presence of Beings who transcend history?
I’d be really, really delighted with such a reading. Thank you.

You’re the first person to bring up Gill, for which I’m grateful. And in your earlier question, you’re perhaps nudging me toward my own fascination with Jones and Gill and other troubled Catholic visionaries.

I would be dismayed to think I’d written self-righteous books, but there is a howling indignation at real-politik late-capitalist shittiness in both books, and a worshipful attitude to notional ideas of decency, warmth, kindness. And wit. Wit is religiously admired, because humor seems to me the great triumph of the species.

I’m pleased to be descended from Quakers, and despite not being a Christian myself, there is in my genetic material a pacifist moral framework which yearns for at least the moral certitude of the god-fearing system. So yes, the accusation is there for sure, and we are all found wanting, and one does occasionally come across someone . . . distinct. Luminous.

Finally (at last!), a simple question for you. Lanny outgrows his “changeling” nature and becomes a “normal” teenager. Is art, then, really the only way to keep such connection and consciousness alive? (“They draw the woods around them.” That verb is a most beautiful double entendre.)
Ha, even your simple question is profoundly complex.

The only way, who knows. I’ve met gardeners, mole-catchers, window cleaners, teachers and so on. They are in tune, they are open.

For shit sure there aren’t many bankers alive in the way you describe, but they figure it out and buy art in an attempt to fake the experience. Who knows.

Increasingly I feel that art and community are the same thing, the same resistance. They both begin with the body in relation to other bodies and the planet. And this all comes back to your first question, to truth. I’m no authority on anything, but when I sit down and write I want to begin from the same basic place one might begin a political or philosophical project, perfectly encapsulated by the Dickinson line I began my first book with.

Connection, consciousness, childhood, crisis, in all of this, now and always, before and after us, the freight is proportioned to the groove.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Lanny.

Author photo by Lucy Dickens

You’ll be hearing a lot about Fleishman Is in Trouble this year. Early reviews are nearly ecstatic. And why not? It’s a terrific novel, sharply funny and brilliantly observed.

It’s the story of Toby Fleishman, an Upper East Side hepatologist (think liver expert at a prestigious New York hospital) who is in the midst of a bitter divorce after a 14-plus-year marriage to his wife, Rachel, a driven, incredibly successful owner of a high-end talent agency. She runs with a crowd that earns so much more than Toby’s mere quarter-million dollars a year that they basically view him as a pauper. It’s Toby who has sued for divorce.

In one of the comedic, thought-provoking reversals this novel deploys so adroitly, Toby is the primary caregiver for their two children—Hannah, age 11, and Solly, age 9. During the summer weeks when this story unfolds, the couple has the customary child-sharing arrangement: Toby will take these days and Rachel the others. But Rachel suddenly disappears and is nowhere to be found. Toby is left in the role of full-time caregiver just when the possibility of career advancement and his dating life as a 40-something divorced man are taking off. How then to respond to a conflict between responsible parenthood, the demands of career and the allure of the sexually charged online dating scene? 

In exploring Toby’s dilemma, Brodesser-Akner doesn’t miss the opportunity to examine the state of contemporary divorce and the weird culture of post-divorce dating.

“When I turned 40,” she explains, “a critical mass of my friends started telling me they were getting a divorce. I was shocked. They would tell me about how their marriages failed, but I was most interested in what their lives were like now. They showed me their phones and how they were dating. It was different from how we were dating right after college.”

She tried to interest a magazine she was writing for at the time, but the idea didn’t appeal to her male editors. So she “sat down and started writing it. A force overtook me. The thing I do mostly is write profiles. I just thought of it as a longer profile.”

The story bloomed, and part of it was the titillating content of her divorcing friends’ phones. “I couldn’t believe how wild it was. How free everyone was. No one was coy. No one was flirtatious. They just went for it. I wanted to tell the story of what it is like now.”

In writing about this modern phenomenon, Brodesser-Akner calls herself a “bit of a prude.” But even in her fictional realm, she’s a reporter interested in the underlying facts—so much so that she took the unusual step of hiring a fact-checker to ensure that her depictions were accurate.

“I’ve done very well in my writing career by being as specific as possible and never being vague,” she says. “Half of the things [the fact-checker] found were amazing, and half were embarrassing—like why are they taking a cab to the 92nd Street Y if they live on 94th Street? That was worth all the money I paid for it. I’m about accuracy and not looking like an idiot.”

Her characters, however, can often seem like idiots, although very successful and mostly lovable idiots we grow to care about. She writes about her characters with empathy but also with the cutting, acerbic wit that became her signature style at GQ and in her current position as staff writer at the New York Times.

“It’s a characteristic that people don’t always enjoy in me as a person,” she admits, “but they do like it in me as a writer. I wasn’t tremendously popular in life growing up until I became a writer, at which point people started to seek me out more. It’s interesting to me that the things that make some people like you are the same things that alienate others.”

While often laugh-out-loud funny, the novel also intimately probes issues of contemporary life, such as social and sexual inequity. We are very sympathetic to Fleishman, who is in trouble. But we’re eventually led to wonder, isn’t Rachel, the missing parent, also in trouble?

“My husband always says that when you’re a hammer, everything is a nail,” Brodesser-Akner says. “Around the time I was writing this, I was suddenly aware of a lot of inequity. I felt very loved and treasured [at my job], but then I would get wind of certain salaries, and I would see how different it was for my husband. I grew up in a house with a single mother with lots of limits that looked like gender limits. So when you wake up to it, it’s all you can see. It was important for me to write a book that was relevant, modern and that showed that suddenly the world [can be] just completely different from what you’d pinned your hopes on.”

Perhaps most surprising of all is that Brodesser-Akner says this engrossing novel took her just six months to write. “I’m a freelancer, my time is very valuable, and we have a mortgage to pay. I couldn’t take more time than that because I needed to see if this was worth it.”

Obviously, it was.

Author photo by Erik Tanner

“It’s possible to write about this without minimizing the horrors, not to airbrush reality, but to create a fully human story.”

In Cantoras, Carolina De Robertis has crafted a masterful novel about the meaning of desire in an age of repression. In a narrative that spans many decades and features five central characters, the author explores trauma, passion, memory and the fragile places where all three intersect. We asked her about some of the decisions that went into the construction of the novel.

Cantoras—both the word itself and its meaning within the story—is a beautiful title. How—and when in the writing process—did it come to you?
Thanks for saying that; I’m so glad it speaks to you. In fact, the title for this book came at the very end. I’d had a long string of other working titles along the way. Cantoras means “female singers” or “women who sing,” and was used by the real-life women who inspired this book as code for lesbians. There are so many layers to this notion of what it means to “sing”—from sexual pleasure to having a voice to the idea that fashioning a queer life might be a kind of artistry. And of course the containing of “female” and “singer” in a single word is untranslatable.

There are some devastating depictions of emotional, physical and psychological abuse in this novel. These depictions are not untethered from the historical record. How difficult was it to write these sections, knowing people have suffered—and in some places, continue to suffer—similar violence?
Two things propelled me through this: first, the knowledge that I was drawing from real histories, and that they deserve to be brought into the light. Writing can be a way of honoring those who’ve suffered real traumas and often surmounted them. And when a story has not yet been fully reflected in formal histories, the telling has a purpose, or so we hope.

Second: My early years as a rape crisis counselor taught me not only about the vast spectrum of human pain but also of our equally vast capacity for resilience. It’s possible to write about this without minimizing the horrors, not to airbrush reality, but to create a fully human story. Toni Morrison said she believes all her novels have not only happy endings, but “splendid endings,” in which the characters in some way arrive at power inside themselves. I had the incredibly good fortune to hear her say this live onstage. Her interviewer was shocked. “Even Beloved?” he said. “Of course Beloved,” she replied. I think about this all the time.

The story of Cantoras spans more than 35 years. Did you know at the beginning of the project exactly what time frame you wanted, or did the chronological boundaries of the story change as you were working on it?
I don’t always know, when I start writing a novel, whether my initial vision for the structure will hold or transform along the way. But the idea of spanning 35 years was present from the beginning, the urge to somehow weave the narrative forward to 2013, when gay marriage became legal in Uruguay. I don’t mean to suggest, at all, that same-sex marriage is the endpoint of queer liberation. But it has been a milestone.

I was living in Uruguay when the law was passed, and attended the wedding of two men who’d been together for 35 years, whose couplehood had traveled through the silences of a dictatorship to this, as had the lives of the women whose stories I’d been listening to for years. I hoped to capture this greater narrative arc of the culture along with the characters’ own inner and outer journeys.

You mention in the acknowledgements section that your first trip to Cabo Polonio—perhaps the central location in which the novel is set—took place in 2001, when you were “a young queer woman from the diaspora seeking my own connection to Uruguay.” If you could go back and give this novel to that young woman, what do you think her reaction to it would be?
I think she’d keel over in shock, and that’s the truth. I think she needed this book. The young woman I was then had been told by her parents that she couldn’t be both Uruguayan and gay, right as they were in the process of disowning her. (And no, they have not “come around.”) It was a raw and vulnerable time for me, but also a time of blasting open and finding my voice. Those things aren’t separate. As Jeanette Winterson puts it, “What we notice in stories is the nearness of the wound to the gift.”

One of the most striking themes of the book is the obliteration of stories—the reality that for every tale of injustice told, there are countless others that are forever forgotten. How did you approach a storytelling challenge such as this, where you’re putting together a narrative anchored to history, but a history whose memory hole is so gaping?
I did a great deal of listening. One of the characters in this book is based on one of my closest friends in Uruguay, and other characters are inspired by friends of hers who generously shared their stories and gave me their blessing to blend them into fiction. That was toward the end; the initial gathering started 18 years ago. I’m also drawing on more formal research, in scholarly and historical text—but you’re right to point out that there are many unrecorded histories, and even the gathering of oral history will only take you so far. At some point, the novelist has to leap head first into the pool of imagination in order to more freely explore the truth.

“At some point, the novelist has to leap head first into the pool of imagination in order to more freely explore the truth.”

Cantoras is one of the most exquisite books I’ve ever read about desire—its many meanings, its subversive power, its capacity to at once imprison and liberate. Did your own feelings about the nature of desire change as you were writing the novel?
That’s very beautiful to hear, thank you. I don’t know that my relationship to the nature of desire changed, exactly, but it certainly deepened and expanded from spending time with these characters, and from striving to bring them to life. That’s one of the incredible things about being a novelist: constant discovery, constant learning. And desire, in particular, is one of the most complex and mysterious phenomena in our human lives—don’t you think?

This book is being published in a moment when totalitarianism appears, on so many fronts, to be resurgent. What do you hope readers take from this novel about the nature of oppression and the ways in which it can infect every facet of life?
While this book is set in a particular place and time, it’s also absolutely my hope that readers will find resonance for our current world. So many of us are grappling with the cost of authoritarianism and various forms of bigotry, from national to intimate spheres. We’re asking ourselves big questions about what it means to resist, to belong in the face of systemic hostility and to shape the culture we long for. If my book can provide a drop of fuel or inspiration even for a single reader, I’d be honored and very glad.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Cantoras.

Author photo by Pamela Denise Harris