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

Kiley Reid wants you to know three things before reading her debut novel, Such a Fun Age.

First, the author says during a phone call amid a very busy book touring schedule, she loves talking about money, class and “all those gauche, awkward things that people don’t want to talk about.”

Second, she’s interested in how memory works and how people can have different views of the same event.

And third, she loves dialogue, especially when people are saying one thing but mean something else.

These all come together in Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid’s smart stunner of a social novel. It’s a will-she-won’t-she page turner about an underemployed African American woman and the wealthy white family that hires her as a babysitter. Never has reading about benefits negotiations been so exciting.

Emira Tucker, a recent graduate from Temple University, is eking out a financially precarious living, cobbling together jobs and dreading her 26th birthday, when she will be dropped from her parents’ health insurance. Her employers, Alix and Peter Chamberlain, have recently relocated from New York to Philadelphia, where Peter is an anchor on a local news show and Alix attempts to turn her lifestyle blog into a book. They hire Emira to take care of toddler Briar and new baby Catherine.

“Do I think she’s a villain? No, not at all. But she can still cause just as much damage.”

Reid wastes no time getting to the heart of things. The novel opens late one night when Emira is at a friend’s birthday party. The Chamberlains ask her to come to the house; a rock has been thrown through the window, and the police are expected. Briar is awake and disconcerted, and the parents ask Emira to take the 2-year-old away from the chaotic scene. Emira chooses an upscale neighborhood grocery store, but is confronted by the store’s security guard, who accuses her of kidnapping Briar. The scene quickly escalates. Kelley Copeland, a well-meaning white bystander, begins to film the encounter on his phone. The Chamberlains are called in, and the ugly incident is diffused—but not without laying the groundwork for future damage.

“I love novels that start with something that really pulls me in,” Reid says. “That’s why I started with the grocery store incident. I wanted to explore these instances of racial biases that don’t end in violence as a way of highlighting those moments that we don’t see on the news but still exist every day.”

Kelley encourages Emira to post the video on social media or send it in to the local news. She refuses, but when they run into each other a few weeks later, they begin dating. Meanwhile, Alix, embarrassed at how little she knows about her babysitter, shows a new curiosity in Emira’s life, even sneaking peeks at her phone and asking to meet the new boyfriend. After Kelley and Alix discover that they went to high school together, Alix’s meddling increases, and Emira becomes uncomfortable with Kelley’s ultimatum that she quit her job.

“I wanted to write about a triangle of people who know each other but don’t really know each other, other than ‘I used to date you back in the day, but I don’t really know you anymore,’” Reid says, “or ‘I pay you to work for me, but I don’t really know you.’ I wanted three people to have that awkward connection to each other, to let the attitudes of the characters lead in terms of how they reveal themselves on the page.”

Reid is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently living in Philadelphia, where she is adapting Such a Fun Age into a screenplay. (Lena Waithe’s production team, Hillman Grad Productions, bought the rights to develop the novel last August, when Reid was still finishing up her degree in Iowa.) During the writing of the novel, which took nearly five years, Freddie Gray died after being held in police custody in Baltimore, and Philando Castile was shot by police in Minnesota. ‘‘Smaller, more domestic incidents were happening constantly,” Reid remembers. “There wasn’t one I was trying to re-create, but I was absolutely inspired by the everyday terror. In fact, my book was being shopped when the two African American men were arrested at the Starbucks in Philadelphia. These kinds of incidents are real. I wanted to focus on the fact that for Emira, this doesn’t go away.”

In lesser hands, the meddling Alix would be the villain of the story. But Reid doesn’t see it that way. “Alix has many great qualities—she’s quick, creative, funny. I’ve definitely experienced what Alix has experienced, in having little friend-crushes on someone,” Reid says. “I see her bad qualities as more of a symptom of a broken system. Like a lot of us, she wants to feel good and like she’s doing good. So she thinks giving Emira a bottle of wine is going to solve something, when what Emira needs is health insurance and to be able to pay her rent on time. Do I think she’s a villain? No, not at all. But she can still cause just as much damage.”

Just as Alix isn’t the bad guy, neither is Emira a hero, though her actions at times and her love for Briar are heroic in their way. (One of the core strengths of the novel is the fierce attachment Emira feels for Briar, even as she acknowledges that their relationship is part of, as Reid puts it, “an exchange of emotional goods.”)

“I wanted to write about a character who doesn’t know what she wants to do and is in a very vulnerable emotional and financial situation,” Reid explains. “Emira has a college education, she’s smart, she has good friends, but things are still very difficult for her, especially as her health insurance is ending.” Worst of all, she blames herself for being underemployed, especially as all her friends are more gainfully employed with their own apartments and benefits.

Like the novel’s principal characters, the supporting cast is unforgettable, from the precocious Briar to Peter’s conventional but take-charge co-anchor. Reid’s skill with character and dialogue keeps the action moving forward at a brisk clip, most visibly at the Chamberlain Thanksgiving table. The scene is a masterpiece of discomfort and revelation, with all the awkwardness that could possibly occur when a volatile mix of friends, former lovers and employers get together in one room. 

“To have that many people in the room has been one of my favorite writing challenges, and it took me about six to eight weeks to get a rough draft,” recalls Reid with a laugh. “I am not great at math, so I had to map out where everyone sat or moved so I could keep track of them. Honestly, I kept losing the babies, forgetting whose laps they were sitting on or if they were even at the table. This is my favorite kind of puzzle game—to create questions that I can then answer. What recipe would this person make? If there was an awkward moment, who would jump in and save the day? Who would make it worse?”

The timeliness of Such a Fun Age is reinforced by the robust presence of social media, which Reid seamlessly integrates into her story. But true to form, there is a message behind the technique. “Social media allows people to see racism play out in real time, in really terrifying ways,” Reid says. “I wanted to include that panic from the onlooker, that point where you are wondering, ‘What am I seeing, do I need to pull out my phone?’ Social media is also the way people brand themselves, which Alix does very successfully, even pretending to her followers that she still lives in New York City. Emira doesn’t use Instagram or Facebook, because she doesn’t really know who she is.”

Back to the things Riley wants you to know. Money, guilt, the emotional cost of a transactional economy and unrecognized white privilege are at the heart of Such a Fun Age. But make no mistake, it’s also a blast to read, and you will laugh out loud. 

“I have no pretense to pretend that this is anything other than a novel, and for me, a novel is meant to entertain,” says Reid. “That being said, I wrote a story about a young woman who is about to come to the end of her health insurance, and that affects her greatly. I want someone to say, ‘Well, why doesn’t she have insurance? She’s a wonderful employee, a hard worker. What would our world look like if that wasn’t an issue?’ Now, that would be a great reaction.” 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Such a Fun Age.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly named Lena Waithe’s production company. It also called baby Catherine the wrong name.

Author photo © David Goddard

James McBride is one of America’s foremost storytellers, a contemporary urban griot whose works offer nuanced portrayals of America’s complex cultural landscape. He first captured our hearts and minds with his 1995 memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. Since then, he’s worked in multiple genres and formats to explore race, love, loss and the basic human threads that unite us all. Following a short story collection and a well-received biography of James Brown, Deacon King Kong marks McBride’s return to the novel. 

McBride’s third novel, 2013’s The Good Lord Bird, won the National Book Award in fiction. Following up a major award winner would cause anxiety in some, but not for McBride. “I never thought I’d win a National Book Award, you know,” he says. “So whatever I got out of it is gravy. The pressure was off. I’ve already demonstrated that I can write to the satisfaction of my peers and colleagues on the business side. I felt creatively free to do what I wanted to do. So I wasn’t that worried about it.” 

“Courage, modesty and morality are still the spine that holds America together.”

Deacon King Kong centers on the fallout after an elderly, grief-stricken Baptist church deacon named Sportcoat shoots a young former baseball player-turned-drug dealer named Deems at the Cause Houses housing project in 1969. McBride uses his sharp pen and incredible wit to explore the inner lives and interconnections of a diverse cast of characters who either live in or engage with the Cause Houses and nearby Five Ends Baptist Church.  

The book features a large set of characters, but the Cause Houses emerge as the central protagonist, taking an almost human form. The buildings are the body, and the characters’ experiences are the organs and organisms that bring it to life. The Cause Houses breathe, communicate, hurt and laugh. For McBride, humanizing the projects was an intentional move. 

“There is a dynamic that exists within the lifestyle of this neighborhood . . . and that dynamic involves a lot of love and a lot of respect for each other,” he says. “And a lot of diversity. A lot of mixing other races and not just white/black, but the mixing of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Haitians.” 

McBride grew up in a housing project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, but as he notes, it would be a mistake to simply trace the Cause Houses back to his own project experiences. “The Red Hook Houses were not like the Cause Houses, but the same love was there,” he says. “Some of it is based on my experiences living in Red Hook as a child, but a lot of it is based on my experiences living in black America as a man. Because the Cause Houses are in every city, but they just have different names.” 

The black church also stars in Deacon King Kong. McBride, who was raised in a black church, bristles at “poor media portrayals” that reduce it to unfortunate stereotypes. Five Ends Baptist Church is a corrective. It is his attempt to illuminate the black church as a site of great intrigue and inspiration. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: An interview with James McBride about his debut novel.

“I really wanted to present the black church as a dynamic place with fully dimensional characters, some of whom are likable, and some of whom are not,” he says. “Some of them are funny, and some of them are not. It’s not just a library or a community center. It’s not a social club. It’s a little bit of all those things. Ultimately, it’s a volunteer agency where people get together and have fun. The faith that holds them together is what makes them interesting, vulnerable and funny at the same time. If you look beyond the race and focus on the humanity of the people, the church is a fascinating place to write about.” 

Despite the seriousness of some of its themes, Deacon King Kong is an incredibly funny novel, with sharp comedic language and precise timing that never lets up. Aside from his own ingenuity, McBride’s brand of humor has a variety of influences. He considers Kurt Vonnegut to be the “most extraordinary literary humorist,” but he’s also gleaned much from stage comedians like cross-cultural titans Richard Pryor and George Carlin. He also highlights the impact of underappreciated African American comedians like Redd Foxx, Nipsey Russell and Moms Mabley. He reserves his highest praise for Dick Gregory, whom he suggests was “the one comedian who really understood a lot about the black experience in America.”

Deacon King Kong is an incredibly funny novel, with sharp comedic language and precise timing that never lets up.

When asked what he thinks today’s readers can learn from a story about a shooting in the projects set over 50 years ago, McBride is very direct. “The aim of the book is to show people that we are all alike, that our aims are the same and that we are more alike than we are different,” he says. “We’re currently at a time where we need to be reminded about humanity and our heritage, and the fact that courage, modesty and morality are still the spine that holds America together.”

McBride has had a remarkably successful career by anyone’s standards. Aside from his hotshot debut and award-winning novel, his books have been optioned and adapted for film and television, and he collaborated with legendary filmmaker Spike Lee on the script for Red Hook Summer. When asked to envision the next stage of his career, McBride’s answer illuminates his ultimate purpose as a writer: “I hope that one day my work around the subject of race will be irrelevant and that we’ll find something else to write about. You know, in a hundred years I hope that we’ll be writing about how even though Martians have two heads and one eyeball and look like two-headed Cyclopses, they’re really pretty much the same as us.” 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Deacon King Kong.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described The Good Lord Bird as McBride’s first novel, not his third.

Success, we often hear, is a double-edged sword. Just ask Emily St. John Mandel. Her surprise bestselling fourth novel, Station Eleven (2014), launched her into the literary stratosphere. That was a very good thing. For the most part.

“When you have a wildly successful book, you have a sense of audience that wasn’t there before,” Mandel says during a call to her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where the Vancouver Island native has lived for almost 17 years. “That’s about the least sympathetic problem in the entire world, so I don’t talk about it too much. But before Station Eleven, I had no sense of anybody waiting for my next book. I could just go out and write. Afterward, I had this internal pressure that I needed to replicate its success. I was aware that people were waiting for the new book, speculating about it.”

“Everybody in [this novel] is haunted in some way by memory or by actual ghosts.”

Much of that speculation had to do with whether or not the new novel would also be a chilling, post-apocalyptic tale like Station Eleven. It is not. Instead, The Glass Hotel tells a more intricate, haunting and enthralling story, drawing some of its narrative energy from Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. It’s about money and the compromises and moral panics of gaining it, having it and losing it—a topic that Mandel acknowledges is rarely talked about, let alone written about in fiction.

“I grew up in a very working-class environment,” Mandel says. “I have no complaints. I had great parents and a really good childhood, even though we really didn’t have much. But what growing up without much money gives you is a sort of painful awareness of money. You’re very aware that you’re wearing secondhand clothes and your friends aren’t. Then, as you get older, you encounter people who have grown up in very different circumstances, and you start to see how much of life can be influenced by how much money your family has.” 

Mandel’s literary success has placed her at events where she spends time with very wealthy people like the ones she so sharply characterizes in The Glass Hotel. “To be clear, they’re often lovely people I adore,” she says, “but I do sometimes feel like a tourist in the kingdom of money.” This phrase is echoed in the novel by one of Mandel’s most riveting characters, a woman named Vincent who grows up in working-class circumstances on Vancouver Island and, through intelligence and personal magnetism, goes on to become the “trophy wife” (loosely speaking, since they’re not actually married) of a Madoff-style investment-scheme mogul named Jonathan Alkaitis. (This is one of three lives Vincent inhabits in the story; she also takes on the roles of bartender at the titular hotel and, later, cook on an international shipping freighter.)

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Glass Hotel.

Now that Mandel has some money herself, she is paying for a younger brother’s college education. “It’s an honor to do it,” she says. “For him it would have been a matter of deciding between getting an education and taking on massive debt.” Her newfound affluence is also helping her and her husband (and their very young daughter) renovate their Brooklyn home. At the time of our conversation, her house is in chaos. Her office, she says, is filled with all the couple’s books and “thousands of boxes.” The hammering thunder of workers is, to say the least, distracting.

Her husband, Kevin Mandel, is also a writer. “Probably it’s not the easiest thing to have two anythings—two writers, two lawyers, two therapists—in one household,” she says, laughing. “But I would say that it’s wonderful to live with someone who profoundly understands the way you want to spend your days. . . . There’s not that kind of bafflement you sometimes get from people who don’t understand why you would want to close yourself in a room for six hours just to write about fictional people. Also, having an in-house editor is a really nice thing.” Kevin, she says, is her first reader.

Regarding the ideas that eventually bodied forth as The Glass Hotel, Mandel says she didn’t have much interest in Bernie Madoff himself. “He seems like a garden-variety narcissist,” she says. “What was fascinating to me was that this was a sort of double mass delusion, where on the one side there were the investors, who were smart people who were getting [financial] statements that really made no sense but were just letting it go because they were making so much money. And on the other side was the staff that was actually carrying out the Ponzi scheme.”

At the time the Madoff story broke, Mandel still had a day job as an administrative assistant in the Rockefeller University’s cancer research lab. “For years, I couldn’t stop thinking about the camaraderie that one has with one’s co-workers,” she says. “Just think of how much more intense that camaraderie would be if you were showing up at work every Monday to perpetuate a massive crime. These people had to somehow convince themselves that they weren’t bad people, that what they were doing was somehow OK.”

Each of Mandel’s characters is haunted in one way or another. Vincent is haunted by the death of her mother, who drowned off the coast of Vancouver Island when she was a child. Her half brother, Paul, is haunted by his betrayal of his sister and others. While in prison, Ponzi-schemer Alkaitis is visited by apparitions and vivid images of an unlived counterlife. Alkaitis’ mostly younger criminal associates have their own ghosts and regrets. In the novel, Mandel writes, “There are so many ways to haunt a person or a life.”

“I see that as almost the entire thesis of the book,” Mandel says. “Everybody in every section is haunted in some way by memory or by actual ghosts. . . . I’ve always loved ghost stories. I’ve found them fascinating since I was a kid. I can offer a lot of very plausible reasons for why it makes sense to put that in the story, but the real truth is, I just wanted to write a ghost story. It just kind of developed.”

Still, Mandel says, the development of this novel was difficult. First, she was writing it after having just given birth to her daughter. And then there is her standard messy process.

“I’ve never had an outline for any novel I’ve written,” she says, laughing. “That has some plusses and minuses. The downside is my first draft is a big mess. The positive is there’s a good possibility of surprise. You might start out writing a white-collar drama about a Ponzi scheme that somehow evolves into a ghost story.”

And about Vincent’s dangerous post-trophy wife existence as a cook on a freighter? “Until I did my research, I hadn’t really thought about how vulnerable people are [when] working in international waters,” she says. “I read a story about a young woman working on a container ship who accused a co-worker of rape. She disappeared from the ship that night. It was in international waters, under the jurisdiction of no country nearby. Legally a ship is a tiny floating piece of whatever country it’s flagged to. So if you’re flagged to Mongolia, Mongolia is not going to investigate a possible crime in international waters. That’s just not happening.”

The perplexing practical and moral predicaments that build throughout The Glass Hotel may seem random—but in the end, the story packs a powerful punch.

“To my eye,” Mandel says, “The Glass Hotel is a more interesting novel than Station Eleven. Because it’s weirder. It has a lot of different threads. It’s more complicated than my previous novels. And more subtle. Because it was so much harder to write than my previous books, it feels like more of an achievement. I’m proud of it.”

Author photo © Sarah Shatz

The events in Raven Leilani’s debut novel, Luster, are indeed dramatic: A young Black woman named Edie begins a relationship with an older white man named Eric, who’s in an open marriage with Rebecca, who is also white. When Edie loses her job and apartment, Rebecca moves Edie into their home, where the younger woman becomes a type of mentor for the couple’s adopted Black daughter, Akila. This arrangement is fraught with strange, unspoken tension, with power, violence and control forming a complicated structure that holds aloft their generational, social and racial imbalances.

But for all this drama, what is most transfixing about Luster is Leilani’s uncanny ability to pin her characters down and to preserve the utter truth of Edie’s thoughts from one harrowing moment to the next. Leilani answered questions via email about the economic precarity of her young Black protagonist, the want and rage of her female characters and what a “millennial novel” even is, anyway.

There seem to be three layers (or possibly more) to the title: lust (a feeling of desire), luster (the sheen of something that is desired) and lust-er (one who desires). What are you introducing to the reader with this title, and how does its meaning change?
Along with desire, I would say it is also about how luster is tarnished as Edie reconciles the fantasy she has cultivated with the reality of earnestly seeking it out. There is the luster of memory—death and grief underpin much of the story, and Edie’s painting is partly about preservation, art as record keeping—and luster is also speaking to the degradation of the body. Her body often doubles as currency, which comes at significant personal cost. A more optimistic take could be that she manages to preserve her luster despite this, and the preservation of nerve and daring and bodily autonomy while wanting unabashedly is what this is partly about.

“I think the sense of dread you feel, and what I felt writing it, was knowing it wasn’t going to end without some kind of carnage.”

The pacing in Luster is absolutely brilliant. The chapters are broken up into smaller passages, and sometimes a single paragraph is a total gut-punch, while other sections sweep along breathlessly for several pages, like when Edie loses her job and apartment back to back. Tell us about the rhythm of your writing and how you use that flow to tell the story.
Thank you so much for saying that. For me this was, and is, one of the hardest parts of writing. I knew the book was going to be short. When I write, I like to get in and get out, say what I need to say as immediately as I can. Part of it is craft, and part of is my own anxiety about maintaining the attention of my reader. So I think that, along with the frenzy of Edie’s experience, brought a kind of urgency to the structure. And I am obsessed with sustaining a high level of energy in the language, because it’s fun, and because it lends itself to a more robust depiction of chaos, and those are the scenes I live to write. So much of this book takes place in Edie’s mind, and I wanted readers to feel the tumult of that processing, the whittling down of that bandwidth.

Speaking of Edie’s lost job and apartment: I can’t think of a better representation of how quickly a person can slip from just-hanging-on to losing everything. With a blink, Edie tumbles from a low-paying publishing job into the gig economy. This seems like an important aspect of who Edie is—that things can tumble out of control, and she’s just doing what she can to keep going. Tell us a bit about Edie’s situation, and how this can happen.
It was important to me to write frankly about that precarity. As I tried to depict the messiness of the artist’s journey, I felt a responsibility to also talk about the social and economic forces that shape, or in this case, impede a person’s ability to follow that path. In Edie’s case, when we meet her she is a young, Black professional, prone to lapses of judgment, of course, but deeply engaged in the performance demanded of her at work and in her personal life. She understands what she is up against, and she is always calculating, always adjusting and always observing, because her survival depends on it. But those demands are impossible and ultimately dehumanizing, and for a lot of Black women, the margin for error is thin. I wanted to write about this tenuousness and how it shapes how, when or if you can make art.

Control and power—who has it and who wants it—play major roles in Luster. Edie seems to have given up on having control over her life, and she has a complicated relationship with sexual power and violence. Rebecca seeks control over her body (and, it seems, her adopted daughter’s body) but also over the open-marriage situation; she also dabbles in violence through her taste in concerts. What is at the root of all these bids for control?
When I came to this book and began the work of trying to honestly depict want and rage, especially within the lives of women, I found I was also writing about disorder. The disorder that is a byproduct of living in a body that is subject to extremes, and that is made unruly by how closely it is policed, and how it lives in defiance of that surveillance. So these characters are doing their best to create some sense of control, which can mean seizing it, wielding it against someone less powerful, as Rebecca does, relinquishing it entirely, as Edie does, and trying to maintain some homeostasis, as Akila does. I wanted to make room for their responses to be human, so I tried to present these contradictions in a way that was nonjudgmental.

Rebecca performs autopsies, which you’ve said in other interviews that you learned about by watching your mother work. Why did you give Rebecca this job? What does it say about her?
My mother worked as a medical examiner at the VA, and I was really struck by the tenderness and rigor of that work. I gave Rebecca this job because this work made an enormous impression on me, and I really wanted to write more about it, but it was also a great window into Rebecca’s character. She is a person who likes to know how things work. She likes to keep a record, and the body is a record. It is another way into writing about the work of witnessing and preservation. Eric does it as an archivist. Edie does it through painting.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Luster.

There’s something sinister about Rebecca’s apparent kindness when she invites Edie to move in, partially because it’s clear that Edie has been brought in to be a type of mentor to Akila, Rebecca and Eric’s adopted Black daughter. What is this sense of dread we feel?
I think the sense of dread you feel, and what I felt writing it, was knowing it wasn’t going to end without some kind of carnage. You get to know Edie before she becomes a part of this family, and you understand her desperation. Desire and powerlessness create a combustible byproduct, and that is threatening to an arrangement that is predicated on rules. There is never any real sense of balance, and this instability feeds this feeling of dread. And also, you understand that in this new environment, Edie is imperiled in a different way. The surveillance is overt, and her unruliness becomes more prominent and more dangerous.

Luster feels like a defining millennial novel the way Ling Ma’s Severance did, but I have trouble pinpointing why—perhaps because Luster seems to acknowledge something dark and truthful about the world, but without overt complaint. How would you define a millennial novel, and is Luster quintessentially millennial?
I think the connective tissue between a lot of millennial fiction is a sense of rootlessness, desperation, a disgust with and complicity in the farce of work under late capitalism and occasionally, total surrender to this debasement, but I have to admit I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the generalizations that find their way into the critical response to books authored primarily by women, which to differing degrees are grappling with how to assert personhood and find meaning within a context of extreme social and economic precarity. Of course there is much to lampoon, and I think a balanced work is also spotlighting the parts of millennial life that are ridiculous, though I don’t feel at all qualified to speak for a generation. I didn’t set out to write a millennial novel, but it absolutely is one, partly because my own experience is deeply present in the work. Edie’s life is pressurized by the intersections of her identity, by racism, sexism and class, and I felt moved to write it because it felt urgent to me, and I noticed, too, that when we talk about millennials, we often seem to be talking about millennials who are white.

Like Edie, you are a talented painter, primarily of portraits. Does your writing world overlap with your painting? Is it a similar creative process, or are you tapping into something completely separate when you paint?
I think my writing world overlaps with my painting world in that art is always creeping into my fiction. I’m obsessed with the role of failure in art-making, probably because this was the first creative endeavor where I felt the frustration of coming up against my own limits and being unable to communicate what was in my mind. It’s a horrible feeling, and I can handle that feeling with writing because if I work long enough, I’ll find my way through. With painting, if it comes together, it feels like luck. Most of my painting process is correcting mistakes. It’s very disorganized, which is very much how I write, but with writing I have a little more control. They both feel like time travel. During the days I’d like to exist a little less, writing or painting is a great anesthetic.

How did the writing of this novel change you? Or perhaps, what most surprised you in the writing of it?
I’m not sure if this is how you mean it, but writing this novel and having it now be a thing in the world has forced me to articulate its intent in a way I don’t think I would have otherwise. It’s made me more rigorous, having to justify why I did what I did, which is not how I write. Not to diminish the role of craft, but I’m always just feeling my way through. What feels good, what feels true. Talking with people who’ve taken such care with it has been so illuminating; in some ways the book has become new to me again.

What are your writing rituals?
My main ritual is to write in bed, totally alone. Regularly, even if I don’t feel particularly inspired. I like the idea of going to get a coffee and working around people, but I can’t shake the feeling of being in public, and I can’t write in that kind of defensive posture.

Author photo © Evan Davis.