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Art, Memoir, Nonfiction

Sally Mann

by Alden Mudge

Does photographer Sally Mann really have a bulging file called “Maternal Slights,” as she writes in her courageous and visually ravishing memoir, Hold Still?

“Are you kidding? Oh my gosh. I can put my hand on it right now!” Mann says during a call to her home on cherished and much-photographed farmland in the small Shenandoah Valley town of Lexington, Virginia, where she grew up. Mann, who is widely regarded as one of America’s foremost photographers, lives there with her husband, Larry, an artist-turned-lawyer she met when she was 18 and married soon after. Their three children, subjects of Mann’s beautiful but controversial 1992 photography project Immediate Family, are adults now, living their own lives.

“I’m so mean-spirited,” Mann continues, “I wrote all my mother’s slights down. There were so many of them.” An example Mann recounts in Hold Still is that her mother planned a trip to Europe that began just days before Mann was to give birth.

Mann's stunning memoir is part family history, part photo album, part aesthetic manifesto.

“She was oblivious to the effect of things like that. Just oblivious. And that’s because she herself had been so badly injured. I knew she had had a rough time, but until I did the research for this book, I didn’t realize the full extent of what her childhood and her adulthood—I mean, being married to my father was no picnic—had been like. In the end, one of the main things that came out of writing this book was this profound regret that I hadn’t been a better daughter. It troubles me no end, even now.”

Mann’s revelatory investigation of the fascinating, wounded histories on both sides of her family—and the shocking tragedy of her husband’s parents—began with an invitation to deliver the Massey lectures at Harvard University. In preparation, she began opening boxes of photographs, letters, diaries, newspaper clippings and other papers that had been gathering dust in her attic—uncovering, as it were, family secrets—and found herself “wondering what part of these lives, this dolorous DNA, has made me who I am.” This is a central question of Hold Still, which is part personal memoir (a word Mann says she hates), part family history, part brilliant photo album and part aesthetic manifesto.

“I think we turn into what our genes tell us to turn into, to a large extent,” Mann says. What that means for her memoir is that each family story leads inexorably to a searching, vividly written examination of one of the obsessions that are the subjects of her sublime photographs, some of which are reproduced in the book.

Sally Mann and her husband, Larry, at their 1970 wedding in her parents’ garden.

An example? In the book’s fourth and final section Mann writes about her father, an emotionally distant but compassionate country doctor she describes as a man with an “air of solipsistic distraction,” a passion for art and a lifelong fascination with death. This leads to a profound discussion of the fearless work compiled in Mann’s book What Remains, which includes photographs she took of dead bodies at the University of Tennessee forensic research facility known as the Body Farm, and of the photographs she took of the body of her father, who committed suicide to end a long illness.

“I talk very cavalierly and confidently about photographing those bodies,” Mann says. “But the first ones I saw were a shock. It was hard. Once I got used to it, I found it helpful to accept that part of death, the physical decay. I’m more than fine with that. What I don’t want is to die until I’m ready to die. Like everybody else, I want to have everything tied up. I want my bed to be made. I want the perfect death.”

Similarly, a regretful consideration of all she failed to ask about the life of Gee-Gee, the African-American woman who raised her and who, more than her own parents, offered Sally unconditional love, propelled Mann into a photography project that explores the emotional and physical landscapes that are a legacy of slavery.

And Mann’s investigation of the hidden life of her mother’s family, especially the life of her sentimental grandfather and his nostalgic love of the land, leads her to write passionately about the place where she has lived all her life and the impulses behind her haunting photographs of Southern landscapes.

“I derive so much strength from being in the South,” Mann says. “It can be hideous in places, but there’s just something fundamentally gorgeous about the South.”

Still, as a young would-be artist from the South, Mann found it painful to be far from the cultural power of New York. She says she and Larry lacked the funds, and she herself lacked the courage, to move to New York. “I put my faith in my work, as I always have, and believed that if it was good enough it wouldn’t be ignored.”

Mann’s breakthrough came with the Immediate Family pictures, which catapulted her to international fame—or maybe infamy. The critical attention she received was clearly a mixed blessing. In some quarters she was vilified for a collection that included nude photographs of her young children. Her harshest critic called her a child pornographer.

In a riveting passage in Hold Still, Mann offers a kind of rejoinder. There, in wonderfully expressive pictures and text, she dissects the aesthetics of a sequence of photographs of her young son who stands naked and shivering in the river at the edge of the family property. One of these pictures found its way into the Immediate Family portfolio. Mann’s exposition offers an illuminating analysis of why she chose one picture over another, of what makes one photograph more beautiful than another. “When I see a good picture of my own,” Mann says, “when it comes up in the developer, my heart will skip a beat. I’ll have a physical reaction. It’s like, as some Romantic poet said, you’ve taken a mortal blow to your chest.”

Great pictures or not, Mann says one of her concerns about the publication of Hold Still is of “dredging all that up again. I didn’t want that to be the focus when the family pictures came out, and I don’t want that to be the focus now. One of the questions back then was, have I done something that is going to irremediably change the kids? It’s good to get to the end of that long tunnel and find that things are OK.”

In her early 20s, a few years after she had begun taking pictures with her first good camera, Mann got a master’s degree in creative writing. “Back then I thought it was possible to marry writing and photography artistically,” she explains. “Naturally that was a dismal failure. Because who can actually do that?”

Forty years later, Hold Still, a glorious marriage of words and pictures, will lead a reader to conclude that, actually, Mann has done it.

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Does photographer Sally Mann really have a bulging file called “Maternal Slights,” as she writes in her courageous and visually ravishing memoir, Hold Still?

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Jonathan Galassi

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Legendary book editor Jonathan Galassi has been at Farrar, Straus and Giroux since 1986 and is now its president and publisher. So why is his rambunctious, captivating first novel, Muse, being published by a rival?

“Oh, I don’t think it would be kosher for us to publish it,” Galassi says during a call to his office in New York. “It would seem like a strange kind of nepotism. Besides, I’d like to feel that my book is legitimate, that it’s being published because someone liked it, not because they had to.”

Muse is certainly legitimate—and more than likable. In fact, it’s quite funny and revelatory about an almost-lost world of literary publishing. The novel tells the story of a clash of publishing titans—Homer Stern and Sterling Wainwright—waging long-term war over, well, just about everything. But especially over Ida Perkins, a poet as famous as Ernest Hemingway and as enigmatic as J.D. Salinger. The novel’s protagonist is Paul Dukach, a bookish young man who idolizes Perkins and becomes the foremost authority on her life and work and, eventually, a sort of adopted son of both publishers.

Muse is, as Galassi writes in the preface, “a love story. It’s about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers, with beautiful or not-so-beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell. . . .”

“They say write what you know,” Galassi says regarding the origins of his novel. “The two old-lion publishers are based on people that I did know very well and admired a lot. They were both very engaging and witty people. And they did hate each other. I thought it was a good setup for a look at the publishing business as it used to be.”

“Big egos have big libidos. Having a big ego makes you insufferable in a way, but it also lets you do things, don’t you think?"

As portrayed by Galassi, publishers Stern and Wainwright are anything but madam-librarian type book people. They are operatic in their competitiveness and their libidos. “That’s all drawn from life,” Galassi says. “Big egos have big libidos. Having a big ego makes you insufferable in a way, but it also lets you do things, don’t you think? There’s something kind of heroic in a monstrous way about it.” His portraits of these publishers are, Galassi says, “part of the swashbuckling, lovingly satirical, comedic tone of the book.”

Although he doesn’t quite admit to it, the milder, more diplomatic character of Paul Dukach probably arises from Galassi’s own sensibilities. Galassi is often described as the most gentlemanly editor in the business.

The poet Ida Perkins, however, is pure invention, a character that Galassi clearly loved imagining into life. Muse includes a puckishly inventive “concise bibliography” of Perkins’ work that will make an unsuspecting reading wonder why he has not read any of these inspired works of poetry. It also includes a selection from Perkins’ final collection of poems in which the novel’s protagonist discovers “an onion skin atom bomb” that will alter the balance of power among his contending father figures.

“There’s chutzpah involved in writing those poems,” Galassi admits. “But the thing about the book is that it’s not meant to be realistic. Of course those poems would not be the greatest poems of the century, but there is something that makes them plausible. I loved writing them. They’re not my poems. They’re her poems. They’re in her voice. Part of the fun of it was trying to ventriloquize. It’s all part of this pastiche of literary life, literary culture.”

Galassi, by the way, is a well-regarded poet himself and an accomplished translator of Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. He was poetry editor of The Paris Review for a decade. His most recent volume of poetry, Left-handed, is a semi-autobiographical exploration of the emotional disruption a middle-aged man experiences as his long-term marriage ends and he falls in love with a younger man.

Galassi says that after finishing Left-handed, “which has a kind of narrative arc,” he felt he should try writing a novel. “I’d always thought I could never do that. I work with all these people who write novels. I admire what they do, and I wondered, are they really a different species from me? So I thought it’s now or never; why not try. It was a challenge to myself.”

Thus in his mid-60s Galassi began to write fiction every day “for as many hours as I could. And then I’d put those pages away and never look at them. I did that for a month. And then I put it away for a year. And then I looked at it a year later and decided I had something to work with. I was going against my own editorial faculty that might have prevented me from letting loose.”

And then the editor got edited. “Robin Dresser, my editor at Knopf, was very critical and very demanding. I found that I had the most difficulty cutting. I didn’t want to let go of this; I didn’t want to let go of that. I had to go against my desire to have pages. But what matters is not how many pages you have but how good they are. This,” Galassi says with a wry laugh, “is what I tell my writers all the time.”

Toward the end of the conversation, the discussion turns to the future of the book, a topic of concern in Galassi’s novel and for Galassi himself. He says that the tsunami of eBooks once predicted to wash away printed books has abated. “eBooks are a big part of our business. But they’re not the whole thing. . . . Books are still books. Many young people really want books as physical objects because book culture is not just about content. It’s an atmosphere, a world of its own, with a physical component. People talk about the ‘erotics of books.’ If you came to my office, you’d see shelves and shelves of books that I’ve worked on and that we’ve published over the years in all their different colors and sizes. Books are beautiful things. They really do furnish a room.”

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Paula McLain

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

When her writing is going really well, when she is “all in,” Paula McLain, author of the best-selling historical novel The Paris Wife, calls herself “a head in a jar.” All brain, no body.

The feeling, McLain says, is “of being in a deep-sea diving bell. You go down, down, down until you hear those pings coming off the ocean floor. You’re not reachable. You’re not conscious of time passing. Whole hours disappear and you’re completely absorbed.”

That was the opposite of what McLain was feeling a few years ago when her brother-in-law, a doctor and pilot, forced upon her a copy of West with the Night, a memoir by Beryl Markham, the British-born Kenyan bush pilot who, in 1936, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. At that time McLain was writing a historical novel about Marie Curie. It wasn’t working. When she wrote The Paris Wife, McLain had felt a deep connection to Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, that allowed her “to believe absolutely, unequivocally that I understood her enough that I could follow her down a rabbit hole to Paris in 1922. But with Marie it was like being kicked out of heaven every single day of the writing.”

The Markham memoir sat on McLain’s bookshelf unread while she suffered. “Then one day when I was in the midst of despair, I picked it up and read one paragraph about her African childhood and thought: What have I been doing!” says McLain, who, when excited, speaks in a headlong rush.

“There was nothing subtle about it. I just knew I was going to write about her. In fact I wrote my agent that day and said, I’m ditching the Marie Curie book and writing about Beryl Markham. And she’s like, oh, please let’s not tell Random House. So for months and months I had to lie to my editor, I had to lie to my publisher. How are things going? Still working, still working. And, meanwhile, I was just lighting up the African bush in my imagination, writing really fast and having a really good time.” McLain finished a near-final draft of Circling the Sun, her novel about Markham, in five months.

In addition to being an aviation pioneer, Markham was the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya. Her mother moved home to England when Markham was very young, and she grew up a wild child, running with the native Kipsigis children while her father built up his farm and stable of racing horses. As a young woman she was unusually tall and strikingly attractive. She was thrice married, unhappily, beginning at age 16. Because of her beauty, independence and adventurousness, she was a magnet for rumors about her romantic life, some of them undoubtedly true. Even today, almost 30 years after her death at age 83, Markham remains a subject of salacious gossip, as McLain discovered during a recent research trip to Kenya.

Writing a convincing, memorable novel about Markham and the society of that era in Kenya, as she has done in Circling the Sun, presented McLain with a host of challenges. First off was the fact the Markham had already told her own story in West with the Night.

Re-reading the memoir and comparing it to biographies of Markham, McLain began to notice that “Beryl was very, very selective in what she chose to tell.” McLain examined the gaps and “thought, oh my god! This is a woman on the run. This is a sphinx. This is a woman like Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast who leaves all the pertinent stuff out. There are almost no women here. She doesn’t talk about her friendship with Karen Blixen. She uses a kind of dazzle camouflage. I wanted to figure out what created the engine of her psyche. I wondered, how does a person like Beryl get made.”

So Circling the Sun became a coming-of-age story that explored the emotional complexity of Markham’s personal and romantic life. The transatlantic flight bookends the novel as a near-death experience that permits Markham to acknowledge some difficult truths about her life. “Someone like Beryl would actually need to be at the verge of death in order to confess some of this stuff,” McLain explains.

McLain feels the reason she was able to write so vividly about Markham’s childhood is her deep sense of connection with her heroine. Like Markham, McLain and her sisters, who grew up in Fresno, California, were abandoned by their mother at an early age, a subject she wrote about in the 2003 memoir Like Family. “I believed I knew something about the wildness she was talking about. I felt I knew what it was like to be let loose to explore that really difficult world.”

Some of the best scenes in the novel are the horseracing scenes, where Markham proves herself in a male-dominated world. Here too, McLain attributes the success of these scenes to her connectedness with Markham. “I grew up sort of the way Beryl did, meaning that from childhood I was super physical with horses. Like saddling up the pony and launching over the landscape with my sisters and not coming back until dinnertime. I understand Beryl’s attachment to the physical animal and that sense of freedom, of flying along in an untethered, unbounded way.”

Developing the details of other sections of the novel—colonial and native life in Kenya during the early years of the 20th century, for example—McLain employed a sort of just-in-time research, gathering facts just ahead of composing the next section of her novel. Her biggest challenge, she says, was sorting through all the conflicting accounts and gossip about Markham’s life, especially her love life. “I had to let some of this stuff go,” she says, laughing. “It’s provocative, it’s scintillating, but I’m not writing Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Instead, the novel concentrates on dramatizing Markham’s most important relationships: her complex lifelong friendship with a Kenyan man named Ruta, the circumstances of her three unsatisfying marriages; and her emotionally fraught affair with the love of her life, pilot and hunting guide Denys Finch Hatton, who was at the same time in a relationship with her friend Karen Blixen, author of the memoir Out of Africa under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen.

Movie fans will remember Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Blixen and Robert Redford’s portrayal of Finch Hatton in the film Out of Africa. McLain admits, laughing, that it was impossible for her not to picture Redford as she wrote about this relationship.

“It’s my favorite movie. All I have to do is watch two minutes in the middle of the night, and I’m reduced to tears. But I had to dismember and complicate it to tell my story. I know that there will be readers who will be really ticked with me for doing that. But telling the true story doesn’t mean that Denys and Karen didn’t really love each other. It just means that they were really, really intricate people.”

McLain pauses and shifts subjects to say that, in her view, Markham was sustained throughout her life by a warrior spirit she developed as a child. When her life went off the rails, as it did in many of her romantic relationships, it was because “she crosses her own lines and loses herself. She loses the connection with her personal power that came from that early childhood identity.”

Then McLain returns to the impact on Markham and Blixen of the death of Finch Hatton. “You know, there’s a line at the end of my book that goes, ‘This time with Denys would fade, and it would last forever.’ That’s something I actually believe about love. Sometimes we don’t get to keep the people we love the most and who change us the most. That’s an unromantic, uncommercial view of love. But to me it feels absolutely true.”

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When her writing is going really well, when she is “all in,” Paula McLain, author of the best-selling historical novel The Paris Wife, calls herself “a head in a jar.” All brain, no body.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

William Boyd

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Beginning with the 1981 publication of his first novel, A Good Man in Africa, winner of the prestigious Whitbread Award, William Boyd has been astonishingly prolific—14 novels, four story collections, four plays, countless film and television scripts, essays and reviews.

“I think it’s a very British thing,” Boyd says during an afternoon call to his home in London. He and his wife, formerly editor-at-large for Harper’s Bazaar and now a film writer and producer, are packing to escape overheated London for the house they have owned for 20 years in rural southwest France, where they spend roughly a quarter of the year. “You’ve got to write something every day,” Boyd says. “It needn’t be a novel. It might be a restaurant review or your diary. I think it’s because of the great Victorians—Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope—those tireless dynamos of writers who make us all look lazy. In the British literary tradition, it seems normal to be prolific.”

Over the last decade, in addition to producing a novel every three or so years, much of Boyd’s extracurricular writing has been devoted to a newfound interest in photography. That interest bodies forth in bold, captivating and mischievous ways in his sweeping new novel, Sweet Caress.

Subtitled “The Many Lives of Amory Clay,” the novel opens on a sparsely populated island off the coast of Scotland in 1977 with the title character, born in 1908, looking back over a tumultuous life. As a professional photographer, Amory has been a witness to many of the signature events of the 20th century: the return of emotionally damaged soldiers—including her father—from World War I; scandalous Berlin between the wars; the catastrophes of World War II and Vietnam. Amory’s romantic life has been equally turbulent.

“In all my novels I tend to steer my protagonists into areas of life or history that intrigue me,” Boyd says. “Amory’s journey is pretty amazing, but it’s not extraordinary. A lot of women photographers, especially between the wars, seemed to live interesting, emotional-rollercoaster lives. Photography is a very democratic profession. There was no glass ceiling for these women. So they had a kind of independence which other professions open to women did not have.”

As part of his interest in photography as an art form, Boyd says he also wanted Amory’s career to span “the many types of photography that the 20th century threw up. So she takes [action] photographs like Jacques Henri Lartigue in the beginning of her career, then she becomes a society photographer like Cecil Beaton, then a fashion photographer maybe like Richard Avedon or Irving Penn, and then a war photographer and a reporter.”

Boyd decided early on that merely describing Amory’s photographs wouldn’t suffice. So in a move that will surely stir comment, Sweet Caress is illustrated with photographs purportedly of and by Amory. Other novels, Boyd notes, have included photos. His own elaborate literary hoax Nat Tate (1998), a supposed biography of a tragic American painter, for example, included images of the fictitious artist and his paintings. But, with 73 images, few previous works of fiction have used photography on the same scale as Sweet Caress.

“The decision to make Amory a photographer in the 20th century made me think that maybe I should do the unprecedented thing and put a lot of her photographs in the novel,” Boyd says. “Once I had that idea, it seemed to me a really intriguing kind of parallel creative process. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could illustrate her life with photos that were purportedly taken by her but are in fact anonymous photographs and also give the anonymous people in these photographs new identities from the fiction.”

And so the search for la photo juste began. Already a frequenter of junk shops and “car boot sales,” from which he had amassed a large collection of found photographs, Boyd also searched through online catalogs for photos of the right era and style. Vietnam War photos were the most difficult to come by because most of the pictures from that war are press photographs. But France, he notes with a laugh, was a gold mine. “The French seem to throw away their family albums willy nilly. Because I live in France, I go to these brocantes—antique fairs—where I’ve bought many a family album. I used them in Nat Tate and I used them in Sweet Caress.”

At the outset, Boyd worried that the photographs might be a distraction. But his creative selection of photographs, many of them snapshots, has the opposite effect. Not only do the images aptly fit how a reader might imagine a particular character or situation, but they add a surprising vitality to the narrative. As Boyd says, “In a very curious way that I haven’t fully analyzed yet, the photographs actually enhance the fiction. It’s a most strange thing that happens.”

Maybe, Boyd speculates, the key lies within the nature of the snapshot. “What strikes me about photography is that it’s a stop-time device. And I think the snapshot is the quintessence of photography. Time is frozen, a moment is frozen, life stops. That moment frozen forever can be incredibly powerful.”

Which leads Boyd to a kind of epiphany. “Many people have read the novel now and there’s a consensus that the photos don’t detract from the fiction. Seeing the man Amory’s in love with or the house she lives in actually makes the novel seem more real. And that fits into this bigger plan I realize I’ve been working on throughout my writing life, which is to make fiction seem so real you forget it’s fiction, to push the bounds of fiction into the real world, the world of history and journalism and reportage. I never had this plan, but I can look back at the work and see, yes, this is something I consistently tried to do: to make people’s suspension of disbelief absolute.”

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History

Stacy Schiff

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches, a brilliant, exceptionally well-researched account of the 1692 Salem witch trials, says her number one requirement when writing her prize-winning nonfiction books is “a big desk, an enormous desk!”

“You’re synthesizing massive amounts of raw material,” she explains during a call to her home just north of the grand, Beaux-Arts main branch of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, a favorite haunt. Schiff speaks rapidly and with enthusiasm. “For whatever reason, I physically like to have the maps, my notes, the articles and the books all on my desk while I’m working. I just can’t do that on a small-size desk.”

In fact, Schiff works at two enormous desks—one in Manhattan and one in Canada. Throughout her married life, Schiff and her husband, a Canadian businessman, have had a commuter marriage. “He’s the one who does the commuting. The kids [two sons, 15 and 24, and a daughter, 21] went to school in the U.S. So for the school year we’ve always been here. He goes back and forth. Then in the summer and holidays, when I get a huge amount of writing done, we decamp to Canada.” Her husband, she adds, is “an incredibly astute reader,” one of two trusted first-readers of her work.

Admiring readers of Schiff’s Cleopatra, her widely hailed 2010 biography of the Egyptian ruler, or Vera, her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, know her to be a remarkable researcher.

“I like to feel documents,” Schiff says, when asked about her methods. “I like to touch them, I like to smell them, I like to read them in the original!”

Schiff’s passion for primary documents proved particularly important in piecing together the story of a disturbing chapter in early American history.

“This is an episode we go to over and over again and can’t quite seem to resolve. It gets under the skin and enchants,” she says. “It’s a chapter that everyone thinks they know well but truthfully have great misconceptions about. Most people think the witches were burned. [They were hanged.] Most people have no idea that it included 19 people. Or that it took place over nine months. Or that men were also victims, including a minister! People aren’t sure about when it took place. Halfway between Plymouth Rock and Paul Revere, there’s this sort of strange wasteland in American history. You forget that there was this very different early America.”

Much of what is so compelling about The Witches is how vividly Schiff brings this very different era to life.

Schiff offers a nearly day-by-day account of the conflagration that is tactile in its detail.

The Puritans lived in near-constant dread of Native-American attacks. They contended with starvation during long, arduous winters in tightly enclosed spaces. Little wonder, Schiff notes, that it was in January and February that the overworked, sensory-deprived adolescent girls in the household of Salem’s minister were overtaken by fits of twitching and barking. The affliction spread.

Add to the mix the foreboding Puritan sensibility, and a skeptical modern reader can almost begin to understand the diagnoses of witchcraft. Of her four years of working on the book, of “disappearing into another century,” Schiff says, “It was a pretty dark and chilly place to live. This is a very bleak religion, in which you are meant to feel at all times off-kilter and inadequate. You are haunted by that horrible Puritan riddle—am I going to be saved or am I going to be damned? At some point I thought the first line should have been, ’This is a book about anxiety.’ ”

The Puritans were also a highly literate and highly litigious people. Neighbor sued neighbor for trespass or pigs in the garden seemingly at the drop of a hat. Carefully kept court records bloomed. And the Puritan elite—political leaders, court officials and ministers—wrote voluminous letters and kept personal journals. But the records of the nine-month witchcraft mania are curiously spotty, perhaps deliberately so.

Nevertheless, by keeping a careful chronology and uncovering “the interesting coincidences, the patterns”—by reading between the lines—Schiff offers a nearly day-by-day account of the conflagration that is tactile in its detail. Building on an account by John Alden, an eminent community member who was one of more than 100 people jailed in the widening gyre of accusations before finally being released, Schiff offers an astonishing description of the packed, smelly, raucous courtroom in which the teenage girls writhed and flitted between judges and accused, pointing to witches in the rafters. And she shrewdly reverse-engineers the hazy record to help us understand the charges against George Burroughs, the little-known, Harvard-educated minister who was hanged for being the supposed leader of this confederacy of witches.

Schiff’s account also draws deeply on Cotton Mather, a young, charismatic, spiritual and intellectual leader of the colony, who was often equivocal as events unfolded. “He’s so fascinating, so unctuous, so prolific, so all over the place and so desperate for the spotlight,” Schiff says. “He shouldn’t be blamed, but he’s at the white-hot center every step of the way. Looking at [the originals of] his letters, I was able to see where he crossed out, what he had trouble with, what he stalled on, what he emphasized. It gives you a strong sense of what everyone was listening to because he’s among the top authorities on the subject.”

Noting that earlier books about the witch trials “are very thesis driven,” Schiff felt her book “could only work if you just tell the story.” While she does sow seeds along the way, only in the final chapters of The Witches does Schiff offer her own fascinating analysis of the complex set of causes that probably underlie the witchcraft charges, the sudden passing of the storm and the years of denial about the persecution of innocents. In Schiff’s telling, this is an old story with contemporary implications.

This narrative approach works so well because Schiff just happens to be a superb and witty writer. Asked about her sometimes droll humor, she says that after reading an early draft of the book, one Yale scholar told her he didn’t know the Puritans could be this much fun.

“I do feel,” she explains, “that at some point you can only write in your own voice. I was aware that I had to be careful with this book—it’s a very sobering subject. On the one hand, you need to feel sympathy for all of these people, including the ones who are driving the prosecution forward for what they consider to be their own good reasons. On the other hand, you need to be interesting and you need to be vivid and you need to be lively. I decided that even while I told this relatively dark story, there was no reason why I couldn’t sparkle on the page.”

And The Witches definitely sparkles.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Sunil Yapa

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Sunil Yapa, author of the gripping, profoundly humane first novel Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, used to hide his laptop in the oven of the beach house he was renting in Chile.

“That was my security measure,” Yapa says with a bemused laugh during a call to Woodstock, New York, where he currently lives. “I’d put it in a baking tray and hide it in the oven!”

What Yapa was protecting was the 604-page first draft of his novel about the chaotic protest during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle that erupted into violence. In Chile, where he lived frugally while he was teaching himself to write, Yapa didn’t have access to a printer, the cloud or a backup hard drive. The novel lived only on his laptop. Maybe you can guess where this is going.

But first, a little more background: Yapa grew up mostly in State College, Pennsylvania. He knew from a young age that he wanted to write fiction. Libraries were his favorite haunt. And while he had many friends as a child, his mother often had to tell him to stop reading and shoo him out of the house to play. But as the son of an immigrant—his father is a recently retired Penn State geography professor from Sri Lanka; his mother is from Montana—“there was a sense that being a writer wasn’t a serious occupation or a useful use of your time. My father never said that to me, and in fact he’s very proud that I’m doing it. But it’s something that I absorbed and something I’ve heard reflected from other second-generation immigrant kids. It was very difficult to think about all he had sacrificed to get here and raise my brother and me in a middle-class life and take being an artist seriously.”

So from the age of 17 to 27, Yapa tried to follow in his father’s footsteps and get a Ph.D. in geography. But then he began to travel, “and I realized I didn’t want to be an academic; what I wanted to do was write fiction.”

Yapa also discovered a surprising way to support his writing habit. “I worked as a traveling salesman. A friend and I would travel all over the country to the biggest colleges and universities and sell posters. We would compress a year’s work into two intense months and make $10,000 or $15,000—not enough to live in New York or San Francisco or, really, anywhere in the U.S.” But with help from his grandfather, who encouraged his writing, he and his friend discovered that they could live on what they had made for a whole year in Chile or Guatemala without working. “We didn’t live the high life, but I was able to teach myself to write for almost seven years before I sent anything out.”

Yapa was eventually accepted to the Hunter College M.F.A. program, where he honed his talents with guidance from writers like Peter Carey, Colum McCann and Claire Messud. After graduating, he returned to his traveling-salesman gig to support the completion of his novel. One night on a sales trip to Chicago, the laptop containing the only copy of his book was stolen from his hotel room.

"I thought, oh god, I’m going to write this thing again because it’s not going to leave me alone.”

“I never recovered it. It was just gone. I was devastated, of course. I was depressed for three months. But I honestly think it was a moment when I knew I must be a writer because the story started bubbling up again in my brain, and I thought, oh god, I’m going to write this thing again because it’s not going to leave me alone.”

Yapa now thinks there were benefits to the loss of the first draft. The disappeared draft had more than 50 characters. The published book includes a streamlined and compelling cast of characters—fully realized personalities who dramatize the stories of the people who clashed in Seattle on the first day of the WTO meeting. These include Victor, an initially apolitical, homeless teenager with a connection to Police Chief Bishop; demonstrators Kingfisher and John Henry, who struggle throughout a brutal day to remain nonviolent; police officers Park and “Ju,” who are overwhelmed by the sheer number of protesters; and Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, a Sri Lankan diplomat caught up in the fray.

“I was thinking about the protest and about globalization,” says Yapa, explaining the inception of the book, “and I found this picture of a woman on the street in Seattle, almost wreathed in tear gas. She was on her knees and there was blood coming from her forehead. Someone, he looks like a medic, is tending to her scalp. Her hands are clasped together and it looks like she’s praying, but she might just be in pain. You can’t tell. I saw that, and I thought, wow, what would make a woman like that risk tear gas, pepper spray, beatings for a protest? Because this was a different kind of protest. It was about someone else’s rights three continents away. It wasn’t about an expansion of this person’s own rights, necessarily, but about a recognition of living in a globally connected world, where our lives overlap with each other. That, to me, was both inspiring and totally confusing.”

Yapa, who lived in Seattle when he was 19—the same age as his luminous character Victor—did an enormous amount of research to bring a startling clarity to his narrative. “Almost everything that happens in the book happened, at some point, in the protest,” Yapa says. “I wanted the experience for a reader to be accurate, not sensationalized.”

So a reader will experience the incredible discipline of the nonviolent protesters; the utter confusion and fear of a police force of 900 at most trying—and finally failing—to maintain order when faced with 60,000 demonstrators; and the tension within all of Yapa’s characters between their public actions and their complex inner thoughts and emotions.

This ends up making Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist an absolutely compelling read. Many of the scenes are simply electrifying and some are quite violent. “I really, really wanted this book to be a page-turner,” Yapa says. “But I didn’t want to sensationalize the violence. And yet [violent acts] happened. I wanted a reader to experience what courage it must have taken for people to sit through this.”

In addition, Yapa is interested in the ideas behind the protests and the WTO. “I also wanted readers to experience the politics and economics of IMF deals and World Bank loans, structural adjustments and austerity programs. All that stuff is very academic and kind of boring.” In the novel, Yapa somehow manages to put human faces and human consequences on these abstractions.

The book probably succeeds so well because Yapa “tried to have no villains in the book. The whole book is a project to empathize with all the characters. I wanted a reader to think, yeah, it’s not just that this character seems terrible, he is terrible! And yet he has a history, and that history doesn’t forgive his actions, but it does complicate our view of him. I think the essence of compassion is to hold two contradictory feelings for someone at the same time.”

Asked how he arrived at such a view, Yapa points to his experiences as a biracial child. “I have double vision. In mainstream white culture, I felt kind of Sri Lankan. But I don’t speak the language and I didn’t grow up there. So when I was around Sri Lankan culture, I felt very white. I am always straddling two worlds. As a kid you struggle with feeling like an outsider. But as a writer that’s an excellent place to be.”

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Sunil Yapa, author of the gripping, profoundly humane first novel Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, used to hide his laptop in the oven of the beach house he was renting in Chile.

Fiction, Literary Fiction, World Fiction

Fiction World Fiction Literary Fiction

Han Kang

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Several years ago Han Kang, the South Korean author of the beautiful and disquieting new novel The Vegetarian, gave up driving and sold her car. Why?

“To be honest,” she writes drolly during an email discussion about her life and her novel, “when I used to drive, it was sometimes dangerous because I had too many thoughts in my head.”

Now, Han says, she walks a lot and commutes from her home in the “quiet city” of Gwacheon, South Korea, to the Seoul Institute of the Arts, where she teaches creative writing. On the bus or the train, she says, she can read or look out the window and let her thoughts go where they will.

Those wide-ranging thoughts end up coalescing into Han’s psychologically compelling fiction, including her first work to be published in English, The Vegetarian. The novel is concise and swift, its language often almost poetic. This is not so surprising, since Han worked as a poet before turning to fiction. She has earned several prestigious Korean prizes for her novels, including the Manhae Prize for Literature and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, and The Vegetarian was a bestseller—and adapted for film—in Korea. It also made waves when it was published in the U.K. last year.

The novel sprang from an earlier short story, “The Fruit of My Woman.” Han describes this work as a story “about a woman who turns into a plant. The man who has been living with her places her in a pot in their apartment. During their time living together, he had trouble understanding her.”

The man takes good care of the woman-plant, but at the end of the season she “produces a few tough fruits and shrivels up,” says Han. “[T]he man looks at the fruits in his palm and wonders whether the woman will bloom again the following spring.”

Immediately after publishing the story, Han says, “I had the inexplicable feeling that the story wasn’t over.” But when she started working on The Vegetarian, she realized the novel was becoming something “quite different . . . something much fiercer, more painful.”

At the center of Han’s novel is Yeong-hye, a woman who first gives up eating meat and then gives up eating altogether, taking a personally destructive path to avoid harming others. Her actions are shocking and intriguing to those around her and ripple outward to others.

Han says the question that haunted her while writing The Vegetarian was about the nature of human beings, about human innocence and human violence.

Han says the question that haunted her while writing The Vegetarian was about the nature of human beings, about human innocence and human violence.

“Humans are creatures who sacrifice their lives without a moment’s hesitation to save a child who has fallen onto the subway track; they are also the creatures who did such things at Auschwitz,” she says. “The Vegetarian was sparked by my uncertainty about the spectrum of humanity—a spectrum that stretches from holiness to horror.”

Though she is the novel’s central character, Yeong-hye remains in many ways a mystery. She never tells her own story. Rather, we come to understand the outlines of her story from the people around her—her oafish husband, her artistic brother-in-law and her sister.

“I thought that the only way to represent the life of this curiously determined woman was to have readers discover her for themselves, at a certain point between three mutually contrary gazes,” Han explains.

In Korea, the three sections were originally published as novellas, before being collated into a novel. “Each one took about a couple of months. I didn’t want to hurry to go on with the next part directly, so it took almost three years to finish the book,” says Han.

The section told by Yeong-hye’s artist brother-in-law is especially challenging, full of vivid and sometimes sexually charged descriptions.

“I think the book’s second act more or less has the structure of a traditional tragedy,” Han explains. “I wanted to deal with the process by which a human being crumbles and crashes due to the fissure which arises within himself. I thought that that internal process needed to be described with the maximum of detail. That suffering was the core of this character.”

Han says the third section, narrated by Yeong-hye’s older sister In-hye, was the most difficult to compose.

“Of the three narrators, In-hye is the character who approaches Yeong-hye’s suffering the closest. In a certain sense, you can say that this novel is a story of sisters. I wrote it in the present tense to separate it from the two preceding sections, and tried to get closer to In-hye’s suffering. But I absolutely didn’t want to exaggerate that suffering; on the contrary, I wanted to constantly moderate it. Maintaining that disparity wasn’t easy to do.”

Han attended a three-month program at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and her English is very good. Yet in emailing responses to BookPage’s questions, she turned several times to the novel’s translator, Deborah Smith, for help with her more nuanced answers.

“More than anything else,” Han explains, “I like the tone of the sentences which Deborah writes. The sense of moderation, of strong feelings perseveringly controlled, corresponds with the sentences I write in Korean. I think I am lucky to have encountered a translator who can render subtle emotions.”

Strong emotions perseveringly controlled is a most apt description of the experience of reading Han Kang’s haunting novel.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Several years ago Han Kang, the South Korean author of the beautiful and disquieting new novel The Vegetarian, gave up driving and sold her car. Why? “To be honest,” she writes drolly during an email discussion about her life and her novel, “when I used to drive, it was sometimes dangerous because I had too many thoughts in my head.”

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Ethan Canin

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

On this winter morning, Ethan Canin seems more interested in talking bicycles than discussing his vivid, moving, finely crafted new novel, A Doubter’s Almanac.

That’s because he has discovered that the interviewer shares his love of bicycling. A couple of years ago, Canin and his wife purchased fat-tired bikes with studded tires, which means he can ride almost every day of the year in Iowa City, where he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Canin, his wife and their three daughters—ages 12, 16 and 19—“own a lot of bicycles,” including a tandem that hangs from the ceiling of his “writing shed,” a building behind his house that he converted from an old carriage house. Bicycling is one of the ways Canin offsets the anxiety and sedentary nature of writing.

But Canin’s desire to talk bikes also seems to arise from a deep reluctance to make any sort of big pronouncements about his book. “It’s all just discovery to me. I never set out to deal with anything,” Canin says during a call to his home. “Fiction can’t be intentional like that. Because anything you set out to prove is too simplistic, and the reader will revolt against that.”

Canin goes on to quote E.L. Doctorow. “He said writing a novel is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but in doing so, you can go the whole way. That’s the way I write. You just don’t know what’s next. When you’re five years out, that’s scary.”

So scary, in fact, that Canin was reluctant to let his wife read the final draft of the novel. “I’ve been married to my wife for many years, and we were together for many years before that. I used to give her every paragraph and ask her to read it. I didn’t give her this book until I’d written the whole thing, and even then I almost couldn’t bear to give it to her. I thought I’d wasted five or six years.”

Readers of A Doubter’s Almanac will be astounded to learn of Canin’s fears. The novel is, start to finish, an emotionally and intellectually gripping narrative about a mathematical genius named Milo Andret. Born in the 1950s, Milo grows up a solitary child in a silent household in the woods of northern Michigan. In a lovely passage early in the novel, on one of his solo ventures into the woods, Milo finds a fallen tree, then conceives of and, over time, fashions an intricate wooden chain from the dead tree; still, his teacher thinks Milo’s claim to have made the chain is a lie. In a small way, this points to the doubts and competitive envy about Milo’s abilities that are one of the powerful currents that cascade through the novel.

Milo’s conceptual abilities—which he sometimes considers a form of idiocy—are astonishing. In his 20s he wins the Fields Medal, which is the mathematical world’s Nobel Prize. But Milo’s singularity comes with high emotional and professional costs.

The second act of Milo’s life—his intellectual banishment and physical decline—is narrated by his alienated son, Hans, who tries to balance his father Milo’s “brilliance, his highly purified arrogance, his Olympian drinking, his caustic derision, his near-autistic introversion and his world-class self-involvement” against his mother’s “modest parcels of optimism and care.” It’s an unworkable equation. Hans also worries that he and his young children have inherited both the positive and negative sides of Milo’s unusual abilities.

Which leads one to wonder what traits Canin thinks children inherit from their parents.

Canin laughs. “My experience both from having children and knowing other parents is that before you have kids, you wonder whether it’s nature or nurture, but once you have kids almost every parent will tell you it’s 100 percent nature. Nurture has nothing to do with it. Maybe that’s a way of avoiding blame, but I see crazy things in my kids that come from my parents or my wife’s parents. I know I have the body type and the head movements of my uncle who I hardly know. I talk like him. I move like him. It’s just bizarre. And my daughter has these crazy similarities to my mother. So with no basis in research, I think all those things are heritable.”

Still, natural abilities aren’t the whole story. Canin, the author of four previous novels and two short story collections, is also a believer and practitioner of the daily habits of craftsmanship. “I teach wonderful students here” at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he says. “I don’t have to teach anything academic. It’s all craft-based, which I love.”

Not only that, Canin is a longtime woodworker and carpenter, experiences that inform sections of this novel in very tactile ways. Canin says he built a standing desk in his writing shed years ago. He is currently remodeling the small house next door in Iowa City that he and his wife bought from their elderly neighbor. And he’s rebuilding a cabin in the woods of northern Michigan where he and his family spend their summers.

“I do a lot of hammer and nails,” Canin says, then adds, laughing, “I’ve always been a woodworker since I took shop in school. It’s about the only thing I learned in high school that I remember.”

Of course, Canin also graduated from Harvard Medical School and practiced emergency medicine in San Francisco, where he spent much of his youth. He draws on his medical background in his powerful descriptions of Milo’s alcoholism and Hans’ struggle with addiction. “Anybody who has worked in an emergency room will tell you that the alcohol problem in the United States is a thousand times bigger than the drug problem,” Canin says. “It’s the elephant in the room.”

More generally, Canin says of his career as a doctor, “there’s no place like it. If you’re interested in stories, you’d want to be a doctor. People tell you things that they tell nobody else. You see a side of the world that is crazy. It’s incredibly interesting. There’s a lot of side learning that goes into it—you have to learn anatomy and physiology and all that—but what could be better for people who are interested in literature? Other than being a priest or a cop or maybe a soldier, I can’t think of anything else that would show you the world the way being a doctor shows you the world.”

Deciding to leave medicine, Canin says, “was very hard. Would I do it today? Never in a million years because I have kids and a mortgage and college tuition to pay. But at the time, I wasn’t able to foresee any of that. It was very difficult to walk away. It’s a huge amount of education. It was a steady job. It was an interesting job for the most part. But I realized that if I didn’t need the money from finishing a book I would never finish a book. I mean, writing is one thing, finishing a book is another. Leaving [medicine] was a motivation to finish writing a book.”

Finally, there is Canin’s lifelong interest in mathematics, which bodies forth in the novel in both playful and serious ways. “I’ve always been good at math,” he says. “I’ve always loved it. But not like Milo’s mathematics. I understand about 25 percent of that math. I adore math, and I’m helping my kids with their math, and of course they can’t stand it. It’s very dicey how you teach adolescent kids, how you have to lie low, but I keep telling them how beautiful math is and they’re like oh, right, Dad, you’re just saying that.”

Canin laughs, then adds, “In some ways this novel really was a labor of love—in the sense that I love mathematics and I love the idea of trying something that is difficult in the world. Imagining myself into a character with Milo’s kind of devotion was one of the few pleasures of writing the book.”

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On this winter morning, Ethan Canin seems more interested in talking bicycles than discussing his vivid, moving, finely crafted new novel, A Doubter’s Almanac.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Sunjeev Sahota

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Sure, he gets more invitations to read his work. And he now has “a proper study” in his basement. But otherwise, Sunjeev Sahota says life hasn’t changed much since his superb second novel was named to the prestigious Man Booker Prize shortlist.

“I’m very conscious that the person sitting down to write in my basement is different from that person on the shortlist,” 35-year-old Sahota says almost shyly during a call to his home in the old steel town of Sheffield, England. “I just realize that it’s two different people; there’s the writer, and then there’s the person who has to go out and talk about the book. It doesn’t make any difference to how I write or what I write about. I don’t feel any greater sense of expectation, possibly because my expectations for myself are high enough.”

But Sahota does acknowledge that the enthusiasm for The Year of the Runaways in the U.K., where it was published last year, and in the U.S., where it was just released, “definitely helps me to carry on living by my pen, which is all I’ve wanted to do for a long time now.”

Sahota’s first novel, Ours Are the Streets, the fictional diary of a suicide bomber, was published in 2011. His urge to write arose shortly after he read a novel for the first time at the age of 18. The novel was Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, purchased while Sahota was en route to visit relatives in Punjab in northwest India. Sahota’s grandparents and parents immigrated to England more than 40 years ago. He was born in 1981, not far from where he lives today with his wife, a government accountant, and their children, ages 3 and 1.

Sahota says wryly that he’s asked so often about his first tryst with fiction that it’s become “a bit of an albatross around my neck. It defines me in a way I’m not quite sure about. I don’t know how much I really understood on that first reading. But it did feel like a dam bursting. I felt quite overtaken by a sense of storytelling as a way of spending your life. And then I became a heavy, avid reader very quickly.”

That reading deeply influenced his conception of The Year of the Runaways. “I knew I wanted to write a big book,” he says, “partly because I wanted to do homage to the books that made me fall in love with reading, those big, immersive novels that I first got myself lost in.”

As the title suggests, the action of the novel takes place over the course of one year. It focuses on the lives of four fully imagined main characters and a host of well-wrought minor characters. Three of the main characters—Randeep, Avtar and Tochi—are young men from India who came to Sheffield with naïve plans for earning good incomes. Tochi is smuggled into the country, fleeing a terrifying family trauma. Avtar enters on a student visa. And the very immature Randeep arrives through a “visa marriage” to England-born Narinda, the pious daughter of Sikh immigrants, who is a mystery in the first part of the novel, and as time passes becomes, Sahota acknowledges, “the moral heart of the book. She’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to writing a heroic character. She loses her faith, but she doesn’t lose her sense of wanting to do good.”

Much of the emotional brilliance of the novel derives from its longer chapters, which illuminate—probably controversially—the circumstances that have led its characters to seek work illegally in Britain. Sahota is a stylistically and emotionally nimble writer. His almost too-vivid scenes occasionally provoke warm laughter, but overall the portrayal of the complexity of these immigrants’ lives is heartrending and calls upon a reader’s empathy.

“My family is from a very rural part of Punjab,” Sahota says when asked about the authenticity of these sections of the novel. “Their farm is still their livelihood. The conversation about immigration of people in this rural world who are desperate to make their way to the West is not a secret, underground thing. People discuss quite openly schemes and methods to make their way across. I speak Punjabi fluently, and I’ve spoken to dozens of people who have been to the U.K., the U.S., Australia or mainland Europe. As far as they’re concerned, there’s a world out there with lots of money, and they’d like a share.”

In constructing the captivating world of The Year of the Runaways, Sahota deploys a generous dose of Punjabi in the conversation of his characters. “It’s the background orchestra of the novel,” he explains. “This is an insider’s view, so it felt natural to include Punjabi in the book to give a flavor, to show this different world that exists inside England. If a reader doesn’t understand some of it, then ironically it puts the reader in the position of someone coming to England who can’t make much sense of this new world.”

Some laudatory British reviews have called The Year of the Runaways a political novel, since it explores the human side of what has become a hot-button issue. “I never started off thinking I was going to write a political novel,” Sahota says. “But I don’t have a problem with the term. It is about immigration, but I think that’s neither here nor there in terms of its politics.

The Year of the Runaways explores "the ideas of sacrifice and the question of what it means to be good in the world."

“Maybe it’s called political because it concerns itself with ideas of sacrifice and the question of what it means to be good in the world where the line between people who have a lot and people who are desperate is so clear and stark. As someone who grew up in England, it’s an active question in my mind. I’m able to live a comparatively privileged life because I was born here. That’s luck. Why is it fair that my cousins in India are struggling and living a very difficult, challenging life? What do I and people like Narinda owe to those who are left behind? In that sense, it is a political book.”

Sahota sighs and then says with some frustration, “It’s a strange world we live in when being sympathetic is seen as a radical act.”

Author photo by Simon Revill

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Chris Cleave

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

The biggest emotional challenge Chris Cleave faced in writing his scintillating fourth novel, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was the duty he felt to honor the memory of his grandparents.

Their experiences in the grim opening years of World War II, when Britain’s defeat by Germany was a distinct possibility, helped to inspire the book.

“I didn’t feel a need to accurately portray their lives,” Cleave says during a call to the home in suburban London that he shares with his Paris-born wife, a chef turned nutritionist, and their three children, ages 6, 9 and 12. “In fact, I carefully didn’t. But I did feel the need to do justice to their memory. More than anything I felt my mother reading over my shoulder when I was writing this one. I felt a familial duty to deliver something my family would find beautiful. And they’re a tough crowd.”

"I felt a familial duty to deliver something my family would find beautiful."

Powered by crackling dialogue among his characters, Cleave’s novel is beautiful, though in a darkling sort of way. The story opens with teenage socialite Mary North fleeing her Swiss finishing school as soon as war is declared and signing on to be, she hopes, a British spy. Instead she’s assigned to be a teacher, replacing male instructors sent off to war. While her mother and her best friend, Hilda, think teaching is beneath her social station, Mary discovers she actually likes it. She develops a special bond with a black American child named Zachary Lee, whose father performs in a minstrel show, a popular form of entertainment in London at that time.

“I think 80 percent of London’s children were evacuated at the start of the war,” Cleave explains. “I was looking at all these evacuation photos, children getting onto trains in their duffel coats, looking very cute, and being taken to a place of safety in the countryside. Then I was looking at a lot of photos of street scenes of London in the 1930s, and there were a lot of black and mixed-race children in the East End. But the evacuation photos were almost universally of white kids. I became curious about where that was coming from.”

Readers of Cleave’s 2009 bestseller, Little Bee, know him to be a keen observer of political and social divides. Amid the devastating German Blitz, Mary falls for Tom Shaw, a middle-class school administrator, but she is also attracted to his more sophisticated apartment-mate, Alistair Heath, who enlists to fight in France, suffers from what we now call PTSD and later nearly starves to death during the siege of Malta. Mary’s dalliances put her at odds with her friend Hilda. As the novel progresses, Cleave’s portrayal of the ins and outs of these socially and psychologically complex relationships is gripping.

“I was very interested in competitive friendships. These are very young people—Hilda and Mary are 18 when the book starts—and they’re jostling for position. In a world of socialites, where the competition was all about who you were going to marry, I felt it might take a long time before their competition was transcended by the competition against the greater evil. By that, I don’t mean Germany. I mean that the enemy is the terror and the danger itself. I didn’t want to write a novel where my characters have great solidarity to begin with and then stoically face down the enemy threat. I wanted the threat to exacerbate the tensions that existed in the friendships and within the society they inhabit. I’m very interested in the fracture lines—between Hilda and Mary, between white and black, between high class and working class, between town and country. For me, the story lies in those tensions. I think there are two wars we have to win. One of them is against the enemy, yes, but the other one is against the tendency of our own society to divide, to polarize, to fracture.”

Cleave says the technical challenge in writing Everyone Brave Is Forgiven was getting the period details right. In his writing room, which he describes as “monastic,” he has a large aluminum suitcase to remind him that he needs to get out and do his research. “I have a rule for myself that I must physically visit the places I’m talking about. I sort of immerse myself in the worlds of the characters.” So he read novels by Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L. Sayers and others that his characters would have been reading at the time. He listened to the music and radio shows his characters would have heard. “I tried to learn what they would have done on a Friday night in wartime.” He collected census data and bomb damage maps. He researched in libraries instead of on Google. And he lost 22 pounds eating London war rations from that period.

“It was quite dramatic and not that much fun. One of the things I noticed was how much our eating behavior has changed since then. The things that were rationed were sugar, lard, butter, margarine and bacon, which are things I don’t eat at all. The biggest thing I discovered was not how hungry I felt, but how I didn’t want to eat that stuff,” he wryly notes.

"Cleave’s characters, both at home and on the battlefield, confront not just privation but shocking and unexpected losses."

In those early, difficult days of World War II, Cleave’s characters, both at home and on the battlefield, confront not just privation but shocking and unexpected losses, something Cleave brilliantly conveys to his readers.

“It was one of those things where I just woke up in the middle of the night and worked it out. I had particular points in mind where the characters died. Then I went back and just arbitrarily killed them 25 pages earlier. It was brutal. I gave myself huge problems because they had died at very inconvenient moments. But that’s war—horrible, brutal, arbitrary. Death comes unexpectedly. I just cut them off midsentence. It was a real nightmare to fix the book.”

Despite the self-inflicted challenges of writing the novel, Cleave says writing historical fiction was liberating.

“You have to raise your game. The penny dropped when I went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform. I’m a big fan. Given that Shakespeare can conjure these brilliant, bloodthirsty tragedies, I wondered why so many history plays, why so many Henrys, Edwards and Richards? And I realized that because he’s talking about this platform of our shared history, because we know the great currents behind the play and we know the ending, what we are curious about is character. So by writing historical fiction, he gets to go straight to the heart of character. That’s what I loved about it. . . . I discovered with historical fiction that I can go straight in there and open with strong dialogue and do the thing that I love most of all, which is character and dialogue and letting the development of the characters inform the progress of the novel.”

Writing about war, Cleave says, surprisingly freed him “from having to have bad guys. I’ve discovered—it took me years to work this out—that bad guys make for terrible dialogue. Something that was really good about writing a wartime book is that the enemy is evil itself. There’s no need to have a bad character in order to create the tension in the story. And that means that you have dialogue between people for whom dialogue is a realistic possibility.”

And the dialogue in Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is excellent—sharp and witty. “A novel for me is a fight to give the characters more space to talk in. I like to win space for my characters to talk in a way that advances their character rather than the plot. If I’m doing my job well as a storyteller, then I can keep the story going where it needs to go and still give my characters space to breathe and be themselves.”

Asked if writing this novel was different from writing his previous books, Cleave says, “For the first time I felt that writing the book was its own reward. I was really loving the process of writing it, and I was learning a lot about myself. I didn’t mind what happened as long as I was happy to show it to my mum.”

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The biggest emotional challenge Chris Cleave faced in writing his scintillating fourth novel, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was the duty he felt to honor the memory of his grandparents.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Yaa Gyasi

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Yaa Gyasi sounds a bit unnerved by the prepublication buzz surrounding her stunning first novel, Homegoing, and the changes its enthusiastic early reception portend for her life.

“I’ve wanted to be a writer my whole life, so this is really the fulfillment of a long dream,” she says during a call to her home in Berkeley, California. She and her boyfriend, a writer she met when they were both at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, have recently moved to the Bay Area.

“I feel fortunate not only that my dream came true but that it’s coming true in such a huge way,” Gyasi continues. “On the other hand, the stakes feel really high in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I find myself being a lot more anxious than when I thought no one would read the book. I feel a lot of outside noise has come in now in a way that it never had before. I had always been writing for myself. And now it’s becoming more public. That’s definitely an end goal of a writer, to share their work with readers. But it is a little nerve-racking.”

Gyasi, who turns 27 in late June, spent seven years developing her first novel. Homegoing is a sweeping, emotionally and morally complex epic that begins in the 18th century in the British African colony that is now Ghana. There, two half-sisters—Effia from the slave-trading Fante nation and Esi from the Asante warrior nation—are born and live nearly intersecting lives without ever meeting. Effia is born during a violent fire. As a young woman, she is married off to a British official as a local wife and lives in the upper realms of the Cape Coast Castle, seat of British colonial power. Esi is sold into slavery and imprisoned in the bowels of the castle to await a harrowing journey over the ocean to the American South.

From there, in beautifully textured alternating chapters in which water imagery represents Esi’s line and fire imagery is linked to Effia’s, the novel explores the lives of these women’s descendants. Esi’s progeny live in the U.S. as slaves and then as free people under Jim Crow laws. Effia’s descendants remain in Ghana and experience the effects of British colonialism and bloody internal African warfare. In the end, in the 21st century, the two lines of descendants experience a poignant kind of “homegoing.”

“People in the present have a tendency to believe that we are necessarily better, smarter or more moral than the people who lived before us.”

“The thing that I was most interested in was the question of what does it mean to be black in America today,” Gyasi says. “So I was very much focused on those last two chapters. I wanted to get to the African immigrant and the African American today. When I first thought of this novel all those years ago, I thought I would toggle back and forth between the characters that make up the first few chapters and the characters that make up the last few chapters to show a then-and-now thing. But then at some point I realized that I was more interested in being able to see the way something moves over a long period of time, in this case slavery, how slavery dovetailed off into this colonialism and institutionalized racism depending on where and how you were looking.”

The novel is propelled by a profound and wrenching sense of history. Yet its characters are emotionally compelling rather than didactic. This is partly because of Gyasi’s “exploratory” style of research. “I didn’t want to feel stifled by the research or the need to get everything exactly, exactly right,” she explains. “I just wanted to have it be this atmospheric thing that was in the background, so that the characters were foregrounded and they were just reacting to a moment in history, as we do now. You know, things are happening around us, but they don’t feel like they always explain our actions and our choices.”

The novel is also shaped by Gyasi’s deep imagining of events and by her family’s experiences. Born in Ghana, she came to the United States when she was 2 years old. Her father is a professor of French and Francophile African literature, and her mother is a nurse. She is the middle of three children and the only girl. Before settling in Huntsville, Alabama, when she was 9, the family also lived in Ohio and Illinois. She went to Stanford University and won a Chappell-Lougee scholarship to travel to Ghana and research her novel.

“I’ve only been back [to Ghana] twice,” Gyasi says. “The first time was with my entire family at age 11. And the second time was when I was 20. I had just a very thin idea for a novel in mind. I had never been to the central region where my mother is from. So I wanted to spend some time there.”

Her visit to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle was the revelation that inspired the novel. “The tour guide started talking about the fact that a lot of British soldiers would marry the local Fante women, and the children from these marriages were sometimes sent to England for school and then came back and started to form the region’s middle class. I’d never heard much about the Cape Coast Castle or about Ghana’s participation in the slave trade. All of this was really new to me. And then the tour guide showed us the majesty of the upstairs level of the castle. It’s beautiful. Then after showing us this upstairs level, he takes us down to see the male and female dungeons. That was also a very striking experience for me—kind of the literal upstairs downstairs thing. And I thought, OK, this is where I’ll start.”

Interestingly, Gyasi says it was reading Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that gave her permission to write her hugely ambitious novel. “That’s such a great book to read, especially if you are about to write a big, messy novel with a lot of family. Just the idea that a reader can look back at the family tree and that doesn’t totally mess up their reading experience was something I got from that book. [Homegoing has a helpful diagram of the characters’ family tree at the beginning of the novel.] I heard from people who had grievances about how many years it was covering or that there are too many characters. But having read Márquez, I could always say he did it, and it was fine.”

Gyasi adds, “People say that first books tend to be more quiet. They tend to be a lot more autobiographical. But I grew up in Alabama. I was a Ghanaian immigrant. When I was in Ghana, I didn’t feel Ghanaian. When I was in America, I didn’t feel quite American. I was kind of living on the edges of these two identities. I’d always been interested in that, and in what we had in common—the African American and the African immigrant. In that way, this book feels incredibly personal to me.”

Asked about the legacy of slavery that Homegoing explores, Gyasi says, “When we talk about slavery today, there’s a sense that it’s this thing that happened a million years ago, so why do we feel like it has any effect on our life today? And I always think that’s a ridiculous way to think about it.

“People in the present have a tendency to believe that we are necessarily better, smarter or more moral than the people who lived before us. We wouldn’t have done this awful thing. We would be the ones who stand up and say, ‘Not me.’ But in the moment I think that is a much harder thing to do. So I was really interested in the people who could say that or who tried to say that, whether they were successful or not. I did want to have their voices in the novel as well. Hopefully, this book is an addition to the conversation about why we still need to think about it today.”

Author photo credit Michael Lionstar.

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Yaa Gyasi sounds a bit unnerved by the prepublication buzz surrounding her stunning first novel, Homegoing, and the changes its enthusiastic early reception portend for her life.

Nonfiction, True Crime

Nonfiction True Crime

Jeffrey Toobin

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Patty Hearst? Jeffrey Toobin was skeptical when his Doubleday editor suggested writing about the sensational 1970s kidnapping saga that Toobin would eventually recount in riveting detail in American Heiress.

“The first thought that came to me was that there must be a million books about Patty Hearst,” Toobin says during a call that reaches him in Washington, D.C. Toobin, whose bestsellers include The Oath and The Nine, is a staff writer for The New Yorker and senior legal analyst at CNN. His wife is an assistant secretary of education in the Obama administration. Their two children are recently out of college and on their own, so as an empty-nester, Toobin says his work is portable. Although he has offices at both The New Yorker and CNN, his real desk, he says, is the dining room table in their apartment in New York City—or his laptop just about anywhere.

To his surprise, when he looked into the Patty Hearst case, he found that “nothing had been written about it for decades. For decades! I was a young teenager when it happened, so I was vaguely aware of it but not really following it. Just a bit of preliminary research suggested that it was an amazing story that had not been told in any detail.”

For those who don’t remember, on February 4, 1974, Patricia (or “Patty,” as she disliked being called) Hearst, a 19-year-old U.C. Berkeley student and the granddaughter of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by a shadowy group of revolutionaries known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Two months later, Hearst publicly declared she had joined the SLA and taken the nom de guerre “Tania.” She appeared heavily armed on a videotape taken during a bank robbery in San Francisco. Months later, she and fellow SLA members Bill and Emily Harris were out buying supplies when police surrounded the SLA’s Los Angeles hideout. A fiery shootout, the first such news event to be broadcast live nationwide, left all the SLA members at the house dead.

Over the next year, Hearst and the Harrises joined with others, including Kathleen Soliah and her brother, Steve, and continued their revolutionary crime wave with bank robberies and bombings. Hearst was finally captured in September 1975, but the drama continued during her trial on bank robbery charges, where she was defended by the blustery F. Lee Bailey.

With great clarity, Toobin takes readers through all the perplexing twists and turns of the SLA’s misadventures. The SLA, for example, was led by a plum-wine-drinking escaped convict named Donald DeFreeze. His leadership was tactically proficient but strategically hapless, almost comically so.

“There was an element of theater to what they did,” Toobin says. “Guerilla theater can be effective. But every time you think of the work of the SLA, it’s imperative to remember Marcus Foster and -Myrna Opsahl [two victims of the SLA’s murderous rampage]. That quickly takes their behavior out of the realm of funny. . . . DeFreeze attracted a small cross section of an extreme of the counterculture.”

Toobin excels in giving readers a sense of 1970s-era counterculture, the petri dish in which the SLA was spawned. “One of the things that I found so fascinating researching this book was how insane the ’70s were. I mean, there were dozens of bombings in Northern California alone. Can you imagine what cable news would be doing with dozens of bombings?”

Two big research scores allowed Toobin to add texture, detail and a sense of the complex interpersonal dramas that play out in his narrative. After Bill Harris was released from prison, Harris collected all the material about the case he could get his hands on—court documents, FBI files, private investigators’ notes. Toobin found out about the materials while interviewing Harris and arranged to purchase what turned out to be 150 boxes of documents. “For a journalist/historian looking at the era, this was a gold mine,” he says. Even more interesting was the acquisition of the jailhouse love letters exchanged by Hearst and Steve Soliah. Passed through their lawyers so they remained protected by attorney-client privilege, the letters speak loudly about Hearst’s state of mind after her arrest.

And Hearst’s state of mind is a central question of the book and was the question at her trial. Toobin offers a balanced portrait that is surprisingly complimentary of her courage and strength. And in some ways he believes her behavior was entirely rational given the circumstances.

“One of my goals in portraying anyone is complexity,” Toobin explains. “People are not one-dimensional. Their behavior is not accurately defined in black and white. I think that is especially true for Patricia. She was kidnapped, and it was a horrible experience. But she also was a willing participant in a lengthy and extensive crime wave, long after she had the opportunity to walk away. I certainly understood why the jury in her trial convicted her. And frankly, she was fortunate that she was not prosecuted for the other two bank robberies that she participated in, or shooting up Mel’s Sporting Goods and setting off bombs in Northern California. That is very serious stuff. If you want to evaluate her conduct, you have to take all that into account.”

Toobin’s portrait of Hearst is nuanced enough that readers are likely to hold different opinions about the extent of her culpability when they reach the end of the book (just as people in the 1970s differed, often vigorously).

“I always thought this was bigger than just a legal story,” Toobin says at the end of our conversation. “It is really about this era and these people. It would have been a mistake to see Patricia Hearst’s experience as simply that was she guilty of a bank robbery. This is really about the question of who this woman was, why she got involved with this craziness, and how did this all happen.”

American Heiress offers compelling answers to these questions.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Amor Towles

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

Entering a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, for an annual investment conference some years ago, Amor Towles suddenly envisioned the premise for his inventive, entertaining and richly textured second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow.

“It came to me in a flash,” Towles says during a call that reaches him in his study—“a 19th-century library” with windows overlooking the street, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a fireplace—in the townhouse near Gramercy Park in Manhattan that he shares with his wife and their children, ages 14 and 11. “I was looking at the people in the hotel lobby and having this eerie sense that I had seen them before. And I thought, what would it be like to live in a hotel like this for the rest of your life?”

Towles rushed upstairs to outline the book. Within the first hour, he knew that his character would not be in the hotel voluntarily; he would be held by force. “And I thought if a guy has to be in a hotel by force, Russia is the perfect place.”

So the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov—a Russian aristocrat arrested by the Bolsheviks during the Revolution, saved from execution because he had written an influential revolutionary poem in his youth, and then sentenced in 1922 to permanent house arrest in the servants’ quarters of Moscow’s grand Hotel Metropol—began to take shape.

But it would be a number of years before Towles actually sat down to write the novel. Now 52, the author says he’s been writing since he was a kid. At Yale, his mentor was Peter Matthiessen, with whom he remained friends until Matthiessen’s death in 2014. And during his graduate writing fellowship at Stanford, he was close to novelist Gilbert Sorrentino. But when he moved to New York City at the age of 25, he found that he “wasn’t ready to be alone in my apartment writing all day.” Nor did he find the bartending, table-waiting and fact-checking jobs of his artistic contemporaries appealing. So he joined a friend who was starting Select Equity, an investment-advising firm, and for the next decade he worked to build a successful business. In his late 30s he began writing again, and in 2011, he published his first novel, the bestseller Rules of Civility. Its success allowed him to retire and devote himself to fiction writing. In 2013, he began to work in earnest on A Gentleman in Moscow.

The action of the novel unfolds over the course of roughly 35 years. A central question the book explores is how we adapt to difficult circumstances over which we have little or no control. Towles’ Count Rostov becomes a kind of model of how to live well within very constrained circumstances. He is an educated, affable, kind man who has a passion for food, music, literature and love that seems to grow out of Towles’ own sensibilities. Towles’ evocative descriptions of food, for example, will definitely make a reader’s mouth water. “I don’t mind using the novel to sweep in many things that I enjoy,” Towles says, laughing. “That was part of the fun of it for me.”

A parallel challenge here is how a novelist makes such a confined life interesting over the course of many decades. In this regard, Towles is remarkably inventive. The Count develops surprisingly deep relationships with guests in the hotel, has an ongoing romance with a beautiful, aging actress, eventually becomes a head waiter because of his expertise in organizing social occasions, and finally becomes a loving, overly protective adoptive father to a musically talented girl whose parents disappear in the Russian Gulag. All of this happens within the confines of the hotel. And through all these changes, the seemingly narrow life of the Count lives large in our imaginations.

In addition, the location of the Count’s soft-cuffed imprisonment, the Hotel Metropol, becomes a fascinating character in and of itself. It makes an interviewer wonder, could such a place actually exist in the early years of the Soviet Union?

“The short answer is yes,” Towles says. “It was seized by the Bolsheviks because they needed office space for the government. Moscow, after all, had not been the seat of government for centuries. But when European nations recognized the Soviet government at the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks realized pretty quickly that the first thing foreign diplomats and businessmen would see when checking in was a crappy hotel, a signal that the revolution was failing. So they restored the hotel to its former grandeur and it became the place, not only for foreigners, but for all of Russia, who dreamed of dining and dancing there.”

Towles’ knowledge of Russian history and literature is deep, which adds a pleasing and provocative texture to the novel. But he says adamantly, “I am not a research-oriented writer. A premise gets brighter and sharper the more it’s tied to an area of existing fascination for me. That happened here. I love Russia. I’ve read all the Russian writers and admire them. I think Russian history is fascinating.”

Instead of facts and research, Towles says he thinks of his writing in musical terms. “I think the closest cousin to the novel in the art realm is the symphony. A novel has movements and leitmotifs. It has moments of crescendo and diminuendo. You feel a growing emotional force and then it backs off for reflection. A work must feel cohesive and organic and the beginning and end inform each other in a way that we can hold in our head.”

It’s an apt observation. Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow often reads like it has a song in its heart.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Alden Mudge

Sally Mann

Jonathan Galassi

Paula McLain

William Boyd

Stacy Schiff

Sunil Yapa

Han Kang

Ethan Canin

Sunjeev Sahota

Chris Cleave

Yaa Gyasi

Jeffrey Toobin

Amor Towles

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