Alden Mudge

George Saunders, the prize-winning short story writer, waited a long time before he showed the beginnings of his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, to his wife, writer Paula Redick.

“She reads my stuff and knows where on the emotional spectrum it lies. So if I do something clever, she’ll go, yeah, yeah, it’s clever. Or she might say, you typed this, you really typed this!” Saunders says, laughing, during an early morning call that reaches him near Monterey, California. Saunders teaches in the esteemed writing program at Syracuse University, and for much of the year, the couple lives outside of Oneonta, New York, where Saunders writes in a converted toolshed that is just far enough from the house to “send a message about what my priorities are.” A light spring-semester teaching schedule, the desire to escape snowbelt winters and the success of his remarkable short stories (which earned him a MacArthur “genius” fellowship) led the couple recently to buy a winter place in California. At the time of his conversation with BookPage, their daughters, age 26 and 28 and also writers, were visiting.

“We’ve been married a long time,” Saunders continues, “and—I’m never trying to phone it in; but sometimes you can inadvertently phone it in—and she knows when that’s happening.” That wasn’t her impression of the new book. “She was like, this is really good. All I needed to know was that she was on board, and it was worth polishing.”

Lincoln in the Bardo is good. In fact, astonishingly good. Yes, it is strange—part ghost story, part historical novel, maybe a little sci-fi-ish—but in the end, it’s an incredibly inventive and deeply moving book that often reads like an epic, elegiac poem. Saunders says he applied the same standards to this novel as he does to his short stories: “Be efficient and brisk and do whatever you’re trying to do as quickly as you can.” Cross this novel’s threshold and a reader will be entranced, magnetized by the beauty of its language and the brilliance of its conception.

“During the Bill Clinton administration we were up in D.C.,” Saunders says of the initial impulse behind the novel. “We drove by Oak Hill Cemetery, and my wife’s cousin pointed out that Lincoln’s son Willie had been temporarily housed in one of the crypts there. And then she offhandedly added that the newspapers of the day reported that Lincoln had gone to the crypt on several occasions to hold the body. I had this idea of Lincoln with his son’s body across his lap on a dark night, kind of like the Pieta. I wondered what were the mechanics of him leaving the White House, why would he do that, and then why would he stop? That was really interesting to me.”

But for many years, Saunders felt the story was beyond his capabilities. “I was like a mountain climber who every day walks by a mountain and goes, nah, no, can’t do it.” Later, in his early 50s, Saunders decided to give it a try. “I’d never written a novel before. I kind of liked the idea of being the defiant short story guy who was getting more attention than is normal for stories. But this idea just kept coming up and sitting on my porch and going, OK, I’m here and I want you to take care of me. You can only walk away from that so many times.”

“But I thought, Lincoln? Sheesh! I might as well write a novel about Jesus. It’s just so daunting. You don’t want to be disrespectful and you also don’t want to rehash the same old clichés.”

Still, there was the problem of writing about Lincoln. Saunders, who was born in Texas, jokes that he has “almost a fashion interest in the Civil War. I love the look of it and the idea that it happened a relatively short time ago. And of course this last election kind of showed that the war is still being fought.” Over the past 20 years, “as a hobbyist,” he has wandered the Lincoln/Civil War section of any bookstore he’s been in, and his research for the novel has benefited from an impressive collection of Civil War books and documents donated to Syracuse by conservative journalist and presidential speechwriter William Safire.

“But I thought, Lincoln? Sheesh! I might as well write a novel about Jesus. It’s just so daunting. You don’t want to be disrespectful and you also don’t want to rehash the same old clichés.”

Saunders resolved his Lincoln issue by limiting the number of occasions Lincoln is actually present in the novel. And even when present, Lincoln is revealed through the eyes of others—which has the eerie effect of making his grief over the death of his 11-year-old son—and his increasing distress over the growing carnage of the Civil War—even more palpable.

Most of the novel’s action takes place in Oak Hill Cemetery on a single night at the end of February in 1862. The story is narrated by a weird and raucous medley of voices. Saunders says that in making the audiobook, he discovered that there are 166 different personalities in the novel. These voices also include a beguiling weave of quotations from actual and invented historians describing—in conflicting accounts—the Lincolns’ growing alarm during a February 1862 White House party while Willie lies upstairs dying. For most of the novel, there are three main narrators, and at some point a reader will likely become skeptical about them. They seem stuck between life and whatever comes next, the transitional place that Tibetan Buddhists call “the bardo.”

Saunders was raised Catholic, but he and his wife have practiced Buddhism for many, many years. “I was really happy to be writing this book because I felt the things it is about are the things I am thinking about: one’s own mortality and the question of how you persevere with a loving heart in the face of the harshness of the world,” he says. Later he adds, “The notion of the bardo is not fake to me. I think in some ways my whole life has been spent trying to get into some relation with death. . . . I love the idea that there are people who are trying to get a little behind the veil. And there’s evidence from really advanced spiritual people that the end is not the end.”

Saunders is quick to add that he tries “not to have too many thematic thoughts because I don’t want to derail the story with simplistic answers.” Instead, his entry into prose has to do with sound. In revising his fiction he says he is “trying to make the sound distinctive, which in turn makes the sense more precise.”

The sounds—the voices—of Lincoln in the Bardo are indeed distinctive, often funny, sometimes bawdy, despite the fact that the novel is about death and grief, good and evil, the nature of human existence.

“I really love writing contemporary voices, or imitations of contemporary voices. This book was a struggle because I usually go out of my way to be funny and funny in a contemporary way. Wondering how I would be funny in a 19th-century way was a constraint I really enjoyed. In writing, the use of humor at its highest level is trying to mimic the comic nature of the universe. We’re trying to imitate the mind of God, and the mind of God doesn’t work like a human mind. You have to remember that the universe runs on its own timer.”

Summing up, Saunders says, “I didn’t want to write a historical novel. I find myself averse to anything pro forma. I didn’t want a reader to [think], oh, I see, he’s going to milk the juice out of the night Lincoln went to the grave. “The trick was to find the means to shake it up a bit. Going back to it after a few months away, I think, wow, it’s a strange book. A little deformed. But it’s deformed because it’s trying to get to the emotional core more directly. This book was kind of a weird blurt. I can stand behind that because I know it’s efficient and I know that its heart is in the right place.”

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

Throughout her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dina Nayeri wrote draft after draft of a second novel, and with each revision her editor would say, no, that’s not it, it doesn’t have the Dina magic.

“I remember thinking, what the hell is the Dina magic? I don’t know what that is!” Nayeri says, laughing, during a call to her home outside of London, where she now lives with her partner, the writer Samuel Leader, and their 16-month-old daughter, Elena.

Finally, her editor told her to shelve the project and write instead about whatever popped into her head when she thought about her life and what she had experienced as a displaced person. Nayeri fled Iran with her brother and mother, a Christian convert persecuted by Iran’s morality police, when she was 8 years old. She ended up, improbably, in Oklahoma as a refugee. Her father remained in Iran. What popped into Nayeri’s head were the four occasions when she had seen her father, a dentist from Isfahan, after she left the country.

These four visits, fictionally reimagined, of course, but also “pretty closely autobiographical,” are one of three beautifully braided narratives in Refuge, a revelatory novel about the lives of uprooted people. One of the narrative threads concerns Dr. Bahman Hamadi, a vibrant, poetry-loving, opium-addicted dentist who remains behind in Iran and runs afoul of the Iranian authorities during the Green Movement’s protests of 2009. Another focus is his daughter, Niloo, a high-achieving, assimilated immigrant now in her 30s. She is in a listless marriage with a sweet man named Guillaume and living in the Netherlands, where despite its progressive politics, anti-immigrant furor is rising, with shocking results.

Nayeri’s 10-page fictionalized treatment of her visits with her father, submitted at the last minute, earned her a residency at the MacDowell Colony, a “sacred space” for artists in New Hampshire, where in a burst of creative energy she completed a full draft of Refuge. At MacDowell, Nayeri also met Sam, who like her had married his college sweetheart and then divorced after 10 years. “It’s an experience that’s hard to relate to unless you’ve been through it,” she says. “We kind of realized we were each other’s person very quickly. This book is deeply tied into my relationship with Sam.”

Refuge is also deeply tied to Nayeri’s profound experiences as a young refugee. “We escaped from Iran and then spent a couple of years in a refugee camp before coming to the U.S.,”she says. “There were two years when we were completely without a home. And when we arrived in Oklahoma, we were suddenly very poor. I don’t even know the words to describe the sense of loss I lived with for those first few years. I developed this kind of crazy determination to find a place for myself in the world, to have a kind of security that won’t disappear in an instant.”

Drawing on these experiences, Nayeri creates in Niloo a character who is very tightly controlled. Niloo fashions, for example, what her husband names the Perimeter, a fiercely protected corner in every place she lives that is for her alone. Unhappy at the beginning of the novel, Niloo’s journey is toward finding some sense of belonging and happiness.

“Once you’ve lost everything and there’s no going back,” Nayeri explains, “you have this sense of panic that nothing is under control. You develop these OCD-like symptoms. You want some small space that you can control—a space just small enough so you know that whatever happens you can huddle over it and it isn’t going to change.”

Nayeri is quick to emphasize that the character Niloo is not her. “I think the child Niloo is very much based on who I was. But as an adult, Niloo is not at all like me. It was so tempting to just pump in all my own feelings and experiences and reactions. Reining that in was something I had to go through a lot of iterations to do.”

"I don’t even know the words to describe the sense of loss I lived with for those first few years."

Likewise, Nayeri makes a distinction between her real father and her character Bahman. “I just love that character. He’s this other version of my dad. My dad was in his early 30s when I said goodbye to him, and Bahman in his 30s is very close to that person. Then my father and this fictional father branch out in different directions. I think I captured the voice of a real, true person and at the same time gave him a balance that maybe my father’s real life hasn’t had. Bahman is a person who has kept his capacity for joy through all his adversity. He represents to me a kind of wild, animal enjoyment of life, a quality that can’t be stamped out.”

Nayeri says she has not gone back to Iran because “it never feels safe enough.” Her visits with her father were in other countries. But she remains deeply connected to Persian culture.

“I moved away from my Iranian roots for a while in my late 20s when I was very lost and trying to become something different. But as I was becoming a writer, I jumped back in. I immersed myself in Iranian communities. I made sure my Farsi speaking and writing skills didn’t deteriorate. I listened to the music, cooked the food and celebrated the holidays. I recaptured my culture for myself.”

Her immersion in Persian culture, in addition to her experience as a refugee, enables Nayeri to create a nuanced and remarkably textured narrative about a world few of us experience.

That was apparently also the opinion of her editor when on the final day of her MacDowell residency, Nayeri and friends hit the send button on the first complete draft of Refuge.

Nayeri recalls, “Of course we went through a long editing process. But the first thing she said was, ‘This is it! This is the Dina magic!’ . . . And I still don’t know what that is.”

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

Author photo credit Anna Leader.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author photo by Nina Subin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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