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Harvey Freedenberg

FictionShort Stories

Spotlight: Short stories

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Nominated for the National Book Award, Jim Shepard's stunning collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, is packed with a brilliantly diverse array of stories few writers would dare attempt to match. Covering a swath of time from ancient Greece ("My Aeschylus") to the Roman invasion of Britain ("Hadrian's Wall") to the present day, Shepard consistently demonstrates both a mastery of the form and a gift for synthesizing arcane research in a way that doesn't detract from his storytelling talents (just check out the acknowledgements for evidence of that fact).

Whether he's weaving grim tales of failed exhibitions to find the yeti in Tibet ("Ancestral Legacies") or Australia's inland sea ("The First South Central Australian Expedition"), recounting, with wry humor, the story of a doomed love affair between two Russian cosmonauts ("Eros 7") or sketching the tragic impact of the Chernobyl nuclear accident on one Russian family with deep ties to the nuclear industry ("The Zero Meter Diving Team"), Shepard never wavers in his focus on the painfully human qualities of his characters. The collection's most gripping story, Sans Farine, included in the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories is the harrowing tale of an executioner during the French Revolution, chilling in its stark detail and heart- stopping in its emotional power. Shepard is the co-editor of a collection of writers' favorite pieces, entitled You've Got to Read This. That's the same magical feeling you'll have when you finish this astonishing work.

An engaging debut
The strength of Canadian writer Neil Smith's collection, Bang Crunch, lies principally in the empathy he displays for an assortment of quirky characters, most of them living in his native Montreal.

Two stories–"Green Fluorescent Protein" and "Funny Weird or Funny Ha-Ha?"–feature Peggy, a sympathetic character who's a doctor and the alcoholic mother of a teenage son. Her husband has died of a cerebral hemorrhage while participating in a curling match, and she decides to put his ashes in a curling stone that she sometime consults for advice. One of the most charming stories is "B9ers," the tale of a support group for people with benign tumors who discover the root of their problem may be that they're too nice. In fragmentary sections, Scrapbook provides the all-too-timely account of the survivor of a college campus shooting who struggles to come to terms with his guilt over fleeing the scene of the incident. Smith also demonstrates a penchant for the occasional experimental story. "Bang Crunch," narrated in the second person and in a single paragraph, tells the bittersweet tale of Eepie Carpetrod, a victim of the imaginary Fred Hoyle syndrome (named for the creator of the Big Bang Theory), who ages one month each day and whose life then implodes at even greater speed. Her poignant advice: Act quickly, act graciously. While it may take some time to expose him to a non- Canadian audience, Smith is a young writer of ample talents that are well represented in this collection.

The space between
English-born, Australian resident Cate Kennedy's Dark Roots offers 17 stories that feature as their unifying theme the myriad ways in which communications between people break down and the corresponding struggle to revive them. Kennedy relies on terse, direct prose that's highlighted by her knack for focusing on small, but essential, details that bring the stories to life.

In "A Pitch Too High for the Human Ear" Kennedy employs the sudden deafness of a family dog as a metaphor for the lack of communication between husband and wife. A couple on their way to have their wedding rings enlarged ("Resize") discover in the process the source of their original attraction, while The Wheelbarrow Thief tells of a woman's struggle with the decision to reveal her pregnancy to her lover. But Kennedy isn't an unreservedly serious writer. Her story "The Testosterone Club" deftly sketches one woman's fiendishly clever revenge on her husband and his amorous mates. For O. Henry lovers, the stories "Habit" and "The Light of Coincidence" feature clever plot twists. Dark Roots ably displays the work of a subtle and accomplished writer who has much to say about the human condition.

Southern tales
Calling a short story writer a Southern writer inevitably conjures up images of giants like Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. While Gerald Duff hasn't reached that eminence, his collection Fire Ants is a fine addition to the genre.

Like most Southern storytellers, Duff is noteworthy for his focus on some of the more distinctive personalities who inhabit the territory below the Mason-Dixon Line. In "The Angler's Paradise Fish-Cabin Dance of Love," for example, a middle-aged oil worker kidnaps a teenager and transports her to a fishing cabin on the Texas Gulf Coast merely to watch her perform her cheerleading routine. "A Perfect Man" shifts the scene to Tennessee, where a mother desperate to free her son from jail after he's been wrongly arrested for robbing a convenience store turns to the only source she can think of to help her make bail her old lover. And in the collection's title story Duff offers the eerie tale of an aging woman who re-enacts the end of a failed love affair in grisly fashion.

Not content to limit himself to contemporary settings, Duff has an affinity for historical tales. "Maryland" tells the story of a slave who's willing to sacrifice his life to save the life of his military office master, while "Redemption" recounts a grim duel in mid-19th-century Texas. Readers from North and South alike will find much to engage them in this stimulating collection.

Nominated for the National Book Award, Jim Shepard's stunning collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, is packed with a brilliantly diverse array of stories few writers would dare attempt to match. Covering a swath of time from ancient Greece ("My Aeschylus") to the Roman invasion of Britain ("Hadrian's Wall") to the present day, Shepard consistently demonstrates […]
FictionWorld Fiction

A portrait of real life in Saudi Arabia

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Most Westerners have a mental picture of Saudi Arabia that's hardly more than a melange of cliches featuring white-robed sheiks climbing into Rolls-Royces to survey vast oil fields. Yousef Al-Mohaimeed's haunting and enigmatic novel, his first published outside Saudi Arabia after being banned there, offers a stark picture of that society.

The central character of Wolves of the Crescent Moon is Turad, a Bedouin and former desert bandit who, as the novel opens, finds himself in the Riyadh bus station with no destination other than one that will take him out of the city he has come to loathe. After losing his ear in a desert incident that's described in wrenching detail at the novel's climax, he has migrated to the capital, moving through a series of menial jobs until he finds a position as a servant at the finance ministry.

Like Turad, the other principal characters of Wolves are physically damaged. Tawfiq is an elderly man who exists on the fringe of Saudi society. Captured in Sudan as a young boy, he is sold into slavery and then castrated. Eventually he drifts into the finance ministry, where he and the Bedouin discover a surprising connection. Nasir is an orphan who mysteriously loses his eye shortly after he's abandoned at birth. In the bus station a stranger hands Turad a government file whose contents recount the mundane facts of Nasir's existence, facts Turad uses as the springboard for an imaginative re-creation of the boy's life. Employing a nonlinear narrative that shimmers with a certain dreamlike quality, Wolves interweaves the lives of these characters in complex and unexpected ways.

It's easy to imagine this tale being narrated by an ancient storyteller to a group of rapt listeners gathered around a blazing desert fire. Al-Mohaimeed's prose is taut and yet lyrical, evoking the harsh beauty of the desert landscape in spare sentences rich with vivid imagery. While his name will be unfamiliar to most American readers, his talent deserves serious attention.

Most Westerners have a mental picture of Saudi Arabia that's hardly more than a melange of cliches featuring white-robed sheiks climbing into Rolls-Royces to survey vast oil fields. Yousef Al-Mohaimeed's haunting and enigmatic novel, his first published outside Saudi Arabia after being banned there, offers a stark picture of that society. The central character of […]
Fiction

10 years after ‘Smila,’ Peter Høeg explores the power of silence

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Danish novelist Peter Høeg, author of the acclaimed bestseller Smilla's Sense of Snow, returns with his first work in 10 years, the dense and enigmatic novel The Quiet Girl. Set in contemporary Copenhagen, it's a work that can be read on many levels psychological thriller, detective story or intense character study, among others all opening themselves to reveal new layers of meaning.

The novel's protagonist, Kasper Krone, is a renowned circus clown who possesses the ability to access people's acoustic essence, auras of sound that reveal one's personality in musical key signatures. He's also a compulsive gambler who's about to be deported to Spain to face charges of tax evasion. But before he's transported there, an unusual order of nuns offers to intervene on his behalf in exchange for his agreement to help discover the fate of a group of children who share Krone's sound-related gift, including KlaraMaria, one of his former students who's the quiet girl of the novel's title.

Krone's involvement in the search for the missing children plunges him into a journey through a Copenhagen that's both physically and psychologically perilous. In it he meets characters known only as the African or the Blue Lady, and he's pursued by both government officials and shadowy corporate interests who are as determined as he is to find the children in order to serve their own purposes. Along the way he must deal with the impending death of his elderly father and come to terms with the loss of a woman who seems to have been the only real love of his life. Krone is a lover of Bach's music, and the novel is packed with references to the composer's work, some well known and others obscure.

Høeg's also comfortable alluding knowingly to thinkers as diverse as Kierkegaard, Jung and Buber, and the novel undoubtedly will appeal to those comfortable in that intellectual environment. In the end, much of the essence of The Quiet Girl remains to be teased out by adventuresome readers and it's likely even some of them will disagree as to the story's real meaning. For those willing to undertake that task, Høeg's novel is certain to provide lots of fodder for reflection and perhaps even some stimulating late-night conversations with the Goldberg Variations playing quietly in the background.

Danish novelist Peter Høeg, author of the acclaimed bestseller Smilla's Sense of Snow, returns with his first work in 10 years, the dense and enigmatic novel The Quiet Girl. Set in contemporary Copenhagen, it's a work that can be read on many levels psychological thriller, detective story or intense character study, among others all opening […]
Fiction

Philip Roth’s fond farewell to his literary alter ego

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Through nine novels, beginning with The Ghost Writer in 1979, Philip Roth has created one of the enduring characters in American literary fiction: Nathan Zuckerman. Now, in Exit Ghost, Roth offers what is likely to be Zuckerman's final appearance. Although Roth's many admirers hope he'll produce more works of consequence, in many respects the novel feels like a summing up, both for a character some have seen as Roth's alter ego and for the author himself.

Zuckerman has returned to New York City after 11 years of self-imposed exile in the Berkshire Mountains. Nine years after surgery for prostate cancer has left him incontinent, he's undergoing treatment to ameliorate that condition. He meets a pair of young writers, Jamie Logan and her husband Billy Davidoff, and impulsively offers to exchange his remote cottage for their Upper West Side apartment for one year. Zuckerman finds himself attracted to Jamie, and his fantasies about a budding relationship unfold in scenes from a play he entitles He and She. Through Jamie and Billy, Zuckerman meets an ambitious young man who's researching a biography of the writer E.I. Lonoff. Zuckerman had spent a single evening with Lonoff and his lover, Amy Bellette, nearly 50 years earlier, and that evening has haunted him for the rest of his life. He reconnects with Amy, now in her mid-70s and dying of brain cancer, and the two of them join forces to thwart the biographer, who's determined to reveal a terrifying secret from the late writer's life.

Exit Ghost is a complex and sometimes disturbing exploration of the line between truth and fiction, the essence of the writing life and the nature of literary fame. It bears all the familiar hallmarks of Roth's fiction: lush and sinuous prose, unsparing insights into his characters' interior lives and a psychological acuity that is at times as comical as it is heartbreaking.

Last year, when the New York Times asked a group of distinguished novelists to vote for one novel they considered the best of the last 25 years, six of Roth's books received multiple votes. With Exit Ghost, this pre-eminent figure of modern American literature has added another fine novel to his acclaimed body of work.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Through nine novels, beginning with The Ghost Writer in 1979, Philip Roth has created one of the enduring characters in American literary fiction: Nathan Zuckerman. Now, in Exit Ghost, Roth offers what is likely to be Zuckerman's final appearance. Although Roth's many admirers hope he'll produce more works of consequence, in many respects the novel […]
Fiction

Richard Russo chronicles a life’s quiet victories and defeats

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In a series of novels culminating with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, Richard Russo has staked a strong literary claim to the small, dying towns of the northeastern United States. His sixth novel, Bridge of Sighs, mines that familiar ground, but it's a tribute to Russo that in it he has created a cast of memorable characters that reveals the complexity of even the most ordinary lives.

Most of the events of Bridge of Sighs take place in the grim upstate New York town of Thomaston, home to a tannery whose chemicals frequently dye the town's Cayoga Stream an ominous red, giving rise to fears that an unusual number of cancer deaths somehow are related to that pollution. Thomaston's West End, East End and Borough neighborhoods are as stratified as Indian castes, the town's residents moving from one to the other as their economic fortunes wax and wane. Much of the novel, which spans a period of 50 years ending in the present, is narrated by Louis C. ("Lucy") Lynch, a lifelong resident of Thomaston. In his mid-60s, he's decided to write an account of the life he, his family and friends have lived in this fading town. Yet he's frustrated that his story probably is little more than my poor attempt to restore what was and is no more. Lucy's father, Big Lou, is a former milkman who loses his job and decides, over the objections of his wife, to purchase a corner grocery store called Ikey Lubin's across the street from their house. The store almost becomes a character in the story, and after Big Lou dies, Lucy prospers, expanding the Lynch Empire to three convenience stores, a video rental outlet and an ice cream stand.

The novel's action revolves around the relationships among three families the Lynches, Marconis and Bergs. Lucy and Bobby Marconi are friends until a job promotion enables the Marconis to leave the West End. Sarah Berg marries Lucy, but the tug of an attraction between her and Bobby persists long after he flees Thomaston to escape his abusive father and establishes himself as a famous painter in Venice, the location of the Bridge of Sighs that gives the novel its title. The final portion of the story focuses on Sarah's emotional struggle to come to terms with the premature deaths of her parents her mother an alcoholic artist and her father a disgruntled and eccentric high school teacher and failed novelist.

Bridge of Sighs is crammed with incidents of sexual betrayal, domestic violence, racial prejudice and emotional cruelty. And yet side-by-side with these disturbing moments are equally vivid ones of compassion, hope and love. Russo's gift is that he portrays all with sensitivity and keen insight, resisting the pull of melodrama, and painting even the simplest characters with nuance and empathy.

In this densely plotted and moving novel, as in the lives of most of us, the victories and defeats are often small and impermanent, leaving scant evidence of their occurrence outside the immediate circle of those affected. But in the end, as Lucy, observes, The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and fill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

In a series of novels culminating with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, Richard Russo has staked a strong literary claim to the small, dying towns of the northeastern United States. His sixth novel, Bridge of Sighs, mines that familiar ground, but it's a tribute to Russo that in it he has created a cast of […]
FictionShort Stories

History’s horror

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Shira Nayman's Awake in the Dark, a collection of three stories and a novella, is another work focusting tightly on a single theme: the Holocaust and the way in which the harrowing events of that time ripple through the lives of her characters, both past and present, to indelibly shape their identities. Nayman is adept at reversing the reader's expectations as her characters grapple with the weight of the burden history has placed upon them. In the first two stories, "The House on Kronenstrasse" and "The Porcelain Monkey," the protagonists make startling discoveries about their parents that transform the way each looks at the world. In "Dark Urgings of the Blood," the novella that makes up half the book, Nayman brings to bear her training as a clinical psychologist to tell the haunting story of a psychiatrist and her patient, unknowingly linked by tragic circumstances.

As befits their subject matter, these four stories are dark and often troubling. Nayman's talent lies in her ability to illumine the essential humanity at their core.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Pennsylvania.

Shira Nayman's Awake in the Dark, a collection of three stories and a novella, is another work focusting tightly on a single theme: the Holocaust and the way in which the harrowing events of that time ripple through the lives of her characters, both past and present, to indelibly shape their identities. Nayman is adept […]
Fiction

Frank Bascombe returns

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Richard Ford's latest novel represents the long-awaited completion of the trilogy he began with The Sportswriter (1986) and continued with the Pulitzer Prize- and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Independence Day (1995). Fans of Ford's writing and of his protagonist, Frank Bascombe, will find their patience amply rewarded by this rich and mature work.

Like its predecessors, The Lay of the Land unfolds in the days leading up to a holiday, in this case Thanksgiving 2000. Al Gore and George Bush battle over electoral votes and the dotcom bubble has burst, yet these events are little more than background noise in the busy mind of Frank Bascombe. Deep into his successful second career in real estate sales, he's moved from the leafy suburb of Haddam, New Jersey, to the small town of Sea-Clift, on the Jersey Shore. At age 55, he's entered what he calls his Permanent Period, though his life is anything but. He's recently been treated for prostate cancer and he's had to deal with the return of his wife's first husband, who had disappeared more than 30 years earlier. During this eventful Thanksgiving week, he loses one of his friends to cancer, witnesses the aftermath of a bombing at a Haddam hospital and tussles with an old acquaintance in a bar. In the midst of these events, he's forced to confront his prickly relationships with his adult children and fend off a suggestion from his first wife that she might be interested in rekindling their relationship.

Apart from the humor and pathos revealed in these sometimes bizarre and inexplicable incidents, what makes this such a compelling read is Ford's skillful channeling of the voice of the narrator he's shaped over the course of three books and 20 years. The novel is studded with beautifully wrought passages filtered through the prism of Bascombe's introspective and keenly observant mind. By the time the novel reaches its resonant climax, readers will be forgiven if they conclude the life they've shared in these pages is every bit as real as their own.

 

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Richard Ford's latest novel represents the long-awaited completion of the trilogy he began with The Sportswriter (1986) and continued with the Pulitzer Prize- and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Independence Day (1995). Fans of Ford's writing and of his protagonist, Frank Bascombe, will find their patience amply rewarded by this rich and mature work. Like its predecessors, The […]
Fiction

A sparkling tale of literary inspiration

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In our age of infatuation with stars of films and television, the idea of a bright and sensitive young woman attaching herself to an established writer in the hope of spurring him to feats of literary greatness may seem quaint. Yet it's that notion that animates Lara Vapnyar's accomplished first novel and infuses it with its quiet pleasures.

Inspired by the prediction of a high school teacher that someday she'll be the companion to a great man, Tanya Rumer graduates from college and moves from Russia to New York City, where she shares a dreary Brighton Beach apartment with her aunt and uncle and earns a modest living performing menial chores in a dentist's office. One day she wanders into a reading by Mark Schneider, a middle-aged novelist and teacher. Soon, she's sharing his penthouse overlooking Central Park, believing she's found the literary giant whose work she'll enrich with her love and tender guidance.

It doesn't take Tanya long to become disenchanted with her role as Mark's muse, as he spends more time working out and consulting his therapist than he does at his writing desk. Tanya struggles to learn English until she trades some of Mark's writing for the romance novels shared by a friendly neighbor. All along, she ponders the fates of Dostoevsky's muses Polina, his mistress, and Anna, his wife whose stories are revealed through excerpts from Polina's diary and the writer's biography, comparing her quest for meaning in her role to theirs. When Mark finally produces his third novel, Tanya makes a startling discovery that helps reveal her life's true path.

Vapnyar, herself a Russian emigrant to New York, has been writing in English only since 1994, but no signs of unfamiliarity with an adopted language mar her prose. Her short story collection, There Are Jews in My House, revealed a talent for deft characterization and keen psychological insight. That same talent is amply displayed in this charming novel, whose readers will agree she's a young writer who bears watching.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

 

In our age of infatuation with stars of films and television, the idea of a bright and sensitive young woman attaching herself to an established writer in the hope of spurring him to feats of literary greatness may seem quaint. Yet it's that notion that animates Lara Vapnyar's accomplished first novel and infuses it with […]
Fiction

A lion in winter

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Forty years into a distinguished acting career, Simon Axler suddenly finds himself bereft of his ability to perform. His wife has deserted him and a halfhearted attempt at suicide lands him in a psychiatric hospital, where he meets a woman whose own struggle with depression haunts him long after his own discharge. His elderly but still enthusiastic agent tries in vain to persuade him to tackle the role of James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but Axler remains paralyzed by a fear of failure.

Into his life strides Pegeen Mike Stapleford, a 40-year-old lesbian college professor, who happens to be the daughter of two of his lifelong acting colleagues. Despite having watched her nurse at her mother’s breast and being fully aware of her incompatible sexual orientation, Simon hurls himself into an intense and invigorating relationship that has him contemplating a return to the stage—and even the possibility of starting a family with his new lover. Alas, this brief interlude of imagined happiness quickly mutates into a distorted image of itself, as Simon all too swiftly discovers “the failures were his, as was the bewildering biography on which he was impaled.”

Befitting the story of a professional actor, The Humbling unfolds in three tightly structured acts, featuring an intense focus on character and a Chekhovian economy of language and detail well-suited to its taut subject matter. In his 30th book, Philip Roth frankly revisits his lifelong preoccupation with the persistence of raw sexual desire, exploring both its regenerative power and the seeds of self-destruction it bears.

In this searing novel, Roth adds dark shadings to the austere vision he has explored in recent works like Everyman and Exit Ghost; there are precious few shafts of light that break through his clinical examination of one man’s catastrophic fall from grace. But in recounting with unrelenting precision the grim story of Simon—not a bad man, simply a tragically human one—Roth offers another unflinching assessment of the essence of our mortality.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Forty years into a distinguished acting career, Simon Axler suddenly finds himself bereft of his ability to perform. His wife has deserted him and a halfhearted attempt at suicide lands him in a psychiatric hospital, where he meets a woman whose own struggle with depression haunts him long after his own discharge. His elderly but […]
FictionDebut Fiction

The dislocation of relocation

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

With his first novel, a story of dislocation and yearning for both the old and the new, David Bezmozgis fulfills the promise he displayed in his 2005 collection, Natasha and Other Stories, and joins the growing list of talented young writers like Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapynar portraying the experience of Jewish emigration from the former Soviet Union.

Set in 1978, just as the first wave of departures was about to crest, The Free World tells the story of five months in the lives of three generations of the Krasnanskys, of Riga, Latvia, as they await their relocation from Rome to a new permanent home. The patriarch, Samuil, is an imperious former bureaucrat and World War II veteran of the Red Army who resents the circumstances that brought about the family’s departure, while his sons, Karl and Alec, quickly adapt themselves to the vagaries of Western capitalism, sometimes in less than savory ways. Despite their Jewish heritage, none of the Krasnanskys is motivated by a passion for their religion or its culture, and the notion of settling in Israel is unthinkable to them.

What Bezmozgis, himself a Latvian emigrant to Canada at age six, captures best is the sense of rootlessness that afflicts the Krasnanskys, each in unique ways. Samuil dwells on memories of his brother, killed in the war, while Alec’s wife Polina carries on a moving correspondence with her sister, who has remained behind. In Rome, they and the rest of the family join the mass of immigrants passing interminable hours in overheated waiting rooms at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or waiting for their turn at the pay phone to call North American relatives they hope will extend the invitation that will pave the way for an early departure from their Italian limbo.

Though one of his characters dismisses the Krasnanskys’ lot as the search to find “a happier miserable,” Bezmozgis understands that the yearning for freedom is a universal human desire. In his portrayal of one unremarkable, but decidedly sympathetic family, he’s produced an appealing portrait of that longing.

 

With his first novel, a story of dislocation and yearning for both the old and the new, David Bezmozgis fulfills the promise he displayed in his 2005 collection, Natasha and Other Stories, and joins the growing list of talented young writers like Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapynar portraying the experience of Jewish emigration from the […]
Fiction

Paul Harding

Interview by Harvey Freedenberg

Paul Harding’s Tinkers was the dark horse winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In his follow-up, Enon, Harding charts the dark course of a father’s grief. We asked him a few questions about his work.

Winning the Pulitzer Prize for Tinkers obviously raised expectations for Enon. How did the weight of those expectations affect you as you were writing this novel?

The expectations Tinkers created for Enon were worldly, external. The process of writing Enon—of writing any novel—is private, interior, a matter of the imagination and of aesthetics. The internal pressure I put on the process of writing Enon was the same as it would have been even if Tinkers hadn’t sold a single copy. That’s just a part of artistic quality control. I found that the worldly pressure created by Tinkers’ success was less than the internal creative pressure of writing Enon. That’s not to say that I didn’t freak out about all of it in my spare time now and then, just that when I was doing the actual writing, I didn’t let the outside world leak in. Whenever I found myself starting to worry over things like this, I just gave myself a good talking to—you know, “You should be so lucky that your problem is having to write the follow-up to your Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel.”

The protagonist of Enon didn’t necessarily have to be connected to the Crosby family of Tinkers to make this a compelling story. What was it about the Crosbys that made you want to live with another generation of the family, and do you have any plans to continue their story?

The milieu is at my fingertips. I know the people, the landscape, the light, the history, the atmosphere, the whole cosmology. All of that makes it easier for me to concentrate on matters of character and truth and beauty and that fun stuff.

"It’s the writer’s job to render the story, not subject it to his conceits about style or whatever."

Charlie Crosby is a desperate character who does increasingly desperate things as this story unfolds. What concerns did you have about making such a troubled protagonist’s consciousness the focal point of the novel?

His troubles emerged over the course of writing the book. I did not think of him abstractly or theoretically at the outset as a “troubled protagonist.” I thought of him as Charlie, who has just lost his beloved child and went from there, moment by moment. He’s also pretty much aware of how screwed up he is throughout the whole book. One of the things in which I was most interested, in fact, was exploring the very common discrepancy between what we know and how we feel. We know better than we act. Charlie is acutely aware of this fact throughout the book and his struggles largely have to do with trying to reconcile the discrepancy.

Charlie’s wife, Susan, essentially disappears in the novel’s early pages. Why did you choose to focus on Charlie’s singular grief and not make her a larger part of this story?

The idea for the book came to me in a single image, an intricate silhouette of a headstone-studded hill over the top of which a man who proved to be Charlie was creeping very late at night. I knew that he had been up to no good and that his daughter was buried down below and that he thought of himself as sneaking behind her grave because he was ashamed of what he was doing. From the beginning, the book was about Charlie, a single, isolated soul, confronting the starkest kind of existential crisis.

Although its structure isn’t entirely conventional, this novel is a more straightforward narrative than Tinkers. What caused you to move in that direction?

The material dictated itself more or less and I just dutifully followed. I spent some time early on resisting, for example, the dialog that kept coming up. I’d try to hush the characters, thinking, “I don’t write dialog; I don’t use quotation marks” and that kind of thing. It was a little scary finding that I had a different kind of book on my hands. But then, it’s the writer’s job to render the story, not subject it to his conceits about style or whatever. When I look at Enon now, too, it seems to me that it necessarily had to begin a bit more conventionally because the story is after all about the corrosion of a fairly conventional set of circumstances into something a lot darker and turbulent and harrowing.

You write with great feeling about the natural world and about history. What gives you such an affinity for these subjects?

It’s just my natural disposition. I spent and spend a lot of time knocking around in the woods and meadows of the North Shore of Boston, so I associate that landscape with all kinds of essential, formative and normative experience. History interests me largely in relation to the mysteries of the nature of time.

Marilynne Robinson, with whom you studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has praised both this novel and Tinkers lavishly, and it feels as if the two of you share a common literary sensibility. Has she been a significant influence on your writing and, if so, in what ways?

She was and is hugely influential. She is a dear friend now. She taught the first writing class I ever took and within 10 minutes of her walking into the first meeting I knew that hers was the sort of life of the mind, the intellect, the soul that I wanted for myself. For whatever reasons, she and I can plunk down onto whatever chairs or park bench might be at hand, or just walk around in circles and talk and talk for hours about theology and art and politics and physics and cosmology. She is justly beloved around the world because she is brilliant and gracious to nearly unbelievable degrees.

Who are some other writers that have influenced your style in a significant way?

I have no anxiety of influence. I love making prose that is tinctured with my favorite writers. So long as the writing is not merely imitative or derivative, I love the fact that, reading Tinkers or Enon, a reader can clearly see my love for and devotion to Faulkner and Dickinson and Emerson and Hawthorne and Melville and Stevens, et. al. I think of them all as my aunties and uncles—Uncle Bill, Aunt Emily. So, the New Englanders are always at hand, not because they’re New Englanders but because of their aesthetics, which came out of the New England religious and theological tradition. I count Jonathan Edwards as an influence, too. Slightly apart from that group stands Henry James, who I adore. Then there are others slightly more far-flung but no less influential, like Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Zola, Proust, Turgenev and on and on.

Tell us something about your next project.

I’m digging up some tree stumps in my yard, rereading Absalom, Absalom! and the selected poems of Wallace Stevens and whatever other books are piled up in various corners of the rooms in my house, watching my kids play lots of little league baseball games, and trying to stay open and receptive to the next, mysterious, irresistible image that, when I make inquiries, will unfold into another fictional world.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Enon.

Paul Harding’s Tinkers was the dark horse winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In his follow-up, Enon, Harding charts the dark course of a father’s grief. We asked him a few questions about his work. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for Tinkers obviously raised expectations for Enon. How did the weight of those expectations […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

Richard Russo

Interview by Harvey Freedenberg

More than 20 years after exploring the high-spirited hijinks of the small community of North Bath, New York, in the bestseller Nobody’s Fool (1993), Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo revisits the town and his now-iconic characters.

Everybody’s Fool takes place over a very eventful two-day span in the lives of North Bath’s residents. Donald “Sully” Sullivan is staring down some bad health news and wondering how to break it to the important people in his life. But in the background, the intrigue and drama of small-town life—romantic affairs, financial struggles, gossip—rumble on. Russo’s comic ability and his nimbleness when it comes to laying bare the human heart have never been more powerful. We asked the author a few questions about his new work and why he can’t stop writing about Upstate New York, the “place [he] left behind.”

What made you want to revisit the character of Donald "Sully" Sullivan 23 years after you created him in Nobody's Fool?
My pal Howard Frank Mosher, to whom Everybody’s Fool is dedicated, has been after me to write another Sully novel for over a decade and I finally gave in. But the book’s real genesis was a great story somebody told me several years ago about a local cop. In his wife’s car he found a garage door remote that didn’t open their garage and he leapt to the conclusion that she must be having an affair. The guy actually went around town with the remote, hoping to find out whose garage it would open. Thinking to myself, “Who would do such a thing?” I remembered Office Raymer, Sully’s old nemesis from Nobody’s Fool. And I was off to the races.

Did you have any trepidation about doing that, especially after any Academy Award-nominated performance by Paul Newman that might fix him in the mind of some readers?
I had all manner of trepidation, and not only about Newman, who was not just fixed in the reader’s mind as Sully, but also in my own. There was also Jessica Tandy as Miss Beryl and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who played Raymer (and who I thought of the whole time I was writing this novel). But it’s a book about memory—the whole thing takes place over a Memorial Day weekend—and writing the book was a way of keeping not just my characters alive but also the talented actors who brought them to life in Robert Benton’s great movie.

You apply a comic sensibility to subjects that include aging, illness and death and what seems like the irreversible decline of the town of North Bath, New York. What were some of the challenges as you tried to make that mood and subject matter work together?
I learned from Twain that if you’re going to go to dark places, you’d best go armed with humor. The dead in Bath are in open revolt, their caskets lurching up out of the ground, whole sections of the local cemetery coming untethered. Both the town and its inhabitants appear to be circling the drain, the result, often, of some broken faith, some mistreatment of the earth. Among the citizens, Chief Raymer’s descent is both the most alarming and, I think, the funniest. From the moment he faints into an open grave, his trajectory is pretty scary.  His choices seem guaranteed to deepen the fix he’s in, but he tries so hard to do the right thing that we have little choice but to sympathize with the poor guy.

Much of your fiction has been set in small, struggling upstate New York towns not unlike your childhood home of Gloversville. Though you've lived elsewhere most of your life, what is it about this territory that has so captured your imagination as a writer?
It’s true that my imagination has been captured by these struggling towns, but in the end it’s more the people than the setting. As a young man I left Gloversville determined to find my destiny in some finer place. I loved the University of Arizona and my life in Tucson, loved the idea of living the life of the mind among people who shared my newfound values. But summers I returned home to work road construction with my father, and gradually it came to me that, while I was attracted to my new friends and my new life out West, the people I loved most—my grandparents, my father and his pals, my cousins, some old friends—were all in the place I’d left behind. The larger world was ignoring these folks, the lives they led, their struggles to find dignity in hard work and family, their kindness and modesty.

After your highly praised memoir, Elsewhere, how did it feel to return to novel-length fiction?
I never wanted to write Elsewhere. It just felt necessary to do so. Returning to novel writing, though, was exhilarating. Unfettered by facts, my imagination could once again slip its leash. That said, the new book offers up a very large canvas with a lot of characters, all of whom wanted their say, their moment. Trying to fit all their stories and backstories into that two-day time frame just about drove me crazy. For about six months I was ready to shoot myself, convinced there was no way to make it all work. But then, as usually happens with novels and novelists, just when you’re ready to give up, some solution occurs to you and the pieces begin to fit and you see the pattern that’s previously eluded you. The scary thing about writing novels is that they’re all different. What worked last time, won’t this time, and there’s always that little voice that whispers to you that this time you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, located the very story that will show you who’s boss (not you).

This novel is nearly 500 pages and in the past you haven't avoided writing lengthy novels. Do you have any concern about doing that in an age when readers' attention spans are supposed to be shrinking to the size of tweets?
I suspect it’s true that people’s attention spans are shrinking, and it’s also true that the world is noisier than ever before. But people still love to dream deeply. Throughout the ages Art has always demanded that we slow down, and the faster our lives go, the more we seem to appreciate the reprieve that Art—good writing, good paintings, good films, good photographs—offers. Do tweets offer real, lasting satisfaction to anyone? Does Instagram?

Are there any writers who serve as literary role models, or works that you return to for inspiration for your fiction?
Like many readers I was deeply saddened to lose Kent Haruf last year. He was not only a great writer, but also a great man. He went about his work with great seriousness and modesty, caring not one iota about fame or fortune, but only the work, always the work. It, not him, was the important thing. He felt fortunate to be the one holding the tools and was ever grateful for the opportunity to wield them. I’ve never known a kinder man or a more honest one.

How do feel about the current state of American fiction and who are some of your favorite writers working today?
I couldn’t be much more bullish on American fiction, especially the young writers in the pipeline, the ones just beginning to make names for themselves. I say this with great confidence, having fairly recently judged a first novel contest and been a guest editor on Best American Short Stories, where I discovered writers like Hannah Tinti, Karen Russell, Rebecca Makkai, Michael Dahlie, Lauren Groff, Tea Obreht and Maggie Shipstead. What I’m less optimistic about is the state of American publishing. Digital platforms continue to erode and undermine the economic model for print, and large publishing houses are now often part of even larger entities that sell lots of other stuff at much bigger margins, causing publishers to wager big money on what they believe to be the most commercial books, often at the expense of “smaller” more important ones. The result is diminished careers, especially for emerging writers. Today’s young writers may be as talented as any that have come before them, but what good does that talent do them if their opportunities are seriously diminished? And in the end, of course, readers lose out as well.

Can tell us anything about your next project?
Next up is a collection of short fiction, and after that a selection of essays about imagination, destiny, and the writing life. My daughter Kate and I are also hoping to collaborate on a screenplay based on the last few years of Shirley Jackson’s life, when she was writing We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

 

 

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

More than 20 years after exploring the high-spirited hijinks of the small community of North Bath, New York, in the bestseller Nobody’s Fool (1993), Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo revisits the town and his now-iconic characters.
NonfictionMemoir

Leslie Jamison

Interview by Harvey Freedenberg

It takes a talented writer to seamlessly blend memoir, biography, literary criticism, psychology and sociology into a meaningful whole. Add in the writer’s own battle with alcoholism, and the accomplishment becomes even more impressive.

That’s what Leslie Jamison, author of the highly regarded 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams, has done in her deeply felt new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. In a recent telephone call to her home in Brooklyn, she was eager to discuss the legendary, often romanticized connection between addiction and creativity.

“I knew from the very beginning that I didn’t want to write a straight memoir,” she explains. “I wanted to write about recovery. . . . Part of what’s always felt so central to the experience of recovery to me is the idea of opening outward and connecting to the lives of other people and finding resonance. . . . The idea of putting my life into a much larger chorus is part of what recovery felt like.”

The genesis of The Recovering was in fragments Jamison wrote in 2010, the year her current sobriety began. She continued working on the book after garnering her Ph.D. in English Literature at Yale, after which she cultivated a flourishing writing career and gave birth to her first child. Her goal in the book, she says, is to present “a complicated excavation of the messy truth that I see of the tortured alcoholic or addict artist, both honoring the difficulty of the lives that produced that art and honoring the creative possibilities of the other side of addiction, of what sort of generative possibilities lie in recovery.”

In The Recovering, Jamison offers insight into the lives of a group of writers—some well known, others less so—and their struggles with addiction and recovery. In sympathetic profiles of authors like Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace and Denis Johnson, which are gracefully woven into her own narrative, Jamison provides “models who found sobriety and recovery incredibly generative.” Many of the creatives that Jamison profiles experienced more nuanced addiction narratives than the one in which, as she says, “sobriety swoops in and is a creative fairy godmother and gives you a new creative life.” In writing about the tragic career of poet John Berryman, whose agonizing and embarrassingly public battle with alcoholism ended with a leap from a Minneapolis bridge in 1972, she describes a man who wrestled with an unfinished novel about recovery while trying and failing to stay sober.

But as Jamison explains, in shaping the book from a journalist’s perspective, it was also important to avoid confining her attention only to creatives. In addition to deep archival research into the lives of her artist subjects, she spent more than a year interviewing former patients at a rehabilitation facility known as Seneca House, which was established in the early 1970s near the Potomac River in Maryland.

“I wanted there to be stories of recovery in the book that weren’t about famous people, people for whom recovery had been transformative,” she says. These revelatory accounts introduce ordinary people who “had turned both their addicted lives and their sober lives into stories that made sense to them.”

“The idea of putting my life into a much larger chorus is part of what recovery felt like.”

For all of The Recovering’s biographical depth and literary sophistication, Jamison’s vividly rendered account of her own addiction and recovery is exceptionally engaging. Without solipsism or self-pity, she spares few details of her behavior, which features staggering quantities of alcohol, frequent blackouts and dangerous misadventures in places as far-flung as Nicaragua. Through each episode, the memoir has the immersive feel of compelling fiction.

The irresistible quality of that candor stems in part from what Jamison admits is nostalgia for “those early days of falling in love with the drinking, when intoxication still felt intoxicating.” That attraction emerged despite the physical and emotional ravages of her drinking days and all their “demoralizing or shameful or brutal or secretive” moments. She spares little mercy for herself in describing her disastrous relapse, an abortion and persistent conflict in the life she shared with her poet boyfriend, Dave, as sober a counterpart to Jamison as one could imagine. In telling her own story so unsparingly, Jamison hopes to “humanize the process that’s at the core of addiction,” one that can “look so inscrutable and deeply frustrating from the outside, and show what it looks like to crave something that’s destroying you.”

Also central to Jamison’s recovery story was Alcoholics Anonymous. In one of the book’s lighter scenes, she recalls the jarring moment when a meeting participant bellowed, “This is boring!” as she shared the tale of her alcoholism for the first time. That incident and others reveal the theme of storytelling at the heart the book: “I think it’s hard to stay mired in self-pity or obsessive attention to your own life when you’re just literally sitting in a room listening to other people talk about what they’re going through.”

It’s in that spirit of shared storytelling that Jamison prepares to embark on a 14-city, coast-to-coast book tour this spring. Among other things, she’s hopeful that The Recovering can be part of the urgently needed conversation about the problem of opioid addiction in the United States. “People are hungry for ways of talking about the addiction crisis that aren’t just policy talk, that are story-based,” she says. “There’s something about personal narrative that gives us a way into those questions.”

 

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

Author photo credit Beowulf Sheehan.

It takes a talented writer to seamlessly blend memoir, biography, literary criticism, psychology and sociology into a meaningful whole. Add in the writer’s own battle with alcoholism, and the accomplishment becomes even more impressive.

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