Facebook Twitter Instagram

Jillian Quint

Fiction

New York, New York

Review by Jillian Quint

In Jonathan Lethem’s latest offering, readers are once again thrust into a genre-bending, category-defying and humorously disjointed New York City. In Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, Lethem explored his favorite outer borough through the lens of noir and fantasy—and now he turns his attentions to Manhattan proper with a surrealistic eye that owes as much to Saul Bellow and James Baldwin as it does to Pynchon, Baudrillard and DeLillo.

The narrator of Chronic City, Chase Insteadman, is a former child actor and popular Manhattan socialite who has recently attained notoriety for his personal life—his astronaut fiancée is trapped in the ether, stuck in a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station. In the midst of this tragedy, Chase meets and befriends Perkus Tooth, an intellectual music critic whose quest for drugs, art and truth rivals the urban experience that Chase has always known. Perkus forces our hero to ask what is real, and what is the product of the myth that is Manhattan?

Chase’s Manhattan is almost—but not quite—our own. Rather, it is a secluded island in which the downtown lies hidden behind a mysterious fog (as close as we get to any 9/11 discussion), an escaped tiger roams the Upper East Side and the rich outbid each other in eBay auctions for mystical artifacts. In short, it’s a setting ripe for paranoia, absurd comedy and a very real exploration of the problems of truth and trauma. The Twin Towers have not fallen, but still the city is in crisis.

In many ways, this psychological and sociological investigation makes Chronic City Lethem’s most stimulating book yet. That said, it is long and meandering—occasionally more fun to think about than to actually slough through. Fortunately, Lethem is a stellar writer, and his prose electrifies. Moreover, the sheer ambition and scope of this new novel is exciting and innovative. Who knows what Lethem will try next, but we’re certain it will be anything but the same-old same-old.

Jillian Quint is an Assistant Editor at the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

In Jonathan Lethem’s latest offering, readers are once again thrust into a genre-bending, category-defying and humorously disjointed New York City. In Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, Lethem explored his favorite outer borough through the lens of noir and fantasy—and now he turns his attentions to Manhattan proper with a surrealistic eye that owes as […]
Fiction

The Moore the merrier

Review by Jillian Quint

Lorrie Moore fans are a patient bunch. It’s been more than 10 years since her most recent short story collection, and nearly 15 since her last full-length work of fiction, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Fortunately, her latest offering proves well worth the wait.

A Gate at the Stairs, the author’s third novel, is solidly and delightfully Lorrie Moore territory; there’s the isolated, intelligent female narrator who both hides and survives through her humor and nonchalance; the Midwestern landscape that stretches with ennui and possibility; the pithy wordplay that is as haunting as it is lighthearted (“I had been the minibar—and not the minbar—in this temporary room of lodging,” the main character says, after her boyfriend leaves her for the callings of Islam). But mostly there is the “spot-on-ness” that readers have so come to identify with Moore’s work.

Set soon after the events of September 11th, A Gate at the Stairs follows Tassie Keltjin, the 20-year-old daughter of a potato farmer and an undergraduate at a large Wisconsin college who accepts a babysitting job for an upper-class couple. The catch: there is no baby. Or not yet, at least. Rather, the pair is trying to adopt and sees no problem with inviting Tassie to take part in the process. If this sounds odd, that’s because it is—and it only gets more odd once they get their child and Tassie’s nanny duties become increasingly blurred and all-consuming. After all, what is she to them? An intellectual equal and friend? An inferior member of the “help”? Or a sort of middle ground between themselves and the biracial baby for whom they are now responsible?

The plot takes several bizarre twists, and readers may be tempted to skim the passages where other white parents of African-American children talk about social inequity. But ultimately, we avoid the overly didactic as Moore explores everything from race to class to the war in Iraq in a fairly organic fashion—that is, behind the guise of a refreshingly agenda-less narrator and with a voice so pitch-perfect as to appear effortless.

 

Jillian Quint is an Assistant Editor at the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. 

Lorrie Moore fans are a patient bunch. It’s been more than 10 years since her most recent short story collection, and nearly 15 since her last full-length work of fiction, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Fortunately, her latest offering proves well worth the wait. A Gate at the Stairs, the author’s third novel, is […]
Family & Relationships

An impressive lonely hearts club

Review by Jillian Quint

Love is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts, a new collection edited by Michael Taeckens, offers flashes of insight from well-known writers about love gone wrong. Gary Shteyngart writes of the leggy blonde who followed him all over Europe, sobbing. Junot Diaz remembers an ill-fated trip with a lover to the Dominican Republic. George Singleton somehow brings dignity to the act of peeing in his girlfriend’s kitty litter box.

But the best stories come from the newer or lesser-known writers. Both “Runaway Train” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and “Conversations You Have at Twenty” by blogger Maud Newton depict torturous, sprawling and ultimately unhealthy relationships with the wincing comedy and clarity that can only come from having been in the trenches. Meanwhile, “Why Won’t You Just Love Me?” by Emily Flake—one of several comic strips in the batch—shows the painful trajectory of a one-night stand that resulted in the author having to send an apology note.

There are a few misses here—most notably, the lifeless introduction by Neal Pollack—but on the whole, the pieces sparkle with wit, pain and honesty. If one can deduce an overarching conclusion, it’s that love is not as blind as the clichés would lead us to believe. Nearly all the writers in this collection sensed their breakup well before it happened, but let the relationship continue past (sometimes well past) this point of realization. The anthology never seeks to explore this disconnect, but one has to wonder: is it because we’re spineless? Naïve? Complacent? Or is it simply—as the contributors here continually show—that the best stories are often the least clear-cut?

Jillian Quint is an Assistant Editor at the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

Love is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts, a new collection edited by Michael Taeckens, offers flashes of insight from well-known writers about love gone wrong. Gary Shteyngart writes of the leggy blonde who followed him all over Europe, sobbing. Junot Diaz remembers an ill-fated trip with a lover […]
Fiction

Critic’s novel has a magic touch

Review by Jillian Quint

In his third novel, Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman deftly and unabashedly walks the line between literary and genre fiction, creating a world of both fantasy and gritty psychological realism. Think J.K. Rowling meets C.S. Lewis meets Donna Tartt.

At the book’s start, high school senior Quentin Coldwater—brilliant, misunderstood and obsessed with a series of children’s books set in a magical land—is trying his hardest to escape his predictable Brooklyn adolescence. That is, until he is unexpectedly admitted to a prestigious college in upstate New York: Brakebills, the pre-eminent American institute for budding magicians. There, students slave away over potions and spells and are occasionally transformed into flocks of geese. For Quentin, this is eye-opening. His talents are nurtured, his limits pushed.

But it’s not all rainbows and broomsticks. There are also the tiny triumphs and trials of any college experience: competition, stress, sex, drugs, heartbreak and the looming uncertainty of graduation and the world beyond. Quentin and his friends move to Manhattan after finishing wizard school, where they live in a cramped apartment, get drunk, sleep with one another and wonder what good their prestigious magic education is actually doing them—and why their childhood fantasies were so off-base.

And it’s here that Grossman’s true cleverness comes into play. For, as much as The Magicians is an allegorical romp about “growing up” in a Harry Potter world (though, admittedly, with a bit more R-rated language), it is also an astute piece of criticism of the way in which literature sets up expectations that no real—or magical—world can ever live up to. Eventually, Quentin learns that the land from his books does, in fact, exist. But, like much in life, it’s not at all as he’d imagined it.

Grossman’s highly acclaimed previous novel, Codex, also asked readers to put aside preconceptions and give themselves over to a fictional world. It’s a testament to the author’s astounding creativity and delicate sensitivity that we are once again so willing to do so. 

In his third novel, Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman deftly and unabashedly walks the line between literary and genre fiction, creating a world of both fantasy and gritty psychological realism. Think J.K. Rowling meets C.S. Lewis meets Donna Tartt. At the book’s start, high school senior Quentin Coldwater—brilliant, misunderstood and obsessed with a series […]
Fiction

Tasting the many flavors of life

Review by Jillian Quint

The follow-up to Monique Truong’s stunning first novel, The Book of Salt, proves the best-selling author has not only staying power, but also a wealth of interests and experiences upon which to draw. Whereas her debut explored the lives of historical figures in 1930s Paris, her sophomore work, Bitter in the Mouth, brings readers into a small and colorful North Carolina town in the 1970s and ’80s.

The novel tells the story of Linda Hammerick, an introspective and often wickedly funny woman who looks back on her childhood, the friends and family she loved—her bad-girl best friend, her outlandish gay uncle—and those who never quite understood her, including her own mother. Linda’s outsider status is, in part, due to her rare and secret gift: an ability to taste sounds, or synesthesia. “Incomings,” as Linda calls them, are distinct tastes she perceives upon hearing words. The word “you” tastes of canned green beans, for example, the word “home” of Pepsi. And as a result, Linda’s way of interacting with the world around her is tempered by sensory perceptions she can neither harness nor explain.

Midway through the story, Linda reveals another secret that further explains the woman she’s become and her increasing need to learn more about her origins. Such a revelation could come off as gimmicky. But in Truong’s capable hands, it simply adds to Linda’s richness of character, mimicking, in a way, the flavorful words she experiences more fully than others.

At times Bitter in the Mouth feels a bit slow—the plot meanders and Linda’s cyclical take on her own story often feels unnecessarily circuitous. But such flaws are easily masked by Truong’s superb descriptions and intimate character portraits. We’ve never been to Boiling Springs, North Carolina, but we feel we have been. We aren’t afflicted with Linda’s neurological disorder, but we taste its power.

The follow-up to Monique Truong’s stunning first novel, The Book of Salt, proves the best-selling author has not only staying power, but also a wealth of interests and experiences upon which to draw. Whereas her debut explored the lives of historical figures in 1930s Paris, her sophomore work, Bitter in the Mouth, brings readers into a small and […]
FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Adam Ross

Interview by Jillian Quint

Born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Adam Ross was a child actor who appeared in the 1979 film The Seduction of Joe Tynan with Alan Alda and Meryl Streep. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in English, he completed an M.A. in creative writing at Hollins University, followed by an M.F.A. in creative writing at Washington University.

From 1999 to 2003, he was special projects editor and staff writer at Nashville’s alternative weekly newspaper, the Nashville Scene, and after his stint there, he taught English at the Harpeth Hall School, a private Nashville girls school.

Ross spent 13 years writing his first novel, Mr. Peanut, in which an apparently loving husband fantasizes about the death of his wife, only to see his horrific dreams come true. With its layered storyline and allusions that range from Hitchcock to Escher, Mr. Peanut is being hailed as one of the season’s best debuts. BookPage asked Ross to elaborate on the novel’s inspirations and themes.

The premise behind the book—a woman’s death at the hands of a peanut—is both absurdly comic and extremely tragic. Where did the idea come from?
In 1995, my father told me about the suspicious death of my second cousin, who was morbidly obese, struggled epically with depression, and also suffered from lethal nut allergies. According to her husband—who was, conveniently, the only witness to her “suicide”—he came home from work to find her sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of peanuts before her. They had an argument, which she interrupted by taking a fistful of nuts in her hand and eating them. She’d also hidden her Epi-pens, and died before his eyes from anaphylactic shock. I was stunned when I heard this story—I was sure she’d been murdered—and immediately afterward wrote three chapters in one sitting that closely resemble those that begin the novel now. But then I pulled up because I’d written myself into something I didn’t fully understand yet. Looking back, I think what’s so compelling about the situation is that it’s a moment of terrible privacy between a husband and wife. Maybe she was sick to death of her life, both on earth and with him; maybe he rammed the nuts down her throat. We’ll never know.

Readers often say they need likeable characters in order to connect with literature. Few, if any, of your characters are objectively likeable, yet Mr. Peanut is almost compulsively readable. Do you find your characters likeable and, if not, how do you at least bring enough humanity to them to make them real?
I find them terribly and, at times, hysterically recognizable, and I’d like to think that’s what makes the novel so readable. Numerous couples have told me that they’ve thought the very things these characters have about their spouses but were afraid to admit; that, and their marriages have been through versions of the same situations, both the ruts and redemptions. I think that part of what we’re drawn to when we read fiction is whether or not the characters bring us news about our world—spiritual, emotional, literal, or otherwise. Humbert Humbert, Nabokov’s famous pedophile, isn’t “likeable,” but the story he tells is enchanting and we’re certainly happy to follow him anywhere, no matter how perverse a place he takes us, because he writes so powerfully and believably about obsession. So it’s not, I think, a question of bringing enough humanity to make them real as much as what Keats demands: beauty and truth, no matter how dark.

Mr. Peanut incorporates a real story—the Sam Sheppard murder case of the 1950s—into its narrative. Was it always your intent to fictionalize this event and how did you negotiate the ‘cold facts’ with your imagining of what occurred?
No, he appeared several years into drafting, again a gift from my father. Initially, the book’s two detectives were allegorical constructs, one assuming all suspects guilty from the get-go, the other the opposite, and after a while I realized I needed a grey-area figure. After my dad and I watched The Fugitive and he told me a brief history of the case, so I read about it and, bingo, there’s my guy: I wanted to rescue the true story from the Hollywood version, because in the remake, Harrison Ford is the paladin knight of marriage, its redeemer in a struggle to regain his good name, whereas what I found so captivating about the Dr. Sam Sheppard murder case was its mystery and muck, what with Sheppard’s serial womanizing, his narcissism, and the way his relationship with his wife anticipated so many moral hazards of the sexual revolution, not to mention the fact that his guilt or innocence remains in question. It’s just a juicy, albeit tragic, mystery, and it required extensive research because I wanted to take Sheppard’s testimony and imagine it from the point of view of the primary suspects—Sheppard, Dr. Lester Hoversten, and window-washer Dick Eberling—as well as Marilyn, the victim. The cold facts are directly incorporated into the novel because you can’t get around them. They’re out there, and so I used them as the plot’s scaffolding.

Hitchcock figures heavily into both your plot and themes. So does Escher and, of course, the iconic wrong man detective story. What other writers and artists inspire you?
The writers who had the biggest impact on me while I was drafting were first Milan Kundera, whose novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being also has overlapping chronologies and is told from different points of view that, taken together, deliver a huge emotional charge at the story’s end. Italo Calvino, the great Italian fabulist, writes formally complex and wildly inventive narratives, like The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which he generated using tarot cards. When it comes to dark tales, I regularly returned to John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, which is about very bad men and women doing very, very bad things, and you can’t put it down. As for artists, music-wise give me Beethoven’s heavy metal any day along with Miles Davis’s lightness; throw in Calder’s subtraction of weight from giant structures, Rothko’s emotionally super-charged color combinations, and the purity of Brancusi’s abstract sculptures.

In many ways,  Mr. Peanut resists traditional chronology and narrative arc. Was this a conscious choice, or something that emerged naturally as you wrote?
It emerged naturally though I wish it were otherwise since it might not have taken so long to write, about 13 years of off-and-on work. I’ve got nothing against classic Aristotelian structure, though I believe you can achieve Aristotelian catharsis by countless other means, but the truth is this: the games the novel plays with chronology, arc, Hitchcock allusions, and names demand the reader be the detective, which I think we all have to be when it comes to identifying both the good and evil that lurk in our hearts.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
Husbands and wives of America: do good housekeeping! Take care of your spouse! Nurture your marriage and be very careful what you wish for when it comes to things like, oh, freedom from it: you might just get it, and the attendant tragedy, loneliness, and guilt that come with it—see Dr. Sheppard above or your neighbor’s recent divorce—are potentially horrible.

We have to ask: what does your wife think of all of this? 
She read it for the first time last year and hasn’t spoken to me since. No, seriously, she was very moved by it because she hung tough while I labored to finish and recognizes moments in it from our marriage that make us both happy: like David and Alice in the novel, we met in a Hitchcock seminar at Hollins University and spent our first months together falling in love with his films and each other. Years into our marriage, we went to Kauai, again just like the main characters, but whereas that trip marks the beginning of the end of their relationship for us it was where we learned we were pregnant with our first daughter. Our life is the Escher-obverse of the book. Plus the Detective Hastroll section cracks her up. And sometimes she wants to kill me too.

What’s up next for you?
I’m adding several new stories to my collection entitled Ladies & Gentlemen, due out next summer, and they’re dark and comic too, but nearly all of them are traditionally chronological with classic narrative arcs. No more crazy outlines for me.

Related content:
Review of Mr. Peanut.

Born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Adam Ross was a child actor who appeared in the 1979 film The Seduction of Joe Tynan with Alan Alda and Meryl Streep. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in English, he completed an M.A. in creative writing at Hollins University, followed by […]
FictionDebut Fiction

Charles Elton

Interview by Jillian Quint

How does it feel to be immortalized in fiction by a parent? That’s the central question of Mr Toppit, British author Charles Elton’s debut.

Mr Toppit is your first novel, but you’ve worked in the book business for many years. Have you seen fame affect a writer and his family the way it does the Hayman clan?
When I was a Literary Agent in the 1980's I worked for the firm that represented the Estate of A.A.Milne and I learnt the story of how much his son, Christopher Robin Milne, hated being in Winnie The Pooh and how it blighted his life. He ended up totally estranged from his parents. I also knew the huge sums of money that came in for the Estate, more than 50 years after the books' publication. That was the inspiration for my book—really the only idea I had when I started it, though the details. I was lucky in that, during the 15 years it took me to write my book, the Harry Potter books began to be published and suddenly my notion of a series of children's books “taking over the world” didn't seem so far-fetched. Since I've worked in television drama, I've seen many actors affected by the sudden fame a part can bring them. Not always a pretty sight.

Speaking of the Hayman clan, they’re an extremely compelling and absurd bunch. Were these portraits drawn from anyone in your life?
There are many autobiographical elements in the book. Sometimes, I took real characters I knew and put them in my fictional setting. Lila, the German illustrator, is based entirely on my sisters' German teacher at school, who became obsessed with our family. Laurie's mother Alma is based on my sister's mother-in-law, who really did call the police accusing her blameless son of trying to kill her. My mother was run over and killed by a cement truck, in the way that happens to the father in my book.

With Luke as the series’ star and Rachel omitted entirely, you’ve set up an interesting dichotomy. Which child do you think got the better deal?
It's interesting to weigh up whether Rachel or Luke get the better deal. In an ideal world, if Rachel had been a more stable character, I think she would have got the better deal, but her own demons bring her down. In a strange way, Luke—because of his detachment—is probably the best able to cope with the fame the Hayseed books bring, even though he hates it.

Was it always your intent to leave out the plot of The Hayseed Chronicles? Why did you choose to do so?
It was a very conscious decision. I wanted to give a flavour and hint at the enigmas but leave it to the reader to imagine what the books might be like. If I had included more, it would have all become too “solid.” As one of the reasons for the Hayseed books’ success is the way that everyone interprets the character of Mr Toppit in their own ways, I wanted my small excerpts to do the same thing.

The success of the Hayseed Chronicles is due almost entirely to chance. These days, it’s said that a publisher’s commitment dictates sales, but do you think there are still real-life books that could take off in such a fashion?
I think it happens less than it used to, but there are examples of books taking off by chance, or just word of mouth. The first Harry Potter book was bought by the publishers for a tiny advance and there was no marketing push. Also (I think) Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin took off (in England, anyway) without any pushing by the publishers. With the proliferation of Reading Groups, I think it could happen more. Conversely, there are many examples of large advances and massive hype that don't pay off in sales for publishers. I'm not even sure that good reviews help that much always. There's nothing like people simply loving a book and passing it on.

You do a terrific (and often quite funny) job of showing the difference between English and American sentiments. You’ve already published to much acclaim in the U.K.; do you think your book will be received differently in the States?
When my book came out in England last year, there was a lot of publicity. Penguin constructed a campaign and a website that looked like a fan site devoted to the (fictional) Hayseed books. On the day of publication, they took out a full-page ad in The London Times purporting to be a statement from 'The Hayseed Foundation' threatening legal action against my book Mr Toppit as if it were an unauthorized and possibly libelous biography of the Hayman family. The morning radio picked up the news and I got a lot of calls from friends worried that I might be heading for prison. The reviews were lovely, and getting onto the “Richard and Judy Book Show” (the U.K. equivalent of “Oprah”) helped turn it into a success. But, of course, the U.S. is a different market and it means a huge amount to me that the book works in the U.S. For one thing, I love the U.S. and lived in Los Angeles when I was an agent. But I think, because quite a lot of the book takes place in America, it will read differently to a U.S. audience—for one thing, the English sections will be the “foreign” ones. And, as Mr Toppit is about a series of books that become famous in America, I'd find it pretty painful if my book falls flat there!

Even though Mr Toppit is very much an adult book, what do you think grownups can learn from children’s literature?
One of the themes of my book is the difference between being a child and an adult. What I love about the best children's books—and one of the reasons I adapted several into films when I was producing drama—is that they show how clear-sighted children are, how things tend to be right or wrong, and how this gets compromised by the adult world for whom the gradations between right and wrong are infinite and confusing. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the best examples of this, and a book I (and everyone else) love.

We have to ask. Who is Mr Toppit and what would finding him achieve?
I wish I knew the answer to this, and one of the points of my book is how differently he can be interpreted. For me, he's the dark at the top of the stairs, the questions we don't want answered, the place in our soul that we'd rather not go to, but mostly The Man Who Knows Too Much about all of us. But maybe—on the other hand—he's just a mirage, or some kind of mental optical illusion signifying a lot, but meaning nothing.

 

 

 

How does it feel to be immortalized in fiction by a parent? That’s the central question of Mr Toppit, British author Charles Elton’s debut. Mr Toppit is your first novel, but you’ve worked in the book business for many years. Have you seen fame affect a writer and his family the way it does the […]
Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Anna North

Interview by Jillian Quint

Anna North's dark, gripping and wildly creative debut, America Pacifica, goes where few Iowa Writers' Workshop grads have gone before: a futuristic end-of-days setting where the buildings are made of sea-fiber and solvent-huffing hoodlums roam the streets. Still, North's story of a young girl in search of her mother (and her island's history) is remarkably universal, with characters as real those found in any contemporary fiction.

We sat down with the author to chat about dystopias, female protagonists and the pressure of happy endings.

America Pacifica is a difficult book to categorize. To what extent do you consider it a post-apocalyptic or sci-fi novel?
I definitely consider it post-apocalyptic, but whether it’s sci-fi is a more difficult question. I think the reputation of science fiction has really improved a lot over the years, but a lot of readers of literary fiction still tend to think of sci-fi as badly written, or as not concerned with character. This isn’t true—there are a lot of wonderful and beautiful sci-fi novels. Sometimes I call America Pacifica “literary sci-fi” so that people know I care about emotions and sentences, but I do look forward to a day when that kind of marker won’t be necessary.

The creation of a fantasy world like America Pacifica requires creating a universe larger than the book itself. Did you have the entire landscape and rules of the Island in your head before you began to write, or did you develop as you went?
I developed as I went, but my knowledge of the world had to be pretty far ahead of the story. So if Darcy was going to a particular neighborhood I had to know where it was on the map and how long it would take to get there before she set out. I drew a lot of maps, and I kept a map of the whole island in my desk and referred to it constantly. A lot of the rules—things like the absence of cameras and phones and Internet, and the general difficulty of getting your hands on metal—I established very early on, because I did a lot of thinking about how hard it would be to get a bunch of stuff across the Pacific. But others, like the toxic seawater, actually came in much later drafts.

The dystopian setting and strong female lead brings to mind the (wildly popular) Hunger Games books. Have you read that series and how do you feel about the comparison?
I haven’t read the Hunger Games books, because someone recommended them to me while I was in the thick of writing America Pacifica and had banned myself from reading dystopias until it was done. But I’d like to read them. They sound like the kind of thing I’d really enjoy, and I’m happy they’ve done so well. I think we need more books about girls swashbuckling and having adventures.

Speaking of strong female lead, Darcy is quite a character. Had you always imagined her as book’s focal point? Or did you develop the concept first and the character second?
I started with the idea of writing a post-apocalyptic novel involving a missing person, but Darcy came fairly quickly after that. In my very early stabs at a beginning, she had a different name and lived in a totally different place—a mainland full of tent cities that people got around by bicycle. But she was pretty much the same person—she was always someone young who has to seek and search, and carry a lot of responsibility mostly on her own.

Along similar lines, I see your publisher is doing cross-promotion with YA markets. Were you ever pressured to publish this as a Young Adult book? What do you think makes it decidedly adult?
I was never pressured, but I did have an agent suggest to me that I make Darcy several years younger and try to sell the book as straight-up YA. I felt strongly that Darcy should be 18, because I wanted her to be an adult, but only just. Over the course of the book, I wanted her to be finding out what kind of adult she would be, the way you do when you’re still very young but not a child anymore. I didn’t want it to be about coming of age quite so much as I wanted it to be about the fashioning of a grownup self. The fact that it’s less about the (very real) perils of adolescence and more about what happens afterward may make it more adult than your average YA book. But I think it’s getting tougher and tougher to make these distinctions—young readers have always read books for adults, and now more than ever, adults are reading YA.

Without giving too much away, I’ll say that book’s second half and ending definitely diverge from norms within the YA/sci-fi genre. Did you feel pressure to wrap things up neatly? Did you always know how the book would end?
I always knew more or less what the last chapter would look like. It was probably the fastest to write because I had it all planned out in my head. But my first draft did end a bit more ambiguously than the finished one, in a way that my advisor found way too sad. I think she was right—not because sad books are bad, but because it hadn’t really had the effect on her that I was going for. So I did end up making some changes, but I never felt pressure to make things too neat or tidy. I think that would be contrary to the spirit of the book.

I see you’re an Iowa grad. Were you working on America Pacifica while you were there? If so, how did it differ from what your classmates were up to?
I wrote pretty much the entire first draft while I was at Iowa, which was a wonderful place to do it. Work set in the future was pretty uncommon there, though one of my classmates did write some post-apocalyptic stories set in Maine (another wrote very compelling fantasy). I worried about this a little before I got there, but it turned out to be totally fine. Everyone was very respectful of America Pacifica and treated it like it was a serious book, and even though futuristic stuff was pretty uncommon, the diversity of my classmates’ work was really impressive. I got to know a lot of people who were taking big risks and trying new things in their writing, and I never felt like I had to conform to one specific mode or do things in a traditional way.

You’re also a writer for the smart-lady blog Jezebel. How does writing in the online (and feminist) sphere influence your fiction?
Writing online means I read a ton of news every day, which is really good for my fiction, because I end up having a lot of ideas and facts swimming around in my head all the time. It’s also exposed me to a lot of writers I might not be aware of otherwise, which is a good thing for any fiction writer. I do think my interest in female protagonists and especially female protagonists doing heroic things was set before I started working for Jezebel, but working there and also reading the other great feminist blogs I became aware of as a result has given me a better understanding of the politics surrounding women’s writing and women’s stories. And I think being more politically aware is making me a better fiction writer, even if my work doesn’t end up being overtly political

We have to ask: what’s up next for you?
I’m working on a novel about a dead female filmmaker, told in the form of a filmography composed by the four people who loved her most.

 

Anna North's dark, gripping and wildly creative debut, America Pacifica, goes where few Iowa Writers' Workshop grads have gone before: a futuristic end-of-days setting where the buildings are made of sea-fiber and solvent-huffing hoodlums roam the streets. Still, North's story of a young girl in search of her mother (and her island's history) is remarkably […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Benjamin Black

Interview by Jillian Quint

Benjamin Black, the alter ego of Irish literary author John Banville, returns with A Death in Summer, his fourth detective novel featuring pathologist/amateur detective Garret Quirke.

You don’t hide the fact that Benjamin Black is a pseudonym. What does having a pen name afford a writer? How does having an alter ego affect your approach toward the crime series?
My decision to write crime fiction under a pseudonym arose out of the fear that if I published under Banville’s name, Banville’s readers would suspect I was working a postmodernist trick on them. I wanted readers to know this was a new venture I was embarked on, and that what they saw was what they got. BB writes entirely differently from JB—both in procedure and in the finished product. I haven’t yet decided what it means to have an alter ego. Nothing much, probably. We are all manifold selves, after all.

The book opens with the murder of a major newspaper tycoon, and his print empire looms over the rest of the story. You were an editor for The Irish Press; did that experience inform the book at all?
I think the only place where I consciously used my experience as a newspaper man was in a little scene early on in the book where a golf-playing news executive is dictating to his long-suffering secretary an editorial on the violent death of the newspaper’s proprietor. I enjoyed writing that.

While you’re clearly writing within the tradition of classic noir, your novels have a decidedly modern bent. What do you take from the genre and what do you make your own?
Have they a decidedly modern bent? They seem to me decidedly traditional, if perhaps a bit better-written than a lot of crime fiction. I like the genre, but on the other hand I dislike the notion of there being genres; to me, there are just good books and not so good books. Crime and Punishment is a crime novel, and The Postman Always Rings Twice is a piece of serious literature.

What kinds of liberties does writing about an “amateur” give you? Do you ever worry that your part-time sleuth is becoming a professional?
I wanted a protagonist who would be the direct opposite of a Sherlock Holmes or an Hercule Poirot, and certainly in Quirke that’s what I got. He’s just as slow and dull-witted as the rest of us are, and most of the time he gets things wrong, misses clues, falls over his own feet and will certainly never be a professional. Since the books are set in the 1950s it means I do not have to keep up with present-day forensic science and so on, which is a great relief, for I find the contemporary obsession with factuality a great bore. A pinch of imagination will tip the scales against a pound of research any day.

Why do you find the 1950s such an interesting time to write about?
The 1950s in Ireland was a horrible, soul-destroying, hidebound and mean-spirited time, but also absolutely fascinating, at this remove. Ireland was just like Eastern Europe, caught fast in the grip of an iron ideology and ruled over by half-crazed zealots who watched our every move to ensure we did not deviate from the party line. And then, life in Dublin in those days, as I vividly recall it, was pure noir: the fog, the furtive sexuality, the dirty secrets hidden deep. Banville gets quite jealous of BB, at times.

You’re particularly good at withholding information without leaving your readers feeling cheated. How do you decide which clues to reveal and when?
Will it dent your admiration if I say that, as in life, so in fiction, and that I just stumble along, making it up as I go? The essence of BB’s work, I like to think, is spontaneity, a sense of the contingent, of what Wallace Stevens calls “life’s nonsense” which “pierces us with strange relation.” From the start I determined to write crime fiction that would be true to life, as true to life as fiction can be. The jigsaw-puzzle crime novel does not interest me, which is not to say I don’t find, say, John Dixon Carr’s books breathtakingly ingenious. But his methods are not, could not be, mine.

When you start writing a crime novel, do you always know “who did it”? 
In some books I knew from the start, in some I wasn’t sure. I liked that uncertainty; it made me feel quite close to my poor, dumb protagonist as he treads on the evidence and falls in love with all the wrong people.

What are you most afraid of?
As a human being: death, insofar as death means the loss of everyone and all that I love dearly. As a writer: the illusion of success, than which there is nothing more dangerous. 

 

Benjamin Black, the alter ego of Irish literary author John Banville, returns with A Death in Summer, his fourth detective novel featuring pathologist/amateur detective Garret Quirke. You don’t hide the fact that Benjamin Black is a pseudonym. What does having a pen name afford a writer? How does having an alter ego affect your approach toward […]
Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Erin Morgenstern

Interview by Jillian Quint

The Night Circus is the story of two magicians who each select a champion to compete in a decades-long tournament that takes the form of a stranger-than-average circus. As competitors Celia and Marco match wits, and fall in love, the  reader becomes equally enamored of the complex, magical world that author Erin Morgenstern has created. We talked to Morgenstern—who describes herself as "a writer, a painter & a keeper of cats"—about the inspiration behind one of this fall's most touted debuts.

Literary/fantasy hybrids, from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to The Magicians, are hotter than ever. To what extent were you aware of genre as you were writing?
I wasn’t even convinced it was a novel for a while so genre wasn’t something I thought about too much. I was mildly concerned that it was too literary to be fantasy and too fantasy to be literary—I hadn’t even considered hybrid territory an option—so I wrote the story the way it wanted to be told and figured I could worry about categorizing it when I was done.

Did you have the full parameters of the circus in your mind before you began, or did you discover as you went?
I began with the idea of endless looping tents with a bonfire in the center and I explored it as I went along. I didn’t have a map at all as far as what the circus was and how the world worked when I started writing. There was a lot of revising and trial and error involved before I discovered all its secrets. (If I even know all of them. Sometimes I think there are things in the circus that remain mysteries even to me.)

One of the great pleasures of reading The Night Circus is following the different time periods that intertwine throughout the narrative. Did you always intend to tell this story in non-chronological order and was it hard to keep track of what was happening when?

I always intended it to be non-linear. In early drafts it was even more so but it never really worked properly that way. It ended up too convoluted. I wanted the book itself to seem like the circus: individual glimpses of tents and pieces of story. And time is an underlying theme throughout, so it made sense to me to play with timeline and history. I did have to write out timelines to keep track of dates and ages quite a bit, but that forced me to keep everything organized.

Katherine Dunn (author of Geek Love) called The Night Circus a fable. Do you agree? If so, what is the lesson or moral learned?
I sometimes call it a fairy tale but I hadn’t thought of it as a fable, though it may have fable-esque qualities. I do think there are themes about making choices and following dreams and defying consequences that could probably be shaped into morals or lessons. Perhaps it is several fables tied into one tale.

Though readers of the novel are very much immersed in the circus, we see very little of the actual performances. Was this a conscious decision?
Originally I had long, sprawling descriptions of the circus but I think it was better to leave more to the imagination, to provide tastes rather than full courses. There were things that I never wanted to describe in detail, like Celia’s performances, which I have a feeling would defy description. I also wanted to leave the impression that there was more to the circus. More sights, more sounds, more tents around unseen corners.

Although Le Cirque des Rêves is quite obviously a fictional troupe, it feels very rooted in turn-of-the-century history and literary tradition. What type of research, both historical and literary, did you do to prepare?
I didn’t actually do much research. I’ve always been fond of that time period in movies and fashion and literature and I think all that previous exposure gave me a decent sense of style and tone. A lot of it was built around a gut-level feeling of what worked and what didn’t, and I occasionally checked to make sure I wasn’t being too terribly anachronistic. But I didn’t want to bend over backwards to make it properly historically accurate. I wanted it to feel believable more than anything else, as I like my fantasy to be grounded in reality.

Friedrick Thiessen, the circus’ reigning expert and academic, is an interesting character. What was it like to be charged with the (rather postmodern) task of writing about a person who studies your own fictional creation?
I suppose it was easier since I sometimes forget that I had created the circus. It seemed more like something that I discovered in my subconscious and excavated rather than something I built. Herr Thiessen is very dear to my heart and I think I understood him immediately—who he is and what the circus means to him, why he feels compelled to capture something of it in prose. He’s the person, along with Bailey, who sees the circus from the outside when so many of the other characters are unable to have that perspective, so to me it was the point of view that the circus was meant to be viewed from. It is his eyes that see the sum of the parts, his words that reflect the circus back on itself. I suppose it is a bit postmodern but, given the nature of the circus as a performance space, the audience plays an important role and Friedrick is the beating heart of that audience.

You say all your work is a fairy-tale of one kind or another. Can you elaborate?  What’s up next for you?
I think everything I create, whether in writing or painting, has a strong sense of story, that Once upon a time . . . element. Otherworldly but familiar, laced with magic and possibilities, with light and dark and shades of grey. The story-ness of books and art is important to me, that intangible quality that elevates them beyond words and pictures and gives them lives of their own.

As far as what I am working on next, it is another novel, which I suppose could be described as something of a film noir-flavored Alice in Wonderland. It is still figuring out what it wants to be, but it’s developing a life of its own already, so I think that’s a good sign.

Read our review of The Night Circus.

The Night Circus is the story of two magicians who each select a champion to compete in a decades-long tournament that takes the form of a stranger-than-average circus. As competitors Celia and Marco match wits, and fall in love, the  reader becomes equally enamored of the complex, magical world that author Erin Morgenstern has created. We […]
Fiction

Grace McCleen

Interview by Jillian Quint

God. Faith. Creation. The ability to receive love. These may seem like concerns better suited to a philosopher than a 10-year-old girl. Yet in The Land of Decoration, readers are introduced to such heady concepts through the eyes of a child—and the result is both affecting and profound.

Judith McPherson, the sheltered, wildly imaginative narrator of Grace McCleen’s stunning debut, is perhaps more inclined to tackle these kinds of things than most children. A member of a fundamentalist Christian sect, Judith spends the majority of her time studying the Bible, preaching the Word with her widowed father and enduring the affections of her church’s stranger members. Her only pleasure comes from creating a miniature homage to the Old Testament in her bedroom. This tiny world—The Land of Decoration, as she calls it—is constructed from found objects and bits of discarded junk. Yet its creation and preservation is everything to Judith, who comes to believe she has the ability to commune with God and perform “real world” miracles by manipulating her little kingdom.

“I didn’t want to rule out the possibility [that these miracles were really happening],” McCleen says during a call to her home in London. “It was difficult making the miracles seem plausible to her, but also plausible simply as natural events.”

These miracles—which begin with a snowstorm Judith believes she conjured—escalate as she becomes the target of a schoolyard bully. Though the bully’s actions against the McPherson family grow increasingly violent and destructive, the dynamic is more complicated than a simple antagonizer/victim dichotomy.

“I think that when you get older you do realize that everyone is a product of their upbringing, their social and economic conditioning. I don’t think anyone is evil or bad,” McCleen says.

"One of the hardest things for humans to do is open themselves to another person."

A Welsh-born writer and musician, McCleen is in a unique position to assess such ambiguities, not to mention the effect of a person’s upbringing. Like Judith, McCleen grew up in a fundamentalist religion, which she left about 10 years ago. And also like Judith, she once thought she had a personal relationship with God. Though she says her own story is less extreme than that of her narrator, she admits that when writing the novel, she drew on emotions from her own childhood: “emotions like fear, grief, anger and helplessness.”

Still, one of the remarkable successes of The Land of Decoration is how universal it feels. McCleen didn’t want the story to be set in a particular country or time period, and she worked hard not to condemn or condone her characters’ faith. “Every culture can relate to God and childhood,” she says. “I hoped the effect would be almost mystical, like a children’s story.”

Indeed, when reading the novel, it’s hard not to think of children’s literature, with its big ideas and morals couched in small, contained plotlines. It’s this simultaneous complexity and simplicity that has earned The Land of Decoration comparisons to adult/young adult crossover novels like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Room. But while McCleen owes much to the canon of juvenile fiction (she cites Beatrix Potter as an influence), her greatest trove of source material comes from the Bible itself.

The opening of The Land of Decoration is a creation story in its own right: “In the beginning, there was an empty room, a little bit of space, a little bit of light, a little bit of time.” From there, McCleen goes on to explain the origins of Judith’s miniature world—the sun she crafted from a metal cage, the homes she made from dry grass and tree stumps.

By choosing to let a child tell the story, McCleen did her narrative a great service. Judith’s religiosity might seem heavy-handed coming from an older narrator, and her innocence is believable, while never feeling saccharine or contrived.

Over the course of the novel, both Judith and her father have their faith tested. But while he finds it increasingly difficult to honor a God who would allow such suffering, she becomes more resolute in her calling—and thanks to McCleen’s deft hand and steady plotting, such devotion rings true. Judith emerges as an honest and likable—if ultimately unreliable—guide.

Still, while readers come to see discrepancies between real-world events and Judith’s imagination, McCleen leaves the issue of miracles open-ended. Spirituality and reality need not be at odds, she feels, and in short, metaphysical passages, she gestures toward the scientific existence of things that seem impossible.

“When I was in my religion—which I was until I was 22—I believed that miracles had ceased in Jesus’ day,” McCleen says. “But then I left my religion and became very interested in spirituality. And there are people these days who believe that miracles still happen. I’m not sure. . . . I could see how something could appear to be a miracle, but also make scientific sense. Now I’m open to many things which I wasn’t when I believed in a single God.”

The greatest miracles, she believes, are ones that may not seem particularly miraculous—every­day miracles, like “a father and daughter finally showing love.” And as Judith and her father struggle to understand each other and combat hardship—both corporal and spiritual—the difficulty and importance of being loved become increasingly apparent. “One of the hardest things for humans to do is to open themselves to another person,” McCleen says. “It can be terrifying and it can be the most powerful thing you’ll ever experience. It’s frightening to be so exposed.”

The Land of Decoration is a book that jumps, head first, into such raw terror and redemptive love. On the outside, it may seem like a small story about small things. But at its core, it’s about the biggest issues a person can encounter—how to confront the unknown, how to negotiate faith and how to be a decent and loving human being.

The fact that Grace McCleen is able to address these matters with such subtlety and delicacy is no small miracle itself.

God. Faith. Creation. The ability to receive love. These may seem like concerns better suited to a philosopher than a 10-year-old girl. Yet in The Land of Decoration, readers are introduced to such heady concepts through the eyes of a child—and the result is both affecting and profound. Judith McPherson, the sheltered, wildly imaginative narrator […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Laura Moriarty

Interview by Jillian Quint

One of the most anticipated novels of the summer, Laura Moriarty's The Chaperone is a delight. Steeped in the atmosphere of the 1920s, it stars two fascinating, complex heroines—future movie star Louise Brooks and the Kansas matron sent to chaperone her on a trip to New York City—who carve very different paths out of the choices alloted to women of the time. We talked to Moriarty about the origins of her third novel, the real Louise Brooks and the challenges of historical fiction.

Your earlier novels are set in the present or recent past. What made you choose the 1920s as a time period and a real person—Louise Brooks—as your subject?
I was reading a nonfiction book about Louise Brooks, and she was so interesting, so intelligent and confident and difficult, even at a young age. But I was particularly intrigued when I read that when she was 15—and already a handful—she left Wichita for New York City accompanied by a 36-year-old chaperone she didn’t know very well. Right away, I thought, “That poor woman.” Then I thought, “Anyone who tried to chaperone Louise Brooks would have a story to tell.”

How closely does your story cleave to Brooks’ actual story? What kind of research did you do about her early life and that life-changing summer she spent with the Denishawn dance company in New York?
I stuck to Louise Brooks’ life story closely. There is an excellent biography on her by Barry Paris, and my copy of that is pretty well used: every other page is dog-eared and marked up. Obviously, I had to invent scenes and conversations, but when I wrote about Louise, I considered what people who knew her had said about her, and I watched her old films to try to get her mannerisms right. I also read Louise Brooks’ autobiography, Lulu in Hollywood. My goal was to give a true account of her tumultuous life and personality while imagining everything else, including the details of that first summer.

Right away, I thought, “That poor woman.” Then I thought, “Anyone who tried to chaperone Louise Brooks would have a story to tell.”

You’ve mentioned that Cora is based on a real person as well. What do you know about this nonfictional woman, and what were the freedoms of creating most of her biography from scratch?
I know very little about the real chaperone. She’s sort of lost to history, but that was a gift to me as a storyteller. I liked the combination of sticking to facts of Louise’s life and having the freedom to imagine anything for Cora. I made up her name and everything else about her, though I did quite a bit of research to give her a plausible background and to make her a woman of her time.

Life at the Home for Friendless Girls is particularly shocking for modern readers. Did places like that really exist?
Yes. And there were a lot of them. I read many accounts from children who lived in similar institutions. But really, it seemed like the people who were running them were doing the best they could, trying to feed and house and clothe as many children as possible. New York City was full of children who had to fend for themselves, either because their parents were dead or too sick or too poor to care for them. The children who found a spot in an orphanage were actually lucky. The orphan trains that brought these children out of the city and to the Midwest seem cruel and strange now, but taken in the context of a time when there were so many homeless children starving and sick in the streets of New York, you can see why it was a viable solution.

Clearly Cora has been sheltered by her Midwestern upbringing. But Louise is also not as sophisticated as she would like to pretend. Which character do you think is more naïve and which is more changed by her five weeks away from Kansas?
Each character is naïve in a different way, but I think Cora changes more that summer. When she goes to New York, she’s bringing years of disappointments and bottled-up emotions, and she’s thoughtful enough to be open to a new experience. Louise’s road is longer and much harder. I think her real maturity comes later.

The Chaperone addresses many subjects that were extremely taboo in the 1920s—sex, contraception, integration, homosexuality, abuse. Was it difficult writing about such things from the perspective of a woman who has no vocabulary for them?
I love how you phrased this question—while I was writing this novel, I was thinking about how so much of the way we see the world relies on our language, our names for things and ideas. It’s hard to conceive of an idea for which you don’t have a name. I really wanted Cora to be a woman of her time, not a woman with modern-day sensibilities and ideas plopped down in 1922. She sees the world the way it was taught to her, and the concepts that are familiar to a modern reader wouldn’t be familiar to her. I wanted to narrate the experience of someone struggling to come up with her own code of ethics in a way that would be true for her time. So yes, that was difficult sometimes, but that was what was so interesting about writing historical fiction—it’s the same pleasure as reading historical fiction, truly immersing myself in another world. But I’d say with writing, the experience is more intense. 

Louise and Cora both break from convention, but while the former does this audibly and intentionally, the latter is more quietly irreverent. Which method do you think is more effective?
Louise’s openly defiant behavior gets a lot of attention, and she was (and is) a role model for many women. But then there are women like Cora. She lives with compassion and she thinks for herself. She also works to instigate real change—though without any of Louise’s fame or glamour. Really, she’s just as defiant. It seems to me that the Coras of the world, once they’re roused, are the more formidable force. 

Throughout the novel, Cora is reading (and not always enjoying) The Age of Innocence. Were you influenced by Wharton’s work?
I chose it because it won the Pulitzer in 1921, so it seemed likely that it would be something Cora—wanting to impress her smart young charge—might bring along for the trip. Also, it was set decades before the ’20s, so Cora is reading historical fiction, which, for me, is a good way to consider the present anew. The Age of Innocence is very much about someone who simply can’t break through the constraints of his culture and time, and I liked the idea of Cora reading this story and thinking about it as she’s grappling with the confines of her own world.

Do any other time periods or historical figures particularly interest you? What’s up next?

Oh yes! So many time periods and historical figures interest me. I love a good biography. It’s looking like my next novel will also be historical, but I don’t want to say too much yet!

 

Related content: read a review of The Chaperone.

 

A clip of Louise Brooks in the 1929 film Pandora's Box:

One of the most anticipated novels of the summer, Laura Moriarty's The Chaperone is a delight. Steeped in the atmosphere of the 1920s, it stars two fascinating, complex heroines—future movie star Louise Brooks and the Kansas matron sent to chaperone her on a trip to New York City—who carve very different paths out of the […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

M.L. Stedman

Interview by Jillian Quint

In the wake of World War I, on a remote island off the coast of Australia, lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel make a life-altering choice: to keep and raise a foundling child who is not theirs. The repercussions of this decision shape M.L. Stedman’s stunning debut novel, The Light Between Oceans.

We caught up with Stedman (herself born and raised in Western Australia) for a discussion of right and wrong, moral ambiguity and an author’s responsibility to her characters.

What a mesmerizing story. Did anything specific inspire you to write The Light Between Oceans?
I write fairly instinctively, just seeing what comes up when I sit down at the page. For this story, it was a lighthouse, then a woman and a man. Before long, a boat washed up on the beach, and in it I could see a dead man, and then a crying baby. Everything that happens in the book stems from this initiating image—a bit like the idea of ‘Big Bang’—an initial point that seems tiny turns out to be incredibly dense, and just expanded outward further and further. I got to know Tom and Isabel as I wrote them, and was drawn into their seemingly insoluble dilemma, and their struggle to stay true to their love for each other as well as to their own deepest drives.

The major moral question of keeping a child that isn’t yours is posed early in the book. Do you think there was a “right” decision for Tom and Isabel?
Aha! It’s up to each reader to come up with their own answer to this one.

Fair enough. Well, you do a wonderful job of refusing to pass judgment on your characters. Was this a conscious choice and if so, was it difficult to do?
It was a conscious choice, yes. I think today more than ever we can fall into “sound-bite judgment,” reaching conclusions on the basis of quite a cursory consideration of an issue. It’s a kind of moral multitasking, that stems perhaps from being required to have an opinion on everything. If we really stop to consider things, they’re rarely black and white.

As to the second part of your question, the more my own views differed from that of a character, the more satisfying I found it to explore them and to put their point of view as convincingly as possible.

To this end, do you think there is a “bad guy” here? Do all books need heroes and antagonists?
I don’t think there are any “bad guys” in the book, just some poor choices made on the basis of imperfect information or perspective (i.e. the lot of the standard-issue human). Stories need tension, which can be supplied by antagonists, but here it’s supplied by fate or circumstance—the overwhelming force that pretty much all the characters are up against. One good character’s gain will be another good character’s loss, which makes the questions a lot harder. I didn’t want there to be any “safe place” in the book where the reader could relax and say, “I’m completely sure of what the right thing to do is here.”

If we really stop to consider things, they’re rarely black and white.

Speaking of antagonists, the landscape of Janus Rock and the great sea beyond is awfully unforgiving. Is it based on a real location?
No and yes. The island of Janus Rock is entirely fictitious (although I have a placeholder for it on Google maps). But the region where the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet is real, and the climate, weather and the landscape are more or less as I’ve described them. I wrote some of the book there: It’s a very beautiful, if sometimes fierce, part of the world.

Lighthouses are always weighty images in literature. What do they represent to you?
A lighthouse automatically implies potential drama: You only find them where there’s a risk of going astray or running aground. They’re a reminder, too, of human frailty, and the heroic endeavor of mankind to take on the forces of nature in a ludicrously unfair fight to make safe our journey through this world. And they betoken binary opposites such as safety and danger, light and dark, movement and stasis, communication and isolation—they are intrinsically dynamic because they make our imaginations pivot between them.

What kind of research did you do to prepare to write?
To prepare, none at all! My research very much followed the story rather than leading it. I climbed up lighthouses, and went through the lightkeepers’ logbooks in the Australian National Archives—wonderful. And I spent time in the British Library, reading battalion journals and other materials from Australian soldiers in WWI: heartbreaking accounts that often left me in tears.

Do you have any useful tips for aspiring novelists?
Write because you love it. Write because that’s how you want to spend those irreplaceable heartbeats. Don’t write to please anyone else, or to achieve something that will retrospectively validate your choice.

In the wake of World War I, on a remote island off the coast of Australia, lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel make a life-altering choice: to keep and raise a foundling child who is not theirs. The repercussions of this decision shape M.L. Stedman’s stunning debut novel, The Light Between Oceans. We […]

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features