Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

The title of your book is intriguing. Which is the country that is forgotten, Korea or the United States? Or is it a metaphor for what an immigrant has to leave behind?

The title worked in a few different ways that I liked. It refers to Korea—not only the Korea that the family in the book leaves behind, but the Korea that was lost when it was divided. In my book, I wanted the break between the sisters to be a kind of echo of that split—and for the family’s exile from their homeland (where they belonged, where they felt whole) to be an echo of the loss of that older Korea. On a metaphorical level, the title also refers to the sisters’ estrangement—so the forgotten country is their childhood closeness, their innocence and the past.

You have a degree in mathematics as well as creative writing. What effect, if any, does math have on your writing?

It’s funny: When I was a math major in college I wrote stories all the time, and now whenever I write, I’m always sneaking in some math. I love both disciplines because it seems to me that they’re both ultimately about learning how to make sense of the world, trying to organize the chaos and describe and communicate it in a meaningful and beautiful way.

Siblings play such an important role in your book. Do you have siblings, and what makes that relationship so special?

I have one older brother, and he’s the best. We shared toys and stuffed animals, and we wrote and made books together! The thing about being a younger sibling is that your older sibling is so much more important and large in your world than you are in theirs when you’re kids. Despite my best efforts to be just like him, we’re very different. Still, all the ways that we’re similar make me feel a sense of belonging that I don’t have with anyone else. He knows where I’m from, and he’s the only one in the world who’s from there too. So I feel lucky and happy to have him.

Janie discovers some secrets about an aunt that she thought had died in Korea. This is based on an incident in your own family—can you tell us about it?

I found out in college that my father had a sister I’d never known about, and that she had disappeared when he was a child. I still know almost nothing about what really happened. The North Koreans used to raid dorms and kidnap girls, and this is what my father’s family thought had happened to her, but they didn’t talk about it—at least not to us kids. I think my way of exploring that marked-off territory was to make up stories about the parts of it that interested me.

I love the way the folktales that are told in the novel reinforce some of its themes, such as obedience and sacrifice.

Thanks! Growing up, my parents told me so many stories, night after night—and I loved all of them: folktales, and fairy tales, legends and myths from all different cultures. They shaped my view of the world and my place in it, and they instilled certain expectations and values in me. I still love all those stories, and that’s part of why they’re in the book, but I also wanted to engage with them a little more and push back.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Forgotten Country.

Debut novelist Catherine Chung talks about her moving first novel Forgotten Country—our Top Pick in Fiction for March.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Sadie Jones

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

A decaying English country house holds menace and mystery in The Uninvited Guests, the remarkable third novel from Sadie Jones.

This is a departure from your previous work, especially the supernatural element. What made you want to explore that?
It wasn’t a conscious “departure,” but the original idea can’t be controlled. I should have loved to write an important modern state of the nation book, but I was given this to do instead! I dreamed the house, Sterne—this beautiful eccentric red-brick manor—and then, in imagining who lived in it and what the voice of the story would be, I discovered that there was a supernatural element, and also comedy.

Your last two novels were so specific about time and place. The Uninvited Guests is set more generally, in the pre-World War I English countryside. But the ambiguity felt deliberate.
Yes, it was. The action never leaves Sterne, and I used theatre to heighten the sense of unreality so that the reader might know they were heading off somewhere unpredictable. I was trying to create a magical realm akin to the transforming woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a time and place where anything might happen. It was a tricky piece of acrobatics, and it requires the reader’s trust and willingness to jump in with the book and revel a little.

What research did you do?
There was very little research compared to Small Wars, which was necessarily rigorous. I wandered the Internet, went to the National Gallery and looked at John Singer Sargent’s paintings of Edwardian socialites and read a 1920s edition of Mrs Beeton’s household management. There were wonderful descriptions of how to apply poultices to boils and what to do with a twice-boiled calf’s head that informed the more grotesque elements of the novel. The Edwardian era is a very entertaining mix of the recognizably modern and absolutely not, their delight in gelatin being a good example.

Right now stories set in England around WWI are very hot (all my friends have “Downton Abbey” fever!). Why do you think people are so interested in that time period?
I suppose it’s the zeitgeist, isn’t it? I had no notion, beginning work in 2009, that there would be a wave of fin de siècle drama or literature—or a vogue for literary ghost stories for that matter. I simply needed a time we perceive as beautiful and romantic and yet trembles on the brink of the unknown. Western civilization was at a peak, both culturally and scientifically; to me that generation sits like white icing on the dark slag heap of the century before it, looking blindly toward the new century, the mass suicide of the Great War. My little book doesn’t even begin to cover it.

You earned a lot of acclaim for your previous novels. How do you think that kind of success prepares a writer for whatever comes next?
The benefits of having a tremendously successful first novel far outstrip any perceived drawbacks. The success of The Outcast gave me a career. I feel now that if I do good work it will be read and have a fighting chance to stand out. It sounds a simple thing, but it is as much as any writer can hope for.

What other eras would you like to explore?
I would very much like to write a modern novel—I just haven’t found one yet.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of The Uninvited Guests.

A decaying English country house holds menace and mystery in The Uninvited Guests, the remarkable third novel from Sadie Jones. This is a departure from your previous work, especially the supernatural element. What made you want to explore that?It wasn’t a conscious “departure,” but the original idea can’t be controlled. I should have loved to […]

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Enid Shomer

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

Two of the 19th century’s most notable minds meet in poet Enid Shomer’s debut novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

With a novel like this, you know there was a historical fact that provided the initial spark to your imagination. What was it?
The initial spark was learning that Flaubert and Nightingale traveled the Nile at the same time. I’m not talking about approximately the same time. They were towed from Cairo to the navigable part of the river through the Mahmoudieh Canal on the same boat. That day, Flaubert wrote a description in his journal of a woman in a “hideous green eyeshade,” and we know that Nightingale had such a contraption that she wore attached to her bonnet. Their itineraries throughout their Nile journeys were almost identical. It’s kind of a miracle that they didn’t meet!

Did you know a lot about Florence Nightingale and Flaubert before you started the novel? Do you think readers need to know about them before they read the novel?
I did not know a lot. My sense of Nightingale at the outset was based on Lytton Strachey’s book Eminent Victorians, which depicts Nightingale as a shrewish and eccentric control freak. (He claims she actually worked one of her friends to death.) The more I read about and by her, the more I came to reject this depiction. She was, for one thing, blessed with a fabulous wit, a virtue Strachey ignored completely. Other early biographers painted her in saintly sepia tones. I set out to find out who the real Nightingale was.

I knew that Flaubert was an important writer and I’d read many of his books, but I was unfamiliar with his life. His journals and letters were a revelation to me. And he, too, had a magnificent sense of humor.

Readers don’t need to know anything about either character before encountering them in my novel. For one thing, in 1850 they both were unknown, confused and upset about their futures, so any notion the reader may have of who they are doesn’t apply. They hadn’t yet done the deeds that would inscribe them into canonical history. She was 29; he was 28. They considered themselves failures. Part of the pleasure of the novel for the reader is taking the journey to self-discovery with them.

It’s hard to imagine Flaubert and Nightingale together, yet there are so many similarities regarding what stage they were in their lives. Did that surprise you?
Despite the obvious differences between Nightingale and Flaubert, I always intuited that they had something essential in common, and my faith in that connection was one of the driving forces behind the book.

Certainly on the surface the dissimilarities were huge, and not just to me. One scholar of the period I consulted told me that these two lived in different lobes of her brain despite being contemporaries, and that she had never thought of them in the same breath. Of course, it turned out that they had a tremendous number of things in common, for they shared the same general culture and came from similar social classes. They both rebelled against upper-middle-class European values, and perhaps most importantly, they were both geniuses.

You based the character of Trout, Nightingale’s maid, on the real life writings of a different 19th-century servant. Why did you do that and what do you think she adds to the novel?
As part of my research, I delved into the lives of Victorian servants. Also, the real-life Trout had disappeared into the vast bone-pile of history, so I had to make her up from scratch. The only clue I had was that she and Flo didn’t always get along, that there was friction in their relationship. Reading the historical servant’s journals helped me to shape a vocabulary and a love life for the fictional Trout.

To me, Trout is an especially endearing and important character. First of all, she is amusing as well as wise in her own way. We get to read parts of her journal and thus get another view of things, one that is often at odds with Nightingale’s. The class differences between them provide insights into Nightingale’s limitations as a would-be humanitarian and social thinker. Trout forces Nightingale to grow—by example and also by challenging her assumptions.

This is not your first foray into the life of historical person—I am thinking of your poem cycle about the first woman pilot to break the sound barrier, Jacqueline Cochran. Can you talk about the challenges of exploring a famous person’s life in prose versus poetry?
I began my writing career as a poet, but soon turned to writing short stories, and eventually, the novel. Though I wrote the Cochran poem-biography (Stars at Noon) in an attempt to deal with character through poetry, I believe that except for epic or book-length poems, poetry is not well-suited to exploring character, especially as it evolves over time. For me, poetry is primarily about language and metaphor, while fiction, though it, too, requires powerful language and metaphor, is essentially about time.

What did you discover about this time period or any of the characters that you couldn’t or chose not to add to the novel?
I learned a lot of surprising things about the period and my characters. For example, in the late Victorian Age, nearly one in four persons in England was a servant. There were juicy bits, too. Richard Monckton Milnes, the first biographer of Keats and the man Nightingale refused to marry, amassed the largest collection of pornography in England. (It is now housed in the British Library). He was also part of a group of prominent Victorian men who wrote pornography together as a hobby. They composed it round-robin style, and published under pseudonyms, always attributing their books to publishers in exotic locales—Constantinople, Cairo or Aleppo in Syria. Nightingale would not, I venture, have approved. I think she was right to refuse to marry Milnes. She would have been much better off with someone like Flaubert.

Have you been to Egypt and if not, did writing this make you want to visit?
I have never visited Egypt, though I have lived in two countries in the Middle East. Egypt is currently at the top of my travel list. I especially want to travel down the Nile.

What’s next for you?
I am currently working on a project that involves two stories: a contemporary one set in the early 1990s, and an historical one set in 1599. I love doing research, which, after all, is just focused reading and travel.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

Two of the 19th century’s most notable minds meet in poet Enid Shomer’s debut novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile. With a novel like this, you know there was a historical fact that provided the initial spark to your imagination. What was it? The initial spark was learning that Flaubert and Nightingale traveled the […]

Fiction, World Fiction

Fiction World Fiction

Mohsin Hamid

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid made his literary debut with the critically acclaimed Moth Smoke in 2000, and cemented his reputation with the 2007 international bestseller The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In his third novel, he continues to plumb the uneasy relationship between Southeast Asia and the United States through the story of a young man’s journey from the slums to the high life.

You’ve written two books in the second person, which is an unusual point of view. What does it offer that the first person doesn’t?

What I like about the second person is that it makes the relationship between writer and reader more explicit. It allows you both to play with how novels are supposed to work. It feels intimate, too. In my mind, second person has echoes of oral storytelling, being told a story by someone you know.

Your previous novels were very specifically located in Lahore and New York. But How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia takes place in an unnamed Asian location. Why were you less specific here?

I used Pakistan as a model, but people, myself included, often have so many preconceptions about the place. By having no named location, I had to force myself to describe things as if they'd never been described before. It was liberating to me. And hopefully it frees the reader too.

Is that true also about not naming your characters?

Yes. And also, it makes the story more universal and more incomplete at the same time. It can be YOUR story. Having no names opens up space for readers to empathize differently.

There are traces of F. Scott Fitzgerald in your novels—characters who are in love with the fantasy of being rich or fitting in with a certain class of people and who then have to deal with the reality of the situation at hand. Are you influenced at all by him?

I think he was a great writer, especially when he was writing at his best. Gatsby has definitely been an influence. It's a small novel, and hits such big themes. Also I went to Princeton, and Fitzgerald's literary ghost still lingers there.

It was interesting that sex was a part of the Pretty Girl’s rise to wealth. Do you think that is more commonly part of a woman’s path to economic independence?

I don't think there's any one path. Different people follow different paths. But sex is part of the power the pretty girl has, and since she's ambitious, but desperately poor at the beginning, in a society where women are far from equal, it isn't surprising she uses that power.

You have spoken about the ability to relate to a range of characters imaginatively as a key ingredient of empathy. What value do you think fiction has in today’s world?

I think empathy is important: It's a moral value, not just an artistic one. And fiction cultivates it. But fiction also does something else very special: It lets adults, readers, spend hours playing in their own imaginations. Not just passively absorb content, but take words and transform them into images and emotions. We often don't get to do much of that after childhood.

What is your writing process like?
I take about six or seven years to write a novel, so it's pretty slow! Usually lots of drafts. On a typical day, I get up early, go for a long walk and then write until lunch. I used to write at night. Then I became a father.

Living part of the time in Lahore, do you feel like there are certain things you can’t write about?
Not so much certain things you can't write about, but certain things you can't approach directly in your writing. You have to find other ways of saying them, less direct ways. It's a challenge, a puzzle. Not simply a muzzle.

How do you feel your law background influences your writing?

I spent three years in law school and produced a draft of my first novel instead of a legal thesis. Plus I never worked as a lawyer; I worked in business. But I think the idea that words really matter, that you have to think about them with great precision, is something I absorbed from the law.

Do you feel your American readership is different from your Pakistani readers?

For me, the wonderful thing is that readers are different from each other. They're individuals. There are kids who grew up in America living in Pakistan and kids who grew up in Pakistan living in America. I once met a blond American guy with dreads and piercings who told me that he was just like the main character of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (a Pakistani character, by the way) because he'd worked on Wall Street and then left it to become a yoga instructor.

Are there other Pakistani writers we should be looking at? Perhaps ones less known in the US?

There are lots. Muhammad Hanif and Daniyal Mueenuddin are both excellent. And there are others: Aamer Hussain, H.M. Naqvi, Kamila Shamsie . . .

What are you working on next?
Another novel, I think. But it's still in notebooks and emails to myself, for now. I keep jotting and scribbling until the urge to write hits me. That can take months, even a year or two.

Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid made his literary debut with the critically acclaimed Moth Smoke in 2000, and cemented his reputation with the 2007 international bestseller The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In his third novel, he continues to plumb the uneasy relationship between Southeast Asia and the United States through the story of a young man’s journey from […]

Fiction, Short Stories

Fiction Short Stories

Joan Silber

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

Award-winning writer Joan Silber returns with another stunning collection of linked stories. The characters in Fools span generations and continents, but are linked by the glow of their ideals, whether obsessive and dangerous or positive and world-changing. We asked Silber a few questions about her writing process and the inspiration behind the new book.

You have written linked stories before. What is it about multiple stories dealing with a single theme and overlapping characters that appeals to you?
It began two books ago, with Ideas of Heaven, and I love this form. It lets me come in very close to a character and then move on to a different angle. It seems to give a larger canvas (something I always wanted when I was a novelist).

Is there a story that you wrote first that led to the others, or do you map all the connections out at the beginning?
The first story was "Fools," about a young woman who's an anarchist in the 1920s. I saw that I was interested in how people live for ideas—and can they live without them?—and this helped me come up with other stories. One of my favorite characters is Louise, daughter of politically principled parents who feels she can hold "two opinions" at once, even about marriage. I have to say I didn't have a plan for the book and the connections were formed from my own obsessions (like: How does money fit in?) and a curiosity about how certain characters turned out. I was especially happy when I found a way to revisit Liliane, who's a conniving young woman in Paris in one story and an elegant older woman in New York in another.

Some of these stories refer to very specific political situations in the 1920s, the 1950s and the present. What similarities do you see among these times?
What an interesting question. The stories do use our country's fear of political radicals—in the '20s the Sacco-Vanzetti case and in the 1950s the "blacklisting" of suspected communists—and later the post-9/11 fear of Muslims. I didn't call up these parallels on purpose, but my characters naturally encounter these spells of public panic. As it happened, in the last stages of writing the book, Occupy Wall Street was in the news, with an analysis of capitalism not very different from that of the anarchists I began with.

I think longing is a component of being human. It controls our relation to time—we're always watching to see if we'll get what we want.

What kind of research did you do for these stories?
I read the writings of Dorothy Day and some biographies of her. I read oral histories of old anarchists and of pacifists against World War II. I had a friend tell me about neighborhoods in Paris in the early 1960s. I read biographies of Gandhi. I got a student in a summer program to tell me about growing up in Okinawa. I read about Sufism, since I was traveling to Turkey anyway. And I kept looking up things online—how much money did Madoff steal? what was that beach I went to in Mumbai? I would gladly dawdle the day away doing research—and finding great details helps me invent.

In "The Hanging Fruit" and "Two Opinions," you create the span of almost an entire life in a single story. What kinds of challenges does that pose?
It was a great discovery for me that short stories could contain long time spans. The challenge is: Summarized action can be very washy to read. But I think it can be written so it's like a series of mini-scenes. The prose can be concrete and striking. And I like to show how change accrues gradually.

There is a real intimacy created between the reader and your first-person narrators. What does that point of view add to the storytelling?
I'm interested in what characters say to themselves, what they make of what they've done; I think of first-person narration as translating thoughts (as opposed to mimicking speech). I'm especially attached to those moments when a narrator makes a sweeping self-description. That said, I did experiment in this book with stories in third-person ("Better" and "Buying and Selling") and found I could get the same effects.

Your characters all long for something—political, spiritual, sexual—sometimes a combination of the three! How do you think that longing informs our lives?
In real life, I'm a relatively contented person, but I think longing is a component of being human. It controls our relation to time—we're always watching to see if we'll get what we want. In my plots, characters don't always know what they want at first—they often have an inaccurate idea of what they long for.

Who are some of your favorite writers and what makes them special to you?
My biggest influences are Chekhov and Alice Munro—Chekhov for the way he can shift our sympathies toward a character who has seemed for most of the story not to deserve them, and Munro for her use of long time spans and for the uncommon length of her stories, whose shapes we often don't see till the end. Both writers show us what we didn't know by shifting the perspective of the story. I'm also a fan of David Malouf and Colm Toibin. And I just belatedly discovered Pat Barker.]

What are you reading now?
I'm glad you asked—I'm totally immersed in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I don't even know why it's so good. It's chock full of truly shocking bits of history—eye-opening in a very substantial way—and has a character who learns everything from the bottom up and can't be outsmarted, on a colossal scale.

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE:
Read our review of Fools.

Award-winning writer Joan Silber returns with another stunning collection of linked stories. The characters in Fools span generations and continents, but are linked by the glow of their ideals, whether obsessive and dangerous or positive and world-changing. We asked Silber a few questions about her writing process and the inspiration behind the new book. You […]

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Laline Paull

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

In a world where writers are eternally reminded to “write what you know,” debut novels are often thinly veiled memoirs, or at least tentatively tied to the author’s own experience through location or life experience. Not so for screenwriter Laline Paull, whose ambitious first novel, The Bees, doesn’t feature a single human character—and it’s set in the labyrinthine world of the hive. There, worker bee Flora 717 discovers she’s also able to lay eggs, a one in 10,000 anomaly that draws the notice of the queen as well as some unseen complications. We asked Paull, who lives in London, a few questions about the inspiration behind this remarkable first book.

Novels that portray animals as human-like in their thoughts and desires aren’t unheard of—from Watership Down to The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore—but insects are an unusual choice. Where did the idea for The Bees come from?
I made a new friend who was a beekeeper, and then I found out that her cancer had returned, and she died soon afterwards. She had a very beautiful conscious death and wrote her own funeral service, in which she mentioned her bees. In the immediate aftermath of her death and as a way of honouring her, I started to read about bees. And then something amazing happened. What had started as a way to try to keep close to someone who had gone became a genuine fascination with the most miraculous creature that is the honeybee. One extraordinary fact led to another, and within a week I was absolutely hooked on finding out more, and then, convinced someone must have seen the dramatic potential for a novel set in a beehive. I combed the Internet, then when I couldn’t find one, raced to make it mine.

How has writing The Bees changed the way you look at insects, flowers? What surprised you the most in your research about bees?
The more I found out about the natural world and the genius all around us that is so far beyond human invention, the more awestruck I became. I can see why scientists become abstracted and obsessed—I certainly did for a while, during my research. Even today I have to stop and watch a bee foraging. Today in my garden I saw a fantastic big bumblebee queen house-hunting for a good site to make a burrow. I watched her for so long that my coffee was cold when I went back to it. And the most surprising thing about my research into bees was getting in touch with that feeling of child-like wonder when you look at the world and think: Wow!

The hive is such a complex structure, like a cathedral or castle. Did you have any architectural model in mind when you were creating it?
I’m so glad that that aspect of the book succeeds—I worked very hard to make the hive feel real and knowable. I looked at the floor plans of 5th-century B.C. Minoan palaces, I thought about the Tower of London, I looked at oil rigs, cathedrals. I thought about the infrastructure of a massive luxury hotel, and the staff required to keep those penthouse suites going, I thought about ocean liners—but in the end, I had to turn the hive on its side to make all the verticals horizontals, to be more familiar to a reader—and easier to write. The topography of the hive took me a long time and many bad drawings to get right. My 11-year-old stepson helped me; he’s a good cartoonist. I did one scribbled map that worked, not pretty, but accurate—and I stuck with that.

"I worked very hard to make the hive feel real and knowable. I looked at the floor plans of 5th-century B.C. Minoan palaces, I thought about the Tower of London, I looked at oil rigs, cathedrals. I thought about the infrastructure of a massive luxury hotel . . ."

Flora is a classic heroine—she is loyal to her kin and to her hive, yet is willing to risk her life to try new things. She stands for both tradition and change. Can you talk about creating her?
The key to writing Flora came when I found out in my research about the real fact of the laying worker, a one in 10,000 anomaly in the hive. I imagined being devout and orderly and never questioning the status quo—and then you find you’re pregnant. You become a sinner, a traitor, and yet you’ve never felt such love in your life—and how can that possibly be wrong? It was the ultimate opposition of instinct and duty, and that makes for great drama. And I’m a mother too, so I know that the law would mean nothing if your child’s life was at stake.

"It was the ultimate opposition of instinct and duty, and that makes for great drama."

You write about the communication between the bees but also about their emotional states. Do you think insects are capable of feeling and thought?
Ah, I am not sure at all about that. We know that insects are irresistibly attracted to flowers, to what we, with our supposed “higher” consciousness, think of as beauty. Flowers are the sex organs of plants, pollen the sperm. Nectar, the lure to bring in the pollinators. Might insects feel some sort of arousal, at the sight of beauty? Men do. Might insects feel lust for each other? Why choose to mate with one, not another of their kind? The honest answer is I have no idea if insects can think and feel—but intuitively I feel they must, if not in any way that we can understand. I suppose I wrote The Bees in response to that very question.

Did you read other books about utopias and dystopias before writing The Bees? What other dystopian fictions or film would you recommend?
The Bees has been called a dystopia, and I suppose it is, but I didn’t conceive of it as such. I love books like Brave New World by the great Aldous Huxley, and of course 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell. I love most things Margaret Atwood writes, and I also love Mervyn Peake’s Ghormenghast. I was addicted to” Game of Thrones” on television while I was writing, so fantasy worlds are clearly attractive to me. And I bend the knee to JG Ballard—High-Rise, in particular.

Utopias I think are rather dull, compared to their opposites. We like to look over the wall of law and order, manners and good behavior. We like to see the wild side let out.

In what ways was writing a novel different than a screenplay? What surprised you about the process?
Compared to a screenplay, writing a novel was both harder and easier. I found it incredibly liberating to be able to tell as well as show, and I found that the discipline of working with story and visual images very useful in writing the novel. I love both forms—film and book. But the novel exists on its own terms—the screenplay still needs interpretation to truly live.

What’s next for you?
My next novel is set in the natural world again, as a character in itself, but also as the arena for much human conflict. More than that I don’t want to say right now, only because the spell is still binding.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Bees.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

Kimberly Elkins

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

At the age of 2, Laura Bridgman lost four of her five senses to illness. Several years later, she was taken to the Perkins Institute in Boston where, under the tutelage and guidance of Samuel Ridley Howe she not only learned how to communicate, but became one of the 19th century’s most notable women. Yet few people know about her today. Kimberly Elkins’ stunning debut, What Is Visible, promises to change all that.

Laura Bridgman was once a celebrity but now few people know about her. How did you find out about her and what made you want to tell her story?
I first read about Laura in a review of her two biographies in the New Yorker in 2001. I couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of her, and both the story of her life and the accompanying photograph of her—delicate and emaciated, but sitting ramrod straight with her head held high as she read from an enormous, raised-letter book—touched me in a more profound way than I’d ever felt about another person. As someone who has struggled on and off with debilitating depression—now off for several years, knock wood—my whole being resonated with the depth of her isolation and helplessness even as she tried valiantly to connect with others. That night, I stayed up until dawn writing the story which eventually begot the novel, and which was published shortly thereafter in The Atlantic. But I wanted to know more, to put together the pieces of the puzzle to explain why she’d been virtually erased from history.

Laura Bridgman reading, circa 1888

What kind of research did you do?
I spent two years immersing myself in the letters, journals and historical press coverage of Laura and my three other narrators: Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the founder of Perkins; Julia Ward Howe, his famous wife, a poet, abolitionist and suffragist; and Sarah Wight, Laura’s last beloved teacher. Besides the archives at Perkins School for the Blind, I was fortunate to get fellowships at the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, the Massachusetts and Maine Historical Societies and the American Antiquarian Society, the last of which was most useful in simply acclimating myself to the 19th-century sensibility. I learned quickly that it was better to read from the period than about the period.

"[W]hen Dr. Howe abruptly ended her education, she was learning French and Latin. Imagine how far she would’ve come if she’d continued to be taught!"

What did you learn about Bridgman that surprised you the most?
Laura never ceased to be surprising! One thing that particularly amazed me was that when Dr. Howe abruptly ended her education, she was learning French and Latin. Imagine how far she would’ve come if she’d continued to be taught! On the negative side, I was kind of floored that Laura was violent toward her teachers and other students up through her late teens, slapping and pinching them, pulling their hair. And she even once bit the famous Senator Charles Sumner, who was probably her least favorite person in the world, due to his roughness with her and his intensely close relationship with her mentor, Dr. Howe.

The title is an interesting one given that Laura lacks the sense of sight. Where you wondering what is visible to her or about her? Or both?
The line most literally refers to the narrative itself: at the end of “telling” her story to the young Helen Keller—a literary device, obviously—Laura says that she will not be able to read what she has written, and prays that “what is invisible to man may be visible to God.” The idea of what is visible, or on the surface, versus what is invisible, or below the surface, and what it means to be wholly visible to others—emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually—never ceases to fascinate. To me, the phrase is all-encompassing, not just about Laura’s handicap, but about the ways in which we all perceive and misperceive the world, what we witness of all the vagaries of human existence, and even the idea of God, who is always described as all-seeing.

"The idea of what is visible, or on the surface, versus what is invisible, or below the surface, and what it means to be wholly visible to others—emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually—never ceases to fascinate."

Laura’s is not the only point-of-view in the novel. Samuel Gridley Howe, his wife Julia Ward Howe, and Laura’s teacher each tell a part of the story. Why did you want to include their narratives?
Well, originally, I didn’t. I wanted the novel to be a tour de force of only Laura’s voice, excited as I was by the challenge of writing a character who can express herself to the reader through only one sense. But as I wrote, I realized that this would make the book too hermetic, too claustrophobic, for both me and for the reader. Then I planned on writing the book as a triptych of three very different 19th-century women—Laura, Julia and Sarah—coming together to provide a nuanced portrait of what it meant to be a woman in society at that time. But then I realized it was more important to give Laura the most possible context—how did those closest to her see her? And Dr. Howe definitely wanted to be heard, opinionated fellow that he was! It became clear that it was just as important to be able to view Laura from the outside as from the inside to provide a full picture. And the more I researched the lives of the others, the more I became enthralled with their individual narratives, and with finding a way to weave them all tightly together, while still keeping Laura at the center of the book.

You make some interesting choices regarding Bridgman’s sexuality. Can you talk about why you decided to explore that and how you came to the conclusions that you did?
With the striking exception of Dr. Howe, with whom she was in love in her own unique way as a mentor and father figure, Laura could not abide most men, a fact which was remarked on by all her teachers and even Howe himself. She greatly enjoyed the company of most women, however, especially touching them, which grew to be such a problem at Perkins that Howe was forced to lay down an edict that Laura never be allowed into the other girls’ beds, at a time when sharing beds with the same sex was considered commonplace. As far as documented history goes, it doesn’t appear that Laura ever really had a romantic relationship—she was so uninformed about that part of life that even as a late teenager she thought she could marry her brother—but as a novelist friend of mine said, “If you’re going to write her whole life, you’ve got to give her something.” And so I gave her Kate, the young but very worldly Irish cook. As for the sadomasochistic overtones of their relationship, that came as a complete surprise to me when I was writing their love scenes, but then it made complete sense: If you have only the sense of touch, you would want to push that one sense as far as it could go.

"If you have only the sense of touch, you would want to push that one sense as far as it could go."

It was Laura Bridgman who taught Annie Sullivan how to finger spell and Sullivan was the well-known teacher of Helen Keller. Why do you think so many people know about Helen Keller and not about Laura Bridgman?
While Helen Keller openly admitted that she set out to be “the best damn poster child the world had ever seen,” Laura never ceased to be her own unique, difficult and very funny person, even at the height of her fame when she was considered the world’s second most famous woman, second only to Queen Victoria. The last straw came when Laura publicly contradicted the Unitarian mores of the New England elite and the Institute, pushing Howe to excoriate her in the press, claiming that he’d suddenly realized his prodigy was “small-brained” and “subject to derangement.”

And though she had been an exhibitable child, Laura’s anorexia due to her lack of taste and smell made her appear even more peculiar. It took Perkins decades to find the “second Laura Bridgman,” and Helen Keller was chosen solely on the basis of a photograph. Helen also got blue glass eyes to make her more presentable, a secret which was kept from the public for her entire life.

But most of all, it was the cruel dismissal of her dear Sarah Wight, Laura’s last teacher, when she was 20, that forever stunted Laura’s potential and celebrity. Without Sarah, there was no one to interpret the world for her. Helen Keller had the precious gift of Annie Sullivan for most of her life, and she continued to blossom under her care and tutelage. And yet it was Sullivan herself who said that she had “always believed Laura Bridgman to be intellectually superior to Helen Keller.”

It’s difficult to read this book and not become acutely aware of one’s sensory abilities! Do you feel like your ideas about sense perceptions changed from writing about Laura Bridgman?
Well, I didn’t do any type of sensory deprivation or anything like that to inhabit her character. I can’t really explain it in any totally rational way, but as soon as I saw her photograph, I knew what it was like to be her. Call it psychic, call it deep emotional resonance, call it artistic arrogance, call it wildly improbable kismet, but it was honestly not difficult for me to imagine being without four of my five senses. I do think I am naturally a more touch-centered person than most, however, and perhaps that made a difference.

You’ve written plays and screenplays, as well as nonfiction articles and essays. Why did you choose a novel for the story of Laura Bridgman? What was different about the experience than other projects?
I knew instantly that I wanted to be inside her head, under her skin, and therefore writing her in the first person wouldn’t have worked for other forms. What made this different from all other projects was my immediate identification with Laura. I’ve always been interested in disability studies; the screenplay I had optioned was about a comedian with Tourettes Syndrome, so this was definitely in my wheelhouse, as they say. I also adapted the original story, “What Is Visible,” as a one-act play, and think that the book would make for a terrifically moving film.

What are you working on next?
I’m currently working on two major projects: A historical novel about two real-life sisters who were famous mediums as children in 19th-century America and who later became the founders of the wildly popular Spiritualism movement; and a memoir that explodes the difference between what actually happened and what could have happened instead, sandwiching the “truth” between the best- and worst-case scenarios of certain dramatic, and even violent, moments from my life. I think everyone would like the chance to go back and rewrite, revise, take the other road, etc., so I’m letting myself go there, in a variation on the classic memoir. The reader won’t know which story in each instance is the true one. And I continue to work on short fiction.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of What Is Visible.

Author photo by Sarah Shatz.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Amy Bloom

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

Readers of Amy Bloom’s riotous new novel, Lucky Us, might want to pack a few snacks and buckle their seatbelts for this highly entertaining ride, which kicks off when half-sisters Eva and Iris hightail it from small-town Ohio to pursue their dreams in Hollywood.

Bloom herself has always loved a good road trip. “My first road trip was the day after I graduated from high school,” she says during a phone interview in which it is clear that her own warmth and humor is the source for much of the wit found in her fiction. “I went with two girlfriends, we borrowed a car from someone’s overly indulgent father, and we drove from Long Island to Vancouver, down the West Coast and back again. And it was great. I always have a positive feeling when I see people getting into a car with a bag of chips. I even told my daughters all they needed to hit the road was 50 bucks and a couple of Tampax.”

I told my daughters all they needed to hit the road was 50 bucks and a couple of Tampax.

At its wildly beating heart, Lucky Us is a novel of rebirth and reinvention told with the kind of candor that Bloom—the author of two previous novels and three short-story collections—is known for. At the age of 12, Eva is abandoned by her mother at her father and half-sister Iris’ house. The teenagers don’t have much in common, except their shared parent, Edgar—and even he isn’t quite who they thought he was. Bloom was intrigued by the idea of writing about sisters.

“I had never written about sisters before. And though I think there are, as always for any writer, lots of sources, I happen to have a sister, and she is six years older than me. We both say we paid almost no attention to each other until she was going off to college. I was crawling around on the floor while she was riding her bike. So the idea of what it is to get to know a sister later, when you don’t have all that shared history, interested me.”

The charismatic Iris shows early talent as a performer, winning every local and regional speech competition, and Eva becomes her loyal sidekick, dresser and confidante. After the girls catch their father trying to steal Iris’ winnings, they hop a Greyhound bus to Hollywood, where Iris hopes to break into the movies. A scandal ensues and the girls are soon back on the road to New York, but this time, via station wagon, with their father in tow. Their friend Francisco, a hair and make-up artist to the stars, finds them jobs as domestics for the Torellis, a wealthy family on Long Island.

But that’s only the beginning of the girls’ madcap adventures: Later in the novel, an orphan is abducted; a friend is accused of being a German spy; and Eva takes a job as a fortune-teller at a local beauty parlor. At times, the book feels almost like a series of outtakes from some screwball comedy—but these are scenes that would have never made it past the censors, like the lushly described party at the home of Hollywood’s most decadent lesbians, or the sisters conspiring to kidnap a little boy from the local Jewish orphanage for Iris’ childless lover. But Bloom’s command of her characters keeps the novel from spilling over into satire just as her judiciously chosen details keep the plot moving forward.

Though she was born in the 1950s, Bloom is as tuned in to the spirit of the 1940s as she was to the 1920s in her award-winning novel Away. Lucky Us gives her a way to look at how life at home provided new opportunities for change and reinvention, especially for women and African Americans.

“Part of what happened when this country went to war are things that would have been unthinkable 10 years earlier,” Bloom explains. “Women not only going to work, but doing difficult physical labor and being in challenging leadership positions—things that the dominant culture had fought against since its founding. Now, it’s true the war ended and we sent those women packing, the war ended and the level of integration between African Americans and the dominant white culture dripped dramatically, but my own sense is that once you open the door, you cannot completely and forever close it again.”

Each chapter of Lucky Us is headed by a song title from the 1940s, drawn from jazz, blues and pop. These evocative headings are both a distillation of the chapter content and reminder of the rich diversity of the times, while also working as representations of some of the decade’s most profound social changes. “This was a time when music was everywhere, and though there were cultural divides, most popular music was heard by everyone. The high school girl, her science teacher, the principal, the custodian and the guy who delivered school supplies all listened to the same music,” Bloom says, adding with a laugh, “I had such a wonderful time choosing these. Can’t carry a tune, but I sure do like to listen.”

Bloom published a complete playlist of the songs on her website, but says, “If you know the songs, that’s a little plus for you, but even if you don’t, the titles are so evocative they still bring something fresh.”

Most of the novel is told from Eva’s wry perspective, but Lucky Us includes letters, both sent and unsent, from the sisters, their father and Gus, who works with them in Long Island, but through a series of unfortunate events, winds up in a German prison camp. The letters move the plot forward, but more importantly, they give the reader an additional glimpse at the inner thoughts of the characters as well as their joys, frustrations and hidden desires.

“I love the epistolary form. There is something very moving to me about letters. The wish to communicate—which is sometimes successful and sometimes not—something happens in the presence of that intention.”

Bloom’s short stories are known for their wise assurance that the very complexity of human expression—conversational, emotional and even sexual—is not only acceptable but also cause for celebration. In addition to the humor and fast-paced high jinks, Lucky Us contains a similar wisdom as it investigates how we engage with our families, both the ones we are born into and the ones we create.

Bloom, who is now the distinguished University Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, also has a master’s in social work and worked as a psychotherapist. She credits her training for giving her empathy for her characters’ deeply human foibles.

“I learned to not interrupt,” she says, “to pay attention to what was said and how, and what was said before and what was said after. I learned to make as few assumptions as possible. To recognize that people are, in their nature, complex. So that training was really useful, especially the listening part. I don’t think you can be a good writer and a bad listener.”

I don’t think you can be a good writer and a bad listener.

About halfway through the novel, Edgar remembers that his mother once told him, “It’s good to be smart, it’s better to be lucky.” But Lucky Us reminds us that not all luck is good luck. As Bloom puts it, “Luck is a roll of the dice and we are all subject to it. So, better to be lucky than smart? Sure. But better to be lucky and smart, so you have a plan when the dice go against you, which they will—sometimes.”

Her playful novel reminds us that life can only be what we make of it and that the biggest setbacks often result in the most gratifying results. Her readers are all the luckier for it.

Author photo by Deborah Feingold

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Caitlin Moran

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

Feminist, columnist, activist, humorist, memoirist—Caitlin Moran is a woman of many descriptors. She can now add "novelist" to that list thanks to How to Build a Girl. Something of a roman à clef, this hilarious, poignant and no-holds-barred coming-of-age tale stars a girl from a council estate in the Midlands who, like Moran herself, became a rock critic at a young age. We asked Moran a few questions about writing, class, feminism, celebrity interviews and, of course, her new book.

How to Build a Girl shares some common themes with your memoir, How to Be a Woman. What are the differences when approaching similar material for fiction?
Well obviously the thrill was that I could make things up. Sticking to the truth, and my own experiences, for How to Be a Woman was often quite frustrating. Now I get to use all the weird, mad adolescent experiences my friends have, then ramp them up for comic effect. You get to exaggerate. I love exaggerating. I would say I am definitely the best exaggerator IN THE UNIVERSE.

"I love exaggerating. I would say I am definitely the best exaggerator IN THE UNIVERSE."

On a related note, you were also a music critic at a fairly early age. How does Johanna’s experience as a pop critic compare to yours?
Well, although Johanna is, like me, a fat working-class teenage rock critic from the West Midlands, she's based on the journalist Julie Burchill, who started working at the NME in the punk era when she was just 17. She was a hip young gunslinger—often more famous than the bands she interviewed, the centre of the storm. A bit of a legend. When I was a teenage rock critic, however, I used to hide in the corner of the office of Melody Maker whispering "I like Crowded House. I wish I had a friend." It was much more fun to write about a girl like Julie Burchill than a girl like me. I kind of stole her life a bit. She inspired me.

Can we expect more books about Johanna Morrigan?
 Yes! This is the first of a trilogy about all those characters. The next is called How to Be Famous, and then How to Change the World. I love Johanna and her drinking buddy John Kite so much. I kind of want to hang out with them and have sex with them. This is part of the essential patheticness of being an author—we invent these people, then fall in love with them. You adore them. But, of course, they're just a part of you, from your brain. Does that make you an egotistic mental? Probably. So that’s why we drink a lot, as well.

"This is part of the essential patheticness of being an author—we invent these people, then fall in love with them. Does that make you an egotistic mental? Probably."

The relationship with John Kite is such an important one for Johanna. Is he based on anyone?
I was so annoyed with all the usual rock stars you see invented in books, and films—all in black leather and sunglasses, skinny, whining, spoiled, a bit thick. That's not like all the great working-class boys in bands I used to interview in the early 1990s—Teenage Fanclub, the Boo Radleys and now Elbow. Clever, self-taught, whimsical hilarious boys who you could while away the afternoon in the pub with, smoking and drinking and shooting the breeze about anything. So I made John Kite out of all those lovely boys. He's basically Richard Burton, in a fur coat, singing the songs of American Music Club. I know exactly how all his songs sound.

American readers may be less aware of the class and financial issues that are so key to the plot of How to Build a Girl. What can you tell our readers that would help them understand what is at stake for Johanna and the Morrigan family?
 Class is a HUGE issue in the U.K. Let me put it like this: I'm a columnist for The Times, I write a sitcom for Channel 4, I'm making a film of How to Be a Woman and I publish books and novels. In my dealings with all the people, across all these different media and cultural companies, I've met precisely ONE OTHER person who was raised on welfare. In the last 20 YEARS. And yet, 60% of our country claims some form of benefit or other.

"Working class/poor people just don't get to tell their stories in this country. I am one of the very few lucky ones."

So, as you see, working class/poor people just don't get to tell their stories in this country. They don't have access to the media. I am one of the very few lucky ones. And so all our films and TV shows and book end up being what the world's continuing impression of Britain is: depictions of lovely middle-class/upper-class life, all picnic and brittle dinner-party chat and public schoolboys in the rain and balls and chintzy dresses and old maids on bicycles and vicars drinking tea.

And that's all fine, but I love the working classes: We do it differently. The power and energy and inventiveness and joy and euphoria and hedonism and anger and sideways thinking that powered the revolution, then the 1960s, then Britpop.

What's working class culture? The Beatles, Joe Orton, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Caine, Tracey Emin, Danny Boyle, Irvine Welsh, Roxy Music, Alexander McQueen, The Sex Pistols, The Who, The Fall, Julie Walters, Steve McQueen, Shane Meadows, Pulp, Slade, Black Sabbath, Amy Winehouse, Richard Burton . . . oh I'm turning myself on. I need to stop.

Music is such a key part of this book. If you were creating a soundtrack for it, what songs and performers would you include?
All the guys in there, man—it's the story of music in the early 1990s. Sonic Youth, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Jane's Addiction, Pixies, New Order, Cure, Hole, American Music Club, Levitation, Suede, Manic Street Preachers, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, Massive Attack, Blur, Mazzy Star, PJ Harvey, Ride, Lush, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, U2's big dark reinvention—it was such an exciting time.

Every week there seemed to be some new fabulous blast of colour being fired up into the sky—every week the music press would make you feel desperate to get some new album, or single, or go down the front of a gig and get your head blown up.

I was so obsessed with Pavement I got my friend Julie—who could drive, and who only liked New Kids on the Block—to drive me all the way from Wolverhampton to Derby to see Pavement live, by lying to her, and telling her they sounded like New Kids on the Block. Amazingly, she didn't punch me in the tits when a band who sounded like The Fall, exploding, came on stage. She actually got quite into them. It was a time of wonder.

You have two daughters. Have your ideas about feminism changed at all after having children?
Yes—I realised how URGENT feminism is. That there could easily be another two or three GENERATIONS of girls before we even get something as basic as pay equality—it's not predicted to come about until 2070, despite it being ILLEGAL to pay women less than men. If any other law was being broken as frequently as the Equal Pay Act, there'd be an outcry. Instead, we just ignore it. IT'S ILLEGAL HELLO HELLO IS THIS MICROPHONE ON?

"If any other law was being broken as frequently as the Equal Pay Act, there'd be an outcry. Instead, we just ignore it. IT'S ILLEGAL HELLO HELLO IS THIS MICROPHONE ON?"

You were a judge of the Bailey Prize, which is Britain’s top prize for women in fiction. What was that experience like?
Exhilarating. To judge in a year where there were books as astonishing and truly genius as The Goldfinch and Eimear McBride's a Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is a total joy. Tartt runs with Dickens' legacy, McBride with Joyce's, and they both fashion something new and euphoric and freeing and utterly beautiful.

Who have been some of your best interviews?
Going to a sex club with Lady Gaga; getting pissed with Benedict Cumberbatch and me going "Do Sherlock!" and him just . . . doing some Sherlock. Asking Keith Richards if he wears a wig, and him making me pull his hair to prove it was real. Courtney Love describing what it was like the first time she fucked Kurt Cobain. Turning up late to interview the Prime Minister in a shitty minicab that looked like the kind of thing terrorists would use as a suicide vehicle. Challenging Jeff Buckley to make himself look ugly (he stuck jellybeans on his teeth and gurned. He still looked astonishingly handsome.).

What is your idea of a perfect night out with women friends?
Oh I don't like to go out. I like to get no more than six people over to my house, and we sit on the patio smoking fags, drinking gin from mugs and launching into impassioned manifestoes about what we would do if we managed Madonna (make her “go hag”! Age! Go grey and angry! Or get her back out with the gays again!) Around the piano by 10 p.m. for a sing-song—all killer no filler: Queen, Jesus Christ Superstar, Beatles, Kate Bush—and then overly sexual disco-dancing in the kitchen to Rihanna from 11.30 p.m. onwards. Crisps at 1 a.m.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of How to Build a Girl.

Feminist, columnist, activist, humorist, memoirist—Caitlin Moran is a woman of many descriptors. She can now add "novelist" to that list: How to Build a Girl goes on sale this week. Something of a roman à clef, this hilarious, poignant and no-holds-barred coming-of-age tale stars a girl from a council estate in the Midlands who, like Moran herself, became a rock critic at a young age. We asked Moran a few questions about her fiction debut.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Marlon James

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

In 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert to promote political unity, armed gunmen walked into reggae star Bob Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road in Kingston and began shooting in what was a failed assassination attempt. In prize-winning author Marlon James’ groundbreaking new novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, the attack becomes a centerpiece of a blistering commentary on Jamaican society in the 1970s and its inextricable links both to Cold War politics and to the drug wars of the 1980s.

I was in elementary school when both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot, yet I think of those events as seminal to my childhood. Likewise, you were 6 when Marley was shot. Do you remember the assassination attempt at all?
I do remember it as a kind of seminal event. When I first heard he had been shot, I remember thinking, he’s in Jamaica? Because by then Bob Marley was the guy who did things in foreign lands, not here. He wasn't on the charts, or on TV, so he wasn’t a part of daily popular culture. But you could hear it in the tone of adults around you that a line had been crossed. Also this: a sense that if this man, beloved by both political sides could be attacked, then we were all sitting ducks. The event did take the sense of security from everyone, even Jamaicans who never had to think about that before. If neither money nor celebrity could protect him, what was going to happen to us?

What kind of research did you do for this novel?
Tons. Over the four years it took to write this novel I had four researchers helping me. There were so many things, people, events, etc to learn about. The Cold War. The history of the CIA. Third world politics. I went through back issues of High Times, Ramparts, Playboy, Penthouse (for research!) and Rolling Stone. Bob Marley books. Rolling Stones tour books. Artillery specs. 1970s slang. 1980s Police blotters. 1990s crack house investigations. Manuals on how to disappear and build a new identity. Source materials. Interviews with actual drug users so as to distinguish between a heroin and a cocaine high. At one point I worried that had the FBI subpoenaed my laptop, I would have had some serious explaining to do.

Papa Lo and Josey Wales are extremely aggressive and violent characters. Yet they are also described with much empathy. What is it like to create characters like these?
I like difficult characters. As a writer they are the only people I want to spend any time with. Especially in those moments I find them despicable. Which is not to say it was easy at all. It’s never easy writing about brutality and violence, nor should it be. But I was also careful, I think, not to explain it all away with pop psychology. These are just not good men. But they are still complex and contradictory. Sometimes depth means not good and bad, but bad with shades of worse. Either way you have to make your characters three dimensional, regardless of who they are and what they do.

Your previous novel took place in the 18th century, vs. the 20th-century setting of the new book. What are the differences in writing a historical novel when the history is within living memory?
Not much. Both needed considerable research. The problem with writing about an event that you were a part of is that your experience is still only one person’s point of view. Other viewpoints, other perspectives become crucial. Especially if it turns out that the event was something that you have no firsthand knowledge of. And given that I was 6 in 1976, that’s pretty much everything.

"The problem with writing about an event that you were a part of is that your experience is still only one person’s point of view."

A Brief History is very honest about the sexism and homophobia in Jamaican culture. How has Jamaican society changed in this regard?
I would love to say that this has changed, but you’re only one YouTube video or one newspaper editorial away from being reminded that not only have things not changed, but in some ways they are worse.

This story is told by so many different characters—gang leaders, agents, reporters, politicians, girlfriends—yet we never hear from Marley. Why is his perspective not included in the novel?
Even before his death, Bob Marley’s presence in Jamaican life was symbolic. One argument was that this was exactly what made him dangerous, that he now represented an ideal for independence, self-assertion, even nationhood. It was very important that I kept that in the novel, that even on a day-to-day level, Marley was a symbol, almost an allegory. In that sense he had to disappear. Also, we’re talking Bob Marley. He could have easily stolen the show in a book that not really about him.

Music is so obviously key to this novel—if you were making a soundtrack for it, what songs and performers would you include?
There’s a playlist on Spotify! But the book is told in real time, over three decades and actually spans four. It skips countries as well. Crucial to the soundtrack would be what Jamaicans were listening to—not what was on the radio, or on the foreign charts. So let’s start with deep roots reggae without the “rock” sheen: Dennis Brown, Mighty Diamonds, and The Congos. But you would have to go even more “street,” closer to what the characters in my novel were listening to: Big Youth, Dillinger, Michigan & Smiley, U-Roy, I-Roy, Sister Nancy, the beginnings of dancehall. The novel then skips to New York for the beginning of hip-hop, so Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, and Run DMC, but also Cybertron and Man Parrish. Some early dance (M/A/R/R/S), some beat fusion (Eric B & Rakim’s Paid in Full remix), Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance and then a return to Jamaica in time for Dancehall/hip-hop to top the charts: Super Cat, Buju Banton, Lady Saw and Capleton.

What other Caribbean writers do you think American readers should be reading?
Oonya Kempadoo, Pauline Melville, Kei Miller, Sharon Millar, Roland Watson Grant, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Louis Simpson, Patricia Duncker,

Marley’s music continues to motivate disenfranchised people around the world. What do you think it is about his music and life that still inspires people?
I think people hear a simplicity in the message of freedom, self-determination and triumph after struggle. Simple enough and universal enough that girls in Kabul can form rock bands inspired by him. That said, it’s also because of these things that people miss just how sly and inventive he was. “Kinky Reggae” is as libidinous as any Stones song about sex. “We and Them” nailed class hypocrisy years before rich kids started to buy the Legend album. But most of us are here for the message and the grooves, and next to Marvin Gaye, Marley was the only artist who figured out how to make hard messages go down sweet.

A Brief History is so intense and so brutal—what did you do to relax while you were writing it?
I read Jo Nesbo.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of A Brief History of Seven Killings.

A version of this article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Rebecca Makkai

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

Rebecca Makkai’s second novel, The Hundred-Year House, is an appealing mix of archival mystery, ghost story and historical novel. Told in reverse chronology, it unfolds as a kind of bookish scavenger hunt set in a former artist’s colony, uncovering clues and putting pieces of the fictional puzzle in place. I was able to catch up with her at Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books, where I attended a panel that featured Makkai, Maggie Shipstead and Bret Anthony Johnston discussing the nature of time in their novels. Afterward, Makkai and I settled in for a coffee at Frothy Monkey, a cozy spot down the street from the Festival and a perfect place to discuss books.

How is the book tour going so far?
The book came out in July, so the proper book tour happened over the summer—I was going to bookstores in July and August. This fall I’ve been going to festivals and conferences—it’s really extended the touring time. I’ve been doing about one event a week, either going to a festival, visiting a college creative writing program or being in conversation with another writer at a bookstore. I don’t know if this true, but they say if sharks stop moving, they die. I kind of feel like that. But I love traveling and seeing new cities and meeting new people. Especially other writers.

The fun thing about something like the Southern Festival of Books is that you get to meet other writers that you might just be Facebook friends with and you already have lots of talk about, plus seeing old friends of course.

The Hundred-Year House takes place in three very distinct times. What kind of research did you do?
The year 1999 I remembered very well. That’s the year I graduated from college and I had very specific cultural markers for it. What I did for the 1920s and 1950s was I bought a lot of magazines off of eBay. I was reading novels, listening to music and watching films from those periods too, but magazines really show you what people are talking about, worrying about, what was on their minds. I also got Sears catalogs for those eras, which was an amazing reference, not so much for ambience but for details, especially what things were called. For examples, sofas were called davenports.

Laurelfield, the estate in the book, is both a private home and an artist’s colony. Is it based on a real location?
I knew I wanted to write about a house that had been an artist’s colony before I actually ever stayed in one. But I was tremendously inspired by staying at Yaddo. I could have imagined what that life was like but I never would have got the vibe or the details right. I also learned a lot about how visual artists worked, which was important to the book. The dedication in my book is for, but not about, Yaddo and Ragdale.

Laurelfield is its own place, but its history is very much inspired by Yaddo, which has been an artists colony since the 1920s. But the physical aspects of Laurelfield are very much like Ragdale. Early on in the research I realized I needed to map out the floor plan of both the house and coach house in Laurelfield. In fact I had to do both floors of both houses three times—for every era. So I had six huge pieces of paper and I drew it all out. Very badly.

I love the idea that it is sometimes only luck that ensures that a document or manuscript makes it into the archival record. Have you ever thought about writing a biography yourself?
No, never. But the one thing I am working on which is nonfiction is about my father’s parents, who had really interesting lives in Hungary. My grandmother was a novelist and wrote about 40 books. My grandfather was a politician and a member of parliament and was both on the right and the wrong side of things politically. I am fascinated by them. I wrote a piece about them for Harper's last summer, and some aspects of their stories, partly fictionalized and partly not, are used in my next short-story collection.

What are you working on now?
I am doing final revisions on a book of short stories called Music for Wartime, coming out in July 2015. It feels really good to be getting it out into the world.

I am also beginning to think about a novel that will be set in the art world against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and a little bit of Paris in the 1920s, although I won’t be moving backwards in time again! More that there’s an older character in the book who remembers back to that time. I am doing a lot of thinking and brainstorming though, I haven’t written anything yet. But I’ll be at Yaddo this January and hope to get started then.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Kate Walbert

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

Kate Walbert has always been a keen transmitter of women’s voices, from conforming suburban wives in the 1950s or British suffragettes during World War I. Her new novel, The Sunken Cathedral, offers a complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a city transformed by radical climate change, tragedy and new wealth.

We asked Walbert a few questions about her luminous new novel—and her own relationship with New York City.

What was the initial inspiration for this book?
I lived in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York for many years, and after I moved uptown I missed it so much I guess I wanted to imagine my way back. I suppose I could have hopped on the subway . . .

What is the significance of the title?
The title refers to the Debussy prelude “La cathedrale engloutie,” sometimes translated as The Engulfed Cathedral and sometimes translated as The Sunken Cathedral. Debussy’s prelude was inspired by the medieval legend of the Lost City of Ys, a fabled city off the coast of Breton that—due to the devil and an evil daughter (naturally)—is destroyed by a tempest and sinks into the sea. The story goes that on especially calm days its cathedral bell can still be heard. In the book, a character peripherally inspired by my best friend’s mother, Jane, who for more than 20 years took daily painting classes at the National Academy, works on a painting she titles The Sunken Cathedral, as Jane once did. It was Jane, always the smartest person in the room, who later told me the legend behind the title, and the origin of the Debussy prelude.

I was in New York last month, after not being there for several years, and it was amazing to me how much of the city I remembered was gone. What is your New York, and is any of it left?
This is such a great question. I love the concept of “your New York,” because I think anyone who has spent any time here has one, or several. There’s something so personal about the experience of the City because of the chance interactions, weird juxtapositions, abrupt encounters that happen here—all of which are somehow both banal and profound. You bump into someone on the bus and it’s a story. You see something unfold on the street and it’s another story, and then all these stories accrue and become your New York. Maybe it’s because the City moves at warp speed and is constantly changing that you write your history in these small daily encounters—that’s where the humanity of the place comes through. I think New Yorkers are the friendliest people in the world. They have to be. It’s almost a miracle we all survive together. But that’s not really answering your question, is it?

My New York has a lot to do with where I’m living at the time and the stage of my life. For instance, for the first year of graduate school I lived in a rent-controlled studio on Grove Street in the West Village, one of those quintessential Woody Allen New York streets that smell of wood-burning fireplaces on cold winter nights. How I got to live there at all involves a shady philosophy professor at NYU and his scheme to make a little extra cash but that’s a different story (and a different New York). What I remember best is the wisteria that grew up the front of this place, a brownstone painted pink, and how, if I left my window open during a sunny day, the tendrils would snake into my studio and wrap around the closest thing they could find. So that’s one New York that’s mine. And then when my girls were very young, my New York was the various downtown playgrounds—seal park, circle park, Bleecker Street park, the beautiful park in Battery Park City with the granite slide straight from the Albany quarries—I can still rattle the names off like a mantra. I haven’t been to these playgrounds in years but if I were to walk by them today they would be filled with other mothers, fathers, nannies; maybe this is the point.

Many of your male characters are veterans or are serving in the army. Both Simone and Marie’s husbands served in WWII, and one of the footnotes explores, briefly, a moment in the life of a minor character’s great-uncle in Korea. What is your interest in the military experience?
I’m not a military brat but I should have been—my father, who served on the frontlines of Korea—was a chemistry professor at West Point when he and my mother married. She convinced him to leave the Army (he took a job with DuPont) but the Army always loomed large in our house. We went to Army – Navy football games. Dad taught us what it meant to eat a “straight meal,” explained the rituals of hazing at VPI, where he went to college, and generally extolled the military life. The one thing he kept to himself was the experience of his time in Korea. Growing up, I never knew his brothers, but I knew they were in WWII (one in the Infantry, at Omaha Beach, the other a bomber pilot over France), and that his beloved cousin, Charlie, who had lied about his age and enlisted at 16, was one of the last soldiers killed on Iwo Jima. All the family details around the military have always fascinated me—especially for the history left unsaid, the stories untold.

By the end of the novel, most of the characters have left New York, yet the city continues on. Do you think of the ending as pessimistic or optimistic?
I think so much of a reader’s experience of reading is what she brings of her own life into it, whether a city dweller or not—so that’s a difficult question to answer. The city does continue on and that’s ultimately hopeful—think of those mothers and fathers in the playgrounds. I ended with the church bells from the General Seminary in Chelsea, the ones that, when I was there, marked the passing of the hours and other things, such as the anniversaries of 9/11, the moment of that morning when the planes hit the towers. It only occurred to me after finishing the book that the experience of hearing church bells ring, marking occasions both happy and sad, is universal and somehow outside of time and place.

Why did you choose to use to put vital information about your characters in footnotes? How do you think separating out parts of the text impacts story?
I believe there’s an increasingly fractured way of being in the world, our lives barreling forward on many parallel tracks, our focus constantly interrupted, redirected. This is what I came to understand the footnotes to be: the things we don’t say, the history, the regret, the stories that are submerged (to keep the water metaphor) and yet constant. Vital information, yes, but not necessarily of the kind the characters would put forth easily, or readily if they had more time. I’ve come to understand that the footnotes carry what is left unsaid but always present.

A lot of your work is about the restrictions that were or are put on women. Do you think aging releases us from some of those limitations?
And leads us to others, she said, laughingly.

Perhaps. But I guess I would also say that in our culture if age releases us, it may do so for the wrong reasons—we move (or are shoved) out of the sphere, the whirlpool of everything. We are suddenly invisible. I could say this gives us a greater freedom to do whatever we’d like, as if we’d suddenly gone underground and can get away with murder, but that doesn’t feel entirely right. Yes, it’s great progress that Joan Didion is the new face of Celine, but let me get back to you about this question in a few more years.

Your novels take place in Japan, England and the United States, and span periods from the 19th century to the current day. Is there a time or place you haven’t covered yet in which you are interested?
I never start out knowing where my books are going to go—I don’t write from an outline, or with any clear plot or story in mind. I follow the voice, the sentences that seem to carry a certain pressure, a particularity that suggests secrets, complications that may prove interesting to explore. It’s the voice that dictates—that gives the clues to the setting and the situation. For instance, A Short History of Women begins “Mum starved herself for suffrage, grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far.” When writing those “mums” I knew I had to be in England, and clearly in the early 20th century, but I hadn’t planned on any of it and so had to feel my way along from there. Who was this speaker? Who was her mother? Her grandmother? Why suffrage? Why England? In other words, it’s anyone’s guess where the voice might take me next.

Who are some of your favorite writers? For inspiration? For curling up and reading?
There are so many writers to admire. In the past five years, Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy has been my constant recommendation—and I find the work of Hilary Mantel enormously inspiring for the clarity of the point of view and the way in which she constructs these amazingly idiosyncratic sentences that seem to speak directly from the characters’ hearts, not just the brilliant and wildly popular Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, but others as well—The Giant, O’Brien one of my particular favorites.

What are you working on next?
I’m completing a collection of short stories, most of which are set in New York City (but not necessarily Chelsea!).

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Sunken Cathedral.

We asked award-winning novelist Kate Walbert a few questions about her luminous new novel—and her own relationship with New York City.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Darryl Pinckney

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

by Lauren Bufferd

Jed Goodfinch is young, gay, black and trying to make a go of it in West Berlin in the 1980s in Darryl Pinckney’s second novel, Black Deutschland. The book is a provocative exploration of city, sexuality and self, written with the intellectual verve and dry wit that Pinckney is known for.

Your previous novel, High Cotton, was published more than 20 years ago. I don’t want to say what took you so long, but . . . what made you want to tell this story now?
When the Times asked Frank Conroy why it took him nearly 40 years to publish a second book, the filmmaker Jay Anania told him to say that he’d been out doing errands.

Your narrator, Jed, refers to Christopher Isherwood and his fictionalized account of being a British expat in The Berlin Stories. There is so much Isherwood wasn’t able to say when that book was published in 1937. Do you think there are still taboo subjects in fiction?
Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood’s memoir of his years in the early 1930s in Germany, came out in 1977. As a concordance to The Berlin Stories, he goes through everything he couldn’t say back then or where he feels he copped out and gets furious that he was not able to be open. That was my window those boys had been whistling up to, though I pretended that they were signaling girlfriends!

Although Isherwood was what we would now call a sexual tourist, an upper-class gentleman who trawled among working-class youth in need, he was brave enough in his way, and he really did fall in love with the boy he could not get out of Nazi Germany. In The Berlin Stories, Sally Bowles is not the narrator’s beard, or even a hetero fling. Isherwood finds a way for the women in Herr Issyvoo’s life to pronounce him unsatisfactory as boyfriend material, leaving him uncompromised and free to be the observer. It’s hard for me to think people who read the story, “On Ruegen Island,” could not figure out what is going on in it, even in 1937. Are there still taboo subjects? We want to say no, but of course there are and some for good reason, so it seems to me.

Where is the title Black Deutschland from?
Years ago I had a plan to write about black American soldiers stationed in West Germany. And in the early 1980s there were a couple of gay films about blacks on the West Berlin scene. And for years now black Germans have been making themselves more visible as a group. Black Deutschland went from being a title I had for nonfiction to the title of a novel. I saw recently that a documentary from a few years ago has the same title. Fortunately, titles cannot be copyrighted.

Jed experiences several key historical events, such as the death of Harold Washington and the end of a divided Berlin. What are the challenges of integrating historical incidents into a work of fiction?
Victor Serge, a wonderful writer who believed in Communist revolution but not in Stalin, said that the truth of the novelist cannot be confounded with the truth of the historian or chronicler. Maybe so, but the best fiction becomes history, a way to imagine the past, much as narrative history can have the drama of fiction: character, motive, plot. A lot depends on how recent or long ago the history is, just as genre determines to what uses a given history will be put. There are novels with historical settings and novels about a specific historical event, certain Civil War novels—or look at the number of works taking off from the assassination of JFK. Where would we put Slaughterhouse Five? In American literature, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime stands out for me as a defining moment in creating a world on the page inhabited by both fictional and historical characters.

Looking back over this year and in to the future, do you think there will be ever be fictional accounts about Ferguson, about the shootings in Colorado or the anti-Muslim backlash in the U.S?.
Is the appetite for stories built into language, and even those about what we know can take us to someplace we’ve not been before. Writers can come from anywhere; the challenge is to find a way to write. People do and will continue to do so and change the language yet again.

You’ve worked in theater, as a book reviewer and a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books. Where do you see overlaps in the types of writing you do? Are there subjects that beg to be written about in a certain way?
Book reviewing can sometimes give the young writer the validation of seeing his or her name in print. From where do we get the belief that this life is possible? It’s harder to write about what you like than what you don’t. To grow up at The New York Review of Books, working for Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, was an education. And I appreciate the encouragement I was given in its pages to reflect on African-American literature. Fiction and criticism have the same source: a wish to add to the literature that you care about.

My experience in the theatre has been as an adapter, dramaturg and text machine for the director Robert Wilson, whose work fascinates me in its beauty. Because of Wilson, I was able to stay in Berlin. My first job with Wilson was to try and make Heiner Mueller, a distinguished East German playwright, sit down and produce the text Bob was expecting for The Forest, a piece they were doing with David Byrne. I failed, but in chasing Mueller from one cigar-filled bar to another I got an extraordinary seminar in German literature. I’d never before met anyone who hated Thomas Mann.

In your book Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature, you focused on three writers you thought were under-read or underappreciated. Are there other writers—black or white, male or female, gay or straight—that you think deserve another look?
Elizabeth Hardwick once noted that Newton Arvin, a gay professor at Smith in the days of the closet, brought back Melville, while the equally closeted F.O. Matthiesson at Harvard ignited the Henry James revival. Somebody being found again is usually the first time around for most everyone in the audience. Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf was my introduction to her work. But I wasn’t alone in my discovery of Bloomsbury. Its principled bohemianism spoke to multiple constituencies in the 1970s. Maybe Mrs. Woolf had never gone out of fashion. Jean Rhys was making a true comeback around the same time. Feminism brought her back. Similarly, many black writers were being republished. When I was a student, the past was giving up its treasures in mass editions. New translations, new literatures in translation. I am enthralled by reprint series—Library of America or New York Review Books, Modern Library or Penguin. Oxford paperbacks. The New Directions backlist fills me with emotion. There is so much out there, you have to assume that you are missing many great things. I am glad for most of what has returned, among them Nella Larsen, a Harlem Renaissance novelist I much admire.

Reputations come and go for different reasons. I was talking not long ago to two very brilliant young writers who were entirely clear that Norman Mailer is out, out. Maybe the ideal reader is in your future and you write for that, for the in/out, in/out. Sometimes you’re just out. Gore Vidal was always trying to promote Frederic Prokosch and not really succeeding.

You just edited James Baldwin’s later novels for a new Library of American edition. What did you learn about his work that you didn’t know before?
Baldwin’s late novels used to be in my mind as his failures and although I am still unconvinced by If Beale Street Could Talk, the other two are worth going back to, because Baldwin always manages to infuse his prose with the magnetism of his personality, no matter what else is going on.

I read that you worked briefly for the American novelist Djuna Barnes. What was that like?
In High Cotton, the narrator works briefly for Djuna Barnes, which was based on actual experience. I was Fran McCullough’s secretary at Harper & Row. She was the kind of editor who took care of her writers. So she hired me out to Miss Barnes as a handyman. Miss Barnes had lost none of her fire or style. But some writers you have to read when you’re young. I wouldn’t dare read Barnes again. Or Gertrude Stein.

You have lived in New York and in England with your partner, James Fenton. Describe your ideal day in each place.
We are only in New York now, in Harlem, where James has managed to make an English cottage garden. My ideal day is to find that we have both woken up and are together and well enough. I am not being corny, and if I am I do not mind it.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Black Deutschland.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Jed Goodfinch is young, gay, black and trying to make a go of it in West Berlin in the 1980s in Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland. The novel is a provocative exploration of city, sexuality and self, written with the intellectual verve and dry wit that Pinckney is known for.

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