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Michael Sims

History

Hitting the trail

Review by Michael Sims

By now every literate American knows who Stephen E. Ambrose is. The author of the best-selling Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis and Clark expedition, he was also Ken Burns's primary source for the TV documentary. Now Ambrose returns with Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery. More than a rerun of the author's favorite topic, this beautiful new book combines Ambrose's personal account of his family's retracing of the journey, along with historical background and excerpts from Lewis and Clark's journals. As always with Geographic publications, all the illustrations and layout are wonderful, with paintings, drawings, maps, and dozens of stunning photographs by National Geographic veteran Sam Abell. The result is as much a photographic journey as it is a historical one. The Corps of Discovery, as Jefferson designated them, performed one of the great explorations, and created an enduring American myth. No one describes it better than Stephen Ambrose.

By now every literate American knows who Stephen E. Ambrose is. The author of the best-selling Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis and Clark expedition, he was also Ken Burns's primary source for the TV documentary. Now Ambrose returns with Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery. More than a rerun of the author's favorite topic, this […]
Children's & YAPicture Book

Stamps carry a message of hope

Review by Michael Sims

Part of the fun of reading is being surprised, whether by an author you thought you knew or a story whose next step you thought you could predict. I was surprised in both ways when I read The Stamp Collector. Before I ran across this inspired picture book, I had read Jennifer Lanthier’s stylish and action-packed series of young adult mystery novels starring an intrepid 12-year-old named Hazel Frump, which began with The Mystery of the Martello Tower. Except for also being very well written, Lanthier’s new book could not be more different from its predecessors.

“This is the story of not long ago,” Lanthier begins, “and not far away. It is the story of a boy who loves stamps and a boy who loves words.” François Thisdale’s delicately colorful paintings match the fable-like simplicity of Lanthier’s prose. If you know a child who wants to write or paint or otherwise find expression in the arts, this book might be just the inspirational nudge you’re looking for. It is very much a story about yearning to communicate.

The Stamp Collector is a thoughtful, lyrical tale about how imagination and empathy take hold in different ways in the mind of a city boy and a country boy—and speak across all barriers. The book’s resonant central image is a stamp on a letter that the poor boy finds on the street. “In his dreams, the stamp is a kite,” writes Lanthier, “a paper jewel from the crown of a wise old king.”

The city boy becomes a prison guard. The country boy becomes a writer whose too-realistic stories draw the ire of the country’s repressive political regime. “Words are dangerous,” snarl the officers who arrest the writer in the night. The two boys, now men, meet across the bars of the prison doors. But they are not allowed to speak.

Then the writer begins to receive letters in response to his book, which is banned in his own country—letters from all over the world, adorned with exotic stamps. The guard can’t pass the letters to the writer, but finally he begins to read them himself. And slowly he begins to pass the stamps to the writer as coded messages of hope.

For this new direction in her writing career, Lanthier was inspired by the story of Chinese writers Nurmuhemmet Yasin and Jiang Weiping, during her work with the international organization PEN (Poets, Editors, Novelists). In many hands this tale would have become a screed about repression or free speech. By concentrating on the basic human need to communicate, and by expressing much of her story through the poignant symbolism of the stamps, Lanthier avoids sermonizing. Together she and Thisdale turn The Stamp Collector into a poignant fable.

Michael Sims’ most recent book is The Story of Charlotte’s Web.

Part of the fun of reading is being surprised, whether by an author you thought you knew or a story whose next step you thought you could predict. I was surprised in both ways when I read The Stamp Collector. Before I ran across this inspired picture book, I had read Jennifer Lanthier’s stylish and […]
FictionClassics

It’s elementary, my dear reader

Review by Michael Sims

If you're a Sherlock Holmes devotee, you will be delighted to learn that there is a new two-volume annotated collection of the Victorian detective stories. For the price of three commonplace hardbacks, you can own a mammoth state-of-the-art edition of some of the most entertaining stories ever written.

Don't confuse this new set with the justly famous Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould, published in 1967. Klinger's work really is a whole new edition, occasionally referring to the Baring-Gould but never dependent upon it. These first two volumes contain all 56 stories about the great detective and his devoted Boswell, arranged in the order of the original collections. The four novels will follow next year in a third volume.

If you already have the Baring-Gould edition, you face an obvious question: why would anyone need two annotated sets of Sherlock Holmes? First because, despite the distractions of a scary world, nerdy scholars never cease burrowing after more details, thus further enlightening us about an ever more distant Victorian England; and second, because there were many lonely illustrations yearning for the society of their fellows. This book is stuffed with glorious artwork, from the original magazines, from various book editions, from catalogs and albums. Fans simply cannot afford to miss these excellent books.

If you're a Sherlock Holmes devotee, you will be delighted to learn that there is a new two-volume annotated collection of the Victorian detective stories. For the price of three commonplace hardbacks, you can own a mammoth state-of-the-art edition of some of the most entertaining stories ever written. Don't confuse this new set with the […]
Travel

Chronicling Cuban roadways

Review by Michael Sims

Richard Schweid's new book, Che's Chevrolet, Fidel's Oldsmobile: On the Road in Cuba appears to be a history of transportation in modern Cuba, but it turns out to be much more. This beautifully textured and detailed volume examines the strengths and weaknesses of dictatorship, the irresistible force of money-hungry corporations, the role of publicity in politics, and the influence, good and bad, of the U.S. abroad.

Often published by literary smaller presses, Schweid is one of those unpredictable explorers who gets out in the world, looks around and doesn't blink. He's interested in everything, especially food, natural history and the travails of his fellow human beings. The results of his explorations wind up in such surprising books as Consider the Eel and The Cockroach Papers. But who knew Schweid had so much on file in his brain about the role of automobiles in Cuban culture, and in culture in general? Schweid spent time in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, a city on the island's eastern edge, to explore how car-loving Cubans have adapted to stringent limits on the importation and private ownership of vehicles. He found both a sense of resignation and incredible ingenuity in keeping an estimated 60,000 pre-1960 American cars in working order. "Cubans have turned dishwashing detergent into brake fluid, enema bag hoses into fuel lines, and gasoline-burning engines into diesels in order to keep Detroit's dream cars on the road," he writes.

Schweid interviewed mechanics and matrons, artists and historians to create this wide-ranging and thoughtful account of a revolution's aftermath, as seen from the highway. Eventually, Schweid predicts, these classic cars will become revolutionary relics, reminders of the economic privations and oddities of the Fidel Castro years.

Richard Schweid's new book, Che's Chevrolet, Fidel's Oldsmobile: On the Road in Cuba appears to be a history of transportation in modern Cuba, but it turns out to be much more. This beautifully textured and detailed volume examines the strengths and weaknesses of dictatorship, the irresistible force of money-hungry corporations, the role of publicity in […]
Children's & YA

All creatures, in books both great and small

Review by Michael Sims

It's a jungle out there. Sometimes we forget that we are only one of countless species flying, swimming, tunneling and scurrying on the third rock from the sun. We still have no clear notion just how many creatures are endangered by the negligent stewardship of Homo sapiens, the currently dominant species of mammal. While biologists labor to identify the unknown animals and protect the known, authors and illustrators turn this feast of information into a golden age for children's nonfiction. Never before have young people had available so many beautiful, fact-filled books about our fellow creatures. There are more good new books about animals than we can possibly do justice to here, so we'll serve up only the cream of the crop.

For Peachtree Publishers, the team of writer Cathryn Sill and illustrator John Sill is producing a beautiful series of picture books about all kinds of animals, with most titles available in hardcover for $14.95 and paperback for $7.95. So far the titles are: About Insects, About Reptiles, About Mammals, About Birds and About Amphibians.

The text expresses important concepts in clear and simple language, and the detailed watercolor illustrations are splendid. Equally beautiful and fact-filled are two new books from Dawn Publications. Salamander Rain, written and illustrated by Kristin Joy Pratt-Serafini, examines a neighborhood pond by following fictional children's studies of it, from lyrical portraits of map turtles to the children's index-card notes. Salmon Stream, written by Carol Reed-Jones and illustrated by Michael S. Maydak, employs a different narrative style, following salmon (rather than a whole ecosystem) through a season. Both are impressive.

On the theme of fine illustrations, there is A Pair of Wings, a beautiful picture book written by Marilyn Singer and illustrated by Anne Wertheim. It's a good idea for a book a look at the many ways that different creatures fly. The text is lively and filled with information without being overstuffed. The illustrations portray animals and habitats from all over the world. From pigeons to beetles, from dragonflies to bats, the creatures live their wildly varied lives. Then, in the appendix, their differing methods of flight are contrasted.

Carol Lerner, who has written and illustrated many acclaimed nature books for children, has published On the Wing: American Birds in Migration. Her simplified illustrations draw readers into the fascinating story of the vast distances many birds fly each year to winter away from home. She addresses methods and goals of migration, differences in seasonal foods and the distinctive habits of certain birds.

As these authors realize, you can't appreciate the different aspects of nature until you can identify them. But not all identification is visual. For this reason, Innovative Kids is publishing a series of Hear and There Books. In Bird Calls and Night Sounds, young children push a button to hear the sound an animal makes, pull a tab to find the creature in its environment and lift another flap to learn more about its life. The sounds are convincing, loud enough to be noticed and will undoubtedly draw young children into the illustrations and text.

Kids will find more stories about sharks in a book from venerable nature publisher Houghton Mifflin. Swimming with Hammerhead Sharks, by Kenneth Mallory, is the latest in the excellent Scientists in the Field series. These books give science a friendly human face by following and photographing particular scientists in their work among animals. They explain the need for specific information in the case of sharks, to combat the cinematic stereotypes and the methods scientists employ to study the animals. The author tells the story in first person and keeps it exciting and full of amazing discoveries. This fine series continues with Once a Wolf: How Wildlife Biologists Fought to Bring Back the Gray Wolf, by Stephen R. Swinburne. This book tells the story of almost catastrophic depredations against the gray wolf, and how biologists have helped the wolf return to some poor semblance of its former glory. Also noteworthy is Sy Montgomery's The Snake Scientist, now in paperback. These fascinating creatures are literally followed into their burrows by scientists and schoolchildren.

The Oxford First Book of Animals, by Barbara Taylor, addresses animal themes, but also covers habitats, from deserts to oceans. Sidebars titled Look Closer provide more details, and the book ends with a fun Animal Detective Quiz. Children from preschool through the first few years of school will enjoy both the preceding books.

All of these books at least imply an environmental perspective, of course, and attentive children will not miss the plea for responsible citizenship implicit in any close look at animals. However, many books address ecological issues more directly. DK is publishing a series of handsome books under the series title Protecting Our Planet. Already out are Earth Watch by David Burnie and Ocean Watch by Martyn Bramwell. The latest addition is Animal Watch by Roger Few. DK's signature all-white background, well-designed montages of photographs, surrounded by equally well-chosen bites of information, encourage happy browsing. Besides being imbued with a sense of the grandeur of biodiversity, young readers will learn about poaching, deforestation and many other crucial issues. They will follow a day in the lives of an animal customs agent and a koala doctor. Readers will also pick up ideas about how to shop wisely and live responsibly. Sidebars provide clever but simple experiments. As this particular book points out, and as all of these other fine books demonstrate, "Our own future lies in the preservation of other creatures."

Michael Sims is currently writing a natural and cultural history of the human body for Viking.

It's a jungle out there. Sometimes we forget that we are only one of countless species flying, swimming, tunneling and scurrying on the third rock from the sun. We still have no clear notion just how many creatures are endangered by the negligent stewardship of Homo sapiens, the currently dominant species of mammal. While biologists […]
Memoir

Bobbie Ann Mason

Interview by Michael Sims

"This wasn’t what I meant to write at all," Bobbie Ann Mason says of her new memoir, Clear Springs. She laughs. "But that’s often true of a work. Usually I don’t know where I’m going at all. I’m just following something."

What Mason followed this time was an urge to recreate her own upbringing and the history of her family, especially her relationship with her mother over several decades. In five sections ranging back and forth from the 1940s into the 1990s, Clear Springs beautifully paints a loving and perceptive portrait of a family’s personalities and fortunes. "I think the questions I was asking are universal questions," Mason says. "The book starts out with the chapter at the pond, and reflecting on a moment of self-awareness, looking at where I’ve been and what I’ve connected to. It’s a way of asking who you are."

About five years ago Mason wrote what is now chapter one as a separate essay. "I didn’t realize I had a book for another year or so. In this case I did have a few years’ worth of interest in family history that got me going. There were all those early chapters about childhood and school and church. I kind of put them in different piles and tried to see what kind of sense I could make out of them. I had to find a way of sorting them all out so that they would cohere so that there would be patterns of them."

Clear Springs is Mason’s first book of autobiographical nonfiction, but it seems an inevitable step. Most of her fiction deals with the area she knows best, rural and suburban Kentucky, where she now lives again after decades in the North. Mason found the experience of writing a memoir fascinating. "I think it’s a natural impulse to want to find some kind of coherence and meaning in your life, to find that it has a narrative, and that there are patterns. There are themes in your life, and themes that connect back to previous generations. You can see where you fit into the puzzle." The image of fitting together puzzle pieces occurs repeatedly in Clear Springs. "Your life starts to make sense, in terms of what you’ve done before and what you’re doing now."

The prose in the new book is slower, more leisurely and meditative, than that of Mason’s fiction. "The characters I write about usually are in the middle of the whirlpool," Mason admits. "They’re racing down the highway. The confusion that the characters in the stories are in — it’s a culture shock. It’s rural people meeting the modern age and getting thrown out."

 One parallel between the fiction and the nonfiction is that Mason thinks of all the real people in Clear Springs as characters. "I think right at the heart of the book, for all the characters," she speculates, "is culture shock. It all happens at World War Two and thereafter. Before that, everything was pretty much the same. For all three generations that I’m writing about, the culture shock is happening almost simultaneously."

Mason has been chronicling this kind of shock for some time. Since her 1982 debut story collection, Shiloh and Other Stories, she has gone on to three novels — In Country, Spence + Lila, and Feather Crowns — and the excellent recent collection Midnight Madness. She is also writing the volume on Elvis Presley for the new Penguin Lives series of short biographies. One of the many pleasures in Clear Springs is Mason’s inclusion of snippets of the first stories she wrote, youthful imitations of the girls’ detective stories she so loved, which later resulted in her charming (and recently reissued) book The Girl Sleuths.

Considering her scholarly interests, evident in her book on Nabokov’s nature imagery, Mason’s style is surprisingly straightforward, never tricksy, seldom particularly allusive. But like Nabokov in his own autobiography, she approaches facts with the tools of an artist: "It’s awfully hard working with facts — or even what you remember as facts. I had so much trouble writing this book because I had to be faithful to what I knew to be fact, and yet I was trying to write something that in many ways was like fiction. But I couldn’t just haul off and make up things."

Like most memoirs, Clear Springs returns again and again to the question of the accuracy and potency of memories. "I realized that your memories over time are really lost, or they’re transformed," Mason says. "They become memories of memories, and you lose sight of the original. And finally there are a lot of things you remember that you can’t prove really happened, and there are a lot of things you don’t remember that did happen."

Out of her memories Mason brings to life the finely graded social distinctions which would be invisible to outsiders, but which anchor and define the members of a group, like the hierarchies in the world of Proust or Tolstoy. For example, Mason’s father treated her mother like a country girl, and his family made her feel inferior because she married slightly above her station.

To the question of what’s next for Bobbie Ann Mason, she gives some thought and responds slowly. "I think I want to turn a corner and go in a different direction. I don’t know what that will be. Well, I want to write short stories. I don’t know what they’ll be like, but I think they’ll be different."

Clear Springs ends in October of 1996, with a masterful chapter in which Mason herself does not appear. With all of her novelist’s talents she recreates an event her mother described to her, in which the elderly woman falls into a pond while trying to catch a fish. It’s a simple scene, barely an anecdote, that Mason somehow leaves resonating with significance and passion — and, quietly, implicitly, with her profound love for her mother.

There’s a fine moment in Clear Springs when Mason and her young husband begin their first garden. It nicely sums up her tone and symbolism in this book: "When I plunged my hands into the black New England soil, I felt I was touching a rich nourishment that I hadn’t had since I was a small child. It had been years since I helped Mama in the garden. Yet the feel of dirt seemed so familiar. This was real. It was true. I wheeled around and faced home."

 

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

 

"This wasn’t what I meant to write at all," Bobbie Ann Mason says of her new memoir, Clear Springs. She laughs. "But that’s often true of a work. Usually I don’t know where I’m going at all. I’m just following something." What Mason followed this time was an urge to recreate her own upbringing and […]
Animals

Peter Matthiessen

Interview by Michael Sims

"I was always writing something down," Peter Matthiessen remembers of his childhood. His voice, on the phone from his home in Sagaponack, New York, is relaxed and humorous. "I don’t know if that was the beginning or not. But even when I was a little boy, I would make strange lists — even of my phonograph records. I don’t know why."

Matthiessen was born in 1927. He wrote what he calls "bad short stories" as a teenager, for school magazines and the yearbook. At Yale he began writing more seriously, and he helped found the Paris Review only three years after graduating in 1950. In the decades since, he has published many volumes of award-winning fiction and nonfiction, ranging from the experimental novel Far Tortuga to the African meditation The Tree Where Man Was Born.

Matthiessen’s latest book, Tigers in the Snow, is a small gem of only 160 pages. It includes dramatic color photographs by biologist Maurice Hornocker, who invited Matthiessen to visit the Siberian Tiger Project and write about it. Inevitably, the book’s terrain and feline star will bring to mind Matthiessen’s 1978 National Book Award winner, The Snow Leopard. But the new book is less mystical and poetic, more journalistic and condensed. It records the plight of these magnificent animals — and the adventures of the scientists and villagers around them — in a prose as sharp and evocative as the lines of a woodcut.

Whatever his aim in each book, Matthiessen never distances himself from his subject matter. "One cannot speak for those who live in tiger country," he writes in Tigers, "but the vivid presence of Hu Lin, the King — merely the knowing that His Lordship is out there in the forest — brings me deep happiness. That winter afternoon in the Kunalaika, the low sunlight in the south glancing off black silhouetted ridges and shattered into frozen blades by the black trees, the ringing clarity of the great cat tracks on the snowy ice, the blood trace and stark signs of the elk’s passage — that was pure joy."

The factual Tigers in the Snow comes on the heels of the fictional Bone by Bone, which won the Southern Book Critics’ Circle Award. Bone by Bone is the final book in a critically acclaimed trilogy that began with Killing Mr. Watson in 1990 and continued with Lost Man’s River in 1997. The genesis for this massive work dates back to a single remark in the 1940s. "I was traveling up the west coast of Florida with my father in a boat, and we were off the Ten Thousand Islands — the western part of the Everglades — and he showed me on the marine chart where a river came down out of the Everglades. And he said, ‘There’s a house about three or four miles up that river, and it’s the only house in the Everglades. It belonged to a man named Watson, who was killed by his neighbors.

"That’s all he knew, but the seed was planted: a man killed by his neighbors! Why? The whole thing had a gothic and romantic ring to it. And it began working in my head. For many years, I thought it would be a thread in a very different book, having to do with the Indian Wars and the environment and so forth. But it grew and grew, and when I started writing, it was the main story."

Although published as three volumes, the story was originally written as one. When, in a recent Paris Review interview, Matthiessen mentioned that he hoped to reunite them into a single narrative, the Modern Library called immediately and offered to publish the one-volume version.

Although fiction, the Watson trilogy embodies many of the themes that drive Matthiessen’s nonfiction. "I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism — those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes." He laughs quietly, ironically. "I wanted that aspect of our great American democracy brought out."

Matthiessen has said that the difference between writing nonfiction and writing fiction is like the difference between making a cabinet and creating a sculpture. "In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth. I’m just doing my job. I’m using my research, and I hope I’m shaping it properly and telling the story well, and you do the best you can with the language. In fiction, you have a rough idea what’s coming up next — sometimes you even make a little outline — but in fact you don’t know. Each day is a whole new — and for me, a very invigorating — experience.

"I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority. And a friend of mine pointed out to me, ‘You know, you’re really writing about the same themes in fiction and nonfiction, but some material lends itself better to fiction or nonfiction.’ I think some of my nonfiction books, especially ones like Under the Mountain Wall and The Snow Leopard, appeal to some of the same senses as the fiction does, simply because they’re so strange. It’s the strangeness, I think, which is the common denominator. It’s like a world of the imagination, it’s so different from what you had known.

"I remember saying to George Schaller, as I started out on that snow leopard trip, ‘If I can’t get a good book out of this, I ought to be taken out and shot.’ I was thrilled by the material and the scene and the light." Obviously Matthiessen is not one to pore over the quotidian malaise of suburbia. "For me, that’s never been very interesting. I’ve always preferred sort of life on the edge — people who are desperate or cut off in some way, or loners, whatever."

Books such as The Snow Leopard and Blue Meridian have a vivid immediacy about them — rich with the textures, scents, and sounds of the outdoors — for a good reason. "When I’m in the field, when I’m working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks. I keep them going all day and then write up the stuff at night. I have to get it down quickly, because otherwise I may lose some of it; it’s taken down in a semi-shorthand. So when I go home, I have a sort of rough first draft."

To the suggestion that such attention to detail is part of his appeal, Matthiessen replies, "I think in any writing you’re paying attention to detail. E. M. Forster made that wonderful observation that good writing is administering a series of tiny astonishments. The astonishments aren’t things you never knew. What they are is sort of the first articulation of something you knew but you’d never seen set down in print. And you say, Ah, yes! How true."

Author photo by Linda Girvin.

"I was always writing something down," Peter Matthiessen remembers of his childhood. His voice, on the phone from his home in Sagaponack, New York, is relaxed and humorous. "I don’t know if that was the beginning or not. But even when I was a little boy, I would make strange lists — even of my […]
Fiction

Mark Z. Danielewski

Interview by Michael Sims

With so many competitors out there, an aspiring novelist needs a strong talent or an original slant to rise above the hoard. Mark Z. Danielewski seems to have both. It’s difficult to imagine a more original and distinctive novel than his House of Leaves. At first glance, it seems to reject most precepts of narrative structure. Remarks by various narrators and commentators appear in different typefaces; there are hundreds of sly footnotes; on some pages the text runs sideways or at an angle; and occasionally there’s only a word or two on a page. One page consists of three measures of music. Toward the back there is a collection of quotations, including a passage from Homer in five different languages. The book ends with an alphabetical index to, apparently, every major word in the entire text.

While these narrative games are all good fun, House of Leaves adds up to more than playfulness. As it should be in such a nightmarish fantasy, what appears to be a barrier is actually a gateway. Like Joyce and Proust, Danielewski isn’t rejecting narration as much as customizing and turbo-charging it. For one thing, he invents several layers of narrators. The author’s name doesn’t even appear on the title page; it’s opposite it, reading "Mark Z. Danielewski’s," with the title page following: "House of Leaves, by Zampano, with Introduction and Notes by Johnny Truant." And the whole thing is a commentary on a homemade film documentary by a man named Navidson. Straightforward this book isn’t, but it is amusing, challenging, and terrifying.

Usually the appearance of a first novel is the public culmination of a long, silent apprenticeship. "I’ve been writing my whole life," Danielewski says, on the phone from his home in California. "My father was an avant-garde filmmaker, very much an intellectual. My mother wasn’t as formally intellectual as he was, but they were always in favor of seeing movies, reading books, and always bringing those subjects into long discourses at the table. My father had been steeped in the 1950s, the literature of the modernists. So certainly the discussions of Freud and Nietzsche and Borges and Sartre were all part of what we discussed and fought about."

Danielewski’s firm grounding in the canon shows in House of Leaves. The central image of the book — a house that is much larger on the inside than on the outside — is very much a Borgesian conceit, and the layering of narrators and cheeky asides bring to mind Nabokov. As the horrors accumulate inside the house, there will be moments when you will think you are reading the unnatural love child of Lewis Carroll and H. P. Lovecraft.

Apparently Danielewski has always confidently ignored readers’ expectations. He wrote his first book at the age of 10. "It was called The Hell-Hole," he remembers. "It was one of those things where we all sat around and made a New Year’s resolution, and I said, ‘I’m gonna write a book.’ I said I was going to write one page a day, and I never altered from that. In the end I had a 360-page book, which I rewrote a little. It was about a young kid who grows up in New York City, becomes a cocaine addict, beats the hell out of a cop, and goes to prison — which was the hell-hole. It was pretty brutal. My father thought it was immoral, and my mother was deeply disturbed. And they basically just didn’t want to talk about it."

He didn’t discuss the manuscript with anyone for at least three years, until he showed it to a high school teacher. Because he used one of the few four-letter words still verboten in prime time, she declared that he had written a dirty book. "I became incredibly wary about showing my work to anyone," Danielewski admits. But he didn’t stop writing. "That was the odd thing, that the force, the will to write, was always far stronger than the criticism that came my way. When I was at Yale, I was rejected at every writing seminar I applied to."

Part of House of Leaves also has its roots in concrete poetry, the tiny subgenre of poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words on the page reflects the topic of the poem. The words to a poem about time, for example, can be arranged in the shape of an hourglass. In House of Leaves, when a character is crawling down a narrow tunnel, the page’s layout shrinks to a claustrophobic band of words. There are many such moments. Danielewski explains: "My view of placing text on the page — aside from being influenced by the likes of E. E. Cummings or maybe some John Cage — was actually cinematic. The point wasn’t just to get really obtuse in the placement of the word. I was very interested in how the reader moves through a book. I’ve never talked to anyone who didn’t feel a sense of elation when they’d read, say, 80 pages in an hour, because something was moving quickly — or expressed some sort of frustration because it took them an hour to read ten pages. So I began to realize that cinema has an enormous foundation of theories on how to control the viewer’s perception of a film." There are passages in which Danielewski’s attitude toward prose seems to echo Hitchcock’s approach to film as collage. His text moves like a camera, slowing down, speeding up, turning corners, zooming, panning, fading.

As he talks about his book, Danielewski doesn’t tell the usual horror stories about the world of publishing. "The book may have started off in solitary confinement," he says, "but I had really a wonderful group of people to help finish it. And we all managed to spit and hiss and finally get together. They called me three days ago with one final question about the blues on the book." Blues are the photographic pages that get shipped to the printer in the final stage of preparing the manuscript for publication. House of Leaves isn’t a typographical maelstrom like Finnegan’s Wake, but its idiosyncratic layout hides countless traps for unwary copy editors and typesetters. "That’s why it was a huge process," Danielewski says. "After the manuscript was purchased, it took two years to really finish the book. I was involved, thanks to Pantheon, in the entire process, all the way from copy editing to layout." He laughs. "The good news is that I got to do it all, and the bad news is that if there’s anything you don’t like, it’s my fault."

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra and two science books for children.

With so many competitors out there, an aspiring novelist needs a strong talent or an original slant to rise above the hoard. Mark Z. Danielewski seems to have both. It’s difficult to imagine a more original and distinctive novel than his House of Leaves. At first glance, it seems to reject most precepts of narrative […]
Fiction

Tom Robbins

Interview by Michael Sims

Tom Robbins believes in truth in advertising. His novels lure the adventurous and warn the timid with outrageous titles, which accurately predict outrageousness within. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Skinny Legs and All — these are not your usual well-behaved titles of popular novels. You won't see Robbins calling his books The Firm or The Notebook.

But for sheer mouthful of chewy syllables, you can't beat the title of Robbins's latest novel — Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue; however, it's more appealing than the rejected working title, Syrup of Wahoo. In a recent interview, Robbins explained that he changed the first title because he didn't like the misleading connotations of sweetness ("while the book is upbeat and exuberant, it decidedly is not sweet") and because he kept having to explain to Generation X friends that "wahoo" was a cry of exhilaration that did not require "a dot and a com" after it.

Robbins says he took the title from his own translation of a line from a Rimbaud poem. "While it has quite literal significance within the context of my plot," he adds, "it has wider meanings, as well. All of us who've managed to survive intense love affairs, political confrontations, or periods of personal debauchery might be said to be fierce invalids home from hot climates."

Fierce Invalids, Robbins explains, was inspired "by an entry from Bruce Chatwin's journal, by a CIA agent I met in Southeast Asia, by the mystery surrounding the lost prophecy of the Virgin of Fatima, by the increasing evidence that the interplay of opposites is the engine that runs the universe, and by embroidered memories of old Terry and the Pirates comic books."

Why so long since his last book? "Hey, it's only been five and a half years. And I have no idea where they went. I've been writing, yes; and building a house and traveling and generally following the Charmer's pipes down oblique paths of mysticism and eroticism. Certainly, I'd like to write faster, but whenever I've tried it, the language has suffered. I tend to sift my mental lexicon for the fresher, more unexpected word the way an old prospector pans for the bigger, more valuable nugget. That takes time."

Robbins's many fans won't mind the wait. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates is everything they've come to expect — humor, sex, adventure, ferocious rants about society and religion, characters who swear on the Bible and Finnegan's Wake, asides on everything from etymology to violence, and a disregard for anybody else's definition of good taste. Switters, the protagonist, is a gun-toting pacifist anarchist who works for the government. In other words, by embodying contradictions, he is in the tradition of such Robbins heroes as the Woodpecker and Sissy Hankshaw.

Robbins says he never goes back and reads his novels once they've been published. "I'm saving that experience, and any selection of favorites that might ensue, for my golden years. Provided my golden years aren't here already." He does, however, have favorite characters. "I suppose I'll always be in love with Amanda, the uninhibited young nature goddess from Another Roadside Attraction. Although I disguised her as a child of the '60's, she danced directly out of the collective unconscious, did not pass Go, did not give a damn for any stinking $200. At the moment, however, I'd have to say that I'm most particularly fond of Switters, the rascally protagonist of Fierce Invalids."

Not surprisingly, Robbins is impatient with political correctness in the arts, especially the variety that expects writers to stay in their own yards and not trespass upon the sacred turf of some other group. "What novelists do — what screenwriters and playwrights do — is get inside other people's heads and look out. The ability to do that convincingly, no matter whose head is so entered, is what separates the real writer from the polemist, the philistine, and the poseur. To say that artists should be limited to portraying their 'own kind' is to say that Shakespeare erred in giving us Lady Macbeth, that Anne Rice's books ought to have been composed by 200-year-old male vampires, or that Bambi should have been written by a deer. Show me, for example, the Japanese woman who's written a more accurate life of the geisha than Arthur Golden and I might be tempted to buy into such a politically correct, asinine notion."

Like many creative children, Robbins seems to have turned to art partially as self-defense against his upbringing. "The family in which I was reared," he remembers, "was kind of a Southern Baptist version of The Simpsons — except that my father never would have eaten pie off of the floor and I played the part of both Bart and Lisa. Which is to say, I was, on the one hand, a rambunctious little troublemaker, and on the other, a highly sensitive, creative, artistic type." Apparently the combination hasn't faded, because Robbins adds, "That dichotomy of personality can sometimes confound me even today."

However, Robbins credits his background with feeding his yearning for life and art. "Growing up in the mysterious old mountains of North Carolina (there was a Blair witch project behind every ridge), I was fed a fair amount of superstitious brain poison and homogenized ignorant pap." His parents, although not well-educated, were avid readers, and they inspired young Tom to read "numberless books." At school he was known as a basketball player and class clown; he kept his intellectual side secret. "What my background lacked in sophistication, it made up for in natural beauty, colorful language, and ample incentive to overlay numbing Sunday School ennui with dreamy longings for a romantic elsewhere. It gave me an appetite." Despite his anarchic sensibilities, Tom Robbins says that he maintains a regular writing schedule, because "sitting around waiting for inspiration is for amateurs." He's at his desk every morning at ten o'clock, whether, as he puts it, the muse shows up or not. Not surprisingly, Robbins offers no magic formula for the aspiring novelist. "Writing is an enterprise that demands unabated discipline and concentration — but by God, it sure beats working."

Tom Robbins believes in truth in advertising. His novels lure the adventurous and warn the timid with outrageous titles, which accurately predict outrageousness within. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Skinny Legs and All — these are not your usual well-behaved titles of popular novels. You won't […]
NonfictionHumor

David Sedaris

Interview by Michael Sims

Many of us still remember when we first heard the dry, droll voice of David Sedaris on public radio. He was the only person in the early 1990s more amusing than George Bush. Sedaris talked about his hilarious adventures doing such seemingly innocent tasks as cleaning New York apartments or working as a Christmas elf at Macy's. Gradually, collections of his essays appeared: Barrel Fever, Naked, Holidays on Ice. With these books, Sedaris fans could keep him nearby rather than waiting for a broadcast on All Things Considered.

Fans will rejoice again, because Sedaris is back with a new laugh-out-loud collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day. The book's title, after one of the essays, records Sedaris's first official stroke of genius choosing to present his own garbled English translations of the garbled French uttered by students in an introductory French class. Sedaris's version is the first time this trick has worked since Mark Twain pulled it off with one hand tied behind his back.

"Sometime me cry alone at night," Sedaris laments about his sadistic French teacher. A fellow sufferer replies, "That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People stop hate you soon."

"The school read that story, and I got kicked out," Sedaris said in a recent interview. "And the only thing that saved me was that every word of it was true."

Being expelled from French class for accurately portraying his teacher is all in a day's work for David Sedaris. About half of Me Talk Pretty One Day deals with family and childhood, and half with his recent move to France and its ramifications in his life, ranging from having to defend the U.S. at cocktail parties to discovering a preference for movies over tourist traps. "I didn't care where Hemingway drank or Alice B. Toklas had her mustache trimmed," he writes. This essay, like most of Sedaris's others, grows out of everyday circumstances riding the subway, working as a furniture mover, seeing a photo of Jodie Foster carrying dog excrement in a plastic bag on the beach. Sedaris likes to make his essays out of the unremarkable strands of his own life.

Not one to propound manifestos, Sedaris is nonetheless articulate about his reasons for this attitude. "It seems like literature, or at least recent American literature," he says in his signature dry voice, "teaches you that unless you grew up living in the back of a car, or unless your folks were in prison, you really don't have a story to tell. It's funny how a lot of rich people and middle-class people think, 'Gosh, if I were poor, I'd have such a good book.' They don't see any value in their own lives," Sedaris notes. "When actually it all depends on how you write about it. Instead of being jealous of these people who had incredibly dramatic lives, who grew up in foster homes and were kept chained in the basement, the notion that if you had bunk beds that just didn't cut it—it took me awhile to realize, 'Well, I took guitar lessons from a midget.' "

Sedaris taught briefly at the Art Institute in Chicago, where he saw these attitudes every day. "To hear my students talk, they had been raised by wolves. Then graduation day would come and their parents would drive up in BMWs, and these kids were dying of embarrassment."

Sedaris doesn't describe himself as an essayist, a humorist, or even a writer. "When I fly back and forth into the country, and I'm asked for my occupation, I just say typist. I would have no problem saying I'm an accountant or a dental assistant, because that's just a job and it's on your W2 form. I mean, it seems like the world can call you something, but don't call yourself that. You know, it's like when you meet somebody and you ask, 'What do you do?' and they say, 'I'm an artist.' I just cringe."

In retrospect, Sedaris also cringes at the memory of his early years as a performance artist in, of all places, North Carolina. His descriptions of the smug posturings of these self-proclaimed artistes is one of Sedaris's most perceptive and heartfelt works not only hilarious and smart, but also candid (and darkly humorous) about his addiction to crystal methamphetamines.

While Sedaris's essays give the sense of ordinary reality, they are unquestionably reflected through the distorting mirror of his outlook. "I've been trying, especially with this book, to pull back a little bit from exaggerating, which of course is my natural inclination. But I found with this last book that what people thought I was making up were the things that were true. I did hitchhike across the country with a quadriplegic."

The stories take place at various times in Sedaris's life, so no matter how solid the bones that are being excavated, some reconstruction is required. "Of course, I can't remember every word of what someone said to me 20 years ago. So that's where I tend to exaggerate the most, in the dialogue, because I want to make it as entertaining as I can."

He mentions a story in Me Talk Pretty One Day in which an American man on the Paris Metro thinks Sedaris is a French pickpocket. Assuming that Sedaris can't speak English, the man loudly catalogues his suspicions to his wife. "Reading it aloud," Sedaris adds, "I could feel the anticlimax. But I didn't want to make up an ending." Actually, the story doesn't feel anticlimactic. It's a vignette, but an astutely observed and funny one, sort of Chekhov meets Thurber.

In Sedaris's world, nothing turns out as expected. Just as she gets off the subway, his sister turns to him and calls out, "Good luck beating that rape charge." He is left to face the hostile stares of strangers and to write up the account for those of us who enjoy seeing the world through the eyes of David Sedaris.

 

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin's Orchestra (Henry Holt).

Many of us still remember when we first heard the dry, droll voice of David Sedaris on public radio. He was the only person in the early 1990s more amusing than George Bush. Sedaris talked about his hilarious adventures doing such seemingly innocent tasks as cleaning New York apartments or working as a Christmas elf […]
History

Mike Wright

Interview by Michael Sims

Mike Wright rounds up and rounds out the Wild West “I sometimes find myself,” Mike Wright says over the phone from his home in Chicago, “writing for the ear instead of the eye.” After a lifetime in radio and television, Wright talks with the precise enunciation and measured tone of a professional speaker, and he writes with the voice of the teacher you wish you’d had in school knowledgeable, enthusiastic, full of wonderful stories about the real people behind the dates. This is one reason why Wright’s “What They Didn’t Teach You” series is proving so popular. Since the first one appeared only a few years ago, the books have explored the lives and times of those who lived through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. The latest book in the series is What They Didn’t Teach You About the Wild West. Many of the characters are familiar to us, but Wright gives them a new slant, a witty, level-headed shakedown that reveals the individual behind the persona. He focuses his searchlight on Lewis and Clark, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, and Doc Holliday. Wright documents the still often overlooked contributions of women women of all sorts, from farmers to prostitutes to mothers (sometimes, of course, one and the same). He devotes a fascinating chapter to the roles of blacks in the Old West, including the surprising tidbit that perhaps as many as 25 percent of the cowboys were of African descent. One of Wright’s most fascinating stories is a reconstruction of Santa Anna’s attack on the Alamo, and the wildly differing accounts of Davy Crockett’s death which may have been an execution following a last-minute surrender.

Mike Wright was born in 1938 and grew up in Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia. During World War II, at the tender age of five, he began a public career as a singer, performing at nearby military bases. Frequently he was dressed in an Uncle Sam suit, complete with pasted-on cotton goatee. “Regretfully,” he sighs, “I have no pictures of that. Now, of course, I’m a little older. I don’t have the Uncle Sam suit, but I still have a white goatee.” Young Mike’s singing had its career pitfalls. “It’s hard to be a boy soprano when your voice changes to a bass or baritone. I did some acting stage, a couple of very minor movies.” Wright began working in radio while enrolled at William and Mary in Virginia, where he found the classes less than entrancing. While working as a disc jockey, he began to write. In time he moved into television news, from which he finally retired in 1991. “I was a reporter, anchor, producer from small cities to large. I spent the last 17 years as a producer with NBC in Chicago.” When Wright left TV news, he wrote a documentary on Route 66 for a Chicago station. “Then I got into writing full-time, and I haven’t looked back.” Wright’s first book, What They Didn’t Teach You About the Civil War, was published in the 1996. He has been zooming along ever since. “From my days in radio and television,” he admits, “I can write pretty fast. I can sometimes churn out 20 pages a day. I get it all in mind; I get my notes; I get the books I work from and I just start writing from there. Of course, these 20 pages or sometimes it’s only two or whatever aren’t the final version.

“I write on the computer,” he adds. “At the end of the day I print everything out in hard copy, and after dinner I read it to my wife, every night. She reads she hears everything I’ve written in that one day. She says she enjoys it.” He laughs. “When I read it aloud, I get a feeling for it myself. I make corrections, she makes corrections, I rewrite. And she gets to listen to my rewrite as well.” Understandably, Wright’s wife seldom gets around to reading his finished books.

Wright attributes his writing speed to his days in television news. “I remember when Elvis Presley died. I was writing copy for NBC. This was back in the days of typewriters, and they wouldn’t let me finish a piece of paper, of copy. It was going directly from my typewriter to on the air. I would type about half a page and they would pull it out and I would finish the sentence and keep on going for another half page and they would pull it out. I kept that up for several hours.” Wright’s account of the first book’s genesis explains the appeal of the series an individual slant on history told with infectious enthusiasm. “I had done an earlier book on the Civil War, about Richmond, City Under Siege. I had done some work for a television producer on a Civil War documentary. And I had a lot of material that I had gathered over the years. I don’t throw away anything, as my wife says.

“So I started putting it together and then realized that I didn’t want to tell a story from point A to point B, from one year to the next. I wanted to tell it so that people can pick up one chapter, read it, put it down, pick up another chapter, and they aren’t really losing the train of thought.” Presidio is primarily known as a military publisher, but Wright points out that his books “aren’t really that war-based. There are other books devoted to the battles or whatever. I try to tell readers what the guy was doing at home. There was so much more going on during World War II, for instance, than just the fighting. There was a lot going on in the East when people were going out West.” Obviously Wright loves history. However, like most of us he has complaints about how it’s usually taught. “You know, in History 101 in college, we all get the same things thrown at us. We get dates, names. We may get facts, but we don’t get the why. This is what I’m more interested in: What makes people do this?” What Wright manages to do is place the so-called Wild West in the context of the history before and after it. We learn a good bit about the history of North and Central America that determined the nature of the immigrant European culture that would soon be imposed on so many areas. For example, Wright explains the role smallpox played in the Spanish overthrow of the Aztecs. He examines the ways in which inflated and outright false stories of the land of milk and honey out west drew innocent settlers who were unprepared to find life so dreary and difficult. He looks at the result of a million or so cattle wandering untended in Texas after so many farmers turned soldier during the Civil War.

Wright is telling us the stories no one bothered to mention in school, and he’s also reminding us of the characters that never make it into the TV movies. How did the Chinese happen to become the primary workers who were laying the new railroad tracks? How did the whites celebrate their attacks against Indians? What did Jesse James like to do in his spare time? Wright knows the answers. This isn’t just the history we’ve not been told. It’s history about real people living real lives lives full of pain and humor and joy and disappointment and grief, just like all our lives today.

Mike Wright rounds up and rounds out the Wild West “I sometimes find myself,” Mike Wright says over the phone from his home in Chicago, “writing for the ear instead of the eye.” After a lifetime in radio and television, Wright talks with the precise enunciation and measured tone of a professional speaker, and he […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Josephine Humphreys

Interview by Michael Sims

On the telephone from her home on the coast of South Carolina, Josephine Humphreys talks about her new book in a soft, thoughtful voice. Her accent is a beautiful subspecies of East Coast Southern. The overall tone is similar to the compassionate voice that has won her fiction both popular and critical acclaim. Probably best known for her novel Rich in Love (which Hollywood made into a film), she is the author of two other highly regarded novels, Dreams of Sleep and The Fireman’s Fair. She has also been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Humphreys speaks excitedly about the arduous but joyful task of writing her new novel, Nowhere Else on Earth. "The new book is almost a total change for me, in terms of subject, method — everything’s different," Humphreys says. "Before this book, I used to say that my ideas for a story began with a vague feeling that I wanted to follow. In my first three books, writing was a process of discovery for me. Everything was written without a plan. I never thought out a plot in advance."

Nowhere Else on Earth was a whole new ballgame. "The story existed before I began," Humphreys says. She has had it in mind ever since she heard the facts behind it as a teenager. Rhoda Strong, the book’s narrator, was a real woman who came of age during the Civil War. She lived in an impoverished Indian community along the Lumbee River in North Carolina, the daughter of a Lumbee Indian and an immigrant Scot. Rhoda’s heroism in the face of white violence and attempts at subjugation became legendary in the region. Humphreys researched the setting and era until she breathed its very air. By doing so, she allowed her characters to perform their drama on a fully realized stage without seeming like reanimated museum pieces.

There are two kinds of historical fiction — lightweight genre pieces about a certain era (a perfectly respectable form of entertainment) and serious novels that happen to be set in the past. Nowhere Else on Earth is in the latter category. Although it is fast-moving, suspenseful, and amusing, it is very much about what Serious Critics like to call "the human condition": growing, loving, working, and dying.

"My life and era are illuminated by Rhoda’s in a thousand ways," Humphreys says. "One is that my notion of ‘Southernness’ has changed because of her, because of the book. My thinking about race has changed. My ideas about community identity and racial identity, about the fate of Native Americans — these have all changed. Also, I think I know more about the difference between private dreams and community dreams. While I was working, I saw what she dreamed of in the beginning as a girl. She dreamed of private discovery and love. But she learns through the man — and he learns through her — that it’s important to work for a better, bigger world."

Humphreys orchestrates masterful changes of pace and tone even in a single scene. For example, about halfway through the book Rhoda is left to tend a dying soldier. At first she finds his bloody, filthy body offensive. However, thinking that he is dying, she cleans him up and even cuts his hair. As she nurses him, reflecting on her mother’s comment that one who comforts winds up comforted, she begins to see him as a sacrifice, then a heroic figure, then the very embodiment of America. She reads the heartbreaking note he left to be found on his body. Yet suddenly the scene turns comic as the soldier begins to revive. Then it takes still another direction. When you reach the end of the chapter, you realize you have been in the hands of a writer who is securely in charge of her material, and that it comes alive for us because it came alive for her.

"There’s a wonderful crossover between me and Rhoda, a connection that I haven’t had in any of my earlier books with characters. I feel that. . . ." She pauses and thinks about it and begins again. "Trite as it sounds, I feel that she, for a short while, inhabited me. I feel that there was such an amazing closeness that I realized a power that fiction had never had for me before — and that I really would never have guessed that it could have. When I describe it, it sounds like hallucination. But as I get older, life does get more mysterious and more wonderfully surprising — whereas my young life was very rationally controlled. Now I realize that there is more that we don’t know."

"I don’t feel that I have a mission to discover and publish untold stories," Humphreys points out. "The Rhoda story is well known in North Carolina. I don’t approach things that carefully. I just know that there’s a presence that I can’t ignore. To ignore it would be to write something not necessarily inferior, but somehow secondary to what I should be doing. To think of it as alchemy — to think of it as the discovery of a transformation process that I can get back into — seems a good approximation of what I feel. You want something that explains other things to you. I think that’s why I love this woman — because getting back to her helped me understand so much of the rest of the world. I hated to let her go." Humphreys laughs. "But that’s the great thing about writing — that you can keep doing it and, even when you finish a book and give up those characters, there are more waiting. I love it. I feel very lucky to be allowed to do this."

Fans of Nowhere Else on Earth will be pleased to learn that Humphreys is already working on a second historical novel. "It’s about a man I inadvertently came across and was stunned by — a man I had never heard of before, but who seems to me crucial to understanding our history."

She laughs again. "I am obsessed and possessed already. My family is dismayed. They knew how long this Rhoda book took me. And they heard me say several times in the past few years that I would never undertake another historical novel. Every time I said that, everybody said, ‘Thank God.’ And now I am beginning another one and no one can believe it." This time she laughs almost in embarrassment. "But I can’t help it. I honestly can’t help it."

Michael Sims is a writer, curator, and regular contributor to BookPage.

Author photo by Tom Hutcheson.

On the telephone from her home on the coast of South Carolina, Josephine Humphreys talks about her new book in a soft, thoughtful voice. Her accent is a beautiful subspecies of East Coast Southern. The overall tone is similar to the compassionate voice that has won her fiction both popular and critical acclaim. Probably best […]
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

David Clement-Davies

Interview by Michael Sims

Arriving on American shores this month, escorted by ecstatic reviews, is Fire Bringer, an epic animal fantasy in the tradition of Watership Down. This first novel by 36-year-old travel writer David Clement-Davies was published in England last year as a children’s book, but here in the U.S. it will be treated more as a crossover title.

This 500-page saga of the lives and society of the Herla, as the red deer call themselves, ranges from private domestic moments to heroic battles, from rival herd-leaders’ secret machinations to ancient prophecies of a deer with a blaze on his forehead shaped like an oak leaf. (Many readers will immediately think of Harry Potter’s lightning-shaped scar, which likewise marks him for future heroism.) No matter how far we think we have come from the superstitious artists who painted animals on cave walls, we are still moved by heroic tales of our fellow creatures. Is it because we intuit deep down that they and we are closer than we think? Whatever the rational explanation for this affinity, David Clement-Davies has tapped into its exotic power.

We reached the author at his home (and office) in London. Clement-Davies is already hard at work on his next book — about wolves — but he well remembers the amount of work that went into Fire Bringer. "Overall it took about three years to write, on and off. I had the idea quite a long time before, actually. I was sort of wondering what to do, especially after leaving university. I wanted to write, but I wasn’t sure how to set about that. Eventually I went on and became a travel journalist." Today he climbs mountains, scuba dives, sky dives, and writes up his adventures for various periodicals.

Not surprisingly, many of Clement-Davies’s own favorite books as a child — and, for that matter, as an adult — were animal fantasies. "Watership Down is a favorite book," he says, acknowledging the most frequent comparison with his own first novel. "Going further back, the sort of greats like The Jungle Book. And there are other books which are more demanding — The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Wind in the Willows."

Therefore, he says, "I had a sense of the type of book I’d like to write." However, he knew he didn’t want to follow too closely in the footsteps of Richard Adams. "Before I got into the book, I thought about deer. They appealed for their mystery and — I don’t know how to say this — they’re rather more exciting animals than rabbits." Deer seem more mystical, more historical — and of course the stags, unlike male rabbits, are heavily armed, which offers dramatic possibilities in a story fraught with rivalry and deception.

Clement-Davies did a great deal of research into the lives of red deer. "Reading about deer is fascinating. You have this unique thing, which is the antler cycle, which makes them for me somehow stranger. While writing the fantasy, I was wrestling back and forth — wanting to make these creatures realistic, too."

Paradoxically, the details of the deer’s natural history — birth, growth, death — somehow "humanize" the creatures. We empathize with them because they go through the same cycles of life that we do, and because they respond to these cycles in the same ways we do — with fear, joy, dread, excitement.

Clement-Davies didn’t want to set his fantasy in a Never-Never Land of animals without a human presence. "I wanted to set people together with animals and see what I could do with that. And that gives me the basic tension." The presence of marauding humans — one of the chief predators always lurking on the outskirts of deer society — affects every scene. For example, most of the deer accept the humans’ Hunt as an inevitable part of life in the Park, and even encourage each other to sacrifice themselves for the good of the herd. Naturally, any deer who imagines a life outside the Park faces cries of heresy and revolution.

Clement-Davies pauses to think over the issues intertwined with his story. "I knew when I set out — you obviously have lots of ideas swirling around in your head, but you don’t quite know where they’ll take you — I knew I wanted to write about people, and about human issues. Actually very big themes such as fascism." The emotional roots of fascism, and the way in which individuals manipulate the society around them toward their own sad goals, is one of the ongoing themes.

Clement-Davies credits his agent, Gina Pollinger (who was also Roald Dahl’s agent), with giving him "the holy touch" and telling him, "You’re a writer." Clement-Davies remembers, "That sent a little shiver down my spine. When you begin to talk of yourself as a ‘writer,’ it gives you a kind of new authority. You don’t feel such a sham anymore, going into a pub and saying, ‘I’m a writer.’"

If Fire Bringer proves as popular in the U.S. as it did in England, Clement-Davies won’t have time to wonder if he’s a writer. Too many people will be reading his books.

Michael Sims’s next book will be a natural and cultural history of the human body for Viking.

Author photo by Tim Booth.

Arriving on American shores this month, escorted by ecstatic reviews, is Fire Bringer, an epic animal fantasy in the tradition of Watership Down. This first novel by 36-year-old travel writer David Clement-Davies was published in England last year as a children’s book, but here in the U.S. it will be treated more as a crossover […]

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