paperhaus June 19th, 2010
If I had a feeling of deja-vu when I read other pieces about Bret Easton Ellis, who seemed to go through exactly the same routine with each interviewer, people (on MeFi, in the comments here) scoffed. That was to be expected, they said, the same routine, the same answers — and some made the point that it was due to the same questions.
Well, I don’t think it’s to be expected, because there are a lot of angles on a book, and authors spend years writing them, years in which lots of ideas have come and gone. There are many places for a conversation to go, and I’d like to think that I listen and follow and ask questions that might have interesting answers.
All these are excerpts of interviews I did for Jacket Copy. If you’d told me in 1989, when I read The Handmaid’s Tale, that I’d be talking to Margaret Atwood about penises, to a National Book Award nominee about the conflicting responsibilities of journalism and fiction, and to that guy who’d just published Mysteries of Pittsburgh about his four kids, I would have told you yes, your acid had kicked in and it was time for you to go see the Butthole Surfers show, already. But here we are.
Margaret Atwood had just published Year of the Flood, a fearsome yet slightly giddy post-apocalyptic sideways follow-up to Oryx and Crake. Part of the novel follows an eco-cult with a charismatic leader, and it includes lyrics of the cult’s hymns. Those hymns were sung — by a choir, trio, individual — in staged performances on tour, with Atwood reading and actors performing scripted parts of the book. The performances shared a script and Atwood, but otherwise were widely different.
Kellogg: After you’ve seen [Year of the Flood] be performed in all these different ways, would you like to see it as a film?
Atwood: It might be too big and multiple for that. It might lend itself more to a series. The real stumbling block is those people with big blue penises (laughs). How are you going to show that on film? I just don’t know. You could have them lurking behind bushes, I suppose. You’d have to have somebody with a very good sense of style. It could be pretty tawdry, but of course any story could be pretty tawdry, depending on how it’s made.
Kellogg: Do you think there’s enough sex in literary fiction? Do you think literary fiction writers are a little afraid of being tawdry?
Atwood: I think they’re a little afraid of being inelegant verbally. There is an award given every year in Britain for the worst sex scene in a book, and nobody wants to win that award. It’s very easy to overwrite a sex scene, at which point it becomes comic.
Kellogg: Why do you think that is?
Atwood: Sex itself is a very subjective experience. So that when you’re describing it objectively, it can quite easily become funny.
Kellogg: But so many other states of being– [meaning to say "that are subjective that can be written well," but Atwood cut me off]
Atwood: Think about it: he put his X on her Y.
Kellogg: (laughs)
Atwood: Already it’s funny, and you don’t even know what the X and Y are. It has to be handled pretty carefully, if you don’t want to be writing just plain old porn, or if you don’t want people to collapse in hysterical laughter.
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When Far North by Marcel Theroux was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award, I realized we hadn’t yet given it any coverage in the LA Times, so I interviewed him. Another post-apocalyptic book, this one is more quiet than Atwood’s — it follows Makepeace as she ekes out a marginal survival on the freezing edge of a disappeared society (think Mad Max on the opposite end of the world). Theroux is a novelist and journalist; he’s reported for the BBC.
Kellogg: [In Far North] Makepeace is such a loner. She spends much of the early part of her life alone, and she is often remote from the people around her. Was it hard to render the world around her? She’s always the filter.
Theroux: I never felt like her landscape was that empty, because there was so much in it, she had so many things she needed to do. There were all kinds of sources of conflict for her, and she’d had a very rich and interesting past. I guess I’m quite interested in isolation, anyway. That never felt like one of the difficulties of writing the book.
It’s a real place — the place where she is having her adventures in Siberia –- I’ve visited maybe five or six times for other reasons before I wrote the book. So it was a place that felt very real to me. Things in it — quite surprising things — I’ve actually seen. I felt confident rendering her world.
Kellogg: By things you’ve seen, do you mean the way people live in that environment?
Theroux: Partly that. Things in the far north — I’ve been into reindeer herders’ huts in north Siberia. But even smaller things. I went to Chechnya in 2000, which then was in the grip of a terrible civil war. The place — Grozny, the capital — had been bombed to hell, and it was very, very dangerous. There were Russian soldiers in checkpoints along the streets, and they would kind of hide in their little posts at night because it was even too dangerous for Russian soldiers to go around. There was a guy whitewashing the sidewalk outside his apartment, which was an insane bit of punctiliousness. The whole place was horrible. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was cleaning it. His name was Shamsudin. I kind of put him in the book, to commemorate him, that civilizing impulse. He was a guy who decided he needed the sidewalk to look nice outside of his largely ruined apartment building, which I thought was kind of amazing and improbable.
Kellogg: You’ve been in some pretty rough places as a journalist.
Theroux: I’ve tried to avoid them, but I have occasionally. I suppose Chechnya was the hairiest place.
Kellogg: What are the different responsibilities of the journalist and the novelist toward violence and brutality?
Theroux: In fiction, you’re saying, “look at this horrible brutality,” but at the same time, the author made it up. So the author’s weirdly complicit in the brutality in a way that a journalist isn’t. I’m sort of haunted by violence, I suppose everyone is. I find it –- I’m sort of fascinated by it. I suppose one of the things I’m interested in is that human beings have composite brains that reflect different stages of evolution — we have a lizard brain that is violent and impulsive and ugly, and we have successive layers of more sophisticated brain that have higher functioning, empathy, the capacity to love and care for each other. The ghastly truth about human beings is that all these things coexist in the same person. And the structures of civilization are a restraining influence on our capacity to do horrible things to one another. I suppose that’s another reason why post-apocalyptic — I prefer calling it speculative — genre is interesting, because it allows you to explore what would happen when some of these civilizing influences are taken away, the same way that [William Golding] does in “Lord of the Flies.”
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Manhood for Amateurs had already been covered by the LA Times when I talked to Michael Chabon about it. The book is a collection of essays Chabon wrote for Details, and while I don’t know anything about fatherhood or being a son, it was still a lovely read. Chabon’s writing is like that — really lovely, even when it’s saying something difficult.
Kellogg: In our review of your book, Steve Almond wrote that you’re incapable of writing a boring sentence.
Chabon: How about that? That was very nice of him.
Kellogg: But I wonder if maybe you’re incapable of publishing a boring sentence? I’d like to ask you about your writing process. Because I’m guessing that these pieces did not spring fully formed onto the page.
Chabon: Oh, no, they definitely did. I actually just wrote them on napkins. While I was cooking dinner and watching a baseball game.
Kellogg: (laughs)
Chabon: I work really hard on my sentences, and on my paragraphs, too.
Kellogg: It’s kind of stunning to anyone who’s ever tried to write that you and Ayelet have four kids and you both actually finish books. What’s your routine? How do you make space to craft your work?
Chabon: Thank god school was invented. I don’t know what we would do if it hadn’t been. We send them away every day. They leave the house — we drive them to school, and then we’ve got all this time. Ayelet works primarily, almost entirely during that period, and she’s very efficient. When she’s really working on a novel or whatever she gets her word count in every day, and that works well for her. I have a harder time — my natural rhythm is to work at night, stay up late and to sleep late. I can get more writing done between midnight and 1 o’clock in the morning than at any other hour of the day.
Unfortunately, that schedule does not work at all well in a family with small children. If I sleep late, then I miss out on what I think is the nicest, most pleasurable time of the day, of an ordinary, everyday routine. In the morning — my kids are generally in a pretty good mood when they wake up, you know, we make breakfast. I hate missing out on that, so I get up. So that means I can’t really stay up as late as I might like. Or else I don’t get enough sleep. I struggle with the schedule. And I’ve been struggling with it for years. Lately, sleep has been losing out. I’ve been staying up late, and getting up early. It doesn’t work as well for me as it does for Ayelet, and I envy her that she’s more of a morning/day person than I am.
Often, I have to go away [to write]. I’ll go to a place like the MacDowell Colony, or borrow somebody’s cabin, or go to a hotel even. Stay up until all hours, and sleep late, and just crank. I can get a lot done. Even in three or four days, I can do about as much as I could do in a month at home.
