October 7, 2020 At Work Ice Pick: An Interview with Katharina Volckmer By RL Goldberg Author photo: Jean-François Paga When Katharina Volckmer and I first met over Zoom, her in London and myself in Baltimore, I couldn’t stop talking, not unlike the narrator of Volckmer’s debut novel, The Appointment. The novel is bracingly frank, acerbic; some might call it transgressive, though I don’t think that’s the right term. The novel’s titration of wit, directness, and erudition made me feel a bit like the narrator: full of nervous, excited, voluble energy. I said that if Volckmer didn’t like any of the questions I’d prepared, she could skip them. She wryly offered to “do a Klaus Kinski on me,” alluding to the German actor’s notorious hostility in interviews. Our conversation could not have been more unlike a Kinski interview: Volckmer was measured and patient, generous with her time and humor. This is not to say that our conversation was comforting, which makes sense, as Volckmer’s work refuses comfort. Elsewhere, she noted, “We cannot spend our lives wearing woolly socks and drinking tea and expecting books and art to broadly reconfirm what we think already—I’m much more in favour of thinking of art as some sort of ice pick,” recalling Kafka’s notion that “we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” The Appointment, out this month from Simon & Schuster, is reminiscent of a Bernhardian monologue, one half of the conversation between a German patient living in London and her Jewish doctor. Over the course of her appointment, the speaker “tests the ice,” demarcating the boundaries of the sayable and the unsaid. Superficially, the novel offers a garrulous tide of sentiments that many might find upsetting (we begin with the narrator’s Hitler sex fantasies). But it is also deftly subtle, never binding the narrator to a determined gender identity or to a specific historical or national inheritance. At once sexy, hilarious, and subversive, the book is also acutely sad. Desire, in this novel, takes many forms: the desire to be heard, the desire to be otherwise, the desire for a different past and a different future. It was not lost on me that my meeting with Volckmer staged, at least formally, the conversation in the book: Volckmer was born in Germany; I am Jewish; the structure of an interview begs confession. But there the similarities stopped. We spoke, on this recent September evening, about identity and desire, the inheritance of the Holocaust, the difficulties with which German readers might receive the book, the impossible definition of a “trans novel,” nestbeschmutzers, Tolstoy, and form. “Every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the Angel and, at best, comes out limping,” French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote in Heidegger and “the jews”; Volckmer’s novel comes out limping in the finest sense, ice pick aloft, frozen sea shattering. INTERVIEWER When people ask you to sum up the book, how do you sum it up? Because the only way I’ve been able to do so is to say something like, It starts with a Hitler sex fantasy and goes on from there. But that part is so peripheral to the novel. VOLCKMER For me the easiest has been to say it’s about identity. It’s obviously about gender identity. One of the questions I often ask myself is, What is it about your identity you can possibly change? Is there anything you can really change about it? Or is there nothing you can change about it? Obviously you can’t change the fact of the language you’re born into or the geographic location you’re born into. And she’s trying. She doesn’t want to be German necessarily, she doesn’t want to live with that burden and that guilt. But the only thing she can really change is her gender, that’s something she can do. And she decides to do it with a Jewish doctor. The original title for the book was A Jewish Cock. That’s the point where she tries to mix these two aspects of her identity, her gender and her national identity. Obviously it’s slightly absurd because she thinks, “If I get a Jewish cock I won’t be as German anymore.” But for me the book was about exploring what things you can permanently change about yourself and what you can’t, and some of the sadness that comes with that. INTERVIEWER Could you speak a bit about Dr. Seligman? He’s very reticent. How do you see that character both in silence and, simultaneously, in dialogue with the narrator? VOLCKMER To me, he’s always been as important as the narrator. He’s very present and—I’m going to keep saying this until someone does it—I’d love to see it on a stage because it’s quite theatrical. His presence was also important because a lot of the stuff she says I didn’t want to be spoken into a void. It’s always her feeling her way along that fine line of the stuff she can say and the stuff she can’t say. Even though he’s silent, and it’s technically a monologue, it’s got strong elements of a dialogue. I hope it has. Of course, it also makes her at times less secure. If he was talking back it would be no different, but there’s an opacity and she has to work it out by herself. Read More
October 6, 2020 At Work Something to Hold On To: An Interview with Rumaan Alam By Cornelia Channing photo credit: David A. Land Leave the World Behind was written in the before times. It was written before the pandemic, the recession, and the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. It was written before wildfires burned more than four million acres of the American West and before skies halfway across the globe were made blurry with smoke. And yet it feels, in a way, like the first novel to be written about our new world. This is not only because it centers around a group of people quarantined in a house together during a crisis (though it does), but because it offers a clear-eyed, if deeply unsettling, portrait of what emerges when our shared reality is bent, cracked, and forever altered. The novel follows Amanda and Clay, a white couple from Brooklyn, who, following the seductive command of the novel’s title, go on vacation to a rural area on the East End of Long Island with their teenage children, Archie and Rose. But after a few indulgent days of hamburgers, sex, and drinking wine by the pool, the homeowners, a Black couple named G. H. and Ruth, arrive one night unannounced. They bring with them news that there has been a blackout in New York City, and, panicked, they have come to stay. It is an awkward, fraught moment that seems to set up a story about race and hypocrisy and misjudged expectations. Without giving too much away—Alam should teach a master class on the suspenseful withholding of information—the novel quickly spirals into something entirely different. Over the next twenty-four hours, a series of terrifying and inexplicable events befall the household. The internet and phone service go out; Archie comes down with a bad fever; flamingos land in the swimming pool; and the air is rent by a series of massive, deafening sounds. Overnight, the world becomes unrecognizable, and the strangers form a tense, unlikely union. Alam plays his cards close to the chest, explaining very little about the nature of the crisis. And in a way, uncertainty itself becomes the novel’s primary subject. Alam attends to the contours of that uncertainty with devastating precision. At a time when focus has not come easily to me—my attention flickers restlessly between impossible headlines, bottomless news feeds, and the same four walls I have occupied since March—I was held still by the urgency, beauty, and uncanny familiarity of Alam’s world. The author of two previous novels, Rich and Pretty (2016) and That Kind of Mother (2018), Alam’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and The New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. He also cohosts two podcasts for Slate. Leave The World Behind is a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. I spoke to Alam by phone in late September. He was at home with his husband and kids in Brooklyn, where he has spent most of the past seven months since the pandemic began. He spoke softly, he explained, because his children were attending online school in another room. INTERVIEWER In your new novel, strangers are stuck in a house together as the world undergoes a mysterious and unidentified disaster. You wrote the book long before the pandemic began, but it’s almost impossible to read it or discuss it without acknowledging the eerie resonances it has with our current moment. ALAM Yes, totally. And, of course, in a very simple way, it’s just a strange coincidence. The fact that I fixed on the metaphor of isolation and the device of people trapped in a house, without knowing that we, American readers, would all be people trapped in our houses, was just an accident of timing. But the novel is also grappling with things that I think have been in the cultural atmosphere for a long time. It’s talking about technology and our strange dependence on it. It’s talking about race and the very complicated ways in which race defines people in our country and in our culture. These are not new ideas. These are things that have been in the air for a long time. It’s inevitable that the cultural and political context of a given moment will determine how we understand art, right? But art isn’t necessarily a reflection of that immediate context. It’s usually the product of an earlier moment. A painting takes time. A film takes time. A book takes time. It’s an understandable impulse to try to make sense of art through the lens of the current moment. And this current moment—I’m talking particularly about the coronavirus—is so heightened. It’s so strange and unusual that it has really dramatically affected how we understand art. There are so many relics of the recent past that already feel irrelevant. When I say that, I am thinking about a reality TV show that I happen to be watching. It was filmed before the pandemic, and it just feels like it’s from a million years ago. But I don’t think that that’s necessarily a fair way to consider art. It has to have a longer or a broader purpose than simply to riff on something in the moment. In many ways, I would be very suspicious of a work that emerged right now—a film, a book, even a short story—that aimed to talk about what is happening right now … whether that is the coronavirus or the 2020 election, because it’s still happening. You need a little context, a little distance. INTERVIEWER That makes a lot of sense. ALAM A while ago, I posted a related question on Twitter. I was trying to solve this problem intellectually and I asked around to see if anyone thought there was a really good novel about 9/11. I don’t mean a novel that depicts 9/11, but a novel that distills what that moment felt like in our cultural and political life, in our individual psyches, in our collective psyches. A novel that really got at what that moment was. And a friend of mine responded, very wisely I think, that they felt it took until Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried for the culture to digest in literature the Vietnam War. And that book didn’t come out until like two decades after the war ended. I think that is a very astute statement. It takes time to digest something in a work of art. If my book was, in a way, an attempt to digest current uncertainties, they were pre-pandemic, pre–Donald Trump existential uncertainties. We are going to see much more art that wrestles with this question. INTERVIEWER That said, I think people are hungry for art that speaks to the bizarre moment we are in. And it’s been interesting to see the novels and films, some of which are decades old, that have a renaissance right now. Is there a particular book or film that you have gone back to during the pandemic? Read More
September 9, 2020 At Work Male Interiority: An Interview with Emma Cline By Annabel Graham I first encountered the work of Emma Cline in the winter of 2016, when I found myself at one of The Paris Review’s legendary parties: this one celebrating the launch of The Unprofessionals, an anthology in which Cline’s Plimpton Prize–winning story “Marion” (first published in issue no. 203) appeared. I’d arrived late, and I tried to enter as quietly as possible—the living room of 541 East Seventy-Second Street, the residence of George and Sarah Plimpton, was packed full with bodies, almost eerily hushed. Cline read an excerpt from her then-forthcoming debut novel, The Girls, which tracks a California teenager’s peripheral involvement with a Manson-esque cult in the late sixties. Though I couldn’t see her face over the sea of heads between us, I let her singular command of language, image, and psychological nuance carry me into the sort of hypnotic trance the best writing does. Once home, I devoured everything I could find of Cline’s. It was no surprise when The Girls, which I read feverishly in a few sittings, became an international best seller. In her aptly titled new story collection, Daddy, Cline delves deeper into the same thematic concerns that haunted The Girls: agency, cost, the performance of gender, the undercurrent of violence roiling just beneath the surface of ordinary life. An aspiring actress sells her underwear to strangers. A washed-up film director confronts his cruel judgments about his son, who wants to follow in his footsteps. The former nanny to a celebrity takes refuge at a friend’s home after her affair with her employer is revealed in the tabloids. A disgraced magazine editor is hired to help edit the ghostwritten memoir of a tech entrepreneur, an opportunity at what he sees as a final chance at redemption. Above all else, the characters in Daddy vie for control—at times over others, but in large part over themselves, their own narratives, and especially the ways in which they’re perceived. The lengths they go to in order to impose some semblance of that control are shocking, moving, and deeply human. Since 2016, much has changed. 541 East Seventy-Second Street no longer belongs to the Plimptons; living rooms packed with people are, at least for the foreseeable future, a thing of the past. Cline’s prose, too, has undergone an evolution of sorts. Critics of The Girls called it “overwritten”; here, Cline’s virtuosic sensory descriptions are pared down in a way that allows her piercing psychological insights to shine. A satiric, bone-dry humor reigns. Atmospheres hum as though shot through with electricity; place informs psychology, and vice versa. In late August, Cline and I spoke on the phone from opposite ends of Los Angeles, where we both currently live. A heat wave raged on; wildfires were tearing through her native Sonoma County. She was crouching in her neighbor’s driveway, trying to find better service—a scene which could’ve easily sprung from one of the stories in Daddy. INTERVIEWER Even though a handful of your protagonists are women, you render male interiority here in a highly specific, and often deeply uncomfortable, way that feels especially exciting to me. Can you talk about the process of inhabiting some of these “monstrous men”? CLINE The culture has sort of forced everyone into having to imagine the interior lives of men, and why they do what they do. Just think about the amount of energy that is expended trying to decode what Donald Trump is thinking, and why he’s acting so erratically—it’s sort of this forced contemplation of male interiority, and I thought a lot about that, during all of the #MeToo moments. Just seeing an entire workplace having to grapple with the actions of one man, and all this energy and effort that was expended by all of these other people to try and figure out what could have possibly been going on inside this man’s mind. So I think on one level it’s not that much of a leap, just because it’s something the culture is already pushing. But in terms of writing, it was nice after The Girls, which is so much about a character who feels herself to be buffeted about by this larger system that she has no control over, very much enthralled to men—there was something interesting about shifting gears so much as a writer, to try to write about men who didn’t feel so attuned to the emotional world around them, or the emotional world of others. Read More
September 2, 2020 At Work We Take Everything with Us: An Interview with Yaa Gyasi By Langa Chinyoka When I call Yaa Gyasi to talk about her new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, we are both in New York—she in Brooklyn and I in Harlem. Because of the pandemic, even our relative proximity feels like distance. Our conversation often turns to the topic of distance, how it manifests in the novel and how it plays into the journey toward healing. Transcendent Kingdom could be called a chronicle of an attempt to heal. The narrative follows Gifty, a graduate student at Stanford who is studying reward-seeking behavior in mice. Though Gifty is in denial about her own past trauma, her work is influenced by her family history: her brother’s addiction and eventual overdose, her mother’s depression. That repressed past emerges into the present when Gifty’s mother, in the middle of a depressive episode, moves to California to live with her. With her mother sleeping in her bed, Gifty is forced into a role reversal: caring for the woman who raised her, trying to will her back to health. Gifty is forced to reconcile her new self, the scientist, with the constant reminder of her old self, an Evangelical Ghanaian immigrant raised in Alabama. I wanted to know how Gyasi came to write a novel that departs so much from her first novel, the critically acclaimed Homegoing, a multigenerational saga that spans centuries. I was surprised to hear her say that sticking to a single character in Transcendent Kingdom felt more freeing. The story feels like an excavation, like pulling from the depths a self. When I heard Gyasi speak years ago at Scripps College, she described Homegoing as “a series of love stories.” And certainly each of those vignettes felt like a tribute, small offerings of a character that left the reader mourning the final page of each chapter. With Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi proves that she can sustain our love for a character over the course of an entire novel. My heart broke for Gifty, my eyes rolled at Gifty, and my chest tightened each time I felt her finally reaching, tentatively and reticently, for intimacy, community, an acceptance of the past and all the feelings that had gone so long hidden. “Where are you, Gifty?” the reader asks. “Come out, come out, come out.” INTERVIEWER This novel is a departure from your last one. In a lot of ways, Homegoing asks questions about American history and mythology. The idea of Americanness. Transcendent Kingdom feels like a personal mythology, a more intimate idea. What is the role of myth, both personal and cultural? GYASI With Homegoing I was thinking about the oracular, larger-than-life nature of storytelling—not necessarily myth, but I was thinking a lot about fables and folklore. I was trying to encompass so much time, and that voice of folklore felt like it could lend itself to holding together such a large swath of story. But for Transcendent Kingdom, I think there’s a more intimate nature to the myth. The family has to start anew and create something of their own in a place where they are othered, not just because of their status as immigrants but also because of the reticent nature of the matriarch, who is often very slow to engage with community. It’s this creation of a family myth that allows them to get through without community. INTERVIEWER Homegoing holds together so much story in a series of vignettes, but Transcendent Kingdom is the whole history of Gifty’s life, as told by Gifty. How did that feel different, both in the writing and in the aims of the story? GYASI I wasn’t setting out to write something completely different from Homegoing when I started. But it became clear to me pretty early on that the story was Gifty’s story alone and that I wanted it to be in first person—and I had never written anything of sustained length in first person before. I found it really challenging and stretching in nice ways. It made me have to think about this character, to try to find ways to see around what she was seeing, and I found that really exciting. There’s a kind of intimacy in this book. I really enjoyed the process of staying with a single character and trying to see into all of the nooks and crannies of her consciousness. INTERVIEWER Elsewhere, you’ve said that sticking to Gifty’s life, Gifty’s voice, was more freeing. How so? GYASI With Homegoing, I knew that I wanted to write a book that covered many centuries and many different countries and cultures and people, so I took almost a mathematical approach to it. How many years between eighteenth-century Ghana and present-day America? How many generations is that? How many pages do I need to write in order to fulfill that? It was much more constrained than Transcendent Kingdom by design. I wanted Homegoing to move very quickly and so I gave myself a twenty- to thirty-page limit for every chapter. Things like that. Those kinds of restraints I did not have with Transcendent Kingdom. It was just really loose. It could be as long as I wanted, and I didn’t have to move around at all. So there was this freedom to explore and to think about structure in an entirely new way, which was really pleasurable. It was like stretching a muscle that I hadn’t gotten to use the last time. Read More
August 20, 2020 At Work Leaving It All Behind: A Conversation with Makenna Goodman By Alexander Chee I met Makenna Goodman last fall, after moving to a small town in Vermont near the college where I teach. When I say “small town” I mean it: we don’t have a stop light, there’s no restaurant or gas station, and no one really comes here unless they live here. Makenna is my new neighbor, across the road, and she threw me a welcome-to-the-neighborhood party that was the first anyone had ever thrown for me. It was also the last party I attended in someone’s house before quarantine. When Makenna asked me if I wanted to read her debut novel, I said yes, even though I feared the awkwardness that would ensue if I didn’t like it. Luckily, The Shame is startlingly original, the story of a young woman in Vermont who leaves her husband and children to drive off in the middle of the night for New York, to meet a woman she is obsessed with, a ceramicist she knows only through the internet. Part of its pleasure is in the construction—the recursive loops through the mind of a woman who is breaking down from not making the art she absolutely must make. The structure feels both assured and free—free of so many of the anxieties I’ve seen in so many debuts over the years. I’ve seen a few of the recent reviews address that the narrator is a mother, and say that this is somehow a novel about motherhood, but I think of it as a novel about art and anxiety, and the narrator is a mother. More importantly, this is a novel about how you can feel driven to take risks that don’t matter in order to avoid taking the risks that do matter. How you will drive all night to meet someone you know only from the internet, but won’t sit down and make art. Most importantly, to my mind, it is a novel about the emotional labor of self-sacrifice, a portrait of how the white middle class eats itself, especially by devouring women, who are asked to prepare themselves like a dish to be served—and then to serve it too, as it were. Makenna’s novel isn’t particularly autobiographical, but it is a bit like talking to her—like her novel, she is blunt and funny, and moves in any direction she wants. It was a pleasure to speak to her about everything from authenticity to social media to “connection.” INTERVIEWER I’ve gleaned that you wrote this novel in secret. Is that an accurate statement? GOODMAN You make it sound so mysterious and exciting. Yes, I wrote it in secret. I was deep in my editing career, I hadn’t been trying to publish anything, I wasn’t a professional writer. So, writing felt like this thing that was just for me, and I didn’t need to tell anybody about it. At a certain point, after I had finished the first draft, I said to Sam, my husband, Oh yeah, I’ve been working on this thing. I don’t know if it’s any good, and he said, Let me read it. We read very different things and have different taste, so I thought, Well, he’s going to hate it and that’ll be good. Because then he’ll tell me he hates it and then it’ll all be over. But then he said I should send it to my agent, whom I hadn’t talked to in years. And I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know. Okay. But I sent it to her and literally four days later, she wrote me back and she said, We’re sending this out. So, it was kind of traumatic. INTERVIEWER This is an interesting way to react. Traumatic? Read More
August 4, 2020 At Work Dissecting Pain: An Interview with Alisson Wood By Leslie Jamison I read Being Lolita in two feverish, painful, clarifying, enthralling, disturbing sittings, over the course of two nights, while my toddler daughter slept in the next room. I found myself wanting to reach into its pages and save the girl who was caught in them, but as I kept reading, I started to understand she didn’t need my saving. Her author was the woman she’d become, and her voice was electric, alive, rigorous, humane, allergic to reduction. It would be easy to summarize Being Lolita as a memoir about a toxic, exploitative relationship between a high school English teacher and his student, and it is about that—but it’s about that in the way Walden is about a pond, or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is about sharecroppers. Which is to say, it’s also about so much more. It’s about narrative itself—the poly-edged blade of storytelling, how it seduces and distorts and justifies; how it liberates and unsettles; how it settles like fog but also pierces through obscuring mists with the chill sunlight of something uncomfortable getting discovered. It’s a book about the way stories can feel like straitjackets and also like exhalations; how we can lose or find ourselves in them—sometimes both at once. The book begins at one chalkboard and ends at another, with the student becoming a teacher, reclaiming the stories that once took away her voice even as they convinced her they were giving it to her. It’s a book that’s faithful to the grit and grain of lived experience, how it inheres in a thousand particulars itching like mosquito bites under the skin: the Latin conjugations and hallway gossip and crepe paper banners of high school; the gimlets and bloody sheets and wearying, labyrinthine convolutions of endless gaslighting. It’s a book that knows if you follow these slivers back into the pulse and flesh of memory, they take you somewhere more complicated than the stories we often tell ourselves about abuse and violence, and they force you to reckon with its messy, enduring aftermath. I first met Alisson Wood after a reading last year, when she approached me to tell me that my own writing had been meaningful to her. There was something in her voice and in her eyes when she described the book she had written that made me realize the world needed it. And when I read Being Lolita a year later, I felt the world expanding—gaining another layer in the compost of its infinite human experience, of all the stories we need to hear told. As I read, I was deeply moved by the ways Wood summoned the teenager she’d once been, faithful to the furrows of that psyche—its delusions and its fragilities and its curiosities and its capacities and its hunger—even as she gazed backward through the years with exacting and attentive clarity. Read More