Left, Varian Fry. Right, Julie Orringer [photo: Brigitte Lacombe]

From the fall of 2008 until the spring of 2009, I was colleagues with Julie Orringer at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. We both had the extraordinary fortune to receive fellowships to do research for our novels. I was researching New York City at various moments in the twentieth century, along with the history of AIDS in the city. Julie was researching the historical figure Varian Fry. Neither of us knew what we were about to make, nor could we make any sense of the pile of books the other had stashed in their office. Ten years have passed, and now we know: I wrote a novel called The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, and Julie has just published her novel The Flight Portfolio. It is an honor to watch a writer in the beginning stages of work, fiddling with their magician’s equipment, and an astonishment to see what flies, at last, out of their sleeve. In her case: a breathtaking work of wonder, set in occupied France. I waited for the world to take notice. Then I saw The Flight Portfolio featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, reviewed by fiction writer and critic Cynthia Ozick, who is now ninety-one. The words on the cover are glorious praise, but buried deep in the second page, I found an unsettling critique: Ozick was perturbed that Julie’s fictional Varian Fry is portrayed as gay. Ozick stated: “there is no evidence of homosexuality.” She even abstractly alluded to the dangers of keeping the record straight when writing about the Holocaust. And I did something I had never done; I wrote a letter. The New York Times Book Review printed it, along with letters from Fry’s biographer, and, of all things, from his son. Fry’s son clearly refutes Ozick: his father was gay. I wrote my letter about the invisibility of gay people in history, the lack of evidence, and the worth of the novel to use empathy and invention to imagine the lives of others. I have great respect for Ozick, as I know Julie does. But since I had seen the beginnings of The Flight Portfolio and the vast amounts of research, I wanted to ask her about the process of using history, biography, and imagination to create a novel—and, of course, about this strange misapprehension that occurred in the newspaper of record. What nerve did Julie strike here? And, looking at myself, what nerve did Ozick strike? These questions have been on my mind since I read that review. So I asked Julie.

INTERVIEWER

Historical research can be overwhelming. How did you decide where to begin your story, and where to end?

ORRINGER

The story of Varian Fry’s lifesaving mission in France has a seemingly obvious beginning and end—he arrived in Marseille in September of 1940 with a list of two hundred writers and artists he hoped to save. He left thirteen months later having rescued, against all odds, nearly ten times that many, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Andre Breton, and Hannah Arendt, among others. But time in fiction doesn’t function along a strict continuum, or doesn’t have to. It can bend and loop, as we often experience it in real life. From the beginning, The Flight Portfolio explores how the past extrudes into the present, and how the prospect of our future—and of how our future selves might judge us—exerts pressure on our present moment. The more I learned about Fry’s personal history—his clinically depressed mother and work-preoccupied father, his decision to drop out of Hotchkiss in protest against its hazing rituals, his conflicts with the dean of Harvard when he was a student there, his relationship with future New York City Ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein—the more I knew this stuff had to be present in the novel, and had to press upon Fry during his time in Marseille. That meant, of course, that my research had to push beyond its initial boundaries, a daunting prospect when the available materials already included twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s papers at Columbia. But it was necessary to go further for the sake of full emotional accuracy. It also meant I had to exercise restraint, or the book might have been a thousand pages. Read More

Amy Irvine (Courtesy Torrey House Press)

Amy Irvine is a writer and a mother, a competitive rock climber, an activist, a caregiver, and a truth teller. (She is also a friend.) Her latest book, Desert Cabal, is a fiercely tender and provocative response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire—his classic and now canonical account of the desert West—on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Desert Cabal is about Irvine’s own life in the West—raising a family, falling in love with the land and working to protect it—and it explores the myths of Western masculinity, the sublimity of endangered territory, and the kinds of intimacy enabled by spaciousness and proximity.

Near the beginning of Desert Cabal, Irvine evokes Abbey’s seductive evocation of solitude as “loveliness and a quiet exaltation.” But her book challenges his understanding of solitude in nuanced and surprising ways. “Now that I have been a working mother wrangling a special-needs child in a complicated and congested world,” she writes, “my definition of solitude has changed.”

As soon as I read that line, I thought, Yes! Solitude means something different for women. It has to do with the intense expectations we face around caregiving—the assumption that we’ll take care of places, people, objects, schedules. Before I became a mother, I remember thinking, How does parenting work for introverts? These days—as someone who loves my ten-month-old daughter so intensely I can hardly stand it, but still loves to be alone—I’ve spent much of the past year thinking about the vexed relationship between care and solitude.

I’m not an expert in wilderness literature, but Irvine’s book is written for all of us: those of us who know the literature of the wilderness, and those of us who don’t. Because the wilderness matters to us all. We are all beholden, and we are all culpable. In proposing a new way of thinking about the wilderness—not in terms of solitude but in terms of relation—Irvine is posing even broader questions about how we understand ourselves in relation to one another. This is a book written for anyone who has ever wanted to be alone, and for anyone who has ever realized solitude is a delusion.

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Franny Choi isn’t done thinking about cyborgs. When we met two weeks before the release of her latest collection Soft Science, she told me she was still discovering AI ideas she wished she could have addressed in her poems. Reckoning with the mythology of a “finished product,” Choi is coming to terms with having a book that is both out in the world and still in progress. The process isn’t easy: as one of Choi’s cyborgs says, questioning reality makes her feel “a / little insecure / a little embarrassed haha.” But to be insecure, or still in progress, should never be mistaken for being incomplete.

Soft Science asks what it means to live as a queer Asian American femme, someone “made a technology for other people’s desire.” How do we distinguish between the constructed pieces that have been imposed on us versus the parts of our identity that we’ve chosen? Are they always distinct? The voice of Soft Science is often corrupting: Choi inhabits colonized language and uses it to her own ends. In the poem “The Cyborg Wants To Make Sure She heard You Right,” Choi runs negative comments directed at her on Twitter back and forth through Google Translate until the language is transformed into something new. By repurposing language, Choi offers up a record of what is happening to our bodies and minds under whiteness and capitalism, and the beginnings of a way forward.

Choi is the co-host of the podcast VS, a member of the Dark Noise Collective, and will begin teaching this fall at Williams College. Soft Science is Choi’s second full-length collection, following Floating, Brilliant, Gone and her chapbook, Death by Sex Machine. Her poem, “Amid Rising Tensions on the Korean Peninsula” also features in our spring issue.

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Though Kathleen Alcott’s third novel, America Was Hard to Find, is set in the mid-twentieth century, its concerns are eerily current—nearly every character is caught between the stability of convention and the blazing allure of revolution. Alcott depicts several big American events—the moon landing, the carnage of Vietnam, and the Reagan administration’s dismissal of the AIDS crisis—but she renders just as many intimate realities with a sensibility that she has come to define as her own. Her prose has a way of finding the cinematic in the personal: the private toil of being a single mother or a fatherless son, the bright loneliness of youth, and, perhaps most vividly, the torrid struggle of a single citizen who is “sickened by the masculine bark of her country” as she tries to find a way toward action.

Fay Fern rejects the traditional path her parents had envisioned for her to instead bartend in the Mojave Desert near an Air Force base; Fay’s transition from the doting mistress of a pilot nearly twice her age to a radical antiwar activist serves as the spine of the narrative. Her stoic ex-lover, Vincent, has moved away to become one of the first astronauts in the nascent space program. He’s also unwittingly become a father to Fay’s son, Wright.

This triangulation sets the book’s plot in motion, but what hooks the reader are Alcott’s darts of wisdom and finely tuned observations. A woman’s youth is “the reigning god in her life, the thing from which came all permission and unhappiness.” Another character’s relationship with the possibility of suicide is “like some billboard he had to drive by every day … a highly effective advertisement that adorned the horizon on his way to getting anywhere.” The last moments of a sunset are “when all the colors, imperiled, flare up in protest.”

Alcott’s narration is penetrating and elegant, but she gives her characters some of the wittiest and most screen-ready dialogue in contemporary fiction. “Call me when you’re sober,” Fay says to her sister over the phone, who replies, “Call me when you shit out whatever rotten thing it is you ate.” A young man in San Francisco stumbles across his apartment and declares of his hungover state: “I feel like a goddamned aborted murder.”

I met Kathleen while we were living in New York, and since then we’ve spent our friendship in several American states and just as many emotional ones. Her intelligence and wit are just as sharp in person as they are in writing, and though I wish we could have conducted this interview in person—conflicting time zones required us to write it over email.

INTERVIEWER

Most of the conventional, collective images of what America “is” changed radically and repeatedly during the five years you took to write America Was Hard to Find. Though the novel is set mostly in the America of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, which had their own snakeskins to shed, did this upheaval change or challenge the concerns of the book?

ALCOTT

I am certain that it changed what I was looking at, or how I looked at it—the winter Trump was inaugurated I was living in seclusion on the Sonoma Coast, and I spent a fearful, manic period watching the Watergate hearings in their entirety on YouTube; that was research for a chapter I was writing, for a fight that takes place in the gas line the summer of Watergate and the oil embargo. It is difficult to imagine that I would have engaged with those hearings in the same way under a Hillary Clinton presidency but it is also impossible, at this point, to imagine a Hillary Clinton presidency. I mean that, mostly, life outside and art inside are always interdependent, and that to try to see one as the teacher of the other is to say that knowledge in the classroom travels unidirectionally—which I know, from the humiliation teaching has always been for me, is not true. I do know I am confronting structural misogyny in a way I did not during the Obama years, as is true for all women, and recognizing the shortcuts I took to avoid feeling its effects.

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The Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia is a sparsely populated landmass that sits atop the Pacific Ring of Fire. Forty percent of the land is covered by volcanoes, twenty-nine of which are active. There are earthquakes, hot springs, extreme weather, brown bears, rivers turned blood red from spawning salmon, and vast frozen expanses. Not many people live there, though more do now than did during the Soviet era—Kamchatka was a closed military zone until 1989. There are no roads connecting it to mainland Russia and much of the territory is accessible only by helicopter (or dogsled).

Julia Phillips is the author of Disappearing Earth, a crime novel set in this remote peninsula of the Russian Far East, “sixteen time zones away” from her hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. Phillips, who studied Russian literature in college, went to Kamchatka on a Fulbright in 2011. While there, she spent a month traveling across Russia’s easternmost tundra with the organizers of the Beringia, a 685-mile dogsled race. More recently, Phillips contributed a piece to BuzzFeed about the challenges facing Kamchatka’s nomadic reindeer herders. In all her writing about Kamchatka, Phillips seems most fascinated by the creative potential of emptiness, identifying in the horizonless tundra feelings of awe and dread in equal measure.

Those feelings are written into every page of her debut novel, Disappearing Earth. Told over the course of a year, the story begins with the news that two young Russian girls, sisters Alyona (age eleven) and Sofia (age eight), have gone missing from Petropavlovsk, the capital city of Kamchatka, one August afternoon. As summer draws to an end, and winter settles in, so too do the anxieties of being a woman in an isolated landscape. In Disappearing Earth, Phillips explores the impact the girls’ abduction has on the fabric of this unique community where xenophobia and tensions between ethnic Russians and the indigenous population are all heightened by the disappearance and the criminal investigation that follows.

I spoke with Julia over the phone about her stunning debut, Kamchatka as muse, and the feminist potential of crime fiction.

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Sarah Manguso (left) and Kate Zambreno (right)

Kate Zambreno’s oeuvre is not just a series of books but a body of thought, an uninterrupted exhortation on incompleteness and the intersections of life, death, time, memory, and silence. She challenges my own tendency to treat pieces of writing as discrete objects rather than divisions of consciousness, and I’ve long felt an intimate and continuous access to her mind, so I wanted to ask her about her newest book, Appendix Project, a collection of talks and essays written over the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, her book on her mother, which took her over a decade to write. Her next book, Screen Tests, an excerpt of which appears in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, is forthcoming this July. —Sarah Manguso

MANGUSO

As for publishing a “small, minor book,” to quote you from earlier … maybe we could start there? I keep trying to write a Big Book, a grand book, a centerpiece around which the rest of my books will gather, but either my fear of death or my general inability to be grand prevents this. And I’m almost always more interested in the small, minor books of people’s oeuvres, anyway. You also work in small forms—the appendix, the miscellany, the essay formed from small compositional units and assembled over a long period.

ZAMBRENO

I am more interested in the fragment, the notes, what is ongoing or continuing. My desire in this new writing life of the past few years has been to be small, to stay small, thinking of Robert Walser. To write about what is ephemeral, the daily, and to use it to attempt to think through the crisis of the self and what is beyond the self. When I moved to New York, now six years ago, I felt paralyzed by the prospect of a first-person novel, which I was under contract for, and anxious about publishing’s desire to have the new “big” book, one that everyone talks about, that is on all of the lists, that is part of the conversation, where the self written is assumed to be the same self as the author, and the self is stable, charismatic, and articulate. I felt blocked from the novel for years, I just took notes upon notes, and eventually the novel became about block and paralysis. I thought for a while my sudden longing for smaller forms was a lack of ambition, before realizing that it is my ambition.

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