August 19, 2010 At Work Vendela Vida By Patrick Loughran Vendela Vida’s new novel, The Lovers, follows a middle-aged Vermont woman, recently widowed, as she vacations in the unfamiliar territory of Turkey in an attempt to re-examine her life. Among these new surroundings, her initial numbness about her bereavement gives way to doubt over whether her marriage was even happy, and she has to face up to a pain she never anticipated. Vendela Vida recently answered my questions over lunch during her book tour’s stop-over in New York City. What drew you to set this novel in Turkey? It was completely an accident. I went there for a month in June of 2005 when I was trying to finish my second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, and wanted to be far away from the Arctic Circle in winter—the setting of that novel—and free from the day-to-day distractions of my life in San Francisco. I found a rental house by typing “Turkey,” “rental,” “cheap,” and “beach” into a search engine. I had no intention of setting a novel there, but a year later, this house and this town I stayed in kept appearing in my mind. I couldn’t get rid of the idea of writing about Turkey, so I did. Did the house you stayed in have any of the unusual contents of the vacation house in the book? Yes. I usually don’t like to take details from life, but, in this case, I couldn’t resist. The owners left out things that people typically wouldn’t leave out—sex swings, pornographic photos of the wife, books on sexual positions. My husband and I would leave the house to swim, or eat, or explore, and when we returned we would want to be in a neutral, uncomplicated place to relax and absorb everything new we’d seen and experienced beyond the walls of the house, but we were continually affronted by some new and intimate discovery about the owners’ lives. I wanted to put Yvonne, the protagonist of The Lovers, in a discomfiting situation like that. Lionel Shriver has said she writes partly as catharsis-in-advance. So she wrote about death to experience bereavement. Was this a motive for you in exploring the character of Yvonne? I write a lot from a place of fear. My friend, the writer Amanda Davis, who was killed in a plane crash in 2003, said that every day you should write about something that scares you. I was finishing this book just after the birth of my second child and the notion that this newborn could one day be estranged and the source of pain for me was also something I feared—and so I made Yvonne’s relationship with her daughter an especially fraught and challenging one. Even the vague idea of my husband dying is something that devastates me. So I was tapping into that fear when creating Yvonne, who’s fifty-three and a widow, and trying to imagine what it would be like to lose someone after spending half your life with them. Read More
August 16, 2010 At Work Tom Grimes on Mentor By Christopher Cox In his new book Mentor, Tom Grimes explores his friendship with Frank Conroy, who was the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for almost twenty years, offering the reader an unvarnished account of the vagaries of MFA programs, the fickleness of publishers, and the anguish and second-guessing that even the best writers suffer. He recently answered our questions about the book via e-mail. You write of Frank Conroy’s memoir, “What electrifies Stop-Time is its demonic anger.” There’s definitely some anger in Mentor, and a strong brew of other emotions. How did you marshal those into a finished book? Type angry and revise calmly? Actually, I never expected to write the book. Its existence is due to pure chance—an off-the-cuff comment by a Tin House editor who suggested that I write about Frank Conroy’s work. Instead, without giving it much thought, I began to write about Frank and me. Since the memoir’s inception was accidental I didn’t know what emotions I’d encounter. I simply knew that I had the beginning of the story—when I met Frank Conroy—and the events that happened during the sixteen years we were friends. Other than that, I handled what came at me, through my recollections, on a daily basis. Usually, I had no idea what would come next until I was just about to write it. Certain parts of the memoir clearly needed to appear: writing my second novel, describing its fate, continuing to write, and my relationship with Frank. But the memoir opens up into a larger meditation on friendship. I never really considered Frank my “mentor.” I considered him a friend and I was more interested and invested in that relationship than I was in our relationship through writing, once we’d moved past the experience of my second novel’s fate. Also, I revised sentences relentlessly and that marshaled my emotions as I wrote. And the quickness with which events moved saved me from the sandpit of self-absorption, which any memoirist absolutely has to avoid. Has Conroy’s initial snubbing of you at a reading in Key West influenced the way you act at your own readings? Yes and no. I’m polite to everyone who approaches me, but I understand that Frank had to be wary of strangers who approached him with questions about applying to or getting into the Iowa Writers Workshop. In retrospect, I understand his guardedness. More importantly, his initial snubbing of me sparked the anger that informed our relationship later on. I believe that if I’d never encountered him I may have been just another student who studied at Iowa but lacked a strong emotional reaction to and, ultimately, a strong emotional bond with him. Several years after the incident when we knew one another quite well and were very close friends, we were at a bar, somewhat drunk. I looked at him and said, “You know, the first time we met you walked right past me after I asked you a question.” Momentarily, Frank stared into space, puzzled. Then he said, “But I didn’t know it was you.” You are unsparingly self-critical in the book, especially about your second novel, Season’s End: “I’m a failure as a writer because I’ve overreached; my ambition was larger than my talent.” How are you judging failure here? My sales were lousy and my novels—no matter how good some people (or reviewers) told me they were, or how good I thought they were—hadn’t won any prizes, so I was left in a vacuum. The literary world didn’t provide me with a sense of my worth as a writer, or give me a reason to continue writing. Nevertheless, I did. That was personal, and that had to do with my ambition. I wanted to be a great writer. I wanted my books to occupy the same shelves that Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, and Pynchon’s books occupied. I wanted to write books that would change the way people saw the world. To me, that was success, and according to those standards I overreached. Had I set my sights lower, at age nineteen, which is when my ambition was first formed—before I’d written a word of fiction!—I may have been less tormented for the past twenty years. Read More
August 11, 2010 At Work Taylor Plimpton and ‘Notes From the Night’ By Reed Vreeland Photograph by Landon Nordeman. Notes From the Night is a memoir about Taylor Plimpton’s many years frequenting New York night clubs. (His father is, of course, George Plimpton, a man of many hats—illustrious New York personality, founding editor of The Paris Review, pioneer of participatory journalism.) Despite or perhaps because the club scene might be, in Plimpton’s words, “the worst place in the world” to look for life’s answers, the after-hours arena of dreams, excess, and potentialities turns out to be the perfect place for him to begin. How would you describe your book? It’s partly a memoir of my life out in the New York night, and partly a guidebook on how to live that life as best as one can: how to avoid its pitfalls and savor its sweetnesses. You once described your book as “the kind of book moms don’t like.” Would you endorse that statement? Not at all. On one hand I understand, to hear about your son or any kid destroying himself out at night is not something a mom wants to read about. But it’s a fact of life, in your late teens and early twenties, that’s just what people do: they go out. But I wanted to give people the tools to recognize the nonsense and look past it toward the things that do matter. Were you concerned with creating your own style, your own distinct voice? I wanted it to read like I was writing a letter to a good friend—as open and honest and natural as possible. I feel like that’s my duty as a writer, because in memoir, if you’re not being honest, what’s the point? I guess the hope is that if you’re really honest about your own madness, it actually turns out that other people can relate to it, too. In terms of being influenced by other writers, I love the long rambling sentences of Kerouac, and of some of Marquez—the three-hundred-word sentence that rushes on. How long did it take you to finish writing? About six years. Part of the reason it took so long was that I needed a little distance from that life before I could fully capture what it was about. Trying to write about it while in the midst of it was good for research, but it wasn’t good for finishing it— Right, for clarity of mind— —Very little clarity of mind. You know, you go out and you have a good time and take some good notes, and then you wake up the next morning and you’re utterly hung-over—the last thing in the world you want to do is sit in front of a computer to write. Read More
August 9, 2010 At Work John Waters By Caitlin Roper Filmmaker John Waters is the author of Role Models, which was published this May by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. I caught up with him recently while he was in Provincetown. Waters in his summer rental with a sign he made for hitchhiking to a beach. I saw your appearance on The Colbert Report and I was impressed that you didn’t laugh. You have to give the totally straight face with him because he is such a good straight man. It was so funny, right before we went on, backstage, it was me and the kid who wrote the article about General McChrystal that toppled the government [Michael Hastings], and I loved the journalist, and we were talking because I used to write for Rolling Stone. So I was showing him my Rolling Stone press card, and right before we go on, Colbert looks at us, because he’s always in character, right, even before, and he says, “I like one of you.” No way! Which is really funny and I knew it was funny; but I think the young author was horrified. I knew it was part of the act, but what a terrible thing to say! So you’re in Provincetown for the summer? This is my forty-sixth summer here. I came here for the first time when I was seventeen. I hitchhiked and then stayed two weeks and lived in a tree fort. Wow, a tree fort! A guy named Prescott Townsend owned it. The first gay radical I had ever met. He was from a wealthy family from Cambridge and he seemed completely insane, in a great way. Part of the tree fort was a submarine. He had to like you to let you live there and it was free and he gave you free hot dogs and eventually the town burned it and then they cut the tree down. How sad. It was a magical time in my life. I worked in the bookshop. First I worked in the East End Bookshop that was run by Molly Malone Cook and her girlfriend, Mary Oliver, the poet, who was not famous yet. And then I worked at the Provincetown Bookshop for many, many years. And it’s still there. Elloyd Hansen, one of the owners, was the guy who really gave me my complete education about books. I didn’t go to school, so he’s the one who told me about Ronald Firbank, Jane Bowles; I learned everything working there. And when I worked there they said, “you can have free books—whatever you want, but you have to read ’em and you have to sell ’em.” So I read everything and would get obsessed by a book and sell tons of copies— Because you would talk enthusiastically about it— Yes! Same thing I did in the chapter in this book. But now you go into a bookshop, and they don’t even know the books. It’s a gift shop! Not all are like that, but many. So, it was a great job. It was my college, really. They’ve only had about four other employees. Jane, who works there now, has worked there since I did. That was forty years ago. I worked there every summer and then I would go get unemployment in the winter, because it closed in the winter (it doesn’t anymore, but it used to). So I could go to San Francisco, I would make my movies and everything and it saved my life, that bookshop. It was really, really important to me. And I still love it. The rest of Provincetown; everyone else says, “it’s changed, blah, blah, blah.” I don’t think it has, I feel like if I dropped a piece of gum there in 1971 it would still be there. What are you reading right now? I’m on the last chapter of a book called, Denial: A Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern. The author has always written about terrorists and in the book she goes back and she investigates her own rape, which happened to her when she was young, and she writes about that and explains why it got her interested in terror. Coming up next, I’ve really been obsessed by Robert Walser. I was stupid and didn’t know about his career, and New Directions is publishing all of his old stuff; I think he is absolutely, amazingly brilliant. What else do I have on my reading list… I’ve got The Scandal of Susan Sontag. I just love the title. I’m not sure what it is, but I bought it. It’s all articles, “essays by well-known critics who bring pertinent areas of expertise to bear on this iconic figure.” Then there’s Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake: The Life of Artie Shaw. That’s my next three books to read. Do you read a lot during the summer? Yes, I always read a lot. I read the same amount. no matter what season it is. I read every night. When I’m on book tour, I’m on airplanes all the time, so I’m always reading. People say, “How do you have time to read?” Oh, come on, it’s simple! You’re single and you don’t watch television. If you’re married it’s hard to read unless you married another total bookworm. If you watch TV, and I’m not saying there isn’t good TV, but if you watch TV you can’t read and watch TV. You can read and watch bad TV, but what’s the point? Good TV you’ve got to pay attention. In Role Models, I love when you say, “Fiction is the truth, fool!” Read More
July 27, 2010 At Work Gary Shteyngart By Natalie Jacoby Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel, Super Sad True Love Story, signals his move out of Soviet territory and into a near-future New York City, where books have no place in a hyper-technological society. Yet, in our conversation a few weeks ago, many of Shteyngart’s expressions (such as “the intertube”) reveal an innocence he has maintained in our own heavily digitized world. He reflects that now, after having lived with this book for three years, he needs to “retreat to the countryside and live in a pristine environment where the iTelephone doesn’t work.” Super Sad True Love Story switches between letters, diary entries, and dialogues. Why did you choose these formats? Well, you know, it’s sort of hard to read an entire book cover to cover these days. Most people just don’t come with the same equipment that we used to have. When they look at a book they think, “Oh my God, it’s so many pages! What am I going to do? How will I ever get through this?” So, you’ll notice the cover of this book is very flashy—it’s almost like you want to press parts of it, hoping that something will pop up. So, the insides of the book—the “text” you would call it—have the same kind of approach to it. Everything is mixed up, and different stuff comes at you at different speeds. Just as the reader is about to fall asleep with one kind of format, all of the sudden it changes. Your new book also features some bizarre clothing trends, especially those Onionskin jeans. What’s your assessment of fashion today? Well, first of all, a couple years ago the pubic bone started making an appearance. I’ve never seen so many pubic bones! I mean, it’s shocking. I know them so well now. Forget the asscrack–that’s been around for a while. After placing two novels in the Soviet Union, why did you move away from that setting for your third novel? Boy, it’s getting tiring! You know? When I was growing up in the Soviet Union, it collapsed. I wrote about that collapse in two books already, but I have an uncanny feeling we’re not doing very well here, too. I think I have a sixth sense when it comes to failing empires. That’s sort of my specialty. If I were around during the Roman Empire I’d be writing a book a week. I’d be so happy! I love things on the decline because that’s really the natural progression of our lives. We’re born, we’re feisty for the first couple of years, and then the inevitable decline begins. That’s what appeals to me—the long slide into oblivion. Read More
July 26, 2010 At Work Jean-Christophe Valtat By David Wallace-Wells 03 marks the beguiling English-language debut of the youngish French writer Jean-Christophe Valtat. The slim book was written in French, and has been published here in a sharp translation by Mitzi Angel, but Valtat writes also in English—or “some idiom that resembles English,” as he puts it—including in his upcoming Aurorarama, to be published in August. “I like both languages, and how they blend at times, but what I write in French is different from what I write in English,” he tells me. “In French, I tend to ratiocinate. English is where my imagination takes me.” The whole of 03 is a single, propulsive monologue—uninterrupted, even, by paragraph breaks. How important was it for you to make this a story that should be read in a single sitting? It’s less a story, maybe, than about getting frustrated by the impossibility of any story to happen. I always wanted the book to be short and filled up to the brim with frustration and anger, as if about to spill. I sometimes describe it as holding as much as can be held in a closed fist—it is supposed to reflect the intensity and urgency of teenage angst, and the way it feeds on itself relentlessly, in the hope of filling the surrounding emptiness. It should sound like when you talk too much in order to impress a girl, or, since in the book the girl is out of reach, like a mad-eyed, clenched-jawed hamster running in a wheel. That girl is not just “out of reach,” of course, she’s retarded, and her disability is presented in an unusual, undomesticated way—it makes her an object of real desire. Is this just a trip to the terminal point in the literature of forbidden love and foreclosed lust—or something more? There is some of that, of course. She works first as a mirror image of the narrator’s own disability regarding love and lust. But on another level, she is an allegory of the general failure that he seems to observe in himself and in others, school kids or adults—and of the way prettiness and youth is doomed to be ignored or destroyed. And then, she is also the blank page or the screen that he uses to construct and project a way to understand others. As this is done through endless hypotheses, it is also the beginning of fiction. Most of what happens in one’s head is fiction, after all. In the book you offer, alongside that allegory, this one: “A young retarded boy asks his teacher if she wants to know the time, and without waiting for her reply he unzips his fly to reveal a watch he has strapped around his penis.” How would you characterize the relationship of these stunted characters to time? The narrator is keenly aware that people are never fully their own contemporaries, mostly because of the annoying persistence of childhood, or because they’re lagging behind a dream-image of themselves. In this respect, everybody seems to be stunted in some way or other. But that seems less a regrettable state, in 03, than simply a mysterious one—almost sacred, and inviting examination. “The more I wanted to identify with her, the more I identified with myself; and the more I tried to understand her, the less, necessarily, I succeeded: the failure of an intelligent mind to grasp feeblemindedness was deep and dark, no less than the failure of a feeble mind to grasp intelligence, because intelligence got its shape by not understanding the thing it could never be.” The portrait of the girl emerges over the courses of the book only through “endless hypotheses,” as you put it—does that make it a failure? I guess there wouldn’t be a book if there wasn’t in it a sense that fiction can work, a little. So, at some points, and though he will never know it, the narrator may get close to the understanding is looking for. I have no particular fascination for failure. In some respects the book is about avoiding it. It ends on a “farewell,” which I think is some sort of success—or profane salvation.