Even if, as his new book suggests, its nearly impossible to make it stick.
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What separates true conviction from mere performance?
He is earnest, unaffected, and, at times, startlingly unguarded.
For him, they are novels, pure and simple.
I hope this has been moderately fun for you, he said as our call neared its end.
God bless you for doing this.
I have some very official questions for you.
No, I dont or that description is not quite right.
This isnt a test.
Im not testing you!
Its a weird thing.
And when I write, I continue to fake it.
The thought of having a conversation with somebody who has taught the reading was a little daunting.
But I disagree with you.
I think you are an attentive reader of 19th-century novels, in particular.
Why saddle your novel with these associations?
So, the phrase was already in my head.
We were using it.
More seriously, I have been thinking a lot about the inescapable nature of religion.
I would say this goes particularly for the virulent atheists.
Of course, there is the fact that Casaubon dies inMiddlemarchbefore he finishes his project.
And undertaking writing three books in my 60s, I thought, Well, thats a funny little joke.
How do we put Gods teachings into action in our grubby, damaged lives?
Does this conflict within religious thought interest you?
I am singularly uninterested in theology.
Im not uninterested in the Bible, both Testaments.
I think the Gospels are an incredibly powerful document.
Jesus says, Yeah, all these other things are important.
But thats the key thing.
Its kind of a watered-down thing, like: give a shot to be nice to poor people.
Thats about a way of living.
I think the questions for me are, am I a good person?
What can I do to be a better person?
I think theyre wrestling with it in a more personal and specific way.
I mean, Russ inCrossroadsdoes acknowledge that being unfaithful to your wife is doctrinally forbidden.
He acknowledges the doctrine only to dismiss it, really, in his own moral reckoning.
Thank you for saying that.
Im glad to have company there.
Why, for you, is marriage the situation where morality repeatedly gets tested and fails?
Not to quote myself, but Ill quote myself.
But you cant move away from your mom.
And you cannot move away from your spouse, unless you get divorced.
And thats just fun to write about.
As a novelist, Im all about fun.
And fun for me is a scene where two people want different things very badly.
This novel begins in December 1971 and ends in 1974.
Why did you decide to set it in the past?
I had the wicked thought:People think Im a family novelist.
Im not really a family novelist.
But maybe, finally, Ill write a book about a family.
And to me, a family novel spans generations.
it’s crucial that you see how patterns replicate themselves.
The most important decade of my life, and I had never set any fiction there.
I started writing a little more than a year into the Trump administration.
It was just the time to be looking back.
It was a kind of escape and an instinct.
That moment marked a kind of retreat from the possibility of genuinely radical politics in the United States.
Well, andRoev.Wadedid galvanize the Evangelicals and push them decisively into the right wing of American politics.
Russ and Marion are good mid-century liberals.
Russ in particular is deeply involved in civil rights and in protesting the Vietnam War.
And the kids are kind of dealing with the aftermath of that.
But Im such a partisan of the novel, I dont want it subordinated to anything.
I do not want to be the little dog yapping after the garbage truck of history.
I always hesitate to quote it because he wrote it in gendered language.
Im struggling to figure out how to make it as elegant without saying he.
Im particularly averse to subordinating it to my own personal politics.
If I were to do anything, I would use a novel to challenge my own politics.
Within the novel, character should not follow from concept.
The concept should be discovered from character.
But youre notnotinterested in the headlines of the day.
Do you ever think of your novels as novels of ideas?
How much more conceptual can you get?
And maybe what youre referring to as ideas in my books are more about the architecture of that world.
And yes, a world does have ideas in it.
I can do that kind of thing so easily.
If thats all writing a novel were, I could have written 40 novels.
But its just not where the action is.
The concepts get sketched out in the two days it takes me to write a proposal for a novel.
And then the characters get built over two or more horrible long years.
How horrible are they?
Theyre just miserable, because Id rather be writing, and its just day after day of withheld gratification.
Every once in a while, I get an idea and that day is less bad.
Who are your favorite creators of character?
Do you knowThe Man Who Loved Children?
I have not readThe Man Who Loved Children, but Im ordering it now.
I have written about it, and I have remained confounded that it is not universally regarded as canonical.
Its Christina Steads great novel from the mid-20th century.
It has three world-class characters.
Most novelists dont produce any world-class characters.
There are three in that one book.
Theres Tolstoy, of course.
Faulkner pretty terrific, actually.
Ferrante, of course.
Those two giant female characters in theNeapolitannovels in particular.
I would be remiss if I did not ask you whether youre a Lila or Lenu.
Im definitely a Lenu, except even more insipid compared to my Lila.
Im mentioning life-changing books for me.
I was conscious of the problem of how to create a good character for a long time.
But it fully rising to consciousness that took a while.
Of course, that increased the pressure to continue to somehow find large characters or develop large characters.
Oh, I could throw in Dostoyevsky as well.
So, lets say Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Stead, Ferrante, Laxness.
I was thinking about the endings of some of your novels.
The ending ofThe Corrections: She was 75 and she was going to make some changes in her life.
Or the ending ofPurity: It had to be possible to do better than her parents.
Do people or characters change in meaningful and substantial and dramatic ways?
Or do they and we all have the Karenin problem?
Which echoes Im not sure if Ive ever publicly admitted that I have seen a therapist in my life.
This is a safe space.
She was a wise older woman.
And one of the things she memorably said to me was that its very hard to change.
Most people dont change at all.
If you really, really work, you’re able to change a little bit.
And its that little bit thats interesting, of course.
But thats really hedged yes, I think people can change.
My own theory of literature has to do with that continuity.
It is a tragic perspective.
Its part of the fantasy of, Were not going to get catastrophic climate change.
Once people really realize what were doing to the planet, that will change their behavior.
probably in my 50s.
And being shocked to discover that I didnt like Anna.
And in fact, her whole family thinks, Eh.
And thats, of course, a great thing.
But never more striking than when you find this weird sympathy.
Whats really terrific and heartbreaking about Casaubon is that he is who he is.
He has a dry, little, shriveled soul.
And were all filled with all of that life and all of that thought.
Can I go back to something that you said earlier about committing to writing three novels in your 60s?
I ask this as someone very preoccupied with death.
Its, oddly, something close to the reverse.
I could drop dead tomorrow.
I still havent ruled out the possibility of the world ending in nuclear war.
I dont know how long I have to live.
I dont know how long Ill have a world to live in.
But Im very aware that I cant write very many novels at the level I insist on writing them.
Maybe, if Im lucky, I can write these two sequel volumes.
Stories and characters that are fully alive and urgent to me do not grow on trees.
I feel like in some ways, I have too much time.
You publishedThe Correctionstwo decades ago, right?
Almost to the day.
The picture seemed very dark to me in the mid-90s.
I think the world of readers and writers is not only surviving but continuing to thrive.
Its a little bit different from literary culture.
Do you really find it refreshing?
I dont know that anyone has changed the novel in the way the academically approved postmoderns did.
Well, as one of those white male writers …
Yes, I saw a therapist and it turns out …
… youre a white male writer?!
Super Caucasian and very, very much a male writer.
Its not a knock against the individual writers; its a knock against the way they dominated the competition.
And that is a particular kind of achievement, represented in the big book, for example.
That was the standard against which all else was measured.
I think good riddance to that idea.
I think thats another positive thing that has happened.
We are hearing from different kinds of voices in different modes.
Who are the newer, younger writers you admire, since almost everyone weve been talking about is dead?
It tends to be individual books more than authors.
Someone like Rachel Kushner is not that much younger, but she is younger.
I think in her own way, Nell Zink is doing very interesting work.
The Wallcreeperis a great comic novel.
I love teaching it.
And she wrote it in, whatever, three months.
And it feels like, Wow, I just got a sample of soil on Mars.
It took three months to get here and now here it is.
Its like, what the fuck?
I think Zadie Smith is the real deal.
Shes the whole package.
Akhil Sharma wrote a great novel.
I havent read Sally Rooney.
People seem to speak well of her.
The danger is we know more now about how the world has turned out.
People in the past inevitably look less enlightened than we are from our privileged point in 2021.
Im actually proud of that Kraus book.
Kraus seemed unbelievably relevant.
His critique of the nexus of capitalism, technology, and media was unbelievably prescient.
And you cant check that superior knowledge or insight and simply go back and say, Rah, rah.
But its also important to recognize what was amazing about them at the time.
I find that language irritating.
But I do ask myself: How do you acknowledge her classism?
How do you acknowledge her racism?
How do you deal with her only very partial feminism?
How do you mobilize those things to show how they resulted in a work of such extraordinary beauty?
It doesnt matter how well-meaning you are.
It doesnt matter what your politics are.
If youre not speaking in the momentarily approved terms, thats grounds for suspicion, at least.
But its important to remember that thats happening only really in a marginal element of the culture.
I have been directed by my editor to ask you: What inspiredCrossroads?
I was overseas and it was waiting for my signature.
But I got up at two in the morning; I was in a tropical place.
Im not going to sign it.
Im not doing it because I met somebody.
Did the germ include the structure of the trilogy?
No, not the germ.
It was just: Ive got a character.
But you dont want the real-life person to swamp the invented character.
Thats perfect, because you want to love the character always.
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