novels | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Podcast • August 25, 2015

Renata Adler on Sadness, Selfies, and Losing

Consider Renata Adler one of the defiantly smart women of the age. She was a star of the culture pages of the New York Times in the mid-60s then for decades at The New Yorker. These ...

Consider Renata Adler one of the defiantly smart women of the age.

She was a star of the culture pages of the New York Times in the mid-60s then for decades at The New Yorker. These days, her tart, tweet-ready epigrams are a hit with millennials and 30-somethings hooked on language and the wide world. We link her to dauntless, independent spirits like Joan Didion, Camille Paglia, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, and Julia Child. She’s a match also for Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal—all of them readers, stylists, and watchers open to surprise.

David Foster Wallace was a Renata Adler fan (who spoke of her as an influence, too). So, on the occasion of our hour about DFW and the air of personal and social sadness that lingers around him, we poured Renata a scotch and sat together for a wide-ranging conversation about American life. What’s been going on, we asked, with our nation’s mood and history since the Vietnam War? In the age of the selfie, how should we be telling our country’s story?

Podcast • February 10, 2014

John Lanchester on London in the Age of Inequality

Economic inequality is still on our minds after last week’s show with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi. Here’s an interview we recorded with John Lanchester in 2012 after the publication ...

Economic inequality is still on our minds after last week’s show with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi. Here’s an interview we recorded with John Lanchester in 2012 after the publication of his novel Capital.

My sense of this period and of the decade or so ahead is that it’s going to be one with — if we’re not careful, and I see no signs of us being careful — the same theme dominating conversation and politics everywhere. And that will be about inequality. It’s a very striking thing that a society like China, which only had private property 10 minutes ago, had effectively — this is a very broad-brush thing to say, but — had effectively abolished inequality. You know, there was a tiny crust of elite, but in essense for ordinary people China was a complely equal state. That came at a very, very high price. They moved away from that to astonishing economic growth, growth of a sort that the world’s never seen, numerically — that number of people being raised out of poverty so fast, hundreds of millions of them. And in the process they in effect invented inequality. Talk to people in China: inequality is a huge issue for them in this coming decade, the gap between coast and the center, between cities and the country. China has on a huge scale winners and losers in a way it never did before. Same thing in India. Same thing in Latin America — lots of countries that went broke and then recovered, with a new class in charge. That’s usually what happens. Old middle classes largely got wiped out. You have a new class of economic winners. Obviously inequality is a huge issue here in the States. It’s a huge issue in Europe and in the U.K. — summed up by the Occupy movement’s thing about the “one percent.” We’re just noticing this thing — everyone’s noticing it at the same time. And yet the trends that are propelling that gap are continuing. One of the reasons I thought it was an interesting moment to write about London is that there’s a global thing taking place there. And I think the world doing the split is part of that.

John Lanchester with Chris Lydon in Boston, June 20, 2012

John Lanchester has written a sprawling neo-Dickensian novel CAPITAL about London in the age of funny money and the crash of 2008. He got the germ of it five years ago, noticing a parade of “florists, dog-walkers, pilates instructors” on his own once-modest street south of the Thames, being radically made-over for bankers and the blooming investment-services class — “manifestly symptomatic,” as he says, “of a boom that would turn into a bust.” Like Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend, CAPITAL has what the Brits call a “state of the nation” feel, delivered in the voice attributed to Dickens of the “special correspondent for posterity.” But of course he’s illuminating an affliction gone global by now, describing life as lived in New York, too, or Shanghai, or Boston for that matter. One moral that Lanchester has given his tale is: “We are not in this together,” inverting the Tory slogan. In conversation he adds a touch from the Gospel of Mark: “To them that hath shall be given.” I marvel at how casino capitalism and its costs come clearer, stranger, more ridiculous, more destructive, more outrageous in fiction than in fact – how the right novels can feel truer than the news.

John Lanchester is eminent also as a non-fiction economics correspondent, a main contributor over 25 years to the London Review of Books. He’s been steadfast against the fictions of market doctrine, and strong in his underlying judgment: “The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat,” he wrote in the LRB last April. “We have at the moment this monstrous hybrid, state capitalism… This is a parody of economic order, in which the general public bears all the risks and the financial sector takes all the rewards – an extraordinarily pure form of what used to be called ‘socialism for the rich’. But ‘socialism for the rich’ was supposed to be a joke. The truth is that it is now genuinely the way the global economy is working.”

In conversation, John Lanchester is extending our thread on the late Tony Judt‘s parting shots in Ill Fares the Land:

Judt makes very important points, I think, about the tragic loss of belief in our ability to act collectively for the good. Let’s gang up, get together, figure out the thing we want to change for the better, and then go ahead and make that change. It seems entirely true when he says the younger generation has entirely lost that sense. I’m writing now about the Underground in London for the 150th anniversary of the Underground next year, the first underground trains. The Victorians were obviously very different from us in lots of respects, but one of the crucial things, I’ve come to think, was their morale. When they were building the Underground, they knew it would change the city forever, for generations to come, and they were certain they that that change was for the better. It was risky, and it was expensive, and it was difficult, and it was right on the edge of what was technologically possible, and they were inventing new techniqes to make the Underground as they did it. But they knew it was going to completely remake the city, and that was the whole point. And I was just thinking: what do we see around us that has that equivalent thing: that you know: we’re doing it and in a hundred years’ time they’ll be using it every day. In London, we’re using Victorian sewers, power networks, holes the Victorians dug. They actually made that world that we’re living in. And that confidence where you can make the world of the future — it’s very sad to have mislaid that, and I see no good reason why we feel we have. It’s just somehow that the frame of the debate has shifted, so that it’s all kind of managerial. You can tweak this and tweak that, but you can’t really change anything. And I wonder: who wrote that rule?

In London or the world, I’m wondering, what corresponds to the Underground, as an artistic or architectural monument of this time?

I think it’s in the rash of buildings trying to be iconic. A thing that’s very much of the moment is these buildings that are trying to be free standing, these buildings that are almost their own brand. Lorenzo Piano’s Shard. Or what’s known as the Gherkin, the Erotic Gherkin, a Norman Foster building which does look indeed like half a gherkin, half a penis, 40 stories high. It’s from the idea of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim-Bilbao, which I think is a wonderful building. But I think it started a trend for the idea that the building is a sort of picture, an icon. It’s not much to with the place; it’s not much to do with anything. It sums itself up and is its own logo, in a way. And we’re seeing an awful lot of those, so I think that’s going to be this moment — the idea of a slightly self-contained, self-reflexive, anti-humanistic building because they look worse when you put people in and around them. They’re better without the humans. And when you interact with them you feel like one of those tiny model figures in an architect’s diagram, and you’re meant to. So there is an anti-humanistic aspect to those guys’ buildings, and I think that’s the kind of thing we’ll look back on and say: oh well, that sums up that period.

By the Way • February 3, 2014

From the Archives: Orhan Pamuk and his Museum

On the way to Herbie Hancock’s opening Norton lecture at Harvard, “The Wisdom of Miles Davis,” we’re remembering Norton feasts of old, a series that has included luminaries like John Cage, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Bernstein, Daniel Barenboim, and Orhan Pamuk, who spoke with us in 2009 after giving his six Norton Lectures, which filled the air with ideas about fiction. “The novel is not about the characters but about their world,” for example, part of the reason that Pamuk has never titled a book with a character’s name. (No disrespect to David Copperfield, Jane Eyre or the Karamazov brothers, either; but Pamuk is more in tune with Thackeray, who called his masterpiece not “Becky Sharp” but Vanity Fair.)

Two recurrent images in those talks will stick forever: first, the scene, endlessly revisited, of Anna Karenina on the train to Petersburg from Moscow after she first danced with Vronsky — “with a novel in her hand and a window that reflected her mood.” This is for Pamuk the most perfectly saturated picture in the greatest of all novels. And then there was the portrait Orhan Pamuk painted of himself, an insatiable teenaged reader, in his family’s grand apartment in Istanbul in the late Sixties into the Seventies, expanding his character, forming his soul, confronting his great teachers: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Thomas Mann, Dickens and Melville, among others. So the conversation begins:

I argue that for the last 150 years novels have been the global literary form… It is a very democratic form. You can talk about the biggest issues of history, life, ethics, things that until recently only philosophers or religion addressed… In my youth, that’s why I think I took novels seriously and read lots of classics. Not only as entertainment but also as guides to understand the world, examples for my spirit, variations on the colors and shades of human spirit. You read Dostoyevsky, you understand something about human spirit. You read Stendhal, you understand something not only about mid-19th century French culture, but the adventuring human spirit and freedom versus community.

Novels taught me not only to understand life, but also how to see and understand myself. I am not a Freudian in the sense that I do not believe that human spirit is formed only in childhood. I argue that although some part of us may have been formed in our childhood, we continue to re-form, to progress, to make ourselves adapt to new conditions, and in fact radically change even in our twenties and thirties.

And I think naively that I did this through reading novels… Perhaps because I felt that I was at the edge of Europe, for me, novels represented the best of European culture. I wanted to acquire that. I read novels in my teenage years and early twenties just as someone gets essential liquid for life.

Orhan Pamuk with Chris Lydon at Columbia University in New York, 12.12.09.

By now Orhan Pamuk is in the front rank of global novelists for My Name is Red and Snow, books about not so much the clash as the interlacing of cultures, in the terms of his Nobel Prize citation. His new one, The Museum of Innocence, is stuffed with the collectible evidence – the earrings, the cigarette stubs, the views out the bedroom window – of a blissful love affair going bad. In his Norton Lectures, that’s what Pamuk said most novels are: they’re word museums stuffed with the human details of a period and a place. “No ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams put it. In our conversation Orhan Pamuk is inviting me and all his readers to see the real museum he’s building now, in Istanbul, to show off the substance, the real stuff of this book. Think of the novel, he says, as an annotated catalog of that Museum of Istanbul in the last quarter of the 20th Century.

Podcast • January 22, 2014

D.T. Max on David Foster Wallace’s Boston

It was David Foster Wallace’s fine biographer D. T. Max who remarked to me months ago that the Boston dimensions of Wallace and his masterpiece Infinite Jest had not been taken in. Spot on, I ...

It was David Foster Wallace’s fine biographer D. T. Max who remarked to me months ago that the Boston dimensions of Wallace and his masterpiece Infinite Jest had not been taken in. Spot on, I realized. The Wallace I met and interviewed (fumblingly, I’m afraid) in 1996 when Infinite Jest appeared seemed lost somewhere between his midwestern beginnings and the oceanic anxieties, addictions, hunger and general weirdness of our times. But Max prompted me to read Infinite Jest all over again, and of course he’s right: the book is a map of the hospital hilltop in Brighton; of Prospect Street in Cambridge between Inman and Central Squares; of Harvard Square and McLean Hospital; of the fashionably seedy precincts, then and now, of Somerville on the edge of East Cambridge. So I asked D. T. Max — the New Yorker staff writer who contributed that memorable obituary profile — who Wallace was after all, and what persuaded Max himself to undertake a serious biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.

David is the author of his time who has the fairest chance to be read 50 years from now… I really feel the way David touched the themes of the 1990s – themes of addiction and excessive entertainment in American culture have become even more outstanding and more relevant to most of us, and when you reread Infinite Jest today – it’s really a novel that’s fundamentally about television and video, but you read it today and you think you’re reading a novel about the Internet.

D. T. Max with Chris Lydon at M.I.T., Spring 2013

Podcast • January 8, 2014

Mary Gordon on Pope Francis: Hope for Grown-Ups

Mary Gordon – a steady light among American writers labeled ‘Catholic’ – has strong, mixed emotions about the Pope who loves the same steamy Anna Magnani movies that the Catholic church used to ban. She “burst into tears,” Gordon remembers, when she first read Pope Francis’ open-hearted interview in the Jesuit magazine America — his identification of himself as, first, “a sinner;” his picture of his church as “a field hospital after battle,” his sharp turn from “obsessive” fixations on sex. She got “hysterically giddy,” she’s telling me, then “scared.” Her tears signaled “how sad I’d been, for so long” about her church. Hope seems possible again, and disappointment, too. She makes writerly distinctions here – that “tone” matters and the Pope’s is a radical turn; but that his “diction” is different when he speaks of women in the priesthood. “His phrase was ‘the door is closed.’ What’s the one thing he won’t talk about? Giving full power to women.”

Mary Gordon is prized as independent-minded, feminist, faithful, and nuanced in novels and searching reflections from Final Payments (1978) to Reading Jesus (2009).

Mary Gordon gave us a roster of female theologians we all might get to know better: Elizabeth Johnson of Fordham, Sandra Schneiders of Santa Clara, Lisa Cahill of Boston College, Margaret Farley at Yale and Mary Boys of the Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Podcast • April 2, 2013

Kevin Powers and The Yellow birds: What were we doing there?

In my own experience I had moments of lucidity when I recognized what was happening to me. And I recognized ways in which my own moral center was being knocked out of alignment… We were ...

In my own experience I had moments of lucidity when I recognized what was happening to me. And I recognized ways in which my own moral center was being knocked out of alignment… We were on a patrol once, dismounting our vehicles. I was pulling security on a ridge line near Mosul, and I realized that in fact we were on the walls of ancient Nineveh. And something about that recognition was so alarming to me — that we were in this place that was, really, in the Cradle of Civilization. What are we doing here? Why am I here? I mean, knowing that my job as a soldier was to kill people. Ultimately, if you’re wearing the uniform, if you’re carrying a weapon, that’s what your job comes down to. And it was so staggering to me in that moment. But then that moment passed, and moments like that would come and go.

Novelist Kevin Powers, of The Yellow Birds, with Chris Lydon in Boston, March 2013

Kevin Powers is being credited with the first literary masterpiece of the war in Iraq. My question in our conversation is why, like so many horrifying war masterpieces since the Iliad, The Yellow Birds leaves us feeling so helpless to fight the next onset of the madness.

Drawing on Kevin Powers’ life as a teen-age Army volunteer from Richmond, Va and a year’s duty as a machine-gunner near Mosul, The Yellow Birds is an absorbingly double-edged book. One very short form might be: Yes, the war was as cruel and criminal a mission as we all knew in our guts it had to be — young kids scared out of their wits 24/7, asking what the f*** are we doing here? The Yellow Birds is a consuming observation of breakdowns — of fraternity and loyalty, discipline and sanity; but it leaves no doubt that the general collapse began in a cloud of delusion and oblivion on the home front. Dave Eggers calls it a “gorgeous novel” and “easily the saddest book I’ve read in many years. But sad in an important way.”

Both the sadness and the significance of it affirm the great wisdom of William James. “Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect” on modern man, as James wrote in The Moral Equivalent of War. “The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us…”

A commenter on the Guardian website made James’ point more pointedly about this very book that everyone (me, too) finds “beautiful,” this winner of the Guardian’s First Book Award. “Kevin Powers’ novel is part of the war industry,” wrote “fan64”. “None of this beauty and fascination would be possible without the warmongers we pretend to hate — oh, and the voters who elect them and become their war consumers…”

Oh, and us readers as well. As I confessed to Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds is a marvelous accomplishment that made me feel sick.

February 27, 2013

Tennessee and Papa: my odd couple from Key West

The knockout cultural event of my winter has been the ART production of Tennesee Williams’ first big hit, The Glass Menagerie, from 1944 – with the amazing Cherry Jones as Mama Wingfield and the TV-movie ...

The knockout cultural event of my winter has been the ART production of Tennesee Williams’ first big hit, The Glass Menagerie, from 1944 – with the amazing Cherry Jones as Mama Wingfield and the TV-movie star Zachary Quinto as young Tom, aka Tennessee, who’s desperate to get out of the house and live his life. The play in Cambridge is all compounded now with my first visit to Key West and Ernest Hemingway’s house and reimmersion in the big novels, starting with For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940). I’ve entered a new Hemingway Period in my head, but Tennessee Williams is in there, too – holding his own with Papa around ideas of manhood, masculinity, masculinism and issues that resound in 2013 not least around guns and gun control, drone wars and who we are in the world.

First things first: about both of these men you gotta jump up and cheer the prose mastery of giant American writers of the last mid-century. They keep you gasping. “Yes I have tricks in my pocket. I have things up my sleeve,” says the playwright in the opening moments of The Glass Menagerie. “But I am the opposite of the stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of the truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” Reminded me of Hemingway’s line that the writer’s assignment, his job every day, was to make up “one true sentence.” The flow of language is like Hemingway’s rivers: clear and swiftly moving, embedded with pebbles and boulders, blue in the channels. And it makes your heart pound.

Second thing, of course, is that Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway are iconic opposites in our star culture. Tennessee Tom, originally from Mississippi, was a gay Southerner before you could imagine such a thing, and the stage poet of outcasts. Hairy-chested Hemingway was the doctor’s son from Oak Park, Illinois, recklessly out in the wide world lion-hunting in Africa, hooking giant marlin off Cuba, toting a typewriter in war zones half his life and exulting in all of it.

But then the third thing, for me anyway, watching The Glass Menagerie, is that the contrast turns itself upside down. Hemingway begins to feel like the kinky one, spiraling downward to prove himself as a writer, fighter, fisherman, big-game shooter, hunter and killer — of himself, finally, in 1961. And then in the ART’s Glass Menagerie production that makes the gay subtext almost disappear, you hear Tennessee Williams speaking for every single one of us, I think, trying to pull our grown-up selves out of the webs of family and the broken past.

So I can’t stop thinking about two giant American writers on the “ruin” of manhood, and I’d ask you to join a conversation here – specially if you’ve seen The Glass Menagerie and if you’ve been drawn one way or another to the Hemingway code, his peculiar way with a sentence, his novels, his stories…

Podcast • February 12, 2013

Geoff Dyer, “on whom nothing is lost…”

Geoff Dyer would tell you he found his way into writing as a way of not having a career. With ever-ready tennis racquet in his book bag, he seems pretty much the man we all ...

Geoff Dyer would tell you he found his way into writing as a way of not having a career. With ever-ready tennis racquet in his book bag, he seems pretty much the man we all want to be when we grow up. He’s a pissed-off Englishman but light-hearted about it. He’s learned, he’s liberated. He’s prolific, he’s celebrated. And he’s very, very funny, in person as on the page. We’re making conversation here at the Key West Literary Seminar this winter.

Geoff Dyer hooked me 15 years ago with But Beautiful, an inspired set of improvisations on the sacrificial lives of jazz geniuses (Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Chet Baker, Bud Powell) whom Dyer (astonishingly to me) had never seen or heard in life. He is famous since then for Out of Sheer Rage about his constitutional inability to write a scholar’s account D. H. Lawrence. He has served a long apprenticeship with the hero he speaks about here: the anti-critic and anti-theorist John Berger. Meantime when Dyer writes from the road about importunate Cambodian kids trying to sell him a Coke — he lifts the travel essay toward a very personal moral majesty.

What’s so individual about Geoff Dyer is the mix of amateur and expert voices — of the angry working-stiff with an Oxford degree who’s judgmental but always original on photography and poetry, history, fiction and that “foreign music” known as jazz, just for starters. He’s in the great line of stylish pubic thinkers from Hazlitt to George Scialabba, writing ever “outside his field,” because in truth he has no field. He invites and challenges all of us to pay attention to everything, to look at what we’re seeing, to get us into the act, to be touched by it.

Podcast • December 29, 2012

Nael El Toukhy: a post-modern novelist’s eye on Egypt

Nael El Toukhy is a bright light among Egypt’s millennial writers at a breakpoint in Arab culture as well as politics. On a rooftop in Cairo we’re talking about the family effects of the Tahrir Square revolution: In every house in Egypt, he’s saying, you’ll find a father who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood and a son who voted against them. Also: about the liberation of Egyptian talk, which used to be “just football.” The chatter on the bus every morning is now about politics, sex, religion, “everything.” Nael El Toukhy, 34, is speaking of his devotion to Woody Allen movies, Kafka stories, Borges fables and “noisy writers” in general. He is known for his own off-beat novels, but also – and it seems remarkable for an Arab writer — for his translations of provocative Israeli authors from Hebrew. The late playwright, Hanoch Levin, a fierce satirist, is “my dream,” he says. “I was curious, of course, about Hebrew, like everyone else in the Arab world. We don’t know anything about Israel from the inside.” So his blog publishes an Israeli poet, story-writer or novelist in Arabic every week. He’s serious guy with a light touch, a modernist and a sort of globalist who, like everyone else in Egypt, all but worships the immortal singer Oum Kulthum. She’s a modern goddess, as you’ll hear him say: there’s nothing like the experience of this woman’s sound, unless it’s smoking hash.

Of the daily battles around the new constitution and the war inside “the deep state”:

Nobody knows about this fight… At the start of the revolution, the Western media said: Egypt is on the road to Turkey… Other media said: no, the road to Iran. I say: let’s be surprised. This is the most beautiful idea in the Revolution: you don’t know what will happen in the next day; you have no plans. The politicians have plans. But I’m not a politician.

Of women, men, couples and families in the “rising generation” of Egyptians, his readership:

The individuals in Egypt are amazing. Society itself is a very awful factor. By society I mean the relationships between people in families. Authority in the family? We have to refuse it, and in the last three years we did. Many families were against the revolution; the new generation was against their families. I think it’s very significant to be against society and family and Mr. President, all at the same time.

I said I was reminded of a scene in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy in which two sons of the patriarch come home tipsy one night — in the 1930s! — shouting “Long live the Revolution! … Down with the tyrannical wife! … Down with the tyrannical father!”

Same theme. Yeah! All the time the boys are more revolutionary against their families, because you know our society gives more freedom for boys than girls. But I saw this with girls also. How’s to say: ‘I am free. I can do what I think about.’ The concept of challenging the family to go to Tahrir Square is a sign. I think in every house in Egypt today you will find the father voted for the Muslim Brother and Mohamed Morsi, and the son voted for the counter-candidate; and all the time they are fighting eachother. I think the main thing since the revolution is that everybody discusses everything in public. When you get the bus, all the time you are hearing discussions — that Morsi did this because he’s a good man; or: no, he did this because he’s a bad man. It’s a really good thing, this fight.

On the “butterfly effect” of revolt that spread from Tunisia to Egypt and beyond. The butterfly has a message:

Don’t fear anybody powerful. Nobody’s powerful… We learned it with Mubarak. Of course we were afraid of Mubarak. We thought he was like God and the Nile and the Pyramids. He will never go. He will never die. I thought: Mubarak is immortal. And then in 18 days he disappeared. There’s nobody behind the curtain.

Podcast • February 17, 2011

Jaimy Gordon’s Racetrack Revelation in Lord of Misrule

Jaimy Gordon impels us to find the other great small-press writers we’ve never heard of. She is this winter’s longshot winner of the National Book Award, for her gorgeous racetrack novel Lord of Misrule. The 40-to-1 payoff is for readers who, but for the big prize, might never hear of non-commercial fiction or savor it’s very distinctive pleasures.

Lord of Misrule was reviewed in the Daily Racing Form before it was noticed by the New York Times. It may never get noted in the Times Sunday Book Review. But anyone who opens it will recognize instantly the real old American thing: horses, jockeys, trainers and touts with Damon Runyon names like Medicine Ed and Suitcase and Two-Tie, loners and outcasts on their own crummy racetrackers’ planet in far West Virginia. Just as quickly we meet characters, both equine and human, whose lives, language and trials feel entirely new.

I wanted to write a social novel of a kind, I wanted to represent, in one way or another, all the orders of humanity of this world. I think my previous books were usually dominated by one reckless human being, usually a young woman, whose fortunes would horrify and interest the reader.

In the case of Lord of Misrule, I think I was getting to be of an age where I could identify as much with the family-less loan shark, Two-Tie, and Medicine Ed, who’s looking for a home at the age of 72, not sure that he’s made the right career choice in being a groom for 60-some years … I think that since, as a writer, I felt that my career had never broken big and I was getting into my sixties myself, [I wondered] had I made the right career choice here? I think that, like Medicine Ed, I didn’t feel competent to do anything else and I couldn’t have pictured myself anywhere else than on my racetrack, which is the world of American fiction, but I couldn’t see exactly where I was heading.

I think that the charm of the book, if it has any, is that the writer is fully as much inhabiting Medicine Ed and Two-Tie as the young woman. I used to be the young woman in my books, but now I am just as much the old guys, looking into a kind of bitter and insecure unknown.

Jaimy Gordon with Chris Lydon at the Boston Athanaeum, 2. 11. 2011.

One of the great epiphanies of her life, Jaimy Gordon remarks, came at 17, working illegally in a bar on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It was the first time she was surrounded by people who “didn’t speak proper English,” and she was amazed at the poetry in their conversation.

I venture that Jaimy Gordon’s work is marked by a kind of comic maximalism in the manner of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, every type of literary effect exploding on every page. Indeed, she’s telling me, she claimed maximalism as her métier when she studied writing at Brown — with John Hawkes and Keith Waldrop, among others — and minimalism was all the literary rage. She points to John Updike’s novel The Centaur, which also won a National Book Award, as her inspiration for transferring the kind of far-fetched, daring metaphors common in poetry into plot-driven prose.

Jaimy Gordon assures us that despite the echoing laments for the death of literature, we are in a sort of “Golden Age of American letters,” fueled by more than 350 college-level creating writing programs. In this conversation she gives us some of her favorite practitioners, well-known and unsung: Katherine Davis for Hell, Labrador, The Girl who Trod on a Loaf; Kellie Wells for Skin, Compression Scars; Joanna Scott, Russell Banks, Peter Carey and Paul Harding for his out-of-nowhere small-press Pulitzer Prize Tinkers. We are blessed.