“The supremacy of the United States must and will be enforced throughout every part of the archipelago, and those who resist it can accomplish no end other than their own ruin.”
Issued to the Philippines in 1899, The Proclamation of the U.S. Commission Towards Conciliation and the Establishment of Peace is about as true to its name as Operation Enduring Freedom. The sentence above was the commission’s first principle. Less than a month later, the Philippine-American War began, and that conflict—that insurrection—would irrevocably shape the future of both countries. A definitive record of Filipinos killed during the war is difficult to ascertain; the number ranges anywhere between 200,000 to 1.4 million (the politics of the census are complicated when so many on one side of a war have been massacred). Waterboarding was first used by American soldiers in the Philippines as a form of torture during this period. Even Mark Twain understood that American imperialism in the Philippines was a genocidal project: “There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”
This was a war that established America as a global empire—the strategies used on Filipinos had already been implemented to devastating effect on Native American populations during the Plains Indians Wars—and yet somehow it remains a ghostly presence, a blip, in the annals of American history, not to mention mainstream contemporary American memory.
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Fiction writers are often expected to address such absences. And while there are wonderful novels and fiction authors who do just that—most notably Gina Apostol in her most recent book, the searing and kaleidoscopic Insurrecto—I know that I’ve also had discussions with fellow fiction writers, especially writers of color and immigrant writers, who often point out the sometimes frustrating consequences of being expected to use your fiction as a platform to educate the wider American public about a historical lacuna.
And I get it: there’s a particular vitality to fiction that makes the past come alive, when an author manages to turn a fact about war into flesh and blood. But sometimes the assumption that we should go to writers of color to learn about forgotten history can often mean we end up instrumentalizing those writers and their art for the ethnographic value they bring to us. The divide often then results in readers going to minority writers to learn the particular, and going to white writers to feel the universal. Certainly many of the literary panels I’ve seen or been on during the year I’ve been on tour have been organized thematically in just this way.
I don’t mean to suggest that writers of color be less politicized in their reception—we’re political, historical and emotional animals and those material facts of our being will inevitably find their way into our fictions. But that logic should be applied equally to all artists. I would love to see a panel about identity consisting of entirely middle-class writers, or a panel about women’s anger in fiction that doesn’t center white women. I would love for readers to expect more white American women writers to write fiction about why so many of them voted Trump into office. I would love a list of fiction recommendations about whiteness, for people who want to “learn more.” (I’d love to write that list, too: George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, one of my favorite books of all time, would definitely be on there, along with maybe Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden; obviously The Great Gatsby, or what about the entire oeuvre of Marguerite Duras?)
So below are a few of my favorite contemporary Filipinx American critics and historians from whom I, too, have gained a valuable education about the wonders and terrors of American statecraft and its rippling effects around the world, particularly the country my parents immigrated to California from—in the hopes that by expanding the list of people from whom we learn our history, we can also expand the list of people from whom we experience our art.
This book should be required reading in American schools. It’s a rigorous and searing work of critical history, in which Rodriguez shows us how contemporary American identity and statecraft as we know it was constructed by its relationship to the Philippines—and vice versa. It connects American anti-blackness and indigenous genocide with its similar policies in the archipelago, and extrapolates that history to the modern day, with a virtuosic chapter on race and natural disaster that compares the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines. Often shocking, utterly indispensable.
Another absolute classic: chances are, if have ever been to a hospital of any kind, you’ve benefited from the care of a Filipinx nurse. Maybe it was my mom, or one of my aunts or cousins. Catherine Ceniza Choy traces the long history of that labor back to, you guessed it, the American colonization of the Philippines, which makes this book a vital work of American history as much as it is a cornerstone of Filipinx history, labor history, and feminist history.
Growing up, I had a godfather who was also sometimes my godmother. The way he liked to be addressed—he usually used masculine pronouns even when referring to himself as a woman, in a way that was both true to him and also indicative of the fact that gendered pronouns do not exist in Tagalog, and thus he was dealing with both gender and grammar in a second, lesser language—was akin to calling someone Uncle Jessica. Queerness in my family was present, protected, often unremarkable, and yet went hand in hand with an underlying structure of patriarchal machismo, misogyny and homophobia. How those two things could live together, often in one person, I still find difficult to articulate, even (maybe especially) as a bi woman. Books like Manalansan IV’s book help: another long-time staple that delves into the lived specifics of a subset of Filipinx queerness (in particular bakla identity; the book doesn’t focus on queer women), while also thinking through the ways race and prejudice inform and deform our desires.
Chances are, if you’ve ever watched The Voice or American Idol, you’ve encountered a Filipinx performer—usually singing a pitch-perfect cover of a torch song, in the vein of Celine Dion or Boyz II Men or a classic musical. Puro Arte explores the long history of Filipinx performance and connects it to the formation of Filipinx identity under U.S. imperialism—more specifically, what the book calls “imperial amnesia.” From white mobs chasing Filipino men in the 1920s era of taxi dance halls (and the accompanying fear-mongering around miscegenation and hypersexuality that historically differentiates the treatment of Filipinos from other Asian groups in America) to the phenomena of Filipina actresses starring as the Vietnamese character Kim in Miss Saigon, Puro Arte will deepenyour understanding of the politics of performance—and maybe even ensure you never look at performers like Bruno Mars the same way again.
A GOAT work of scholarship and criticism, with a staggeringly wide historical scope and a generous, approachable readability. Denise Cruz brings us from the colonial era to the Cold War, and gives us a much-needed feminist historicist approach to thinking about everything from national heroism, to class, colorism, and the ways in which the costs of war and empire are often borne on the bodies of women.
Mabalon’s sudden passing in 2018 dealt a tremendous blow to the Filipinx American community. Little Manila Is in the Heart is a much-loved masterpiece of ethnography, history and activism all at once, centering on the titular Little Manila of downtown Stockton, California. Mabalon’s writing is as sharp as it is loving and accessible, and the way she traces the community’s origins to its contemporary struggles against gentrification could be fruitfully linked to similar struggles around the country, particularly the rapidly changing Bay Area. Rest in power, Dawn.
I’m a bi suburban kid of Filipinx immigrants, and though Tongson’s book mostly covers the queer suburban imaginaries of southern California, I still feel like I recognize traces of the Bay Area I grew out of in the pages of this deeply felt work of criticism as love letter. The attention to and love for queer suburban life (and the particularities of, for example, suburban gentrification and displacement and its effects on queer lives) is what makes the work shine: it’s a much-needed antidote to both art and criticism’s focus on narratives of queer urbanity. The writing itself is elegant and singing with emotion, and Tongson understands beautifully that there is as much history (American, global, colonial, interethnic) in our strip malls as in our libraries; as much global epic drama in our garages as in our grandest theaters.
Music had its night in February at the Grammys. The film world followed closely behind with its Oscars. Now, in true saving-the-best-for-last fashion, it’s our time, book people, to celebrate American literature from the year that was. In just a few short days, on April 15th, the announcement of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—yes, contrary to recent tweets by a certain someone’s son, it’s a real award—will become the popular culture news event of the day.
The Pulitzer Prize, of course, isn’t the only major literary award that gets people talking. It’s the oldest, though; Ernest Poole’s His Family claimed the inaugural award for fiction all the way back in 1918. And the Pulitzer Prize is the rare literary award that garners mainstream media attention and produces real sales. Reading through some of its past recipients sounds like a through-the-ages who’s who of American literature: Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Edith Wharton.
The announcement of the winner can provide pleasant surprises. Last year’s recognition of a comedic novel (Andrew Sean Greer’s Less) is one such example. But the Pulitzer Prize announcement can also come with confusion—and even anger. I’m thinking of the 1974 scandal involving Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. The three-person jury pushed for Pynchon to receive the honor, but the board rallied against the decision, resulting in no winner. And I won’t remind you of the near-unspeakable recent disaster from 2012. (Yes I will. Karen Russell was robbed!)
Guessing what title will win is a tough gig, but it’s a challenge I welcome. Truthfully, I’m up for just about anything that celebrates the written word. And what a celebration we should be having from the plethora of wonderful books released in 2018.
Before getting to the ten most likely contenders, I have to mention a few of the many fantastic and acclaimed books that will likely just miss receiving the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. These include memorable debut novels from Tommy Orange (There There) and Elaine Castillo (America Is Not the Heart); masterful collections from Kevin Wilson (Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine), Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Friday Black), and Nick White (Sweet and Low); and (already) award-recognized titles from Luis Alberto Urrea (The House of Broken Angels), Lisa Halliday (Asymmetry) and the late Denis Johnson (The Largesse of the Sea Maiden).
For the record, I’m focusing on other awards, reviews, buzz, and good old-fashioned intuition in making these predictions. (I decided not to allow my own personal feelings about the best books of the year—shout out to Leesa Cross-Smith’s Whiskey & Ribbons and Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man—to interfere too much with my judgment on what I think will happen.) Without further ado, here are the predictions, in order, for the ten books most likely to receive the honor of being the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
It’s hard to resist a debut collection of stories that is this good. And, really, who would want to? This collection received multiple awards citations. It was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, a L.A. Times Book Prize finalist for first fiction, and longlisted for the National Book Award. In Heads of the Colored People, Thompson-Spires looks at issues of race and class in ways that are incredibly timely and darkly funny. If the jury wants to champion a short story collection by a new writer, watch out. This one is certainly worthy.
Abby Geni’s first novel, The Lightkeepers, was longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and her sophomore novel, The Wildlands, proves that honor was a sign of the things to come. In her latest novel, which begins after a deadly tornado tears apart the town of Mercy, Oklahoma, Geni explores humanity’s relationships with other humans, animals, and nature. It’s a remarkable achievement. Don’t just take my word for it. Buzzfeed and Kirkus both recognized the book as being one of the year’s very best, and it was selected as a fiction finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. The Wildlands comes from Counterpoint Press, which is an indie publishing house. Small press titles are surging, and Geni’s novel is a standout. This is a book to watch out for—and to read (if you haven’t).
Ackerman is a past National Book Award finalist, which puts anything he writes on the radar of titles to watch. Waiting for Eden, a novel told from the perspective of a dead man who is waiting—on his marriage, on his friend, on understanding, on his life, on his afterlife—is Ackerman’s masterpiece. Clocking in at less than 200 pages, this slim novel is a meditation on the meaning of life. It’s quiet, tender, and absolutely haunting. It’s loved by critics and readers alike. All of these things make it perfect for awards season. Plus, the ALA listed it as one of its “2019 Notable Books,” which is a good Pulitzer indicator.
When this timely novel appeared on the longlist for National Book Award, it was a welcome surprise. It didn’t get a ton of press upon its release last March, but it still found a loyal readership. That, in itself, proves something. Since its NBA recognition, Time and Library Journal selected Gun Love as one of the best books of the year. It has momentum as we approach the Pulitzer finish line. Clement’s novel looks at issues of class and guns, and the focus on the mother-daughter relationship is orchestrated wonderfully. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see it as a nominee (and maybe even the winner).
Okay, so quirky, satirical apocalyptic novels aren’t typical Pulitzer bait. I get that. But hear me out. Severance continues to show up on lists that matter. The New York Times cited it as one of the “100 Notable Books of 2018.” That’s a big deal. It won the Kirkus Prize. Another big deal. And it was a finalist for the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award. Big deal again. On top of all those accolades, it appeared on “best of” lists from, among many other publications, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, and Bustle. The book is charming, and it’s so original that it’s hard to forget.
Before The Friend won the National Book Award, I had it at the top of the predictions. But history works against NBA winners and Pulitzer winners matching up. In fact, there have only been seven times when both awards went to the same book (Faulkner’s A Fable, Cheever’s The Stories of John Cheever, Porter’s The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Updike’s Rabbit is Rich, Walker’s The Color Purple, Proulx’s The Shipping News, and Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad). The Friend is a novel that could join this exclusive list. Everyone I talk to loves this book—I mean, folks emphatically love it. It’s hard to resist a novel about dog-human relationships. (Yeah, it’s also about grief and loss, but still. Dogs.) Plus, it has all kinds of accolades, including the important mention from The New York Times as being one of the “100 Notable Books of 2018.” While history works against it, don’t be surprised if Nunez wins.
Many people thought Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers was going to win the Pulitzer in 2014. The fact that it didn’t helps The Mars Room, which has received equally rapturous reviews. Additionally, it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize. Time listed it as the top fiction release of 2018. It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and it received acknowledgment from the ALA and The New York Times. Each of these mentions is major in predicting the Pulitzer Prize. The Morning New’s Tournament of Books, a literary March Madness matchup, isn’t really a predictor for the Pulitzer Prize, but for what it’s worth The Mars Room did really well there too. It lost to My Sister, the Serial Killer (the eventual winner) in the zombie round. Kushner’s novel about Romy Hall and her time at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility is a front runner.
The Monsters of Templeton. Delicate Edible Birds. Arcadia. Fates and Furies. Florida. Those are Lauren Groff’s books, and somehow she doesn’t have a Pulitzer yet. Florida finds Groff back in her best form, the short story. These stories are haunting, oozing with humanity—both its horrors and its loves. Florida was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award, and it won the Story Prize. It has a ton of buzz, and Groff has to eventually win a Pulitzer. Florida could be the book to do it.
There’ve been several winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in this decade that have also been the literary “it book” of the year. Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, and Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad are the ones the come to mind that fit this trend. If the jury is looking to continue on that same path, Jones’ An American Marriage would fit the bill. It’s a novel that people love, share, and discuss. Even Oprah loves it. An American Marriage is, simply put, a brilliant American novel. It’s rich in character and place. It’s full of love and hope and despair. It’s classic in how it explores the notion of the American Dream, and it’s timely in its dissection of wrongful incarceration. The story of Celestial and Roy is one for the books. Don’t just take my word for it: it was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. Additionally, it received ringing citations for The New York Times and the ALA. It would be a beloved winner.
A 1980s-set novel about Chicago, the AIDS epidemic, and friendship is the most likely winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It’s everywhere. Readers, writers, and bloggers can’t stop talking about it. It won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal—just like recent Pulitzer winners The Underground Railroad, The Sympathizer, All the Light We Cannot See, and The Goldfinch. The Great Believers was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the National Book Award. It made it onto the “100 Notable Books of 2018” by The New York Times, and it received an ALA citation. It also appeared on countless “best of” lists. The story is emotional and totally consuming, and it’s impossible to forget. Sometimes, a book is too big to ignore, and The Great Believers looks to be one of those books.
I did pretty well when I tried this prediction thing back in 2017. I got that Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad would win, and I called Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone as a nominee. I really do think Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers takes it, but the Pulitzer announcement usually comes with some surprises.
Here’s the thing to remember: April 15th is a day to celebrate literature. Whether a book you love or loathe wins, the public will be talking about books. And you know what? I think that makes us all winners.
The term “community” is one of the most worn out phrases of the early aughts. I’ve had more than three job titles featuring the word “community.” Each of these jobs had entirely different goals and tasks I completed in front of a computer. Every nonprofit I have interacted with has “community” peppered in mission and value statements. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter sell community as a service. In the meat and produce sections of grocery stores, community is mentioned on food labels and store signs. Yesterday, I ate a bag of chips that had a paragraph about community under the nutrition information. Community is thrown around so often that I’ve lost sense of what it means.
Enter Lot by Bryan Washington. Lot is a collection of short stories that feature characters from Houston neighborhoods. Places like Alief, Bayou, and Shepherd are depicted from many perspectives. Corporations and nonprofits depict community in one dimension—a space for pleasant interactions with people of your choosing. Lot tells stories of people trying to figure out how to survive and find joy in situations they don’t choose. Lot reminded me that the unit of a city is the neighborhood and that a community is any group of people trying to figure out what they owe each other.
I was happy to speak to Bryan about how he chose the short story genre to write about Houston, how this collection changed him as an artist, and how his relationship to Houston has changed since he penned these stories.
Candace Williams: While I read the book, the word “community” kept popping into my head. I’ve worked in schools, startups, and nonprofits that really preach community. It’s mentioned in most mission statements. When I think about Alief and Waugh, I’m thinking about the physical terrain of the neighborhoods and the orbits and constellations of people. I think the question “What do people owe to each other and to their situation?” is very important to this book. Very early on, I realized that in this book, community doesn’t necessarily mean friendship or being nice. That was very interesting to me because many people think of friendliness when they think of the word “community.” I’d really love to hear you talk more about community and how it works in this book.
Bryan Washington: One of the things I’m most interested in, or one of the themes that I gravitate to with the characters that I write, is they’re sort of seeking a place of comfort or a place where they fit in. Sometimes that’s with their blood family. Other times that’s with their found family. The idea of community is one that I come back to often, particularly in narratives about Houston, because one of the most fascinating things to me about this particular city are the ways in which people reach across ethnic lines and religious lines. And across languages to create a sort of community. Often times what they end up with isn’t necessarily what would be the expected outcome. I think that’s part of what makes Houston so rife for stories. The diversity of the city is such that you just have a lot of different narratives. A lot of different ways of life, and a lot of different ways of living that are just bubbling not only under the surface, but within plain sight.
On my end, I didn’t appreciate it until I left the city for a little while and got to travel a bit and came back. I was a little bit mystified upon returning how everybody was able to make it work despite their differences. So that’s something that was deeply interesting to me at the time and it was a really fun question to parse in each of these stories—What community meant to each of these characters, what were the sort of bonds that each of the characters have between one another, and how much pressure could be applied before they came apart or didn’t come apart and why on both fronts. So, sort of asking, “What is each character looking for? What are they going to do when they find it?” And the why, just continuing to ask “why?” for every conflict, every scenario, every character. That’s one of the ways in which the collection came together.
CW: Would you say that for you, writing is a way that you find comfort? Is it a comfortable process? Or is it the opposite? I kind of find that for me, poetry is both extremes. Sometimes I’ll be like, “Wow, that broke me apart and I need to see a therapist right away.” And then other times I’ll say, “Wow, this is one of the most cohesive uplifting things I’ve ever done.”
The process of writing for me is pretty hellish. It’s really a shitty experience. But, on the flip side, it’s just absolutely horrible.
BW: So, the process of writing for me is pretty hellish. It’s really a shitty experience. But, on the flip side, it’s just absolutely horrible. I saw Min Jin Lee when she passed through Houston maybe a year ago and someone had asked a similar question to her about what it took to just sit down in a chair and just slog through the process of writing a novel. Because it is work, you’re not building houses, and you’re not washing dishes, and you aren’t mowing laws. The actual physical toll on you is minimal and it is very much a privilege to be able to get to do what we do. But it is labor. Her thing was finding the joy in what you were writing, and not writing something that isn’t, if it doesn’t put you in the chair. If you aren’t excited to write it, then it’s like why do it?
That is sort of what fuels all of my work on the fiction side. If it’s not a story I’m excited to write, if I’m not excited to write about these characters, the conflicts, the conversations that they’re having, the ways in which they’re gravitating and moving through the world, then it’s not gonna be exciting. It’s probably not gonna be exciting for the reader. So that is something that I’m constantly having to evaluate with the project of Lot, or any other project that I’m working on. Is it something that I want to sit in the chair and do? And then if it is, everything else in my experience has sort of fallen into place. Even if the work is difficult, I want to be there and I want to do it.
CW: I was wondering how these stories fit into the timeline of your life and Houston’s life. How long did it take you to finish the whole collection?
BW: Three years total. From the first story until the last story, and then after we sold the stories, it was another two years before release. Originally, I thought of the stories that make up the collection as singular entities and I was submitting those to journals. Mostly the ones that I enjoyed reading. I didn’t really have a map or a foundation behind it. About half of them had already been published in one form or another out in the world prior to Riverhead picking it up. That in itself was a sort of validation as far as my seeing that people might be interested in these stories or they might have a little bit more value outside of my interest and my friend’s interest because it’s one of those things where I write for myself and for my friends really. You write the story that you wanna read. But seeing that external validation is pretty helpful as far as giving me a sort of a drive to finish the project.
Once we sold the text I got to work with my editor at Riverhead, Laura Perciasepe, and our goal from there was tying each of the narratives that we’d originally conceived as being separate into a full book. So, in lieu of reading one story about a particular hub of Houston, and then another story about a particular hub of Houston, and then the only thing that binds them together is the book’s literal binding, is the challenge to create a sort of community. Or a sort of atmosphere that tied all of the stories together.
CW: I just want to hear more about how this book might have changed you as an artist or even as a person because I think that’s a big artistic shift—to go from seeing it as disparate stories to kind of seeing it as separate stories that feed into one place or one work that you’re trying to build.
BW: I’m still trying to reckon with that. The way in which Lot changed my process or how it informed my process. One thing that I did fairly recently is read about half of the audiobooks for the recurring narrator stories.
CW: Wow.
BW: It was an illuminating experience because as I was reading it there were times where I would look up and I would make contact with the audio engineer and we would just think like, “Fuck, the narrator has really been through a lot,” or I would read certain passages and I was like, “Wow.” One of the ways I think that my process has changed is that there was a sort of kinetic energy that was running through the stories that now when I read them or when I look back at them I sort of wonder how I was able to conjure that at the time. Because it just seem very foreign to me. The energy that’s throughout the book.
Originally, when I was trying to decide what it would look like, in my head I thought of a collection that was made up of a series of Houston’s hubs. Each piece or each story would take place in a hub within the city and they would be connected, just like you said, by merit of geography. But, because each of those tiny little towns have very specific characteristics and details to them, those details would give each piece its own autonomy. I ended up moving away from that because it was really ambitious. That would have been really fucking difficult to pull off for a first time author let alone any author.
I was approaching it from too big of a focus on the geography in lieu of just trying to tell the stories. What ultimately ended up happening was that I latched on to a handful of voices. And one voice in particular, the recurring narrator. At first, the goal on my end was to figure out how to tell the stories about each of these hubs that tries to capture the character and the atmosphere of that area. Then, I thought: Here’s this one person, what’s going on in their life? Why do they feel the way they do when they’re moving through the world? How does it affect the people around them and where are they going to go from there?
Once I started asking those questions, everything else surrounding those particular narratives and the narratives of the other characters made a lot more sense and the process was a lot more seamless. It was still difficult to try and pull off and bring together, but the structural question was put to rest. More often than not, when I’m working on a longer project, the structure is the hold up. Trying to figure out how something will work. The interior of it. Piecing things together or just trying to figure out what component goes where is a lot less painful once I have an idea of what the makeup looks like.
CW: Playing with the words. I try to talk about, talk to students about that. Sometimes I’m just like, “Can you just play, kind of like you’re playing basketball or you’re just painting and you’re experimenting?” Get yourself to a place where you could actually play with language. That’s what we tend to hammer out of kids with language because we take it so seriously. As we should. But it turns into, “Can you read? Can you understand this and write about it? If you can’t then it was a waste of time and you need to be knocked back a class or whatever.” Instead of saying something like “Not everything you write has to be intelligible to everyone or even to you. You might write something and it doesn’t make sense to you until two or three years later.” How do we help kids keep the creativity going when it’s so cutthroat out there?
BW: Two revelatory things to me in that respect were: One, reading Helen Oyeyemi talk about the idea of writing a novel that’s like a game. Or writing a novel that’s existence is solely for the sake of this being a novel as opposed to some sort of large, overarching thing with all these important scenes and ideas that all have to build together to create the capital B-I-G, capital N-O-V-E-L novel. It just seems super cool to me because it’s something that I just hadn’t thought about. But then, you hear it and say, “Yeah.” The point of a novel that you’re writing should be to exist in and of itself. For the sake of itself and creating its own universe.
I think something else that’s been super helpful for me is that I teach ESL, so I’m working with a lot of kids who are just now coming to terms with English. Point blank. They’re trying to figure out the contours of the language. I’m watching the ways that they treat it very much like a game and they’re right I think.
CW: Yeah, it is a game.
BW: They try to figure out the adjective placement or try to figure out certain tonalities. Because a language is a language, they come across a new way of speaking, and that in itself becomes a language. So then they’ll find the words to adjust to that. I see the many different ways in which English is malleable. So, the question on my end becomes “How do we negotiate the malleability while trying to tell a narrative that has weight, and doing it in such a way that I’m able to tell the story that I wanna tell in a way that is clear for the reader?”
CW: So, do you think that if you attempted to write these stories now, do you think that they would be different or the same? Do you think that these areas of Houston have changed even since you’ve written these? Or do you think that your artistry has changed?
BW: I think they would be different partly because these particular areas of Houston have changed. The neighborhoods that I mentioned. Whether it’s East Town, whether it’s Montrose, whether it’s certain portions of Alief. Writing the book, in a lot of ways, was a little bit like lighting in a bottle. Two or three years ago those places were in a major moment of flux. And it would be very difficult I think to conjure or re-conjure that on the page now given not only how those parts of the city are but how my adjustment to them has been in the interim years. As far as what I’m drawn to on the page, they would just read as wildly different. I think that they’re, again the energy that I brought to Lot. Now that I’ve come out of another long project I can say that the process with which I approach stories has changed.
I don’t think that that’s a foreign idea. I think that every project has its own requirements from you as the creator. Is the same true for poets? I know that at times poems can be much smaller endeavors, much smaller projects if it’s one word in lieu of a much longer piece.
CW: I’m trying to take myself back to when I first started and not be writing toward a collection. For me, in poetry, things are better when I can play around more. If I get married to one form or one content idea or one speaker, then I might actually miss out. So I’ve been trying to talk to different poets and read different things that are out there for me. I would say a linear poet in a lot of ways. I’m a very logical, conversational poet. Everything has a logical next step and there’s a beginning.
It’s not predictable but it’s definitely linear. I’ve been trying to break that mold in a lot of ways. After this summer, I would like to say, “Oh, I kind of know the project I’m working on.” But I’m also working on some visual art right now and trying some other things. So it’s okay if keep my work in this pre-project stage. A lot of interesting things could actually happen.
BW: That’s so cool that you’re able to work across mediums. Because generally when I’m working, I mean certainly for all of my fiction, for a good chunk of my non-fiction, the way that I approach those narratives is very non-linear. This makes the essay pitching process just the worst because I can’t say what it will be like. I haven’t figured it out myself yet. But as far as fiction is concerned, I have an inclination to juggle multiple narrators and multiple timelines. To work with larger gaps in time. Sort of moving back and forth and playing with white space. Partly, this is the idea of making the text a game, and partly that’s what I have to do before I figure out what the narration would ultimately look like. To sort of move things around and, you know, just play with it until it makes some semblance of sense to me.
Once that happens, it’s usually a structural issue. I’ll move the right passage from page 15 to page three and all of a sudden everything else will click in my head. I must spend the time doing that work and moving it around. It can feel as if it’s dead work. You’re just sort of moving words or putting words and getting rid of them without actually playing into the conflicts on the page. If I don’t do it, then it’s really hard for the story to come together for me. It just won’t really make sense. Then, once it does, everything else fits into play.
CW: I’m just really interested in your thoughts on Houston and its future. Just so you know, my sixth graders come in wearing a lot more Houston gear.
BW: Oh great, absolutely.
CW: Well, I think it’s because of the Astros, right? But also Travis Scott and Beyoncé. My students are wearing Travis Scott gear. A lot of his artwork is about Astroworld and why it was put there and why it was taken away. I just think he’s had a huge impact on consciousness about gentrification, specifically in Houston. I think that, even my students are having a conversation about it which is pretty awesome in some ways. But then, on the other hand, I’m thinking about Brooklyn and also Atlanta. When people start to have conversations about your city or neighborhood, there’s a displacement process associated with that conversation. So the conversation can be good but it’s also scary.
So, if someone were to give you millions of dollars and said “Hey, you can build an art institution in Houston.” What would you want that institution to do? Where would it go? What would the goal be?
BW: That’s such an interesting question. And that’d be a huge responsibility so I don’t know could give you a clean answer. The one thing I will say is that I would want it [to be] Alief. Alief is a very diverse suburb within Houston. I don’t know exactly what the makeup of that particular museum would be. I think that there’s an interesting way in which people who aren’t from the city can acknowledge the expanse of the city’s diversity and the totality of the city’s diversity and what its implications are without actually centering the voices that make up that diversity. To sort of acknowledge that there is a massive, massive Latino influence upon the city. And, that there is a massive Black influence upon the city. And, that there’s a massive Asian influence upon the city. People who aren’t from the city will simultaneously center white voices to tell those stories and narratives and sort of dictate the terms of what those narratives are allowed to look like.
When folks approach Houston with the intent of finding one story they’re going to fail every time because there’s just too many different ways to live here.
Finding a way to tell the stories of each individual community and the ways in which they’ve managed to create community within the city, in the same place, would go a long way to also telling the story of how they ultimately managed to fit together. The ways in which they were able to come together. Because that’s what’s happened here. I mean, each of these communities within the city are very much themselves and yet, they’re willing to learn from those that are adjacent to them on our left, those that are adjacent to them. Give and take. It really is a gift to live here. The challenge will be to find a way to display the city’s individual components while also paying a huge homage to how they’re able to come and work together.
It’s really cool to see the city get a sort of national visibility and in some cases international visibility. Whether it’s Travis Scott, whether it’s Beyoncé. Whether it’s Solange. She just had the record come out. Half the tracks are street names. Like Almeda, Binz. That sort of thing goes a really long way because when you see those street names, those place names, that iconography, you’re able to attach a narrative to it. I feel like that’s how Hollywood becomes Hollywood. How Main Street in any city becomes Main Street, you know? Like, Canal street becomes Canal Street because of the narratives and the associations we bring to them. But, I think that it’s really not enough to have narratives associated with those places and things. Who is getting to tell those narratives? On what terms are they able to tell those narratives? Would they not be able to tell the ones that they want to tell? How they would like to tell it? Or, maybe they’re being dictative with a sort of dominant narrative in mind. Where it has to be a cis white narrative or a cis white vantage point.
With any changing city, whether it’s Brooklyn or whether it’s Oakland, there is a risk that’s there. Who gets to tell the stories? How are they getting to tell the stories? To what extent are the stories that they’re telling are being amplified in relation to the folks who have historically had control of this dominant narrative?
Trying to spread the wealth of stories to around the city would be the goal of that museum. It would take a really long time to do that. Houston has multitudes. I think that, in a lot of ways Los Angeles is a sister city. I very seldom hear someone say, “Oh, you know L.A. This is the story of L.A. It’s just one thing.” There’s a sort of general acknowledgement, at least from my end, that L.A. is made up of many different people. Many different narratives. I think the same is true of Houston. Which is why, when folks approach the city with the intent of finding one story they’re going to fail every time because there’s just too many different ways to live here. And that’s a gift, so the solution is not really a story, so much as more stories. I want more people to tell their stories. And from that you’re able create a story that’s, mural or a modulation of what the city is, and can be. Where it can go.
There is certain joy in discovering the brilliance of a new writer. With favorite, seasoned writers like Jesmyn Ward or Michael Chabon, I know to expect exceptional work. The gamble of picking up a name I am not familiar with could end with reading a jumbled mess. Yet, there is no greater rush than when I find a gem that I fall in love with. That rush has inspired me to create Debutiful, a literary website dedicated to celebrating debut authors and their books through book reviews and author interviews.
Narrowing down this list of debuts was difficult. There have already been a lot of stellar new works published and it would be impossible to read every single one that publishes in a single year. These are the newly published memoirs, novels, and short story collections that I have not stopped thinking about or titles that booksellers and writers have been enthusiastically recommending.
Here are the 20 best debut novels of the first half of 2019.
Mesha Maren’s atmospheric Southern noir was the first book I fell in love with this year. Her book explores queer sexuality and how where we live informs our life decisions. When Jodi McCarty is released after nearly two decades in prison, she is not exactly sure who she is or what she wants. Until she meets the enigmatic Miranda.
99 Nights in Logar follow a young boy in war-torn Afghanistan tracking down his family guard dog who bit his finger off. A coming-of-age tale, this novel offers a worldview into the ties of familial history.
Rabeah Ghaffari’s story set during the 1979 Iranian Revolution is more than a history lesson. The saga is a character study about how our place in the world is viewed by others, but more importantly, what our place in the world means to us.
Lauren Wilkinson’s debut is a Cold War spy thriller starring a black, female intelligence officer. But it’s so much more. It’s a meditation on double consciousness and bounces from 1980s Burkina Faso to present day America through complex threads and clever prose. It is sincerely one of the best books I have read so far this year. Read my interview with Wilkinson here.
Pitchaya Sudbanthad explores the past, present, and near future of his native Bangkok through tangentially connected stories that reveal the essence of the city. Ranging from tales about a missionary doctor to a post-World War II relationship to present-day political uneasiness, he showcases the complexities of the city’s history and culture.
In her novel, Lindsay Stern provides an insightful look into the difficulties of communication within a marriage. Two married college professors have a wedge driven between them when an attractive new colleague comes to town. It is a fresh take on the unraveling of a relationship and the fragility of our egos.
Connected through life in the circus, these stories delve into the lonely worlds of misfits and outcasts. While it would be easy to put the freak label on some of these characters, Mayer finds the nuances in their lives that give them humanity. The collection of short stories is dizzyingly fantastical on every single page.
Bryan Washington’s portrait of his hometown Houston reveals the modern-day struggles of race, socioeconomic status, and sexuality. Woven throughout the stories is an unnamed teen who struggles from adolescence to adulthood. His upbringing by a hyper-masculine father is a reoccurring clash that unfolds as he navigates his own identity and status in the world.
In this fiercely honest memoir, T Kira Madden offers a look into her unstable childhood through to her sexual awakening in her teenage years. She writes about her father’s alcoholism, being a misfit at her private school, and exploring her queerness that she never knew was there. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is written with a raw emotional explosiveness that is so often hidden in our social media era.
I stayed away from this book at first because it was billed as being reminiscent of Bridget Jones’ Diary, which isn’t exactly my cup of tea. Then, on a whim, I read half of it through a single night. Reader, don’t make the mistake I did. It was a pleasure to watch the titular Queenie go through messy breakups, figuring out how to balance her two cultures and stand out as an independent black woman among her white peers.
A Woman is No Man is a multi-generational saga of Palestinian American women that Etaf Rum says was “violating our code of silence.” Rum questions why there aren’t many books by and about Arab American women. Her novel follows Deya in modern-day Brooklyn who is approaching her high school graduation (and an arranged marriage.) The book also explores the traumatic pasts of her mother Isra and her grandmother Fareeda.
Sarah Blake has published two poetry books as well as an e-chapbook, but this is her first official novel. So, I’m counting it. It’s epic, biblically so. Blake reimagines the Great Flood and puts Noah’s wife at the center of saving civilization with the Ark. It allows Hollywood another original Bible story to adapt, which is good because I’m kind of getting tired of Russell Crowe prancing around with a bad accent.
The Affairs of the Falcóns is a familial saga of undocumented Peruvians in the 1990s. Matriarch Ana struggles to keep her family afloat as the world lobs up every curve ball it can offer. Born in Peru, Melissa Rivero spent most of her childhood in America undocumented and became a U.S. citizen in her 20s. It is eye-opening to see exactly how much and how little immigration policy has changed.
Written by a former trial lawyer, Miracle Creek is a taut courtroom thriller. It moves from the courtroom to explore what it means to be a parent; more specifically, what it means to be a parent who is also an immigrant.
The Light Years is a memoir about hippies, psychedelic drugs, and life in the desert. Chris Rush is an artist by trade. He wrote this book to explore how LSD and acid shaped how he saw the world. This is an ideal narrative for anyone who is a fan of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Beautiful. Bleak. Those are the two words I would ultimately use to describe Lin’s debut. It seems understated, mostly because a lot of people use beautiful to describe nearly everything. Everything from Lin’s prose to her characters to the unjust actions that happen to this Taiwanese family struggling to survive in Alaska is beautiful.
Stella is an Italian immigrant should have died a lot over the course of her century-long, but somehow survived. That is the general synopsis given for this book. Her name itself means “lucky star” in Italian. The book is twisty and complicated, but wholly original.
Subtitled “Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race,” this memoir lured me in with the story of a 1,000-kilometer horse race across the Mongolian grassland. Lara Prior-Palmer became the first woman champion of the Mongol Derby Champion at the age of 19.
Again, technically Ocean Vuong is a published writer (Night Sky Exit Wounds is a breathtaking collection of poems) and I am bending the rules a bit. With On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, he raises the bar with a novel that will surely be on numerous Top Ten lists by the end of the year. The book is written in the form of a letter from a son to his illterate mother, the book gracefully explores sexuality and masculinity as well as race and class. The novel has such a softness to the prose that it stayed with me weeks after I finally finished it.
Toby and Rachel Fleishman are separating after 15 years of marriage. It happens. But what he doesn’t expect is that Rachel would just disappear after leaving the kids at his. Fleishman is in Trouble sounds like a downer, but every advanced praise refers to how blisteringly funny the novel is.
Listen, just because we’re a literary website doesn’t mean we’re above loving comics giant Warren Ellis—author of Transmetropolitan, Planetary, The Authority, Nextwave, and the criminally underrated Desolation Jones among many, many others. So when we found out that Ellis also published his third non-graphic novel Normal with FSG, parent publisher of our Read More Women partner MCD Books, we just had to see whether he’d contribute to the series. Even in the macho world of comics, Ellis has always written interesting, funny, cliché-defying female characters—so which non-male authors does he recommend? These picks are adapted from Ellis’s newsletter Orbital Operations, which includes book reviews among other news. (On the subject of cribbing his RMW picks from his newsletter, Ellis writes: “Hi. I’m a man. We cheat. All the time.”)
Read More Women is Electric Literature’s series, presented in collaboration with MCD Books, in which we feature prominent authors, of any gender, recommending their favorite books by women and non-binary writers. Twice a month, you’ll hear about the five non-male authors who most delight, inspire, and influence your favorite writers.
The Book of Joan is a science fiction story about women. Women who love, women who hate, women who kill, women who destroy. It’s a story about what happens after the end of the world, where (another) other-humanly elite has gone to orbit to live out sexless, loveless lives of bizarre art and ritual.
Christine Pizan, a denizen of the orbiting station that may be all that’s left of the human race, is an artist of skin. Through a braille-like process of branding and skin grafts, she wears stories on her skin. She is the Book of Joan—Joan being Joan of Dirt, the superhuman child soldier who fought the good fight down below and was burned at the stake for it. The term used for Joan’s superhuman condition is engenderine—from engender, whose more archaic definition is “to cause to be born.”
Any book that starts with a quote from Doris Lessing’s mighty Shikasta has me on its side.
The medieval writer Christine de Pizan’s last work was an eulogy of Joan of Arc.
The station is run by a mad misogynist called Jean de Men. De Pizan’s intellectual status in her time was partly made by her dissection of the misogynist writer Jean de Meun. Not being a student of the period, these are things I learned after reading the book. Joan of Dirt is an obvious avatar of Joan of Arc, but I didn’t know the rest. It didn’t make the book any less fascinating to me.
It’s not a happy book, I warn you. There are moments of joy that blaze through it, but, contra to the first quote above, it’s a book about war and women, and birth and the earth. It’s a huge fable about the end of the world, told with pieces of history. It is ambitious, frequently beautiful, and weirdly haunting.
A short book full of big explosions of language. It is an alternate-history of the Radium Girls crime, mashed up with a few other historical occurrences that I don’t want to mention because spoilers. I’d love it if you could come to this book clean.
Which makes it more difficult to talk about.
There are three timelines. In the present day, Kat is trying to solve the problem of marking radioactive waste dumps so that future generations know to avoid them. Which is a real-world thing you should look into sometime, it’s fascinating. A hundred years ago, Regan, a Radium Girl, is dying of cancer and finding her agency. In the deep past, there are myths and legends of elephant culture, passed down through the elephant generations.
Elephant cognition has also been a subject of recent conjecture. This is proper speculative fiction. Bolander adds an elephant-human sign language to great effect. The book is beautifully structured, very inventive (the Disney connection is genius) and generally just a goddamn joy to have discovered in my Amazon Kindle trawling.
Bolander’s conjuring with language, though, is the greatest delight of all the book’s many pleasures.
Kat turns her back on the memorial and the roaring Atlantic dark and shuffles towards the garish electric dawn of Coney Island, some skeleton’s memory of what progress looked like.
Some skeleton’s memory of what progress looked like. I would have paid real money to write a sentence like that.
There’s a field of rogue mutant hair transplants, and the hair field is grazed upon by a trip of transgenic goats, and there’s like five pages on the digestive processes of these goats, including shoals of microsquid that live in one of the four stomachs. And it’s brilliant.
If you’re not up for that: the book is about people who use chopsticks to tie knots in spacetime for travel purposes. And art.
Rachel is a synthetic biologist—I met her at a think-tank in Eindhoven a few years ago—and Origamy is what happens when you let a synthetic biologist write a full work of speculative fiction. Possibly this practice will be banned after Origamy is released.
It’s an incredibly dense piece of bizarre fantastika balanced artfully on a very simple structure, a journey of discovery, secrets and ancient threats. Parts feel like they’ve come from fable, or folk tales about strange circus people. In reading it, I’ve gotten through about ten pages at a time before having to stop and stare into space and process everything that’s just been dumped into my head. It’s like she freebased twelve novels into one intense concentrated rock.
Origamy is a magnificent, glittering explosion of a book: a meditation on creation, the poetry of science and the insane beauty of everything. You’re going to need this. Frankly, there are only people who have read Origamy and people who have not, and neither of them are able to understand the other.
This book is a wonder. It’s the story of existentialism. By which I mean: this is the story of crazy people and wonderful people and fucked-up people and dancing and drinking and thinking people. It starts with someone in a cafe in Paris explaining a new form of philosophy using a cocktail. Meanwhile, in Germany, a man is yelling for coffee so that he can make that philosophy out of it. This is phenomenology, which gave rise to existentialism, and Bakewell tells it all in terms of cafe conversation and jazz clubs and old houses and shacks in the woods, in occupied cities and military stations and mad dashes across borders, alternating between biography and the sort of clear, warm explanations of philosophical ideas that even uneducated laypeople like me can grasp. Husserl, Heidegger, Camus and the like are all here, and, of course, Sartre, but also, thank god, Simone de Beauvoir gets significant space, and pleasingly, so does the dancing master of humanism, Merleau-Ponty. I did not want this book to end. It’s marvelous. A great story, and, in some ways, a valedictory one, of the days before philosophy was completely subsumed by academe and became a thing of technical language and minor considerations. (Side effect: if you’ve ever visited Paris, it will really make you miss it.)
It’s a crime story. It’s also a study in isolation and mental illness. And a masterclass in literary eccentricity. For example:
“He was a man of very few words, and as it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.”
The protagonist’s narration is just fascinating, and a joy to read. She lives on a plateau, somewhere in southern Poland near the Czech border, shares with a few other hermit types and a lot of animals. One night, one of those hermit types is found to have died. And the protagonist finds evidence suggesting it may not have been a simple death.
I don’t want to say a lot more about it, save that the mystery—and the deaths that follow—tangle up the supernatural with the ecological and the social and even the literary, without ever really breaking the spell of one estranged and lonely and aging woman who is a head smarter than anyone else she knows dealing with loss and damage and distance and an unexplained death that nobody else seems to want to solve.
It is fierce and golden and kind of heartbreaking and another phenomenal choice from one of my favorite publishers, Fitzcarraldo. There’s nothing else quite like it.
Set in and around a performing arts high school in the 1980s, Pulitzer prize finalist Susan Choi’s latest novel, Trust Exercise, introduces Sarah and David, caught in a teenage love affair that draws in everyone around them, including their classmates and their acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. By turns witty, wise, and moving, around the halfway point a startling shift in point of view launches the characters forward in time in a reexamined conclusion that is both astonishing and memorable.
While at the AWP conference in Portland, Oregon, I had the chance to sit down with Susan in a hotel lobby for an interview. We spoke of everything from language play to Susan’s electric plot twists to the difficulties of being a teenager—and yes, spoilers, which, given the intricacies of Trust Exercise, were impossible to avoid during the interview but which of course have been omitted here.
Marci Cancio-Bello: I wanted to start with the way you use physical space in the book to portray the relationships between characters, describing who gets to observe whom, who is on stage versus who is in the audience, and which characters can move between these spaces. Can you talk about mapping out those spaces?
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Susan Choi: I always think about spaces and have always had trouble writing scenes unless I knew what that physical space was like. While I was revising my last book, My Education. I was concerned that I had not depicted the evolution of a certain relationship in an effective way. These two people lived a certain distance apart, and in the scene they’re on the phone, and I thought, “She’s just going to hang up the phone and walk to this other person’s house.” Depicting that walk was one of my favorite scenes to write for that book, and once I wrote about her traversing that space, the emotional reality of the scene clicked for me.
WithTrust Exercise, I thought a lot about where people lived and what their homes were like. Even from the very first line—“Neither can drive”—I was interested in the attraction between these two young people who can’t traverse spaces to get together. I grew up in a car culture, where getting your driver’s license was possibly the most important thing because you had no freedom without it and were totally dependent upon other people to get you places. Sarah and David want to get together but they can’t drive and there’s all this space between them. How do they cross it? I realize now it was similar to that scene in My Education where I was trying to get these lovers across a physical space so they could be together. That has to be something I’m preoccupied by at some gut level.
MCB: Because you’re working with teenage characters, those moments are so heightened. It’s important to them what they drive, who gets in whose car, and even where they sit. In one of the trust circle exercises, Sarah has intense emotional reactions precisely because she can’t see where David is sitting. These details are so beautifully done. I stayed up late each night reading this book, trying to pick out the threads, and wanted to read it again as soon as I finished. I couldn’t stop.
SC: I’m sorry to have kept you up, but that’s really exciting. One of the things I’ve been laughing about is that this book started as a side project. I was working on a different book that I still haven’t finished. I was just looking for something to do because my work was not going that well, and I thought, “Maybe I’ll finally write a short story.”
My dream has always been to write a decent short story, which is challenging and rigorous, and you have to have your structure under control. This was my attempt at a short story, which is really just the shortest book I’ve ever published. Everything just started spooling out and getting more complicated instead of tying up. At some point, when it was around 70 pages long, I thought maybe it would become a novella, but that didn’t work out either.
MCB: I love that this novel was a side project. Do you think that freed you up to write this one with less pressure?
SC: I think somebody gave me the term “side project” as I was trying to explain how this book had come to exist, because I certainly never thought of it as a side project. I thought of it as something I did to put in my writing time for the day when everything was going poorly. I was freed up in a way because I thought of it as something just for fun.
MCB: One of the most entertaining passages for me was when you played with language itself, the way a word can become either noun or verb with a different emphasis. For example, “OBject vs. obJECT” and “PERmit vs. perMIT.” Could you talk a little bit about those moments?
SC: It was really fun. A fair amount of that came out of procrastination. The transition from physical dictionaries and thesauruses to online has created a real space for high-minded procrastination because I would sit in my writing space trying to think of the right word, and I could just look it up. It used to be that I found it onerous to turn to the dictionary or thesaurus because I’d have to go get it off the shelf, open it, remember how the alphabet works—true laziness—but with the online versions, you can sit there and google Merriam-Webster, OED, etc. It became a permitted form of procrastination. I would think, “This is educational. I’m finally being a good writer looking up different words,” when actually I was just wasting a lot of time.
I was spending so much time doing this that it folded itself into the character voice. I can’t remember how I found a word list similar to the one in the book, but over the course of looking things up, I kept thinking of more and more words that worked with the varied emphasis. I was interested in “audition” because I couldn’t understand why it was called that. It’s one of those words where, as it is described, the subject performing the action is changed. That was an example of when procrastination actually pays off.
MCB: The very act of writing for yourself, but also for everyone who is going to read it, seems similar to the idea that as a teenager, everything feels deeply private but also deeply public.
SC: Yes, it is a strange, contradictory thing to do. At one of my AWP panels, the moderator asked about inhibition or fear as you’re working on a project; did any of us ever feel like we can’t say this or can’t write that, or shouldn’t. My response to that, which is also appropriate to this, was that it would never occur to me to feel that way while I was writing, because it always felt very private, but then there’s this strange transition where you show the work and expose this thing that felt like something no one would ever see, which is not ever true. You have to pass through the looking glass and then ask, “Actually everyone will see this, and am I still okay with that?”
MCB: Yes. When we’re young, our feelings are so strictly policed by others and ourselves that we feel like everyone is watching, but nobody’s really paying attention because they’re all noticing themselves too. At one point, the movement teacher tells Sarah that these feelings are a difficult gift, which is really insightful. You’re able to capture the complex feelings of what it means to be a teenager more than most books for and about teens.
SC: Oh, thank you. I hope to have captured that, but at the same time, I would not want my teenage son to read this book. That’s the weird conundrum, that maybe this story captures what it means to be a teenager but is strangely inappropriate for actual teenagers. I don’t think of this as a book that I would want a young adult to read, because there is something terribly bleak and painful about so much of it. The emotional landscape of teenagers is extremely complex, arguably more complex than that of us adults, and I believe in that idea that the movement teacher expresses to Sarah when she says that your experience of your emotional life is so much more intense than it will be when you mature, and that is really difficult but it is a gift because you are going to lose this capacity for heightened feeling as you grow up; the edges get sanded down and you grow all of the armor that enables you to get through life without having a really terrible time of it, but that’s a loss too. I really do think that’s true.
That period of maturation, passing from childhood to adulthood, is critical for everything that comes after.
MCB: This story made me feel like I could better understand my teenage self better, but also understand other people better for their teenage selves.
SC: It has to be retrospective. I have heard of studies about music preference—and other forms of preference—there are reasons to believe that a lot of our lifelong preferences are set at this age, 14, 15, 16 where we’re exposed to things that sink into our emotional core and become the things that are precious to us, even though we might have an intellectual appreciation of other things later. I remember reading a particular study about music and thinking, “Oh no, no wonder I still tear up when I hear Journey on the radio. I’ll never be cured because I really liked Journey when I was 14.” But I think there’s a larger truth in it. That period of maturation when you’re passing from childhood to adulthood is critical for everything that comes after and makes us who we are, for better or worse.
MCB: It’s fascinating how your characters look back on their teenage years. At one point, David says, “They knew what they were doing. We knew what we were doing. Remember what we were like? […] We were never children.”
SC: It was as true as it was false. At that age, you are an adult, and you have opinions and judgments and you’re no longer this vessel for your parents’ ideas, and you’re also still a child. You’re so different from who you will end up being at 25 or 35 or 45. It is a difficult age for us to understand culturally. There is a weird social incoherence about the way we treat people at these different ages that we’ve chosen socially to represent adulthood: The age at which you can serve your nation in the military is different from the age at which you can drive a car or buy beer. You can look at a person and see an adult and also see a child, and you are right on both counts.
MCB: We can’t expect these characters to think about the repercussions of the decisions they make when they’re teenagers, but it deeply affects the rest of their lives. Can you talk about that level of complicity in their own journey?
SC: They make decisions that they make because they have agency, but they do not make decisions in the same way as they might later on. When my children were about three years old, I remember a friend of mine said that this is the stage at which children have all of this physical capability but no judgment, and there’s something analogous about their teen years. They have all of this knowledge and sophistication and agency and discernment and judgment, and yet they still lack a lot of those same things that they will acquire later, so it is possible to make decisions that seem really considered but if you put them in a time machine and push them forward ten years, they would never make that same decision. It’s quite complicated.
MCB: That movement teacher who recognizes this about Sarah is perhaps one of the most generous adults in the story, and yet the students make fun of her a bit.
SC: She is one of the few adults who actually recognizes that there is a difference between adults and teenagers, but the difference isn’t in the form of inferiority. She’s saying that they are different in this fundamental way that has to be respected, but since most of the other adults don’t acknowledge that difference, there is a difference in power that also goes unacknowledged. The movement teacher is one of the very few adults who sees them in their difference, respects them, and passionately supports who they are, and they are flattered by her generosity toward them, but they don’t actually recognize it for what it is. She’s really a minor character, but I loved what she said to Sarah because I felt like it’s one of the truths in the book, among a lot of non-truths.
You can look at a person and see an adult and also see a child.
MCB: I felt that this story teaches its readers about respect for the many subjects you’re tackling: respect for teenagers, respect for feelings, respect for other people’s emotional truths, which may not be your own. You’re teaching readers to pay attention to the complexities of other people’s place in the world.
SC: I started this book so long ago when I started procrastinating with it, that I was more interested in mining my memories of being a teenager, and my speculations about teenagers as a category, but this book took so long to evolve that in the course of it, I found myself the parent of a teenager. In a way, my child turned into a teenager more quickly than this procrastination turned into a book, but it’s been interesting having those two experiences in tandem. I got to thinking about the worlds of emotion and thought and experience that are locked inside my teenage child that I’ll never know. And it’s right that I shouldn’t know, right? They’re his. But it’s humbling to be aware of that.
MCB: Do you feel like you gave more space to the book because your son turned into a teenager while this was happening, and vice versa, that you gave him more space because you were understanding your characters better?
SC: The book was pretty far along to being what it was going to be as my son was becoming the young adult that he is continuing to become. It might surprise him to hear this, but I think that actually thinking about the book has made me a slightly different parent.
I think the book has changed my feelings as a parent more than my feelings as a parent have changed the book. Doing all the thinking the book required has powerfully reminded me that my teenage child is this separate world and it’s not for me to try to control that world, it’s not for me to try to spy on it or fully understand it. In a way, I have to figure out how to honor it and support it and protect it without trespassing. It’s tricky because in my own experience of being a teenager, in my recollection, that the adults in my life felt irrelevant. That’s probably as it should be to a certain degree, because you’re becoming an adult yourself, so you have to render the adults in your world irrelevant, but I think that still there was a role for the adults in my life that I still haven’t quite figured out, and I have to figure it out now as I’m the adult in my own child’s life. A lot of ink has been spilled on this subject, so I have a have a lot of help in figuring out how to be the right kind of adult. It’s a tough challenge.
When I entered the world of Indonesian literary translation several years ago, I was blissfully unaware of how dysfunctional it was. (Nor did I suspect that I would eventually become so troubled by its colonialistic aspects that I would write a controversial and impassioned Tweet thread on the subject.) What I’ve found, though, is that unequal power dynamics are determining how literature from Indonesia is being curated for consumption by the English-speaking world. The problem is systemic, evident in the condescending attitudes of Anglophone publishers and advocates of Indonesian fiction and poetry—and also which authors get to regularly represent Indonesia on the international stage.
A bit about myself: I am of Chinese-Indonesian descent, but only lived in Indonesia from the age of 9 to 15 (the rest of my childhood was spent in Singapore although I was born in the U.S.). I grew up hearing Indonesian spoken around me and though I occasionally used it myself, I only began making concerted efforts to improve my language abilities during graduate school by taking classes and reading Indonesian fiction.
I was driven by a desire to connect with a part of my heritage that my family, for their own reasons, had discouraged me from cultivating. I moved from being a reader of Indonesian literature to researching it as an academic before becoming a full-time writer and translator. Ever since, I have become increasingly horrified at the multiple layers of gatekeeping that distort the Western world’s impression of Indonesian writing. I attempt a partial exposure here to help with efforts to solve the problem—not only in the context of Indonesia, but also other countries that may be facing the same issues.
“Publishers Aren’t Looking For You.”
Does this book travel well? This question is maddeningly familiar to those operating in international writing and publishing networks. The variations of this question include: Can this story cross cultures? Will readers be able to relate? Is there too much historical and cultural detail for the reader to process? Publishers don’t mean that they are looking for “un-foreign” foreign work. Rather, foreign work needs to be foreign in familiar ways—exotic enough to give the reader satisfaction about foraying into another country or culture without overwhelming or alienating them. It’s like crafting the perfect tourist experience. Unfamiliar yet comfortable. Orientalizing, not disorienting. This is why once a few authors from a particular country win over the English-speaking market, other authors may follow suit: their subject matter has become more known and therefore more palatable.
If prodded, individuals in the publishing industry may be apologetic. They may acknowledge it’s unfair that Western readers get to be so finicky when the rest of the world (including Indonesia) readily consumes whatever books are taking the English-speaking world by storm. Nevertheless the expectation that the rest of the world cater to Anglophone tastes remains in place, informing the assessments of even those who earnestly profess to be seeking content from other countries. As a recent Guardian article has observed, English is colonizing the planet, which is also why getting the attention of the English-speaking market is key to global literary success.
Indonesia’s literature is no exception to the rule, subject to the same concerns about works “traveling well” even as they remain recognizably foreign. I was once asked to recommend a work to a publisher—something “classic” and “universal” was the stated preference. These terms are code for the question, Can the Western reader relate? I’ve also been asked to assess whether a novel “would speak across cultures” and whether its cultural and historical details would prove too challenging for readers.
Conversely, works have to be sufficiently “Indonesian” to excite interest. I found out from two friends who co-translated a short-story collection that a UK press rejected it for not engaging deeply enough with Indonesian political and social issues. As one longtime publisher and translator has baldly stated in a Jakarta Post interview: “Publishers aren’t looking for you, they’re looking for Indonesia.”
The parochialism of the Anglophone publishing industry also means that it is unwilling to trust the judgment of Indonesians concerning their own writers. While a positive reception back home may certainly earn an author’s work a closer look, they won’t ultimately compel an editor to accept a work for publication. This effectively means that Indonesian authors have to pass through two stages of screening to find a publisher abroad: one on its home turf, followed by another in which any accolades or rave reviews garnered may be discounted, or worse, contradicted.
I’ve received rejections from editors at anthologies and literary magazines, some of them supposedly eager to receive Indonesian submissions, who have dismissed short stories using language that suggests the works fall short of some objective non-culturally-specific literary standard—despite the fact that the same stories, among Indonesian readers, have garnered recognition and praise. For example, one journal expressed “concerns about the structure of the story”; another piece was deemed well-translated but “a bit muddled” with regards to its handling of time. The same two friends I mention above received in their rejection letter the remark that the writing “wasn’t arresting enough,” despite the fact that the author in question is widely considered one of the nation’s greatest revolutionary-era writers.
In short, Indonesian literature undergoes a transformation when it moves beyond its country’s borders. Beloved, acclaimed, or influential at home, the same literary text may be dismissed, even denigrated, by Western arbiters of taste abroad. One would hope, then, that those responsible for bringing these texts to the attention of the western world would do their best to counter such disdain. Unfortunately, by and large, those who advocate on Indonesian literature’s behalf are often guilty of perpetuating the problem.
“Limited at Best”
Anyone remotely familiar with Indonesian literature in translation will have heard of John McGlynn. Born in Wisconsin, McGlynn moved to Indonesia in his late twenties and is now the most prominent and powerful individual on the Indonesian-literature-in-translation scene. In addition to being a translator and chairman of the Lontar Foundation (which promotes and publishes Indonesian literature in translation), he sits on the National Book Committee as supervisor of its translation and literature funding programs. McGlynn was also responsible for coordinating Indonesia’s literary programming at both the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair and last month’s London Book Fair, where Indonesia was, respectively, the guest of honor and market focus. I would hazard to say that he is regarded internationally as the foremost expert on Indonesian literature in translation, and the overwhelming majority of Indonesian literature showcases featured in literary magazines—at least within the past several years, have been curated or co-curated by him, including those featured in Words Without Borders’ 2015 and 2019 issues, Asia Literary Review, AAWW’s The Margins, Cordite Poetry Review, and Stand.
Given McGlynn’s power and visibility, he inevitably sets the tone for how to perceive and treat Indonesian writers. Therefore, it is somewhat concerning when he writes in Issue 52 of the translation journal In Other Words that the Lontar Foundation has resorted to publishing Indonesia’s most revered authors because their “chance for commercial success outside Indonesia’s borders is limited at best.” (The text of the journal article itself, originally made public on the National Centre for Writing website, was taken down due to some controversy caused by the thread I wrote and a Jakarta Globe article by an Indonesian writer published soon after.)
The statement I mention earlier in this essay—“Publishers aren’t looking for you, they’re looking for Indonesia”—hails from the same interview. McGlynn’s other remarks about “Indonesians” include their helpfulness in soliciting funds for Lontar: “donors look askance at giving money to an old white man, even if it is for a good cause. But a beautiful Indonesian woman, that’s another story.”
McGlynn is certainly entitled to his opinions, which come from more than forty years of experience as a translator and publisher. The real question is: does such experience give someone who is meant to champion the merits of Indonesia’s literature the right to speak so dismissively and pessimistically about its literary canon? Or the decisions its authors have made about what language to write in? Or their attractiveness to foreign publishers, which appears to reside solely in their Indonesianness? Or Indonesians’ pretty faces?
But McGlynn is not the only Western advocate of Indonesian writers who is guilty of condescension. We find patronization even in what is meant to pass as praise. For example, Benedict Anderson’s foreword to Eka Kurniawan’s Man Tiger, in which the late Indonesian studies scholar takes the liberty of remarking how much the author’s craft has improved. In Man Tiger, Anderson asserts, we find “a growing discipline in the use of the supernatural….a better grasp on chronology. In Beauty Is a Wound there are a great number of time-shifts but they often seem arbitrary and needlessly confusing…”.
Even dedicated Western translators of Indonesian literature may assume this attitude of superiority, regardless of good intentions, and whether they are aware of it or not.
For instance, in an essay appearing in the aforementioned issue of In Other Words, the respected and prolific literary translator Harry Aveling writes, “there was often a lot of opposition to my translations, particularly from critics who knew Indonesian well but had little appreciation of the subtleties of English.” I find it interesting that Aveling, who himself is a non-native speaker of Indonesian, assumes that his critics are wrong about the quality of his translations, not that his translations may indeed be flawed due to his inability to fully appreciate the subtleties of the language he translates from.
More recently, Words Without Borders published an essay in which seasoned translator Toni Pollard reflects on the challenges of translating gender fluidity in Clara Ng’s “Meteors.” Despite consulting Ng and the various non-binary options that Ng provided for translating the gender-neutral third-person pronouns of the story, including the grammatically acceptable gender-neutral singular “they/them,” Pollard appears to have chosen the option that Ng was least comfortable with. “As all translators must ultimately do,” she reflects, “I had to make a decision myself.” (Numerous people on Twitter expressed frustration at this outcome, including the author herself.)
Like it or not, the globe still reels from colonization’s effects. The resulting power imbalances—political, economic, and cultural—have enabled those from Western countries and backgrounds to occupy positions of authority over Indonesian writers with relative ease. (To test the truth of this assertion: imagine the likelihood of the reverse scenario occurring, where the foremost experts on American, British, or Australian literature are mostly Indonesian, or simply non-white.)
But lest we forget, Empire has historically relied on the complicity of the native ruling elite, and this is no less true of neo-colonialism today. A simplistic “West versus rest” opposition elides the power dynamics operating among Indonesian writers themselves. For example, a disproportionate number of the authors chosen to represent Indonesia at international events like festivals and book fairs tend to be affiliated with Komunitas Salihara—an arts centre founded by the journalist and writer Goenawan Mohamad that has been criticized within Indonesia for the undue influence they exert over the arts scene. (For a glimpse into the situation, see the section on Salihara in this article by Indonesian writer Wayan Jengki Sunarta).
It’s Broken. Let’s Fix It.
I have no doubt that Western translators and others who speak with authority about Indonesian literature act with the best of intentions—if not, why would they expend so much time and energy trying to further its cause? I also do not think that the Anglophone publishing industry is purposely attempting to shut out Indonesian authors’ voices. But I do believe both parties need to recognize that their roles as publishers, promoters, and translators do not give them license to disrespect the autonomy that Indonesians themselves should have when it comes to appraising the worth of their writing, having a say in translations of their writing, and deciding how “Indonesian” their written work should be and what language they want to use.
Additionally:
1. Anglophone publishers might think twice about whether their reasons for rejecting a manuscript rest on Eurocentric assumptions about what constitutes “good” writing. They might try to be open to the genuinely unfamiliar, especially when it comes to countries that are more underrepresented in the Anglophone literary world than others. (By daring to do this they’ll nudge readers in the same direction).
They might even consider seeking permission from relevant parties to publish (and publicize!) new translations of a work already available in English but that has gone out of print or been translated poorly. If multiple English editions of Kafka’s Metamorphosis exist and can be appreciated alongside each other, then why not multiple English editions of Indonesian literary texts?
2. The Anglophone world in general should also avoid relying too much on certain individuals or groups (including me) for their knowledge and experience of Indonesian writing. As with any literary scene, there are people that have more power and visibility than others. It is certainly easier to rely on ready-made connections, but it will come at the expense of doing justice to the diverse world of Indonesian writing.
3. Promoters of Indonesian literature in translation, like the Lontar Foundation, should have more faith in the marketability of the texts and authors they represent. And they should be willing to publicize other initiatives and individuals who have chosen to work independently rather than ignoring their activities or giving them minimal attention.
4. Translators should work closely with their authors if the latter are willing and able. They should do their best to respect their authors’ wishes, dialoguing until an agreement truly satisfactory to both parties is reached. I’ve learned from experience that even if a writer isn’t a native English speaker, their feedback can be invaluable and improve a translation dramatically, taking it in different directions and to new heights you wouldn’t feel comfortable with if you were acting alone.
I’m guessing that these observations and suggestions may also apply to literature in translation from other countries. I hope that they will be of some help in those situations as well. By working collectively and respectfully, we’ll hear the voices of those we translate, advocate, and publish. And we’ll also do a better job of making them heard.
The author would like to thank Intan Paramaditha for her feedback on an earlier version of this article. For more on decolonizing Indonesian translation, see Khairani Barokka’s article in Modern Poetry in Translation, published in parallel with this one.
The house lay behind a solid gray gate on a long arm. A winding driveway carried us deeper onto the property. It sat in a clear field, a boxy structure of glass and pale concrete. Instantly I could imagine the way it would take on the color of the seasons. White in winter, green in summer. Tonight with the lights off it looked nearly invisible in places, a suggestion of angular geometry against the night. It was an esoteric design object you could live in. It belonged on a plinth.
“The architect chose everything. The furnishings, the art,” Hugo was saying. “Unity being the idea. Blurring the line between indoors and outdoors. The dimensions of the recessed living room are the same as the pool. All of the materials are local. The granite. The wood. Every few years the state tries to make it a landmark.”
We climbed out of the car. Hugo insisted on carrying my tote. The straps were filthy, I noticed, and his arm was touch- ing a bottle of store-brand face wash I had crammed on top.
“Why not let them?”
“It’s a house,” he said. “Not a museum.”
He led me through the downstairs, turning on lights as we went. Through the windows: acres of moonlit field in every direction. The kitchen was white and stainless, opening seam-lessly into the living room. Beyond the sliding glass door the flat of the patio gave way to a dark, wobbly presence. The pool. I sat down at the marble slab of island to unpack our grocery bags. I took out high-concept crackers and pricey Côtes du Rhône, while Hugo busied himself retrieving silverware.
He had a whole drawer of tiny, specific knives and he looked down into it thoughtfully for a long time before giving up.
“So what’s your story?” he asked.
I was struggling with a wine opener evidently from the future. “Me? Nothing. I’m just over here trying to figure out how much manchego is acceptable to eat in this scenario. We should all get together as a species and nail down some cheese protocols.”
Hugo nodded. “A Geneva convention for dairy. I like it. But what I meant was what’s your story more generally. Your upbringing, et cetera. Are you from New York?”
“South Carolina,” I said. “Outside of Charleston.”
“You don’t seem southern.”
People always said this to me. I had lived in New York since college and didn’t have an accent. I was never sure how people expected southerners to act. The place I had grown up was a lot like this place. The Upscale Anywhere. Only the wealth was not as great and the worst of its ruthless villains were already dead.
“The South isn’t all that different. Except for the trees.”
“So why leave then?”
“Hope. Ambition. Belief in myself. You know, kid stuff.”
Hugo crossed his arms. He was tall and broad in an appealing way. His paunch seemed solid rather than flabby. What wrinkles he had appeared calculated, left intact so he’d look like a reasonable facsimile of a gently aged human being. Leaning against the sink in his shirtsleeves, he was just this side of too orange to be my thesis advisor, or my rumpled editor in chief, or—I didn’t want to think it but there it was—my father.
“What fucked you up enough to want to become a stand-up?” he asked.
“I’m a writer,” I said. “Not a stand-up, not really. No stage presence, you see.”
“Then why do it?” he said.
“It’s that or a Web series, right? Or improv.”
“Improv. Ick.”
He took the wine opener from me, negotiated its stainless steel levers. He poured us each a glass and held his up in a shy toast.
“Thank you for coming on short notice. I think you’re going to have fun. While you’re here you can treat this place as your own. That’s it. You can drink now.”
I clinked his glass and we both sipped.
“Mm,” I said, “tannins,” though I didn’t know what that meant.
He swirled his glass. “I like my wine like I like my women.”
I groaned. “For real?”
“Humor me.”
“Abundant? Great legs? Available for purchase?”
He looked pleased. “I was going to say dry.”
He handed me a plate and I laid out crackers.
“Your childhood,” he said.
“I wasn’t abused, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It’s not always abuse. Sometimes it’s a stutter. Sometimes it’s childhood obesity. Sometimes, it’s, I don’t know, a back brace.”
“I didn’t have a back brace,” I said.
“You’re being literal. You were an outsider.”
“You mean because I’m Jewish.”
“There couldn’t have been many.”
“None. None that weren’t eighty years old. So few that people didn’t know. The possibility of a Jew didn’t even occur to them. My brother and I more or less passed. Kids at school would ask us where we went to church.”
“And what would you say?”
“Episcopalian was a safe bet. Evangelicals were too intense and Catholics could sniff you out. You had to know stuff to be a Catholic. When I got older I would tell the truth. People didn’t know what to do with that.”
“Well, there you go,” said Hugo. “That must have been isolating.”
“But everyone feels isolated as a teenager, don’t they? The reason is almost beside the point.”
“So nothing causes anything. That’s your thesis?”
“I don’t have a thesis,” I said. “I’ve got my woes like anyone. No one’s unscathed. My grandparents are dead. Three of four, anyway. I was only intermittently popular in my small town. Not, you know, full-on popular. Um what else? I don’t know . . . I’ve had an abortion?”
“Are you asking me?”
“No, I definitely had the abortion. And I’m not trying to be flip about it either. In case that kind of joke makes you uncomfortable. What I’m asking is, is that enough?”
He chewed a cracker, half smiling. There was a poppy seed stuck to his lower lip, and I thought of Gil. On Thursday afternoons Gil printed out bingo cards and the writers all played while we watched a live feed of the taping: B-plus ad-lib was a square. Glance at guest’s tits was a square. Spittle on lower lip was a square. Winner gets a raise, Gil always joked. I never knew what Hugo thought about these games, if he found them funny or insulting. If he saw them as a way for the staff to let off steam, if he knew about them at all.
“Is that enough what?” asked Hugo.
“Enough bad stuff. To convince you that I’m miserable or lonely or whatever it is you think qualifies me to be a comedian.”
“I never said you had to be miserable. I’m just saying that’s usually the case. I know a lot of comedians, too many, and they’re a pretty desolate bunch. It’s not always something in their past; sometimes it’s clinical. Is it clinical for you?”
I took a gulp of wine to conceal my surprise. “You’re asking if I’m depressed? I thought this was supposed to be a date. Or a datelike hang-out.” I blushed. “Maybe I misread it. Can we just eat these crackers? Damn.”
I shoved a handful into my mouth and coughed. They tasted earthy, like rosemary and dirt, and absorbed all my spit. I had to drink a lot of wine to get it all down.
“Nothing fucked me up,” I said, when I could speak again. “Nothing in particular.”
It was true. I hadn’t had a difficult life. My father was a dentist and my mother ran the practice. We had health care, school clothes, summer camp. We had an extra room just for the computer. A Honda Civic that my brother and I took turns backing into street signs, telephone poles, other cars. I could get a twenty from my dad on the way out the door anytime if I was willing to needle him for it.
And it wasn’t just money either. I hadn’t been beaten up or neglected. I hadn’t ever been mugged. I’d done well in school, well in college. I’d had a couple of iffy sexual experiences that I’d thankfully been able to shut down before things went too far. The worst I had suffered was nonsuccess. I was twenty-nine with an entry-level job and unable to pay my bills. I had been provided for. I hadn’t been harmed or held back, I hadn’t been scarred, but I had quietly failed anyway.
I said, “I don’t hold with sad clown theory. It’s facile, superficial. The idea that something horrible has to happen in a comedian’s past. Like all comics had shitty dads or dead mothers. Like that’s the only reason you could have for wanting to be funny.”
Hugo said, “Maybe that’s what you need. Something big to hurt you. Maybe it would make you funnier.”
“Is this a preamble to sexual assault?” I craned my neck and looked down the hall off the kitchen. “Does this place have a designated rape room?”
I knew my tone was nasty; he’d gotten under my skin.
Hugo shook his head. “Come on. I just mean that you probably need to have some more experiences.”
I said, “Maybe I just want to be funny because the world is funny. Maybe it’s the only way I can see of telling the truth.”
I looked at him, daring him to laugh at this preposterous statement.
When he didn’t I put down my wineglass, pushed back from the countertop. “Where’s the bathroom?”
It was cleverly hidden under the staircase, a cubbyhole with a smooth, black-tiled floor. I peed looking at the copper bowl of the sink and considered leaving. I pictured walking down the long drive and waiting outside the spooky gray gate for a car service. There was nothing actually spooky about the gate. I was drunk. I wondered if Hugo would follow me out. Come on, June. June, come on. He would use my name a lot like that, I was sure. Possibly, it would work.
Or if it didn’t I’d what? Call my own bluff? Get on the train? Ride back to the city, back to Brooklyn? Go to the roof party and drink a warm PBR? Pick up the mail on the floor of the vestibule?
It was too logistically difficult, I concluded. I had come this far and I was still curious. The experience hadn’t even amounted to a story I could bring back to Audrey yet. I washed my hands, reapplied lipstick, studied my reflection for signs of credulity. There was no medicine cabinet to check for pills. Better that way, because I’d have looked if there was. I’d have been unable to resist confirming for myself the things I suspected: his sadness and erectile dysfunction, his growing prostate and failing heart.
The kitchen was empty when I got back. Maybe he left, I thought, and the house belonged to me now. I picked up the cheese knife and held it in my hand. A pleasing silver heft.
“This is mine,” I said experimentally.
I got up and looked in the refrigerator. It was empty except for Diet Coke, pickles, and condiments. Even the condiments were sparse. The mustard lids looked crusted on. I opened a low cabinet and saw nothing. I opened another and saw a SodaStream still in its box. I didn’t want to get caught gazing at an unopened SodaStream, so I sat back down.
He returned from a door off the kitchen, brushing the dust from a bottle of wine. He held it up so I could inspect the label.
He said, “No offense, but the wine you picked out was garbage compared to this.”
“I read something awhile ago that said if wine tastes good then it is good.”
“Hm,” he said. “Not really.”
“But if it tastes good . . . it is . . . good.”
“You just said that. Are Hostess cupcakes good just because they taste good?”
“Yes. The theory holds.”
He poured me a glass. “Here. Try this.”
It tasted woody, like someone had dragged some grapes along the deck of an old boat. I told him that and he laughed. “You’re not actually wrong.”
We both sipped. He opened his mouth a couple of times to say something and closed it again. Finally he said, “I had the shitty father you mentioned.”
He was trying to apologize, I realized. The special wine was an apology. His sudden openness about his childhood was an apology, too.
“Shitty how?” I said.
I already knew the answer. I knew all about his upbringing. Years before I’d found his memoir on the one-dollar rack outside the Strand and stood skimming it while smoke from the halal cart on the corner stung my eyes. It had a purple cover with raised silver lettering and brittle yellow pages that kept falling onto the sidewalk. Finally I fished out a single and took it home.
“You name it,” he said. “Distant. Ragey. The type of person who would hit a kid with a closed fist.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah. He waited until I was ten, though. Double digits. That was his bizarre boundary. I probably weighed eighty pounds.”
“And your mother . . .”
“Did nothing. I could never really get a handle on her. She was this soft, creative person, but she let him do what he did. Maybe she didn’t like it, but she didn’t stop it either. She had boundary issues of her own, my mother. She was a dancer. She’d been a Rockette for about an hour when she was young, and she used to put on her costume and perform the whole Christmas extravaganza in our living room for fun. Oil up her legs.”
He fell silent. All of this, I remembered, took place in Woodside, Queens, in the crisscrossing shadow of the LIRR. They had a grim little row house, brown on beige, loose banister, silverfish in the tub. His room was divided from his sister’s with a particleboard partition that wobbled when one of them rolled over in bed. The mailbox said Bechkowiak.
“Is that why you changed your name? To distance yourself from them?”
“I changed my name because you can’t be Bechkowiak in Hollywood. Or you couldn’t back then.”
But yeah, he went on, he picked Best because it sounded good, was empty of association, and also because he was nineteen and pretty dumb. He picked Best because it said nothing except that he was the best, which made him laugh to this day.
“It wasn’t all bad,” he said. “My childhood. My dad was a mechanic and he taught me about cars. He had an incredible breadth of knowledge. He’d flown planes in World War II. Probably he should have been an engineer. He was smart enough. And we watched Carson together almost every night. That we did do. My father didn’t really like it, but I could tell he thought it was a bonding thing. I can’t remember if he ever laughed. I’m guessing not. I would have enjoyed it more on my own. But instead it was this weird solemn ritual. Glumly making popcorn, sitting down on the couch.”
“But you loved your sister,” I said. “Vivian.”
There was a photo insert in the middle of the book that included some family pictures. Hugo with a terrifying Easter bunny; Hugo and Vivian on roller skates in front of the house; the whole family posed for a frowning department store portrait. Hugo and Vivian looked alike. Tall, fair, and miserable.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “You read my book.”
“I might have. Does it have a purple cover?”
“I was against that cover. It was silly. It misrepresented the content of the book. People picked it up thinking it was this light, gossipy thing, and were surprised to find out it was really about a kid clawing his way out of an abusive home. It fell out of print.”
He ate the last sliver of manchego, tossed in a jagged shard of cracker after it. That was something you didn’t consider when you wrote a book, he said. That one day it would be out of print, and sooner than you’d like. Not thinking about endings didn’t stop them from happening. It only made the endings sneak up on you.
He stood to clear the plate, tilted the crumbs into the sink. He pressed buttons on the dishwasher, trying to get it open, but it seemed to be locked.
“Eco wash in progress,” he mumbled. “What does that mean? No it isn’t.”
He looked up at me and smiled abashedly. I went over and took the plate from him. “Let me.”
I punched a few buttons and opened the dishwasher, set the plate on the empty rack. As I was closing it again he grabbed my wrist. His hands were aging faster than the rest of him. They were lean, tanned to spotting, and the tendons stood out. His grip was urgent, but not painful, and the warmth, the give of his skin, startled me.
He said, “You’re not a sad clown, okay? It was wrong to assume that we’re the same, you and me. That you’re a mess just because I am.”
We stayed like that for a moment, not speaking. I thought he’d do something else, pull me closer to him, kiss me, but he didn’t. The dishwasher started to whoosh—all that water for one plate. I hadn’t meant to run it. I hadn’t meant to come to this beautiful house and needlessly run the dishwasher. It was the last thing I ever meant to do.
He let go and told me a joke, the classic Catskills one-liner about two old Jewish women in a restaurant. The joke went like this: two old Jewish women are sitting in a restaurant eating their food. Waiter walks up to them and says, “Is anything all right?”
I didn’t know exactly what he was trying to tell me, but because the joke was funny, and because he was a professional with perfect delivery, I laughed.
At midnight, we tuned in and caught the end of Hugo’s lead-in. We had finished the bottle of wine and I sent Hugo down to the cellar to retrieve an even nicer bottle. He came back with one that tasted like a Hershey bar and we sat drinking it on the hard charcoal couch in the recessed living room. I kept getting distracted by the room’s functional twenty-first-century objects, its flat-screen TV and sliding Jenga tower of remotes. It was as if a set dresser had let a few anachronisms slip through to see if anyone was paying attention.
On TV, a different middle-aged white man presided in a different signature suit. He had an America’s sweetheart of his own on, this one newly minted. Her dress zipped all the way up the front and Hugo wondered aloud whether some part of her felt tempted to unzip it in a single deranged swoop and continue telling her anecdote in her underwear.
“They’d burn her like a witch,” I said.
“She’d deserve it,” said Hugo.
I expected the host to acknowledge the end of Hugo’s show, pay tribute in some way. But he only said, “Don’t go anywhere. Stay Up is next.” The credits rolled and were interrupted immediately by a commercial for bleach.
Hugo’s intro music began, dominated by jazzy, dated sax. When Bony’s tenor boomed through the speakers announcing the night’s guests, a bad feeling crept into my chest.
I said, “Hey, let’s put on a movie instead.”
Hugo didn’t respond. His own face, his own body, had appeared on TV. He stood delivering his opening monologue.
Behind him, the purple curtain caught the light and shimmered like stardust.
“I, Hugo Best, being of sound mind and body,” he said, “declare this to be my last will and testament. I appoint my bandleader, Bony Saurez, as my personal representative to administer this will, and to make sure that there are no, you know . . .” He paused, rubbing his palms together. “Shenanigans.”
The audience laughed. Hugo said to Bony, standing off to one side behind an old radio mike, “That cool with you? You prepared to administer?”
Bony nodded. “On it, boss.”
“To the incoming host,” Hugo continued, “I devise, bequeath, and give all my hackiest material.” He paused. “And man, there have been some turkeys over the years, am I right?”
“Some clunkers,” agreed Bony. “Some whiffs. Some real, uh, what do you call it? Comedic misfires.”
“All right, Bony,” said Hugo. “We get it.”
“And that’s the best stuff. You guys should see what doesn’t make the show. Woof.”
“All right, Bony,” said Hugo again. He addressed the audience. “This guy’s a media expert all of a sudden. A bold and incisive critic of TV’s new golden age.”
Next to me, Hugo chuckled softly. I turned to look at him. The real version of the man sat with one leg crossed over the other, wineglass resting on his knee. But it was the version on the screen that caused a clenching in my chest. When I was ten, eleven, twelve, I lived for Hugo’s show.
It had seemed like such an act of largess on my parents’ part to allow me to watch him, even though it made me tired at school the next day. Hugo was younger then, cool, something of an iconoclast. My crush had been a mini-collision of forces, a science fair Krakatau. The double whammy of loving him and also wanting to be him. Here, for the first time, was a way of living. You could move to New York, be urbane, wry, ironic. You could be a wit and hover above the whole sad, grasping fracas.
Tonight he was up there for the last time, on the same set, in the same clothes, trying for the same vitality. His face was older. His body was heavier. He was carrying around the knowledge that it was all over. Even so he was almost pulling it off. Something was the same. His self. His Hugo-ness.
The Hugo on the couch reached over and put his hand on my knee.
The Hugo on the screen said, “I’m so happy you’re here with me. We have a great show planned for you tonight.”
Usually it’s a confession made over a two-person dinner. Occasionally it’s a hedged statement to a larger group, the words tethered to my mouth like a cartoon dialogue balloon, ready to be sucked back in at the first sign of resistance. I didn’t like that new book from Literary Bigwig. Why does such a statement feel provocative, a little heretical? Why all the secrecy and self-doubt? It’s because publishing suffers from Paul Varjak syndrome, and it’s worth asking what’s at stake.
For those who didn’t watch Breakfast At Tiffany’s a thousand times during high school as I did, Paul Varjak is the handsome, lazy writer who falls in love with Holly Golightly. In the past, Paul wrote one best-selling book of short stories and, despite having written nothing else for half a decade, it’s understood whatever he writes next will be a whopping success because he’s already been established as a rare literary talent. That’s exactly what happens, even though Paul’s next stab at writing is a short story titled “My Friend” and doesn’t exactly indicate a work of towering genius: “There was once a very lonely, very frightened girl. She lived alone except for a nameless cat.” In short, Paul Varjak is the embodiment of the publishing phenomenon whereby writers who achieve a certain level of success with one book are always viewed positively afterwards, regardless of the work they produce.
It would take a combination of rare talent, extreme self-editing, and a trust fund for someone to only publish truly brilliant books.
The problem with Paul Varjak syndrome, of course, is that humans are inconsistent. It would take a combination of rare talent, extreme self-editing, and a trust fund for someone to only publish truly brilliant books. (And they’d probably still produce some mediocre stuff—they would just have the option not to sell it.) Yet while reading book coverage, browsing bookstores, and having conversations with friends, it becomes clear that there is a halo around certain faces. Why?
Publishing houses, for one, definitely stand to benefit from the myth of the flawless writer. If you were Hemingway’s publisher and he wrote something new, you’d publish it and call it the next great novel even if it was the worst thing you’d ever seen. It doesn’t make sense for publishers to publicly acknowledge that their established authors have written a dud; they’d only lose money. This may seem harmless, but because publishers inevitably benefit from the writers who gain that halo, they throw the weight of their marketing machines behind those same writers, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of favorable publicity that all but ensures certain writers’ success, regardless of the quality of the individual work.
In other words, to become a certain kind of literary star is to receive the benefit of the doubt, and not just from publishing houses, but from the media. Book reviews and profiles of established figures are more likely to be complementary rather than critical or nuanced.
Part of the reason for this is the loss of professional book reviewers. As broadsheets shrink and platforms like Goodreads rise, it’s hard for publications to pay for a dedicated reviewer. Instead, they employ freelancers to write the occasional review, which means reviews are often pitched only by the writers who are moved to do so—either because they’re excited to praise a big-name author or pan an enemy. This has led to a critical landscape that is overwhelmingly either positive or (more rarely) scathing. It’s not easy in any field to take a contradictory stand against an established figure, but the literary community can be particularly harsh to detractors. The irregular book reviewer stands to lose from writing a negative review; they risk insulting someone they know personally or professionally, and their taste could be questioned in a way that impedes their chance of getting employed again. Staff reviewers, on the other hand, are used to ignoring the noise, both around a particular author and from the masses, and if they give a negative review, it’s framed by their expertise.
You can tell just how rare it is to read a critical review of an established author because of how infamous it made the former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani. As a rule, Kakutani graded each book she read on its own merits, no matter who wrote it, and as a result she’d occasionally negatively review everyone from Philip Roth to Martin Amis. Though impartiality seems, to me, the first qualification required for being a book critic, Kakutani became newsworthy for hers, and tales of authors she’d critiqued headlined all the career recaps which proliferated the Internet upon her retirement in 2017. (The great authors themselves clearly weren’t used to such treatment; Jonathan Franzen called her “the stupidest person in New York City,” and Norman Mailer, “a one-woman kamikaze [who] disdains white male authors.”)
I’m not trying to minimize how hard it is to write even one truly great book, nor do I want to suggest that most people who are considered to be at the top of the field haven’t earned their status. But I think we should all be concerned about the tendency to reward the same writers and ignore their unevenness—to create literary gods— because it reinforces the stratified world of publishing.
More than ever, only a small percentage of writers can sustain themselves on the money made from publishing their books. The decline in author incomes is a complicated issue, but one factor is that the big publishing houses, who can typically offer more money than the independents, are taking less risks on the unknown in favor of promoting “sure” bets. This obviously feels unfair to debut writers, and it’s also unfair to career writers who write good books but don’t achieve this special level of fame that comes with a publicity support system, and instead have to prove themselves every time.
Publishing has become the kind of system that reinforces its own prophesies in order to make money. By promoting the belief that certain writers are capable of writing amazing books every time, you are encouraging people to spend their increasingly limited book money on a smaller circle of writers, thus limiting the opportunities for new and unproven works to enter the world. This also has the effect of enforcing a certain view of what “good literature” is, and sets unrealistic expectations about how art is created. We see this superhero franchise mentality—put your money in what’s worked once– in many creative industries, and it ultimately detracts from the quality and diversity of art.
We can praise great talent without forcing the narrative that certain people represent the ideal writer.
What’s the answer? I don’t think it’s aggressively negative book reviews—those certainly exist, and are their own click-bait phenomenon— nor is it to go after the old masters wielding pitchforks and red pens. I also understand that it’s unrealistic to expect publishing houses to openly critique their own clients. What is needed is for the media to judge every book on its own merits. Book reviewers should honestly review the work at hand, allowing for the natural spectrum of success. We can praise great talent without forcing the narrative that certain people represent the ideal writer. (And media presentation matters.) In turn, the public will feel more confident that great writing exists in many forms and may come from unexpected places, and will spend their money on a wider array of books. A more open public will enable editors to publish debut authors without worrying if they are going to be a superstar, and will encourage them to keep an open mind about established writers they already know.
We’re in a strange time, both for publishing and the American arts in general. Some of the best work is coming from unproven talent, but fear about declining sales means more money than ever is going to remakes and well-known names. There is nothing wrong with supporting artists you love, and I would totally preorder Paul Varjak’s second book if he were real. But I shouldn’t assume it would be perfect, or be afraid to voice my opinion if it wasn’t.
Sarah Blake and I met last year at the AWP Writing Conference in Tampa, where we bonded not over writing, but rewriting. The Bible, to be exact. I’d recently finished a version of The Book of Genesis for my nine-year-old son, stripping away the dogmatic aspects and giving the whole thing a secular-humanist, feminist spin. Blake’s work, on the other hand, was far more focused and ambitious: a novel entitled Naamah (Riverhead Books) that imagines the Great Flood from the perspective of Noah’s wife, Naamah.
The Biblical tale is a familiar one. Seeing that the world is wicked, God makes it rain for forty days and forty nights, flooding the earth and killing all its inhabitants. Well, almost all of them. Having second thoughts, God speaks to the virtuous Noah, detailing plans for a large boat, an ark. God tells him that once built, Noah is to take to the ark with his family and seven pairs of all the animals of earth. Once the flood waters recede, God essentially reboots his creation, promising never to punish humankind with such destruction again. Within that very short text, wherein the men — Noah and his three sons — are named while the women are referred to only as the wives, Blake’s wonderful novel takes place.
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While attending to the many duties of maintaining a floating menagerie, Naamah experiences a wide range of emotions. She grieves for her deceased lover, a woman named Bethel, and deals with the trauma that comes with surviving the apocalypse. She struggles with isolation, and the pressures of being the family matriarch, in charge of birthing animals and humans, doling advice to her sons and daughters-in-law, and helping to bolster spirits as days aboard the ark become months. Seeking a relief from monotony, she takes to the water in long swims and discovers a whole world beneath the waves, replete with an angel and ghosts. Meanwhile, at night, in dreams, she communicates with the birds, puzzling over the nature of God’s plan — should God even have one — and her place within it.
With prose as luminous and heady as it is grounded in Naamah’s strong physicality, Blake creates a complex woman in a complicated yet terrifyingly simple situation. It’s these juxtapositions — how Naamah is both human and mythic — that makes the book such a powerhouse of a debut. Blake spoke with me about it, unpacking some of the work that went into writing Naamah, and how her poetry background (her previous collections include Mr. West and Let’s Not Live on Earth) contributed to how she constructed her debut novel.
Brian Gresko: Though the legend of the Great Flood looms large in our culture, in the actual text of The Book of Genesis it’s a very short story. Of all the tales of The Bible, what drew you to this one?
Sarah Blake: I think it was when I got to this part of Genesis: “7:24 And the waters prevailed on the earth one hundred and fifty days. 8:1 Then God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided.” I thought of Naamah on that ark, adrift, with no sign for five months that the waters would ever go down. And with this implication that God had forgotten them, if he had to come to remember them. It was horrifying to me — the idea of the ark, the floating, the animals, the noises, the smells, the impossibility of it all. I became obsessed with the woman put in that position.
BG: The name Naamah isn’t one of your own choosing, it comes from a very old midrash, a Biblical exegesis written by Judaic scholars. Did you do a lot of research about Naamah in particular that informed her character? Or about the other women aboard the ark?
SB: All of the women’s names are taken from the ancient Jewish text the Book of Jubilees, or Leptogenesis. Sadie from Sedeqetelebab, Neela from Ne’elatama’uk, and Adata from Adataneses. But while the Book of Jubilees expands on their family, it doesn’t offer too much more information about the story of the ark. Mostly it’s more specifics about the timeline, the moons and months when particular things happened. There are some other stories that say that Naamah was in charge of the seeds and plants, and I brought that into my book. There are others that say she sang, but I gave that characteristic to Sadie instead. I never saw Naamah as much of a singer. I imagined her growing to detest the animals too much to sing to them.
BG: Naamah’s relationship with the animals is fascinating. At the book’s start, she’s literally become blind to them — her vision is unimpaired except for when it comes to the beasts, which she can’t see. I’d love to know more about that decision, which is so central to the book, and so surprising.
The ark is something we’re all somewhat familiar with, so as quickly as I could, I wanted to make the ark unfamiliar.
SB: I wanted the ark to be magical straight off — or if not the ark, the reality of the ark — or if not the reality of the ark, the reality of Naamah — or perhaps just Naamah herself. I imagined all the difficulties that the animals created, but the idea of not seeing them not only made them more dangerous but magnified their sounds, their smells. The ark is something we’re all somewhat familiar with, so as quickly as I could, I wanted to make the ark unfamiliar. I also needed a physical manifestation of Naamah’s discomfort in and distrustfulness of her position.
BG: Did Naamah come to you from the start as a character full of anger?
SB: Not anger — certainly frustration. But whenever she feels anger or doubt or frustration, it’s always balanced by the gratefulness she feels to be alive, to have been saved, chosen. And that constant tug, away from anger, is one that I think she resents. Greatly. So yes, she came to me right away with all of these layers to her feelings about surviving, survivor’s guilt, and all the implications that entails for her relationship with God. Getting to write into all of that — until I understood how she felt and how she would speak to those things and how that would affect her relationships and choices — that was one of my favorite parts of writing this book.
BG: That complex layering of emotions seems to play out directly in her sexual relationships. One of the most engaging aspects of this novel is that Naamah is both powerfully and centrally a maternal figure on the ark, a true matriarch, while also being alive to her sexuality as an individual. Some of my favorite scenes were of her with her former lover, a widow named Bethel. How did that aspect of Naamah’s character develop?
SB: Yes! That seems pretty inherent to the experience of parenting. I feel pretty asexual as a mother. I try to be shameless and direct about my body around my son. But of course I’m a sexual person. And my body is how I experience both sex and sexiness. So there’s this very strange duality to not just how I spend my time (when I’m being sexual or not) but also in my relationship to my own body, my very understanding of it. I guess it existed before motherhood, but, boy, did motherhood draw it out to its extremes. So I knew that same sort of thing would be happening for Naamah, mother of three adult sons and three adult daughters-in-law, wife of Noah, potentially, for centuries, and also the lover of many people as they came through her life. I’m so glad I captured that for her.
BG: The memories that Naamah has of caring for her sons as infants resonated with me as a stay-at-home father. It seems that at no other time is a human more god-like than when caring for a very young child; you create their entire reality for them, you are their world. I wondered if her experiences as a mother amplifies the crisis of faith she experiences on the ark. She has no assurance that God won’t destroy them again. For all she knows, God may continue to be a harsh and uncompromising father who scorches the Earth whenever He’s displeased. That’s a terrifying prospect to consider.
I think Naamah’s crisis of faith is most amplified by being put into a position of godliness for the very first time.
SB: I hadn’t thought about it like that — that she might have experienced a version of godliness and, because of it, been more thrown by her perilous position. I found raising my son led and leads me to more helpless feelings than god-like ones. I think I carried that into the book for Naamah as well. I think Naamah’s crisis of faith is most amplified by being put into a position of godliness for the very first time, something she’d never experienced, never imagined. And from that position, yes, I think she’s all the more certain that God might punish them all again. Until she gets to talk to Him later in the book.
BG: Pretty early on in the novel, Naamah begins a practice of taking long swims from the ark. Beneath the water she finds an angel, and later, the spirits of the dead. This, along with her dreams, is such a wonderful and surprising aspect of the book, and one that adds real tension as the story progresses. How did this element of Naamah’s story come about? Was this entirely of your own invention, or was there any precedent for it in the research that you did?
SB: Before I wrote prose about Naamah, I’d written poems about her, and even a short screenplay. The first thing I knew about the book, all the way back to that screenplay, was that Naamah was going to take up swimming. That seemed like the most logical response to this feeling of being trapped, which I imagined overwhelmed Naamah on the ark. But once she was in the water, what an opportunity! It felt like a space where anything could happen. In the short, Naamah sees a woman, but the screenplay is just about over at that point. I was so excited to figure out the mystery woman when I went forward with prose. Would she be only a vision? Or would it be God? A dead woman? Bethel even? Or an angel? I’ve always been curious about angels, fascinated by their characterizations and how they’ve been carried through into contemporary fiction/media. So once I thought that it could be an angel, that was all I could think about.
The angel and her village of dead are completely of my own invention, though it has been pointed out to me, since finishing, that she could be read as an origin story for the devil and hell.
BG: To me, this book perfectly sits in-between a kind of narrative realism — Naamah as a character has a familiar and specific psychology grounded in her body — and a fable in which she’s enacting a complex drama about a woman’s role in a patriarchal world, and an individual’s relationship to the divine, among other possible interpretations. From a process perspective, what was it like to walk that line?
SB: Perhaps this is where my being a poet helped me the most. I always try to stick as closely as I can to the truth of whatever narrative I’m telling, the truth of the character and their world, and I trust that any parallels that are developing will be fitting and, in their own way, true. Those parallels are not entirely my business; they’re the reader’s. I must only watch for ways I definitely don’t want the text to translate. But it was more of a concern for this book being a retelling of a tale from Genesis. I knew it was more of a concern for a novel than, say, a one-page narrative poem, where you can track the fable, the metaphor, and it never gets too unwieldy (if it goes astray in a poem, you can lead it back). Writing this book required more faith. I had to commit to all of the truths of Naamah and believe that the other side, the murkier depths, the reflections, would read over in a way that made sense to me. Of course, I got to revise, but I found that I was happy with the ways the story dipped into parable, the ways Naamah stands also as symbol.
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