At 32, he had written two plays, both for the London stage. By his 40th birthday, he could boast seven novels, four plays and 11 television series as a writer. Add that to his work as Britain’s top stand-up comedian — known for his energetic tirades against Thatcherism and world business — and you see someone with no shortage of inspiration.

“Maybe Baby,” his first film as director, suggests that he is no longer such an angry young man. Based on his novel “Inconceivable,” it’s a sweet romantic comedy about London yuppies Sam (Hugh Laurie) and Lucy (Joely Richardson) as they try desperately to procreate and he tries desperately to conquer writer’s block.

To his long-term fans, it’s a sentimental debacle, like Jim Carrey doing “The Truman Show” or the Rolling Stones performing for the queen. However, the “new” Ben Elton (just like the old one) is happy to tell his detractors exactly where they can stick it.

One of the topics covered in “Maybe Baby” is writer’s block, which is interesting because you seem to be someone who doesn’t know much about writer’s block. You seem to come up with work at an envious rate. Do you ever have writer’s block?

Not really. I never have real writer’s block, like my character in the movie. He’s on the verge of really doubting whether he’s a writer at all. Every writer has block in the short term, because that’s part of the process. If you get frustrated for a week because nothing’s really happening, that’s not writer’s block. That’s part of coming up with the ideas. I’ve never doubted that I’d ever write again, and I know some writers who have that problem. But I can write about it. I don’t think you need to experience something directly to write about it. Otherwise, nobody would be able to write a historical novel. I know about the desire to create, and I have some knowledge of how bad I’d feel if I couldn’t do it.

Your earlier plays and the novels were much more pessimistic, much darker. You had the world ending in your first novel, and “Popcorn” was even more downbeat. I saw the play in London and I was just shaking at the end of it.

Great!

I’m sure that’s what you were hoping.

I wanted you to be moved and shaken.

Starting with “This Other Eden” and “Blast From the Past,” and even more so with “Maybe Baby,” you’ve been exploring nicer territory. It seems a bit more optimistic. Is this something to do with age?

I hadn’t really thought about it, because normally people don’t put it as nicely as you’ve put it. People say, “Oh, you’ve gone soft,” but I say, “Oh, fuck off!” I’m just writing what I want. But you’re right. It is an optimistic piece, because the experience my wife and I had with IVF [in vitro fertilization] is that you learn to celebrate the love you have, rather than trying not to be completely defined by the love you haven’t got and you can’t yet get. So it is optimistic — although I didn’t give them [Sam and Lucy] a baby at the end, because I didn’t want to go that far.

But I’ve always been an enthusiast. Some of my writing is darker because that’s where the plot took me. I don’t think I’m personally more optimistic, but certainly my work seems to be a bit sunnier. I write more personally now. I’m not embarrassed to talk about my own feelings.

It’s funny you mentioned “This Other Eden.” Someone said recently, “That’s your first-ever sex scene.” And it’s true — I never wrote anything that was potentially embarrassing before that. I think as you get older you get more relaxed about yourself. Now I’m happier to write about love and sex and emotions, and perhaps I’m less interested in writing about the entire world blowing up.

“Maybe Baby” covers a lot of current issues, but you don’t seem to be on a soapbox anymore. You were tackling a lot of the great issues of the world in your first books.

Certainly “Stark” was a polemical work. There’s no doubt about it. I was talking about money, the environment, that sort of thing. I haven’t made a conscious decision to make less socially committed writing. I remain personally and socially committed to and interested in the world I live in — and in any efforts that can be made to improve it. But I suppose it’s true that previously I was writing social observations, as opposed to personal observations. I guess you just change. I bet you I’ll write something with my opinions and politics in it again at some point.

I certainly don’t feel that I’m no longer connecting with the wider world, but I have definitely written more personally in the last few years. “Blast From the Past” is essentially a love story. “Inconceivable” is definitely a love story. What can I tell you? I think your observations are right, but I don’t know why. I don’t feel I’ve changed; I always write what I feel like.

After watching “Maybe Baby,” somebody said, “This is definitely your first romantic comedy.” I don’t agree. The very first episode of “Blackadder” I ever wrote was a lovely little romantic comedy. Blackadder falls in love with a girl dressed as a boy. He was totally in love. He thought he was going gay, but he was going to live with him anyway. I think I’ve always had a spread in my work. “Blackadder” and “The Young Ones” weren’t particularly politicized; “Stark” was. What can I tell you?

You said previously that you became a performer more as an avenue for your writing. Now you’ve become a director. Why direct?

Because I felt like doing it. I’m lucky; I can get work. It doesn’t always come easy; getting a movie financed is very hard, but I did it. I’d never really wanted to direct a movie before because it takes so long — it’s a two-year commitment, and here I am, still publicizing it. It’s a big deal. And you know me: I like to work hard. I like to crack a novel out, do a stand-up tour, get another sitcom going. So I didn’t think I had the time. But with “Maybe Baby,” I felt so personally connected with the story that I thought I was the best person to do it. I’ll be honest with you: I know something about comedy; I’ve been in the game 20 years. So I decided to do it myself — and I’m thrilled that I did, because it turned out to be probably the most fulfilling professional experience of my life.

“Maybe Baby” talks about in vitro fertilization. You came to Australia to promote the film just after Australia’s conservative prime minister, John Howard, had spoken out against lesbian couples using IVF to start families.

In Britain everyone’s saying it’s a romantic comedy that has no politics at all. Then I come to Australia and it turns out I’ve written something at the center of a debate. The funny thing about my film is that it’s a perfect IVF for Howard, because it’s about a heterosexual couple who are married. There’s no doubt that modern technology throws up endless debates, and this is one of them.

Howard’s comments were unfortunate, as I think, in the long run, they will lead to further stigmatization of single-parent families. The subtext seems to be that it’s a second-class option not to have a father. He may feel that, and he’s perfectly entitled to his opinion, but society has changed, fundamentally. He can’t turn the clock back. The nuclear family is no longer the absolute way. He’s just got to accept that.

There were whispers of a film of “Popcorn,” which wasn’t to be directed by you.

That’s still in the pipeline. I’m talking to Ridley Scott about it. He read the novel, absolutely loved it. He has since commissioned me to write the screenplay. We’ll see if it comes off, but you never know with movies. They’re a terribly dodgy game, even when you’re as big as Ridley Scott.

Do you ever get exhausted? It’s quite exhausting simply watching your stage act.

I was a little more frenetic before. My stage routines have gotten a little slower, a little more paced. I prefer it that way. I’m getting older, and my timing is better now. I don’t speak quite so quickly. But I do get tired. I’m tired right now — but that’s more a symptom of drinking too much than working too hard. I’m always very enthusiastic about things that I do, so I’ve got a reason to get up in the morning.

You still must be outspoken about some of your political views.

I don’t think I’m any more outspoken than any old pub bore, going on about what’s wrong with the government. I just have a wider pub. But I’m still connected with my society, and I’ll say what I think when I feel like it.

Do you still get so political now that Tony Blair has brought Labor to power?

Novels like “Stark” were political, but they weren’t party political. They weren’t about Labor and Thatcher and Tories. It’s only in the stand-up work where I do that, and I haven’t done any stand-up since I toured Australia in 1997. I don’t have a particular desire to do it again — at the moment. If I did, I’d almost certainly take the piss out of what was going on in the government, if I thought it was funny. But I don’t think that Britain is as divided a society as it was in the ’80s, so I think there would be less venom in my comedy than there was then.

Surely only ignoramuses and resentful students slogging through their required reading feel this way, right? Not according to a new study led by the chair of the mathematics department at Dartmouth College, Professor Daniel Rockmore. In “Quantitative Patterns of Stylistic Influence in the Evolution of Literature,” an article published in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even today’s literary writers have little use for the classics. They are, the study asserts, much more influenced by their peers than they are by the most revered authors of earlier centuries. And these researchers, being mathematicians, have the numbers to prove it.

If it strikes you as peculiar to see numbers guys (the article’s authors are all men) weighing in on literary style, then you haven’t been keeping up with the latest developments in humanities research. Crunching data — especially the vast number of texts that have been converted to a digital format by such programs as GoogleBooks — is all the rage in liberal-arts academia these days. Among other interesting recent projects, researchers have graphed the emergence and usage of particular words or phrases by date, looking for insight into how certain ideas developed historically.

The Dartmouth research belongs to the relatively established field of stylometry, the study of linguistic patterns in texts. Digitally-aided stylometry is most familiar as a means of establishing the authorship of contested works: Plays or poems allegedly written by Shakespeare, say, or Christopher Marlowe. This involves comparing a small number of works to each other and looking for internal consistencies and differences. Most authors use detectably distinctive language patterns, even after you eliminate such obvious giveaways as content. In fact, stylometrists often assert that tracking “content-free” words — such as conjunctions, like “and,” and prepositions, like “above” — is the most reliable way to reach what the Dartmouth researchers call a “useful stylistic fingerprint” for any given author.

It’s more unusual, however, to crunch a large body of texts written over a long period of time by many different people. The Dartmouth study analyzed multiple works by 537 authors who wrote English language texts published since 1550. Comparing them to each other, they found, not surprisingly, that authors from a given historical period have more in common with each other stylistically than they do with authors from the past (or future). They also found that the more recent a work is, the more “localized” its stylistic brethren are in time. An author from, say 1850, will have more in common with an author from 1800 than an author from 1950 will have with an author from 1900.

All of this makes sense; language changes over time, and during the 20th century, with the advent of broadcast media and other mass-communications technologies, it changed faster than ever. Today, thanks to the Internet, slang, jokes and new figures of speech seem to disseminate instantaneously. Suddenly, everyone’s talking about frenemies and saying, “Do not want!”

Where the Dartmouth article makes a big leap, however, is in claiming that contemporary authors are less “influenced” by authors of the past than they are by those of their own time. Furthermore, they propose a reason: The explosion in the number of published books in the past century or so. Titles by contemporary authors are in the (vast) majority. By this logic, with “even more authors to choose from and selection dominated by contemporaneous authors,” writers, like everyone else, are less likely to read the classics.

There are so many wobbly assumptions built into these interpretations that they could be used as an illustration of the dangers of empirical hubris: Having a lot of numbers and equations is not the same as knowing what they mean, especially in such a complex and meaning-rich field as literature. The Dartmouth researchers seem somewhat aware of this problem — they suggest that the dramatic decrease in the influence of the past on 20th century literature might be due to the Modernist movement, which advocated just such a break with tradition. (Note: The texts used in the study were taken from the public domain, and so included nothing published after 1952, a time when Modernism still ruled the literary roost. For all we know, postmodernism might cause the math department’s processors to melt down.)

First, there is the assumption that a lack of stylistic similarity is the same thing as a lack of influence. This is manifestly untrue. A stylometric analysis of, say, the prose of John Irving, for example, would probably not show much resemblance to that of Charles Dickens; one author is a contemporary American and the other a Victorian Briton. But Irving worships Dickens and cites him as his master and model in every interview he gives. He writes in the voice of a modern American, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t profoundly influenced by Dickens’s novels. On the pop fiction front, Helen Fielding doesn’t write a bit like Jane Austen in “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” so does that mean the founding text of chicklit simply couldn’t have been influenced by “Pride and Prejudice”? Please: Fielding’s novel is a retelling of the Regency classic in a modern setting.

Also built into that first assumption is the peculiar notion that the only influence on a writer’s style is the work of other authors. Most writers aspire to represent the speech of their own time. They listen to people talking at home, in the street and in the media. If the authors of a particular historical moment tend to sound similar, it is most likely due to this common influence rather than their influence on each other. It would be absurd for, say, Jonathan Franzen to write about 21st century Americans in the prose style of Anthony Trollope, but that doesn’t mean that Trollope’s approach to “the way we live now” (to borrow the much-quoted title of his best-known book) hasn’t infused Franzen’s ambition to write sweeping, often satirical “social” novels set in the present day. In fact, it’s precisely his desire to emulate Trollope that makes it impossible for Franzen to write prose like Trollope’s; the way we live now can’t be described in the language they used then.

Finally, the authors of the Dartmouth study seem to believe that readers choose their books by making a random selection from the pool of potential candidates. If there are more books by contemporary writers, then probability dictates that a reader is more likely to pull a recent title from this grab bag. True, the abundance of choices can be overwhelming, but it can just as easily lead someone to devote their precious reading hours to the tried and true. There is no reason to conclude that because contemporary writers differ stylistically from the authors of the past, they therefore must never have read those authors. I realize that my evidence here is anecdotal, but I’m willing to bet that I know a lot more novelists than the Dartmouth math department does, and as a rule they read far more of the classics than the average civilian. They want to know what people are writing and reading now, of course, but every author also wants to know what kind of books stand the test of time — because most authors want to write one.

As I mentioned earlier, language changes, and authors who aspire to lasting renown are sometimes vexed by these changes. In 1712, Jonathan Swift published a letter to the Earl of Oxford (then Lord Treasurer) urging the establishment of the English equivalent of the Académie Français: a body authorized to dictate the correct form and usage of the language. If “Court-Fops, half-witted Poets, and University-Boys” could be prevented from constantly introducing “affected Phrases, and new, conceited Words,” Swift argued, then there might be found a way to “fix” English forever. If not, “How then shall any Man who hath a Genius for History, equal to the best of the Antients, be able to undertake such a Work with Spirit and Chearfulness, when he considers, that he will be read with Pleasure but a very few Years, and in an Age or two shall hardly be understood without an Interpreter?”

English has no academy, and Swift was both right and wrong. We still read him today, and we have even concocted the “new, conceited” word “Swiftian” to describe the ferocious mode of satire we identify with him (though we now give “conceited” a different definition). But then there are those one-star Amazon reviews for “Gulliver’s Travels”: “I had to give up on this book about 2/3 of the way through,” one reader complains. “I was just getting too tired of looking up ‘Old English’ words as I read.” No doubt this protest would have confirmed Swift’s generally low opinion of the human race. Prose styles come and go, but idiots will always be with us.

Further reading

“Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature” by James M. Huges, Nicholas J. Fotia, David C. Krakauer and Daniel N. Rockmore in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (abstract)

“A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue” by Jonathan Swift

The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can’t escape being identified with New York – or, in Lethem’s case, Brooklyn – and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms. Lethem fans already know of his love of the band – composed of David Byrne (vocals and guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums) and Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitar) –  from his essay “The Beards.” There, he connected his love of  “Fear of Music” to the aftermath of his mother’s death from a brain tumor. “I have an obvious predisposition to handling the material of 1978 and ’79 with an exaggerated, personal intensity,” he told me. We spoke via Skype, Lethem from his office at Pomona College where he is the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing.

What drew you to Talking Heads’ music as a youth?

In 1978 I launched myself out of a very difficult Brooklyn public school and got into the High School of Music and Art, in Manhattan. It was like crossing the threshold. Suddenly I was hanging out in Harlem, trying to figure out who the cool kids were and how I could become one of them, or whether I somehow already qualified. Everyone had their band; it was pretty much like a menu: You could be into the Ramones or Cheap Trick or the Dictators. U.K. punk was this attractive signal coming in, but we had a special affinity for the New York bands. I had a friend that semester who was into Television — he was a little hipper than I was.

I was just at the right conjugation of nerdy, alienated and hyper-alert that I identified instantly with Talking Heads. They sang songs about books! I got it immediately.

In the book you call “Fear of Music” a paranoid album, and other works of art you’ve written about – some Stanley Kubrick films, and Philip K. Dick’s novels, for instance – have this bent as well. Are you a paranoid person?

Paranoia is closely related to a subject that’s right at the heart of the album: fear. Paranoia is an intellectual shading on a somatic experience, a physical reality that is fear. I experienced a lot of fear — not only my mother’s death, but I lived through a rather desperate chapter of New York’s urban history  —and it shaped me. Paranoia is a kind of utilization of fear, like “Let’s pick this fear up and shine it around like a flashlight and see what I can see with it.” As it invests itself in certain kinds of artworks, like in Philip K. Dick’s novels, paranoia tends to be a mode of inquiry and exploration — a philosophical mode, really. In that sense, it was attractive to me, because it was a lot less passive than just lying there and trembling.

But I try to disentwine my inclination for conspiracy and paranoia in artwork from its general lack of not only usefulness but interest in everyday life, where it’s actually a way of shutting possibilities down.

Do you have a favorite song on “Fear of Music”? From your description of “Heaven” – “If heaven’s impossible to know, ‘Heaven’s’ hard to recollect” – that seems to be your least favorite.

I received, in a very specific way, skepticism about “Heaven.” I have a friend, John Hilgart, who was a sounding board while I worked on this book. Hilgart said, quite passingly, “I always felt on Side 2, after ‘Air,’ there’s a three-song lull. I like ‘Heaven’ in principle, but to listen to it is kind of boring.” And then he felt, and I think this would be a much more common remark, that “Animals” and “Electric Guitar” are buried on Side 2 because they’re less inspired melodically or fully realized, and bear less relistening.

I had always held the whole album on this pedestal, where, in a way, it was all exactly as good as itself. I saw it as fractal, “This album is perfect, therefore everything on it is perfect.” Besides, I had always taken “Heaven” as a sacred object — everyone knows this is one of the masterpiece songs. But when Hilgart said that it was like – click! – “Heaven” is one of those things that I listen to and tell myself I’m loving it, but it’s actually boring. I started focusing on the idea of tedium, because the song’s self-referential; it wants to be boring.

In fact, I like “Heaven” a lot. The only song I’m uncomfortable with is “Electric Guitar.” The song is crippled by its disorganized quality, and it doesn’t seem as pure conceptually, because how do you put an electric guitar up there with air, heaven, animals, mind? It doesn’t belong on that stage. Also, it’s been played live barely ever. It’s a sitting duck if you need there to be a worst song on the album, though, really, I don’t know if “Fear of Music” needs to have one.

I do know that my favorites are the two side closers. I wouldn’t want to have to choose between “Drugs” and “Memories Can’t Wait.” Those became the most rewarding songs to write about; they just got richer and richer for me. I actually made myself like them even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Of course, “Life During Wartime”  is pretty good too. [laughs]

Did you find yourself liking the album more in general as a result of writing about it?

It was like having any subject before you when you’re writing a book — your own characters, your childhood, some stupid idea you made up about Tourette’s syndrome, whatever it might be that you’ve committed years of your life to — you love it and hate it a lot along the way. There were days when I felt utterly under its hobnailed boot, and there were days when I did not want to listen to “Fear of Music” again. I wrote through those feelings, of course, as you do with your contempt for all the different assignments life has given you, and I was enraptured by the end.

What’s weird is that I put it on for pleasure now. Your iTunes counts listenings, and my entire top 25 most-listened-to tracks on iTunes is all “Fear of Music” and different live versions of the songs. It was ceaseless, to the point where my wife would force me to switch to the headphones.

How did you start?

I rarely delay — and certainly proportionate to how many pages the piece was, I don’t think I’ve ever delayed starting a project as long. There are novels that I had in mind for three or four years, or even more than that before I began writing them, but those were very long novels. I took three years circling around this.

I kick-started myself in a really specific way. I accepted an invitation to the Experience Music Project Conference to be on a panel about urbanism. I said I would talk about Talking Heads’ relationship to urbanism and the evolution of their vanity as urban dwellers, starting with the “More Songs About Buildings and Food” song “Big Country,” which goes “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” to “Fear of Music’s” “Cities,” “I’m finding a city I’m going to check out,” and ending with “True Stories’” “People Like Us,” where they’re pretending to be hicks from Texas. I saw this as a topic I could make an interesting presentation on, but of course I was thinking, I’ll start writing about “Cities” and then I’ll have myself on the page about “Fear of Music.”

There are small traces of that presentation in the chapter on “Cities” in the book. A lot of it had to get thrown out, but at least it got me thinking about how to make something actually occur. I knew that I would write about each song directly and that I wanted to intersperse those chapters with provocative side questions about the album as a whole — I had that structure sitting there. I wrote about the commercial, the radio spot advertising “Fear of Music,” and then I wrote about the album jacket, and then I started writing about “I Zimbra.” Except that I had this weird chunk of thinking about “Cities,” which I incorporated, I wrote the book straight through as it reads.

Were there critical works or other texts that influenced your approach?

I was very conscious of the 33 1/3 books. I’ve been an eager customer, so I was thinking of some of the ones I loved best, like Franklin Bruno’s “Armed Forces,” Douglas Wolk’s James Brown book, “Live at the Apollo,” and Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion, “Let’s Talk About Love.” Not that I was going to ape their approaches, which are quite divergent anyway, but I write to enter into a conversation that books on shelves are having. I wanted to be a really exciting member of the 33 1/3 team, I wanted to come in with something that only I could do, but that also was recognizably a contribution to this recent but very interesting tradition.

In terms of critical writing, I followed less a specific example and more the general idea of close reading. I had written a book on the John Carpenter movie “They Live,” where I had just stared at the movie and free-associated. I wanted to do that but more so. “They Live” had a relatively high number of outside comparative texts brought in — other films, artworks and some theoretical things. With “Fear of Music” I thought, let me bring in fewer, and let me sometimes bring in none at all, let me just be with the sound of the songs and say what I’m hearing.

You write that it’s never unimportant asking what was going on in the artist’s life at the moment of creation. Let me turn that on you. Why write this book now?

How can I reconstruct or account for such a sprawling intention? I began fantasizing that I might do a 33 1/3 book before I had even agreed to do one, and “Fear of Music” was always the record that I knew I would write about. Then three years elapsed between agreeing to do it and actually starting.

I have been amazed to find myself doing so much critical and cultural writing, a lot of it being a weird mix of criticism and memoir, or covert memoir pieces pretending to be critical pieces. There’s a long evolution for me, thinking I would write fiction that was all going to be invented, and that I like to read criticism but I would never want to write it, then having it invest in the fiction itself. “Fortress of Solitude” is where that really starts, but “Chronic City” extends it. I incorporated a lot of critical impulses, cultural commentary — even things like liner notes crept into the voice of the book.

Having come into this hyper-developed critical voice without ever meaning to, I wanted to both do it service and quarantine it by writing this book. Like, you go over here and write a whole book about “Fear of Music,” then shut up. This and the “They Live” book would be both a summit and a farewell, which has to do with an intention for what I want to have happen in my fiction next, which is that I want to stop incorporating the critical voice into it in the same way.

Simultaneously, I think I’m also done with the tokens of my 14- or 15-year-old self. I can’t really imagine anything after this climax of “Fear of Music.” It’s like I finally came out of hiding, like once you show yourself you can slam the door, because the internal paparazzi are satisfied, they got their shot.

In the liner notes of “Sand in the Vaseline,” Jerry Harrison said, “There is a shared sensibility [with Talking Heads fans] that would make friendships immediate.” What’s that sensibility?

They’re pretty bookish. One of the things I thought interesting was how underwritten the songs are. They’re not wordy, really, but the sensibility is so fundamentally literary. Usually people think about Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or somebody recent like Craig Finn, who have these cascades of descriptions and evocations. Byrne never did that and it doesn’t seem like there was ever a phase in his songwriting career where he was even thinking to do it. But in another way I think Talking Heads are a very literary band in their fundamental stance, their ambivalence and sense of inquiry. I think even when he’s switched to nonsense lyrics there’s a spirit of inquiry that pervades all of Byrne’s best work, and “Fear of Music” is dominated by it.

A man consumed with war, words and images, Busch served two combat tours in Iraq. He proved himself both exceptionally thoughtful and also terribly overconfident. In his first tour, beginning in April 2003, he was the commanding officer of a light armored reconnaissance unit, in a village near Iran. In his second tour, in an exploding Ramadi in 2005, Busch had the impossible job of trying to rebuild a town — and gain its trust — while insurgents and sniper fire added to the general lawlessness and lack of any power structure.

Oh, and in between those two tours, Busch returned home to play Sgt. Anthony Colicchio on “The Wire.” The military man who emphasized listening to Iraqis and learning what he didn’t know played a fictional Baltimore police officer of the exact opposite variety. The over-aggressive Colicchio loved nothing more than making arrests to show toughness and to pump up the Western District’s stats. He’s not interested in getting to know the streets he patrols, and he’s disgusted by covert efforts to legalize the drug trade in a part of Baltimore dubbed “Hamsterdam.”

In an interview this week, Busch said real-life frustrations in Iraq fueled Colicchio’s rage. But the challenge in Iraq, he says, was making sure those frustrations never, ever revealed themselves when working with Iraqis. Both roles, he said, were essentially acting jobs. We also talked about Robert Bales and how soldiers handle pressure, where the war plans went wrong and whether the Marines need more Vassar alums.

You were a student at Vassar during the first Gulf War, the 100-hour action that pushed Iraq out of Kuwait. You write about feeling disappointed that it was over so quickly – that this looked like your generation’s shot at war. You very much wanted to go to war.

I thought that. I pushed the extremes throughout my youth, as you can see from some of the small stories even as a child. I was always venturing into what I either considered unexplored territory or what I considered unwise territory to explore.  And war was certainly one of those things. Its mere existence is entirely an environment of threat. Although, as you learn in war, with the randomness of death, preparation is only partially useful. Looking forward to it, you think that you could develop skills which would make you impervious. I painted myself in that idea, that I had survived the poor wisdom of my youth, and it must be because I had certain endurance. I wanted to believe that that could be extended into an environment as ferocious as war. I covered myself in a certain invulnerability in my first tour as a commander, mostly because my Marines expected it.

There’s a vivid scene in the book where your helicopter is going down, and you see the side of a cliff rushing toward you, the small details of land getting clearer and clearer. But you have Marines in the back of the helicopter facing the other direction who don’t know what is happening. So you just calmly smiled at them.

What else can you do in the face of death but smile.

Some people might scream. 

I’m not a screamer. There’s a certain calm that comes with both a belief that you are invulnerable and a belief that you’re doomed.  It leads to a lack of anxiety: One you can’t affect, and the other you can’t be affected.

And that’s the change you describe during your two tours in Iraq. The first time, there’s an eerie confidence. But the second time, death is omnipresent.

Yes, between the two tours that became very pronounced. My first tour I was wearing it for show; I created my own myth and believed in it. My second tour I was wounded almost immediately and we were taking incredible casualties and Ramadi was just a caustic environment in 2005. It was entirely random; every day you expected that it was going to be your day. We almost had this fatalistic humor about it all. We’d walk out the door and say, “Oh, I’m probably going to be killed today, so you can have my uniforms.” People weren’t surviving.

This is post-insurgency, and in the capital of the Sunni province of Anbar. It was a very bloody time, and you suggest our presence didn’t help, which in some ways is a startling admission from a Marine.

It was teeming not just with insurgents — actual Sunnis which were fighting for their own destiny — but it was also overrun with Syrians who were real pure jihadists. They came across the border to fight and die – they came there for us. Many of them were funded by Saudis. So there was a strange triangle of danger created all around our mere presence. And what we would look at was the families. There were children living there and parents who wanted what everyone wants – a secure day, food on the table. And not to fear that something collateral will happen to them, either by insurgents or by us. It was hard to watch that every day, knowing that they were under threat because we were under threat. And that our job was to protect them and we really couldn’t.

Let me back up for a moment. Your memoir has nine chapters, structured among elements like water, metal, stone and blood. You recount stories involving those materials from your youth, and then connect those materials to your war stories. So how did your childhood prepare you for what you saw when you weren’t playing games?

Endless fascination. I think it was endless fascination that prepared me for everything in my life. I was always paying attention. I was put here to observe and build upon my fascinations.

You make it sound simple. But there’s another scene in the book where you are called to mediate an emergency council meeting in Jassan. Water had been diverted to Saddam Hussein’s family. The town wanted a pipe sealed so their water flow would improve. The people did not know what to do, and insurgents were threatening the village’s leaders and sent a message during the meeting that they would also kill you. How does a young American in that situation know what to do?

It’s my Lawrence of Arabia moment.

It’s also a moment where you teach the meaning of democracy. You empower them to put the matter to a vote, and then act. You see people hungry to solve problems together, and excited to find the power within themselves to do that. That’s in some ways what we said we would do there — and exactly what didn’t happen often enough.

It was my place not to impose that, but to let that native urge be successful. I just felt very early that they wanted direction, and the worst thing that I could do would be to give it, because that would make me in charge. That would make me the ruling class. What had been removed was any sense of structure – the Baath party had been dissolved at that point, and had not been replaced with anything. There was a huge vacuum and all that had been put into it was us. And I knew that our mistakes would be made by creating a dependency upon a new state order that was perhaps not sustainable. I had nothing to offer except advice and bullets. That’s what I had. We couldn’t even get our mail at the time. What I wanted to do was find native solutions to native problems that I could only reinforce their answers to their problems, in some ways.  And that was a big moment I wish I could have celebrated in some ways because it was their choice and it was just that brief moment where they felt like they were in charge of their destiny – they felt like they had done something. They had the power to achieve justice, and they did it against all the odds. We had to replace rule of law in a place that is entirely lawless.

So you pay attention. I just followed my fascinations. Why is the water not running? Where does the water come from? Let’s follow that. And we did. You begin to reverse engineer everything just by seeing what’s wrong at the end. I wouldn’t say that I was good at anything.

Good questions. Too bad we didn’t ask them more often.

We could have saved a lot of time and a lot of loss if we had done so. What I feel the most regret about is that I left those people. We had that place almost stabilized in some ways, and though it was not in any way efficient or in any way without corruption, there was a possibility of being quietly transformative in some of those communities.

How do you see what went wrong?

We tried to define them. It’s what we do. We’re Americans. We find ourselves in a position that’s generally comfortable and our vision can only extend so far as us, and who wouldn’t want to be like us. So, if we just offer this, then it will be accepted and embraced. We don’t have a lot of respect for cultural traditions because we barely have any.

And honestly, our own history, if you watch how we achieved our great comfort, it’s pretty ugly. We’d like to criticize everyone for their stages toward democracy but if you look at ours – we didn’t let women vote, we didn’t let blacks vote, we had slaves. We had issues. We eradicated an entire native population almost.  I went into the place knowing that I was the one with the least information, and so it was my job to spend as much time listening and not talking as I could. I wanted to make sure I kept track of the details, the names. I was rebuilding family trees because the environment was built out of family trees.

Unless you’re going to come in there like the British empire and establish infrastructure and reform an entire place in its image, then you’re going to be wholly ineffective. We are definitely not the British empire in the way that we do business. We went in there awkwardly, we built mistakes upon mistakes. And after a while, you know, we wore ourselves down being wrong about things. It just took a little perspective, and some specialists. The people in the State Department knew all about Iraq. I would have liked to have had them in my vehicle.

All that failure, all that pressure, the consecutive tours. Not everybody handles pressure the way you were able to. What do you think happens when a soldier snaps, like Sgt. Robert Bales in Afghanistan, and allegedly goes on a shooting rampage and kills 17 people.

I can’t diagnose him. We have people that do horrible things all the time. Everyone deals with stress in their own way. There were ideologues over there. There were people who were on crusades. You just name it – look at everyone’s background.

Is this the right way to put a military together? When you look at the background you had, and the very different way you approached problem-solving and building relationships with people, those don’t necessarily seem to be the skills most valued by the military right now. You were a visual artist from Vassar. You probably had many cultural issues to overcome. But would a more diverse military be beneficial? Even some sort of mandated public service of some sort

What I found intriguing was that I met America in the Marines. At Vassar, I met a certain intellectual group. Vassar doesn’t teach you how to do anything. Literally. You come out of Vassar with no skill other than that if you find yourself in any situation you’ll be able to think your way out of it. It’s a critical thinking environment. To constantly question, to constantly try to resolve, and to resolve by not talking over the problem but by engaging in it. Collectively in some ways.  The military obviously has a very hierarchical system, but I didn’t see them any differently. I took the discipline of critical thinking, much to the chagrin of certain people, and I employed it.

Now that led to its own kind of hubris in your second tour, when you thought what had been effective among the Shia might also work with the Sunni. It didn’t.

I said, well, I don’t understand anything that’s happening here, which should tell me something. Shut up and find out. I deluded myself into thinking that because I had been effective in that area, which was very rural, Shia, on the Iranian border, with completely different feelings, that when I went for my second tour in Ramadi, the opposite side of the country, Sunni, I thought I could apply these great collective, cooperative ideas of building a city to a place that was a shooting gallery. And I was exposed for being the most wrong person, ever. It was just one step short of delusional that I could take these ideas and apply them effectively to a place, thinking, Well, this has been effective in a small scale, on a small range, with almost no money. We repaired buildings, we established critical infrastructure, we fixed water lines. We did an awful lot of stuff in a small place and they liked it.

With the irony, of course, that we fixed what we blew up.

Right. I thought that if you give something to someone that they realize is of great value to them, then they will defend it and, in doing so, they will embrace some of the stability that comes with preserving things instead of destroying them. We knew very well what the Taliban did and what the insurgents could do, which was destroy things. They didn’t build things for people; they blew them up. Our message was, “We didn’t do that.” And of course, in order to fight them, we blew things up. So our message was lost in our own struggle, and we never could achieve the support of the locals because we could prove nothing. We couldn’t give them the one thing that was needed for all these things to be effective, which was security, peace. We couldn’t do it. And because they knew we couldn’t do it, they were forced to side with those who would use extreme measures.

“Hopelessness” is certainly a word that comes to mind. I mean, we fought the city every day, as one captain said when we were there. You don’t fight the Battle of Ramadi, you fight Ramadi every day.

An impossible bureaucracy, corrupt institutions, intractable problems — it’s almost like a David Simon TV show.  And in between tours in Iraq, you established an acting career, and played a Baltimore policeman on “The Wire.” How did one experience affect the other?

Sgt. Colicchio fed off that second tour of Iraq where I was so frustrated. Colicchio is the opposite, he has a very black-and-white sense of justice. There is no gray for him, and of course, Iraq was entirely gray. So I got to air all the things I had to bury while I was there.

What was the timeline like on the acting roles, and your military service?

Interestingly, I had just come back from my first tour when I got the role of Colicchio. And for a year, 2004, I did Season 3. Immediately at the end of the filming schedule, I went to Ramadi. For 2005, I came back just in time for the beginning of Season 4 and rushed to grow out some hair on my face. It was literally at the end of one experience and the beginning of a very different one.

How do you handle that psychologically — to go from a real war zone into playing a police officer?

It was all an acting of a certain kind. When you play a role, there is some of you in it, and the rest is what you’re burying yourself in to create a character. I did that in Iraq. I didn’t think I could be killed. I had to prove that by acting that way. And I did the same thing with Colicchio; Colicchio  was airing a lot of frustration I truly felt, that I kept to myself, and he gave it a voice. So it’s interesting that I think the war informed Colicchio in some ways, and then going back, I was once again placed in that environment where I had to create a certain person who was both real and partially imagined to deal with that environment. I couldn’t actively and visually be frustrated with Iraqis, because that was insulting. Even if they were saying the most outrageous stuff imaginable. It’s an area of conversation, most of which is a lie. Asking questions about the lie, you begin to get pieces of the truth, and eventually, you create something close to what’s really going on.

So this man offered to show me the city, grab a cup of coffee and talk for a while. He listened and gave me good advice. Then as dusk overtook the storm, he told me his tale.

At 30, he’d been a promising history scholar, on faculty at a major university and traveling the world. But after five years, he was denied tenure. And suddenly, everything in his life — teaching, research, sabbaticals — simply disappeared.

He fell apart briefly, then rallied and decided to write a book. It would be successful and he’d reclaim his rightful place. A few years into the project, he won a prestigious grant. And with that, he became obsessed. His marriage fell apart; he lived on next to nothing. When he finished the novel and his agent couldn’t sell it, the man hired a series of editors to help him revise.

One day, he woke up and realized that two decades had passed. His credentials were out-of-date, his novel a 10-pound weight on the shelf. He started a small business, writing corporate copy and people’s histories, and it took off. He was fine now, but sad.

By the time he finished, our cups were long empty. I touched his hand but hardly knew what to say.

A year later, my husband and I moved back to Minneapolis and I took a job in advertising. Was it simple cause and effect? Probably not. But I still credit that man with the smartest career decision I ever made.

- – - – - -

I was nearly 43 when I started in advertising, which is roughly equivalent to being drafted into the NFL at age 39.

For years, I’d supplemented teaching and fiction and freelance journalism — my real work — with small, lucrative commercial jobs. Over time, I put together a decent portfolio of posters, ads and annual reports. But this wasn’t something I talked about.

Advertising was, after all, a frat boy’s business ruled by wanton consumerism and outright lies. I didn’t belong. I’d earned an MFA at Iowa and established a credible byline. Copywriting was, for me, like the hooking that some women do to pay their way through law school. A necessary evil, but definitely not something you put on your CV.

Which is how I ended up on contract with a hot Twin Cities agency to do some medical writing in early 2010. It was like high school … and by that I mean my kids’ high school. I attended meetings with children who looked too young to drink (though two of them held beers) and we brainstormed strategy. Despite their Justin Bieber haircuts, these kids were smart. The ideas flew. People laughed. No one asked why someone’s mom was at the table. I was relieved.

One day I ducked into a conference room and overheard two women talking; one of them had recently turned 32 and she was panicked. She figured she had three years left in advertising, eight years max. I silently agreed.

So I was stunned when the agency offered me a job. The salary they threw out was double the last teaching job I’d applied for. The benefits were excellent. My hiring manager was a gentle hipster, a few years younger than I, who ran his neighborhood farmers’ market. A talented guy who’d come to Minnesota from a major television studio in New York so his kids could attend better schools.

Still, I accepted reluctantly, thinking of this as a year-long experiment. I was a novelist. To take this job long-term would be selling out.

In my world, advertising was something a serious writer did before doing something important. Augusten Burroughs. Don DeLillo. Salman Rushdie, for God’s sake. These guys didn’t keep up their copywriting after they got famous. If anything, they lampooned it. It was like the laughably bad marriage they’d had when they were young.

And yet, my conversation with that man in Seattle echoed through my head. What if you never become Burroughs or DeLillo or Rushdie? What if — horrifying as this was to contemplate — being Ann Bauer of 2005 was the peak? I shivered and vowed to treat this job as if it were real. I’d play the part. Act as if.

A lot of people asked me, once I enlisted, if modern advertising really was like “Mad Men.” Were there fevered all-night creative sessions? Client meetings where we hid our work behind curtains and dramatically revealed it? Wild, drunken parties where we dressed up and danced and people had sex under desks?

Yes, yes, and, uh, yes. (Except for the sex part. I’ve heard rumors, but I can’t say for sure.)

The truth is that advertising — at least in the agency where I practice — is just as fun as it looks on TV. But here’s the part I wasn’t prepared for: I also found it very good-natured. Stimulating. Strangely sweet.

I came to this field jaded, not only by nature but due to the experiences I’d had in the previous couple of years. My older son, who has autism, had gone through a hellish psychosis at age 20. My younger son was struggling to cope and floundering. Our year in Seattle had been mostly dark and grim.

But after six months I realized that despite my angsty temperament, I felt lighter. Who could stay melancholy when surrounded by interesting, funny kids who make paper hats out of their creative briefs, then spend 10 serious hours designing a bank logo that’s a perfect work of art?

If a baby was sick or a parent had a milestone birthday, people didn’t say, “What about your work?” they said, “Go home. Be with your family. Don’t worry. It’ll all get done.”

And slowly, I saw that some of my assumptions were wrong. Yes, most of the directors were male — and young. But a lot of this was circumstance. There were more men taking the training and applying for the jobs. The young, single ones were free to work nights and evenings. They had the voice and aesthetic for advertising’s bulwarks: national sports accounts, casual dining, retail, spirits and beer.

But when our agency acquired financial and medical clients, they tapped me. A middle-aged woman, but the best person for the job. No one was filling out those minority/ethnicity forms that universities make you sign. But taking age out of the equation, I walked into a pretty diverse work environment: Jews, Arabs, blacks and Hispanics. People with disabilities. The foreign-born, Republican, communist, Catholic and gay.

I watched as our agency hired a young Web developer who was in the middle of gender-reassignment surgery. She transitioned from male to female among computer nerds and tough, biker-y looking IT guys. They often go out for drinks as a group. She ran for, and won, the title of “queen” at our annual holiday party. Everyone cheered.

There were even a few more hires like me: women past the Peggy Olson ingénue phase. People who never went to ad school. Former lawyers and clerics who came in with wonderfully weird new slants.

Just as my experiment was due to end, management said it wanted to promote me. I was given the title associate creative director and put in charge of some of the brightest writers in the place.

And oddly, I was happy. My anniversary date came and went and I felt something unexpected: a reluctance to leave.

- – - – - -

I’ll admit, I waver sometimes.

I struggle with some of the messages we send out and I’ve drawn a few personal lines: I won’t work on pharma ads or have anything to do with gambling. I won’t market alcohol to young people. Twice, I’ve stood up in a meeting and said, “No, we will not say that. It would be wrong.”

I like to think it’s one of the reasons they keep me: I’ll speak up divisively when groupthink takes hold. And so far I’ve won every battle, pulling our copy to what I see as the ethical side.

But I also struggled with the ethics of teaching, my other career. It’s forbidden to say this in the ivory tower, but students pay tens of thousands of dollars for creative writing degrees then graduate into a world where there are no jobs. The only thing they can do is teach, breeding more creative writing majors. It’s an endless, self-serving cycle.

Most days, I take pride in being part of a company that stimulates the economy and employs more than 400 souls.
Even so, when every academic and writer I know converged at a conference in Chicago, while I was back home writing ad copy, I had another crisis of faith. For days, my Facebook was full of photos of people with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Posts like: “Met Pam Houston at AWP and she was really nice!” I felt, irrationally, left out.

Then I remembered: I hate conferences. Crowds, bad food, high entrance fees. People constantly whispering things like, “Did you hear about that fiction opening in South Bend? Some guy with like nine books and a screenplay in production got that job. Asshole.”

I avoided conferences even when I was in the academic world — one reason I wasn’t terribly successful. But teaching … that’s another story. Teaching, I miss.

In a way, I get to do this at the agency, too. I give random lectures on grammar and lead rhetoric seminars (we call them “presentation training”). Kids — sorry, junior designers — come to me with any number of issues: pregnant girlfriends, divorcing parents, money problems. On good days, it feels a little like office hours to me.

One winter afternoon while I was at work, my agent called to tell me he had an offer for my novel from a small but very well-respected press. He quoted the advance amount, then said cheerfully, “I’d tell you to buy champagne and celebrate, but you’d blow the whole thing.”

For the first time in my career, I didn’t have to care about the money. And make no mistake, it is about the money. All my conference-going friends were busily filling out 50-page grant applications, spending days on personal statements, making multiple copies, saving their receipts from FedEx. They support fiction in their way; I support it in mine.

Yet I knew, eventually, my way must end. Even a mid-list book requires attention: readings, bookstore signings, interviews and radio shows. When I received a letter asking me to teach a summer workshop at Iowa, I sent my acceptance but chose the last possible dates. I wanted to put off quitting as long as I could.

But eventually, I prepared a formal resignation letter requesting that the agency convert me back to contract so I could continue working with them when I come back from my tiny summer tour.

I took it to the chief creative officer (our Don Draper). He said no.

He said don’t be silly, we’ll work it out, take the time you need, we want your book to do well, we think it would be great if you teach at Iowa. Keep your job. Other writers stepped in without my asking to cover the time I’m gone. It felt kind of like a barn raising: Someone rang a bell and the forces converged.

Are there still things I don’t like about advertising? Sure.

The Nerf gun wars get to me. When the song about “itty-bitty titties,” played at ear-splitting volume for the fifth time, I leaned over and said, “Some women may not appreciate that, you know,” and got exactly the same eye roll my 17-year-old gives me. Occasionally, there’s an all-day client meeting in a hermetically sealed room that makes me feel like time has actually stopped.

But even then, I’m glad to be out of the frantic, impoverished, pure academic writer’s life.

I stay in touch with the man from Seattle. I’m happy to say his business is soaring, and he’s working on his novel again. Not for a job. Not because he has to “publish or perish.” But because he likes his book — a Gothic story about music and driving ambition and real human tragedy. Exactly the sort of novel I would love to read in a firelit coffee shop, safe from the falling rain.

This fictional family tours around to places like London and Copenhagen and Bavaria, and they go to Paris a lot, and skiing in the French Alps; we did all that too. They live in a duplex with a fireplace in the medieval center of Luxembourg, as we did; their children go to the British-run international school, as did ours. They buy a secondhand Audi in the downtrodden industrial city of Esch-sur-Alzette, but it takes them a frustratingly long time to figure out how to find the car they want, because the word for “station wagon” in French is, bizarrely, “break” (?), a word they choose to ignore when they come across it in the classifieds, because it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, meanwhile wondering why for the love of God there are no used station wagons for sale in the entire country.

You get the picture: There’s a lot of circumstantial overlap between the fiction and the reality.

Yes, now that I reread certain passages, I have to concede that some of the dialogue seems to be lifted more or less verbatim from real-life conversations in my household.  And, OK, I can’t deny that my nonfictional wife and my fictional heroine share some personality traits: They’re both smarter than their husbands, for example.

Here’s the part that’s not my fault: The book’s jacket is dominated by a silhouette of a woman who — there’s really no way around this — looks a great deal like my wife. My publisher designed the jacket, so this bit is entirely their fault. (I’m pretty sure they did it on purpose, as some weird type of Valerie Plame-like leak, possibly as retaliation for my wife’s habit of wandering around their building, barking orders at people. I lightly objected, something along the lines of “Doesn’t this look too much like my wife?” My editor stared at me as if to say, What are you, an idiot? Of course it looks like her.)

Actually, I’ve got to admit that there are certain, shall we say, holes in the narrative of my wife’s youth that I’ve chosen to not examine closely. Her internship in the U.S. Senate. Her year-long trip around the world with the boyfriend who, apparently, didn’t return to the States, and ended up, if I’m not mistaken, in Morocco. Her summer job in Venice. Her nonspecifically “European” godmother married to the British Lord with the houses in London and St. Tropez. Her months spent supposedly waitressing in Paris. What type of recent Harvard graduate in art history (supposedly) takes a job waitressing in Paris? At a vegetarian restaurant, for crying out loud? Vegetarians? In Paris? I don’t think so.

When it comes right down to it, I frankly don’t understand the point of all these “business” trips. To places like Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Mallorca (Mallorca?), and, now that I think of it, Istanbul. What sort of business could an American book-publishing executive have in Istanbul? Absolutely none, that’s what.

Hmm.

OK, now that it’s all enumerated in detail like this, I can’t deny that it’s looking pretty bad. So maybe I’m not absolutely, definitely certain that my wife is not a spy.