"A Disorder Peculiar to the Country"
Divorce meets 9/11 in this interview and excerpt from Ken Kalfus.
By Salon staff
Dec. 13, 2006 | There have been quite a few 9/11 books out in the past couple of years, but few of them dare to be satiric. "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" does. Did you worry at all that readers might not be ready for that yet?
No, the readers worth having are adventurous and open-minded, and I think many are more than ready for writers to take on 9/11 and the other catastrophes of our recent history.
In fact, I think there's a great deal of frustration out there over the course of current events. We need satire and black comedy, as well as all the other literary strategies, to pierce the sanctimony, cant and hypocrisy that have come to shroud our public life.
Why did a novel about divorce strike you as a good way to approach writing about 9/11? Or was it the other way around?
The idea for the novel came to me in the weeks after Sept. 11, at a time when, reflecting our grief, the media was glorifying the victims of the attacks, calling them heroes, as well as perfect husbands and wives. I felt that through these clichis we were dehumanizing the dead and robbing them of the particularness of lives that were probably as normally messy as our own. Given what we know about the frequency of divorce and the extreme bitterness that often accompanies it, I supposed that if 3,000 people were killed in the towers that morning, then there must have been at least a few spouses relieved and gratified by the end of the day.
Starting there -- and after arranging for Marshall and Joyce to be disappointed by each other's survival -- I wanted to take them through the other garish events of our recent history, again making them experience current events in unexpectedly personal, and increasingly ludicrous, ways.
Some of the things the divorcing couple in your novel do are so extreme it's tempting to think they're exaggerated, but then again, divorce makes people crazy. Did any of your characters' antics come from things you know happened in real life?
Not specifically; for example, I don't know of anyone, locked out of the bathroom by his spouse, who defecated in the kitchen sink. That happens to Marshall early in the novel -- and they don't even have a garbage disposal! But I've heard stories about some unfortunate divorces in which the hateful passions and bad behavior far exceed those in the novel. In fact, both Joyce and Marshall each still bears painful, self-sabotaging memories of having once loved the other. Some divorcing couples lose even this.
Your past couple of books have been set in Russia and deal with Russian themes. What was it like to come back to the U.S. as a setting?
I never considered myself a writer exclusively on Russian themes, and God knows my expertise wouldn't carry me very far if I did. I do believe that America has recently passed through a pivotal moment in its history, offering plenty of opportunity for literary exploration. We'll be writing about the Bush years for a long time, I think. I myself hope to return to Russian subjects some day, as well as take a shot at other places and themes.
The novel's title is peculiar itself. Can you describe how you settled on it?
It comes from a 1760 essay by the British writer Oliver Goldsmith, author of "The Vicar of Wakefield." Here's the relevant sentence, from which I've also drawn my novel's epigraph:
"They are afflicted, it is true, with neither famine nor pestilence, but then there is a disorder peculiar to the country, which every season makes strange ravages among them; it spreads with pestilential rapidity, and infects almost every rank of people; what is still more strange the natives have no name for this peculiar malady, though well known to foreign physicians by the appellation of Epidemic terror."
Goldsmith is writing about the public manias that swept his nation two centuries well before the advent of the electronic mass media that regulate our passions today. "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" leads Marshall and Joyce through the anthrax scare, the Afghan and Iraq wars, the collapse of the stock market bubble and the other "strange ravages" that have plagued our nation in the course of the Bush administration. Propaganda has become integral to their lives, making Marshall and Joyce, like the rest of us, keenly suspectible to "Epidemic terror."
Next page: Read an excerpt from "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country"