T A B L E+T A L K What was the last book you read that made you laugh out loud? Join the discussion in the Books section of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Haruki Murakami By Laura Miller (12/16/97) Allan Gurganus By Dwight Garner (12/08/97) Mark Leyner By Laura Miller (12/08/97) Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) Gus Van Sant By Cynthia Joyce (10/15/97) Edmund White By Daniel Reitz (10/15/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S Animal Husbandry By Laura Zigman When a TV producer named Jane Goodall loses yet another boyfriend, she searches the natural world for lessons about commitment (01/05/98)		R U S S E L L_ B A N K S PAGE 2 OF 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - In "Continental Drift," Bob DuBois comes to the conclusion that "there are no such things as adults after all, only children who try and fail to imitate adults." What, then, do you think are the defining characteristics of being an adult? I think it's at the point that you are in control of your own economy, and you are able and willing to take care of others who are unable to take care of themselves -- to protect others, I should say. You have a capacity for loving others without deluding yourself about them, about their weaknesses or their failures. So by that definition, Bone would be an adult. He is in control of his own economy, he has a trade, a skill -- he's a cook. He's taking care of these two kids on the boat in a way that's more realistic, though nonetheless still custodial, than the way he took care of Sister Rose, because he was still deluded then, he was still a boy. He thought that any mother was better than no mother, so he sent her back to her abusive mother. And he's able to say he loves even old Bruce, the homophobic, kind of cracked biker. So when he looks up at the stars, he sees the constellation of these people. How did you get into the head of a 1990s 14-year-old boy -- When I'm obviously a '50s kid in the body of a 57-year-old man? I am that in some ways, an adolescent boy in the body of a 57-year-old man. I think a good novelist has to be that in a sense, has to go to the emotional life that you had at different points in your life and access that. That's what I did do with Bone -- I didn't go out and try to imitate 14-year-old boys so much as try to re-create for myself, and tap into, my emotional life in that period, even though the time frame was radically different. But my circumstances weren't all that radically different. I came from a broken home, and although it wasn't sexually abusive, it was abusive due to alcohol and violence. And we were poor, lived in a town not unlike the town that Bone lives in. So it wasn't that hard for me to go there and remember what it was like to be in that strait. I think that was probably the key for me. There was research for it, certainly. I didn't want to write about the '50s. I wanted to write about the '90s, so I did have to go out into the world and hang around tattoo parlors and the shopping malls and the video arcades and so on. I also had to listen to an awful lot of alternative rock music, which I actually thoroughly enjoyed. Now I've got a big collection of CDs. Is there anything in particular you liked? Grunge music I ended up really liking a lot. My kids have ended up borrowing -- and not returning -- my CDs. But I've got a complete run of Pearl Jam. So that part was conscious research. You can get that down easy, but still not get down to where a kid like Bone lives. To do that, you have to tap into your remembered emotional experiences. But I think I probably couldn't do it until I was middle-aged. You have to separate from it. Your memory improves to the degree that you can get somewhat detached from the experiences. Is it still painful once you've detached from it? It's painful, but it's clear. You can understand it better, and can have greater affection for it, and be less defensive, maybe. And you can be less neurotic about your approach to it. You've been very pleased with the screen adaptations of your novels. Have you considered skipping the novel form altogether and writing an original screenplay? Uh, no, I haven't actually. It's not something that would be entirely out of the question, because I like the form and I'm attracted to it the closer I get to it. The more I work with it and the more time I spend with it, the more interesting it is to me. But I don't think my sensibility really suits that form. Ultimately, film is frustrating, because I so dearly love language, and the sound of the human voice, and you can hear that in film. But I'm a control freak and I like to be in charge as much as possible, and film is such a collaborative art that I'd have to give up all the roles I can play as a novelist. When you're a novelist, you're the art designer, costumer, as well as the director and the writer. You do everything. How difficult is it to give up the details in the adaptation? I was thinking specifically of the Ottos, the hippie family in "The Sweet Hereafter" -- in the book, they lived in a dome house, which to me said a lot about who they were -- -- and in the film we put them in an A-frame (laughs). Yes, well, I think you have to steel yourself for that. Sometimes it's just what's available, the exigency -- you're stuck with it. But in this case, it approximated the kind of homemade house that I had in mind. What would have bothered me more would have been if the house had been of a different economic class, if it had been, say, a beautiful modern chalet, or something like that, because that would have violated the class identification that I thought was important to the story. That gave some kind of dimension to the loss, and the experience and the quality and the kind of people that the Ottos were. Your stories all deal in some way with class, and often where class intersects with race. I think those things are inescapable, certainly in our culture. So often race is identified with class, and we often talk about one in order not to talk about the other. Or we concede to one so that we don't have to concede to the other. But, in fact, our "classless" society is riddled with distinctions of that sort -- of gender as well as racial and class distinctions. It would be naive at best, I suppose, to ignore them. I don't write about them out of any commitment to any particular ideology, but out of a simple desire to be accurate. I look out at the world and see them there. I don't feel I have any choice but to put them in the book. In "The Sweet Hereafter," "The Simpsons" is the only TV show the Burnells can all watch together -- but Nicole hates it because she thinks it's insulting. Yes, it's insulting to family life, in the same way that "Beavis and Butt-head" is insulting to adolescents. Do you think there are any truthful representations of American family life in pop culture today? Gee, that's a good question -- I'm stymied. I can't think of any. I don't watch a whole lot of TV, but I do have pretty easy and ongoing access to pop culture. I used to love "The Honeymooners" when I was a kid. Thinking back, "Life of Riley" was a good corrective to "Ozzie and Harriet." They were working-class stiffs, and they were buffoons in many ways, but they were clearly struggling. The economic realities of their lives were present -- you were aware of them constantly. N E X T+P A G E +| Redefining the American Dream