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 3 OF 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your characters are always redefining their own American Dream -- trading in what they have to chase it, or realizing those who are living it can just as easily lose it. Do you think the dream has changed at all since you began writing? I don't think the imagery has changed all that much. There was an interesting piece in a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine about the Disney-created village now in central Florida called "Celebration" -- which is an image of the American dream, probably in its most carefully packaged and merchandised form. I think that imagery is incredibly attractive -- you can own a home, you basically can provide food, shelter and education for yourself and your family, and you can be employed gainfully and interestingly all your life -- that's your reward. But that dream is unreachable for a majority of Americans. Running alongside of that dream are some interesting stats: The average credit card holder in the U.S. has $4,000 in debt that they're paying interest on -- 20 to 21 percent interest. What does that say about the American Dream? That you can have it if you're willing to pay 21 percent interest on it? So much of the American Dream is used to manipulate people into putting themselves and their families at risk, and bending themselves all out of shape in order to chase that dream. Bob DuBois, the main character in "Continental Drift," is afraid of blacks -- he doesn't trust them -- but still he's fascinated by them, and in fact falls in love with a black woman. Do you consider him to be racist? What he is is a passive member of a racist society -- passive in the sense that it's mostly unconscious, and he has no sense of the history of racism. And he therefore has no sense of the role he plays in it. One of the things I believe is that if you are a member of a society or culture that is racist and sexist -- as ours is -- and you don't offer an ongoing critique of that as part of your daily life, then you're inevitably going to end up participating in it. I mean, I do it -- we all do it -- unless we aggress it. The only way out of it is a kind of constant ongoing cultural critique. And Bob certainly doesn't occasion that, which leads him to disaster -- and heartache and heartbreak -- all along the way. Is that what you're trying to get at with your forthcoming novel, "Cloudsplitter"? I'm not consciously trying to write that other side, but certainly the characters in "Cloudsplitter" are very conscious of that. After all, this is John Brown, the abolitionist, and his family, and he surrounded himself, consciously and deliberately, with African-American people. And not just as colleagues in the abolitionist movement, but as members of his household. But that's a different kind of man. Bob DuBois is a much more typical man, of his time and place, than John Brown. John Brown is an exceptional man. You write with such wisdom about maleness. But you've also written from a female perspective, though not quite as deeply. Is that something you'd like to do more of? I've certainly considered it. In fact, the novel I'm currently gathering material for is about a woman and is told from a woman's point of view. As someone who was raised pretty much in a single-parent family from the age of 12 -- my mother raised four children -- and someone who has been married several times and has raised four daughters, I'm very much aware of the differences between men and women. Profoundly aware of them. So do you find it daunting to write from that perspective? No, I'm eager to do it. I've tried a couple of times, in "The Sweet Hereafter" particularly, where two of the narrators are female, one an adolescent girl and the other a woman. And I found myself extremely comfortable doing it. In fact, I found it more difficult to write the voices of the characters that resembled me more closely -- to get inside the lawyer Mitchell Stephens or Billy Ansel, the Vietnam vet who loses his kids -- their voices were harder for me to hear than it was for me to hear the voices of Nicole or Dolores, because they overlap with my own. How do you know when you get a character's voice right? I think it happens when I feel I'm listening, and not speaking. In this most recent novel, "Cloudsplitter," which is a very long one, and narrated from the point of view of an elderly man looking back over his life at the turn of the century -- in 1900 looking back to the 1840s -- it's a man who's extremely different from me, the son of John Brown. His voice and character and circumstances are so different from mine that I could listen and pay attention. I couldn't speak for him. It's easier for me that way. I get confused, or my signal gets weak, when I end up trying to speak for somebody. Do you have favorites among the books that you've written? You sort of love the books nobody else loves, the way you love a child that nobody else likes -- you feel a special affection for that child because it has such a struggle in the world. I suppose there are a couple of books of mine that tend to get overlooked, while the other ones get all the attention. One of them is called "The Relationship of My Imprisonment," which is a very short book, almost a novella, that I've remained loyal to and fond of for odd reasons. One of them is that, formally, I think it comes as close as anything I've written to accomplishing what it set out to do. It realizes its own form; it goes as far as it can go. It's a peculiar book -- it's eccentric and has eccentric language and an interesting publishing history that I'm pleased by. It started very small, and was eventually serialized in a mimeographed magazine on Manhattan's Lower East Side -- perhaps the '70s equivalent of Salon. I'm really kind of pleased that it started out that way. "Affliction" is considered your most autobiographical novel, although almost all of your novels contain at least some recognizable, and sometimes detestable, biographical elements. Is writing a way of exorcising the painful parts of your past? I wouldn't put it quite that way. But I do know that storytelling has made it possible for me to make my life coherent to myself. Even though I haven't been telling my own story necessarily, you can't keep your own life story out of it, even if you've gone as far afield as I've gone. There are certain things that writing has done for me that if I hadn't had them, I probably would have killed myself or somebody else. Some magazine was asking writers what they would have become if they hadn't become a writer, and I said what would have happened to me is that I would have been stabbed to death in the parking lot outside a bar in Florida at 24, or something like that. I really believe that, actually. I think writing saved my life. I was so self-destructive, so angry and turbulent, that I don't think I could have become a useful citizen in any other way. So I don't think it worked as exorcism, or therapy, but I think it saved my life. Had you always written as a way to vent? Not really. I didn't write until my late teens, early 20s, and I came to it kind of piecemeal. Originally, I thought I was going to be a visual artist, because I had that talent. As a little boy, people would praise me for it, and it was a way to get special attention from teachers and parents and other adults. But in my late teens, I started to read more seriously then and started falling in love with books. I stared to imitate what I was reading, which was poetry for the most part, but also fiction -- in order to find my way into that. I tapped into impulses I really didn't know I had -- storytelling, and also a deep affection for language, an almost sensual affection for it, that I really wasn't conscious of having had up to that point. Your stories are often so tragic that the reader can sometimes feel betrayed by them. For instance, with "Continental Drift," I wanted more of the young Haitian boy Claude's story -- I was angry when he died. Does the story write itself to the extent that you can't change a character's fate? I didn't want to lose Claude, either -- I was also grief-stricken at the time. But I think that yes, when you are telling a story, especially such a long story like that, you open up very many possibilities that you don't know the conclusion of, and you're just following them. But pretty soon, about a third of the way into the telling, those lines and possibilities start to narrow, or curve back in again, and with each turn of the page fewer and fewer things are possible. You end up compelled by the logic of the form and the logic of the characters' inner lives -- the givens that have got much more control over the story than you do. The difficulty for the writer is knowing when to give up that control and let the story control you. Too many times, you can read a book or novel, and you can see the writer trying to wrest control away from the story, or save a much-loved character, or introduce a new character, some kind of savior, to solve the problem. Twain reintroduces Tom Sawyer in the last third of "Huck Finn." You can see it happening ... oh no! Don't do that! Let Huck and Jim go on alone! Things like that, you can see it happening. And it's very difficult to recognize that point where you have to give up control to the story itself. In "Continental Drift," there was really no way for Claude to survive, it wasn't in the logic of the story. It wasn't his story. Is that what you meant when you said in one recent interview that you and Atom Egoyan, director of "The Sweet Hereafter," share the same bottom line -- that you both "must love the truth"? Yes, I think so. You have to see what's the real truth of the conditions that people are living under. You can't idealize it on the one hand or judge it on the other. You can't narrow it down and foreclose it either way. And I think that's where most of us as writers fail. Because we simply cannot stand what we know is true. It's too difficult. SALON | Jan. 5, 1998