April 2008

Q:  Many young writers begin by writing stories and then, once they figure certain things out in the shorter form, move on to write a novel. Is that what you did?

A:  That would have been more reasonable than what I did. I never wrote stories. I finished one in college and one in graduate school, but that was it. I was always working on novels.  I started writing a novel in the fifth grade, a rip-off of the Susan Cooper Dark is Rising books, and stayed with it for about four years until I gave it up and started another one.  The second novel I worked at for about another four years before throwing it out, too. 

I never got very far into the novels. I would write a few chapters and then rewrite ad nauseam.  In retrospect they were exercises, although it was important that at the time I thought they were the real thing.  It just never occurred to me to try to write stories.

Q:  Why not?

A:  Because I never read them.  Or I read them in school, as assignments for reading class.  Do they still have reading class?  In the schools in my town, we read these stories that were supposed to teach you how to “strengthen your language skills,” and you read them in something called reading class or language arts class. It wasn’t until about the tenth grade that we were assigned whole books.  Until then, if I read a novel it was something I borrowed from the public library for fun during the summer.  I thought of the story as something you read for school and the novel as something you read for pleasure. 

Q:  What were some of those novels you read for pleasure as a child?

A:  Herbie Goes Bananas—a novelization of the Disney movie about the Volkswagen Beatle “with a mind of its own.”  That was the one where he went to Mexico and fought a bull. Then I had a copy of Before Adam by Jack London that I found in my grandmother’s basement.  The Natural by Malamud.  Shall We Tell the President? by Jeffrey Archer.  A lot of it was going to the library and taking out something I’d heard of, often because there had been a movie. I really didn’t have any guidance about what to read at all. 

There wasn’t a culture of reading for pleasure where I grew up.  There was a culture of reading for nutrition.  If you were a reader, you would end up in a well-paying job, working indoors.  So when I had my first experience as a teenager of literary pleasure, I felt as if I’d discovered another world hidden in this one. 

There’s a feeling of absolute freedom you can get as a teenager while reading: you discover a world inside your mind where you’re not only free from the constraints of family and society but also—especially with fiction—from the constraints of your own personality and ego.  You feel as though you’ve become the character. 

And then there was the pleasure of language itself. I started to read the Annie Dillard book An American Childhood on my way home from high school one day, but I couldn’t get past the first page.  I just read it over and over, because the language was so beautiful. And I really had no idea why. I had no consciousness of how people produced a literary effect.  I felt as though I were looking at a product of the natural world, not a product of technique and choice.  It was like I was looking at the stars. 

I read all of Toni Morrison’s novels around that time, the end of high school, more or less unaware of their political content.  I got a continuous thrill from reading her, and it was almost all a language thing.  Later on, I heard her say in an interview that she tried to rewrite to the point that the book should feel unwritten.  Virginia Woolf also says, I think in her diary, that she detested the personal in writing. 

Q:  What do those words mean to you, unwritten and not personal? 

A:  Well, they don’t mean “lacking fingerprints.”  There’s a certain ethos in some university programs, I think, that values absolute removal of any trace of the writer and views consciousness of the writing itself as toxic.  It may be a reaction against the solipsism of memoir and the abstractions and obfuscation of theory. But I always thought there was a danger in taking that ethos too far, because the writer in trying to have this magisterial remove might end up with no identifiable style, and the voice would have a flattened affect, like an autistic child.

That being said, I think by unwritten Toni Morrison means she wants the reader to have an impression of unmediated experience. You may be unconscious of technique even while you’re having a deep experience of it.  Morrison is such an erotic writer. She values intimacy above all things.

And by not personal I think Woolf means not merely personal.  Personality is a performance; it’s what we show the world.  And because it involves the senses, the fiction writer surely has to be attentive to it, because writers are always dwelling in the land of sensual detail.  But personality is not soul.  And when a writer is content to describe the way a person eats a sandwich without holding that description responsible also for revealing the true character behind the action, then the description is merely personal, and the writer has failed.

Q:  Did you have these things in mind as you were writing The End?

A:  I had them in mind while I was revising The End.  I had an enormous amount of paper—there were probably four finished, revised chapters in the trash for every one that’s left in the book—all covered with observation, action, or thought of one kind of another.  What I eventually tried to do was to keep only the surface observation that revealed the depths of the characters; and to keep only the ideas, the thinking, that was exposed through observation of surfaces, through concrete detail.

I was trying to create meaningful experience—with equal emphasis on both words.

Q:  What about the story? How did it come to you?  What do you think the book is about, in a plot sense?

A:  I started off with a short scene, a small piece of violent action. Then I needed characters to do the action, a time and place in which to set the fictional world. Then other characters, and so on. After about five years, I had a world that I felt I knew very well, based on the Murray Hill neighborhood of Cleveland, where my grandfather was born.  And I had about six characters with whom I’d spent long enough that I felt I knew them as intimately as I knew real people; and I had a vivid sense of the characters’ autonomy: I could only get them to do things that they wanted to do. But the irony is that all the action—the story—around which those first five years worth of work took place was bogus.  It had to go.  So in effect I had six characters in search of a play.  And I rewrote the book in such a way as to be true first and foremost not to a preconceived idea of what the drama should be, but true to the characters.

No, that’s not right, not true to the characters.  I didn’t exercise that kind of control.  I was in control of certain elemental events, like acts of God and of strangers; but the characters seemed to act and react to the events in ways that were of their own choosing.  And once they started to do that, I began to have an entirely different relationship with them.

Q:  Like a parent with a newly grown-up child.

A:  Exactly. I wanted them to succeed.  I gave them all the support I could.  But in the end I knew they had to make their own decisions and live with the consequences of the decisions.

Then in the final few years there was another phase, in which I felt as though I was the child and they were the adults and I was learning from them.  All the characters are so different from one another, and they each know things that I myself, as it were, don’t know.  Rocco knows how to believe in the Christian God.  Enzo knows how to live in service of other people.  Mrs. Marini knows how to be supremely egotistical and yet to find herself ridiculous, and laughable. Ciccio knows how to ask certain kinds of overtly cerebral and philosophical questions without abstracting them from his emotional life.  Lina knows how to be alone.  

Q:  What does the jeweler know how to do?

A:  The jeweler knows how to kill.

Q:  But what do you think the book is about in a plot sense?  If you had to compare the structure of The End with the structure of one of your favorite novels, which would it be?

A:  I think Mrs. Dalloway, in which the party is the occasion for the book.  The characters in Mrs. Dalloway each have their own beginning, middle, and end, and those arcs parallel and reinforce one another.  The cumulative effect is quite dramatic and emotional, and yet all the while the book is being held together only by this party that Clarissa is organizing.  The book does not terminate in the party.  The book terminates in the characters. 

In a similar way, the Assumption carnival is the occasion for The End.  Mrs. Marini might be the Clarissa character, very skillful and socially ambitious; the jeweler would be like Septimus, the suicide; and so on.  There is a lot of action on the surface, and the action is in the realist mode in the sense that the events are faithful to the “real” sensual world as we experience it.  Also, the action comes to its own conclusion. The carnival begins, erupts in confusion, and goes to pieces, sending each character into a different place.  It sends Rocco to Niagara Falls, where his faith abandons him; it brings the jeweler to his death; it settles Lina down finally to a good job back at home; it blows Ciccio to Chicago; and it sends Mrs. Marini into the deep past.

Q:  What do you mean that the characters’ thematic arcs are parallel to each other?  Does that speak to the title in some way?

A:  Yes, exactly.  The characters are all quite different from one another.  But what they have in common is that they are all drawn to their own disappearance, their peculiar end.  This is the common place where all their arcs terminate. 

Lina disappears one day in the middle of the book.  Ciccio disappears onto the train at the end.  In the 1880s, Mrs. Marini disappears from her family’s home.  The jeweler drowns himself, and his name disappears before we can find out what it is.  And Elephant Park, considered as a character, knows that white flight is impending, and so it’s planning its own disappearance.

This is one of the reasons I love the cover of the book.  The eye follows those train tracks into the distance, toward this great, brilliant, blinding light—the hoped-for place.  But the tracks, the way forward, disappear in the smoke before they actually reach that place.  For me, the tracks are the paths of the characters’ lives, and that light is where they’re trying to go. The light is the end.

Then of course all the major characters have these crucial moments getting on trains, or getting off them, or waiting for someone else at the station.

Q:  Is The End an immigrant novel?

A:  It’s just a novel.  There have been a lot of novels about the so-called immigrant experience in recent years, and it makes sense that people should be writing about this because globalism in its many forms (the global economy, immigration, the Internet, global terrorist networks) is the big story of our times.  That issue as experienced by believable characters ought to make for a great and timely novel.  I’m sure it does sometimes.  But often it turns into a kind of celebration of an ethnic culture as such.  “Look at these people and their quaint old-world ways and their delectable cuisine!”  I’m sure it serves an important sociological function to educate people about cultures different from their own.  For that, I’d rather go to journalism, travel writing, or just to travel.

The mistake of this kind of ethnic or immigrant fiction is similar to mistaking personality for character.  The novel has always been about individual human beings.  They may find themselves in a rich cultural backdrop, but when the culture comes into the foreground, the characters are forced to the back and become types. They lose their freedom, and the crucial experience of reading a novel, that intimate relationship between the reader’s private mind and the individual mind of a free acting human character, is lost.

All but one of my great-grandparents immigrated to Cleveland from Europe and never saw their home countries again.  All of them are buried in Cleveland. Contemporary immigrants are more likely to go back home from time to time, but that happened much more rarely among the immigrants from the beginning of the last century.  Now, the enormity of a break like that—to leave, often as a teenager—and never to go back to your home country must have been excruciating.  It’s the peculiar individual experience of that break that interests me. 

The End is set among Italians because those are the immigrants whose experience I know most intimately.  But it could have been set among the Hungarians or Bohemians or Poles of Cleveland and been a very similar book. 

Q:  There’s a consistent undercurrent of racial anxiety in The End.  The misunderstanding at the carnival in the third chapter eventually forms the backdrop of the climax.  And yet it never takes over the plot.  Can you talk a little about the race issue in this book?

A:  At first I was reluctant to address it at all. I was writing about the characters and their experience of their small-scale world.  Also race is so hard to write about in a way that doesn’t amount to sermonizing, smug, armchair liberalism.  But eventually I had to admit that there was no way around it. 

In the 1930s, Cleveland, like a lot of industrial Midwestern cities, was largely a patchwork of white ethnic neighborhoods, with languages and religions alternating from block to block.  The vast majority of these neighborhoods evaporated in the space of about fifteen years, after World War II. 

We’re all familiar with the polite explanation that the post-war economic boom, the GI Bill, and the Interstate Highway system all made a house in the suburbs possible and the old neighborhoods obsolete.  But I still think the single biggest reason—or I should say the catalyst, the thing that made a lot of the residents of these neighborhoods actually call the real estate broker—was when blacks began moving into those neighborhoods.  The speed of the transformation of all-Polish or all-Italian neighborhoods into all-black neighborhoods was breathtaking.  And because of the era in which The End takes place, I couldn’t ignore it.

But the issue poses enormous rhetorical problems. It sucks all the air out of the room.  It’s such an important issue for us as a society that as soon as it comes up, the room goes quiet and we must all reverently talk of nothing else.  I didn’t want to do that.  I wanted the people to continue to have their very private concerns in the midst of this large historical reorganization.  So the racial story line doesn’t culminate in a riot, as it threatens to.  It culminates in something much smaller and in a way more humiliating for the characters involved. 

Gary, the man who has already moved out to the suburbs and is coming to the old neighborhood as a kind of tourist, wants nothing more than to bond with the Italians from the old neighborhood, but he doesn’t share the religion anymore; he doesn’t speak the language; all he has in common is that he is white like they are.  And when he and the immigrant Eddie see the black women coming out of Lina’s house, they can’t even communicate with each other, to say nothing of chasing these women down as they both would like to do.  The racial story line ends with a whimper, not a bang: the little boy on the street who pisses his pants.

I guess what I’m saying is that I wanted the racial issue to be true to life as the characters experience it.  And for these people, racial tensions are neither overwhelming nor resolvable.

Q:  What about abortion?

A:  I tried to treat that in a similar way.  It’s a big, charged, issue in our political culture now.  But I know that for a lot of women—working class, immigrant women—it was not quite a political issue or even, I suspect, much of a religious issue as it is now.  It was a practical issue—that is, it was less an idea than something they did or did not do at one time or another in their lives.  The politics surrounding abortion have turned it into a legal and moral abstraction, especially for men who may feel very comfortable in their judgments, either for or against legal abortion.  But I suspect that in 1930 the choice whether or not to have an abortion was more likely a matter of whether you could afford to feed another child and whether you were willing to risk dying from sepsis after the procedure.  It was less a question of what the church or the government had to say about it.

We often think of that time as largely defined by the sexual restrictions of the society and the church. I always thought, for example, of my grandparents’ Catholicism as more devout than the one I experienced in our church as a child.  It may have been.  But I think it took strange turns.  My grandmother told me once that dispensing communion used to go much more quickly when she was young.   I asked why.  Because everyone was using a diaphragm! They were devout enough to deny themselves communion because they were sinning by using contraception, but they were practical enough to use contraception anyway.

Q:  Who were your inspirations?

A:  My grandparents.  I grew up around a lot of old people.  All four of my grandparents lived close by and I saw them at least once a week. All of them were alive when I started writing the book.  All of them are dead now.  We used to sit around and play cards.  My father’s mother used to cut my hair while I sat on a chair in the kitchen.

They were all great talkers.

Q:  What did they talk about?

A:  Politics.  Family gossip. The old neighborhoods.  Grudges.  Also they were all in the trades, so you could ask them how a siphon works, and they would take a pencil out of the china bowl with their blood pressure medication in it and flip the light bill upside down and say, “Like this here,” and draw a little picture.

 

The End is the furthest thing from autobiography, but there’s at least one thing modeled on life.  I think it’s in chapter 11.  During the summer when I was about ten years old, I caught a fungal infection in my feet from walking around in puddles.  This my ex-Marine grandfather could not abide.  He had had a horrific injury in the South Pacific during the war.  A large part of his face was blown away and had to be reconstructed with dozens of surgeries over the next three years.  In any event, he had that unyielding Marine Corps discipline about feet. And he got down on his knees—he was 72— and washed my feet.  Then he toweled them off and medicated them and gave me a pair of dry socks, all the time berating me. I must listen and watch and do like he was showing me to do.  He said, “You have to learn to take care of your feet.” 

When my father was getting on the plane to go to Vietnam (he was a Marine, too), my grandfather had only one piece of advice.

Q:  What was that?

A:  He said, “Keep your head down.”

#     #     #