A man lies in bed waiting for his wife. She’s gone out on some mysterious errand in the city. He spends the evening fantasizing, listening to music, ordering Chinese food, and seeking ways to reinvent their marriage.

If that doesn’t sound like the plot for your typical piece of literary erotica — especially not the “psychosexual thriller” promised on the jacket copy — neither is Jim Landis your typical debut novelist. Landis spent twenty-four years in the heart of the publishing world as an editor at New York publishing house William Morrow & Company, where he worked with such diverse authors as Robert Persig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) and Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls).

And now, four years after his retirement from Morrow, Landis has produced this stunning, if opaque, literary gem (under the name J.D. Landis) and is on the phone with me acting frustratingly elliptical about it.

“One thing about this book is that it is written, if you know what I mean,” says Landis. “Sentences come to a conclusion for a specific purpose. That seems to be going without saying.” Er, yeah. I guess so.

A Straightforward Tale of Love and Discovery?

Landis seems to have the odd notion that he’s written a completely straightforward tale of love and self-discovery. (“Then again,” says Landis, “I wrote it. I wasn’t cursed with thinking about it.”) He discounts the technical difficulties of confining an entire novel to the space of a single New York apartment (albeit a large one). He breezily mentions that Lying in Bed has no outside authorial voice, just the present-tense narration of John Chambers alternating with the journal entries of Clara Bell, and therefore what you read in the book isn’t completely reliable. “It’s not that they’re not to be trusted as narrators,” he hastily adds, “because I don’t like that either — you know, that kind of writing where the narrator is always lying.”

If Landis’ narrators aren’t liars, neither are they apt to steer a clear path for the reader. Lying in Bed can be exceedingly difficult at times, both in deciphering John’s odd vocabulary and ultra-logical thought processes, and in piecing together Clara’s story from her vague and non-chronological diary entries. The result is an engrossing and often touching story of love and redemption, unique in its challenging, self-absorbed views of love, language, and sex.

Landis: The Odd Man Out

Certainly in the publishing world, Landis was something of the odd man out. While other acquiring editors in the business were chasing after name-brand authors and bestseller manufacturers, Landis took the high road: he wanted writers with talent that went beyond the ability to lure your average B. Dalton browser to the pulp paperback rack.

“The best writers are often not known,” he says. “I resist and resent it when anybody becomes well-known simply because they have a connection to those that are already well-known. Being known by many people is no distinction whatsoever — we’re just feeding this ridiculous idea that there’s something special about celebrity.”

According to Landis, that notion only leads to writers justifying the quality of their work in either the popular or critical sphere by their popularity. “Many authors who get hammered by the critics believe that a writer is as good as a writer’s audience. That’s how they defend their place in the world. ‘People love my work, millions read me, therefore I must be good.’ Then again, people who don’t sell at all justify their own obscurity by saying that obscurity is better.

“The number of readers that a writer has is no reflection on the work itself. Now the number of intelligent readers that grasp the work at hand and truly absorb it or understand it is a blessing to an artist, especially when you find people who really enter into the work who could sit down at a moment’s notice and discuss it with the writer. Often they’re much more intelligent about these works than the authors themselves.”

Given Landis’ loathing of popularity as a determinant of quality, it’s surprising to find him only minutes later mounting a passionate defense of popular fiction. “Serious writers can learn a great deal from popular writers, because popular literature is often just great literature simplified,” says Landis. “Jacqueline Susann once wrote a book where she killed off her male lead character in a plane crash in the middle of the book. That’s a very courageous thing to do — characters take a lot of energy to create. It’s the type of thing a Tolstoy might look at and say, ‘Gee! I think I’ll kill off one of my characters.’”

The type of authors Landis looked for seemed to be just the type who would make such daring creative moves. He began his publishing career in the late 1960s during the height of the counterculture, when books were the prime medium of disseminating new ideas. “I did books on communes when we thought we’d all end up living there, and I stayed on a commune while editing a book,” he says. And over the years, Landis ended up publishing some of the Left’s most well-known faces: Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex), Robert Persig, Leroi Jones, and more recently, Naomi Wolf.

But Landis is insistent on drawing the focus away from him and towards the work in question. “I don’t want this to be an interview about me,” he says. Okay, fine. So what about the book?

Sex, Revelation and Game-Playing

Perhaps like Landis himself, his narrators aren’t disposed to reveal themselves to the reader. What keeps John and Clara together is a strange mixture of kinky sex, personal revelation, and game-playing that harks back to the twisted relationship of George and Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Nicholson Baker also comes to mind, although Landis claims that Lying in Bed was in the planning stages before he had read Baker’s groundbreaking dirty-talk novel Vox.

John Chambers, a millionaire by inheritance and aesthete by temperament, describes himself as a rhetorician (“someone who studies the power of language”). He speaks with horribly arcane words not listed in your everyday desk Webster’s dictionary, such as in the following:

“Diascuties?” [he said.] It was either a brilliant agnominative response or a defensive logodaedaly of the first order.

This is a man who tells his sexual partner after lovemaking, “You were sarmassational!” (pun on sarmassation, n., love play). This is a man who, on being told that his lover was born on November 22, 1963, exclaims with a start that that was the day Aldous Huxley died. This is a man who once went an entire year without speaking because he had lost the sense of purpose to his words.

John’s soul mate Clara Bell seems at first a distant figure, more an enigmatic Beatrice than a flesh-and-blood partner in the marriage. But as we begin to see more of her through her personal journal entries, Clara emerges as an even more complex character than John. Where Chambers is deliberately obscure, pedantic, and insular, Clara is a free spirit devoted to sensual pleasure. Her journals invoke Led Zeppelin rather than Schubert, Virginia Woolf instead of Nietzsche or Strindberg. They also detail Clara’s obsession with a peculiar type of sex act — she likes to numb her fingers by sitting on them and then engage in mutual masturbation with her partner.

“I didn’t want her to be a dummy,” Landis says. “To the extent that she wasn’t going to be an academic, I didn’t want to use her the way they used whores in old movies — you know, bringing joy and life to the dull intellectual.”

It certainly seems at times that John could use such treatment. Ensconced in his own self-contained world and deaf to the realities around him, Chambers is sort of an inverted Rain Man: too intelligent for his own good, a genius savant who hasn’t yet bothered to figure out what the feminine menstrual cycle is all about.

But don’t make the mistake of calling him cold, an adjective Landis emphatically rejects. “Why do we assume that a person very much of the mind is cold or not passionate?” Landis asks. “He certainly becomes quite passionate and quite a connoisseur of Clara’s body. He’s withdrawn, certainly. But I don’t hold to the theory that man is a social animal, that we desire to go out and communicate with others. I think deep down inside we’re all very solitary. He’s a very natural man in that respect.

“At one point, John says he wants to ‘repudiate the tyranny of the gene,’” Landis states. “To repudiate the tyranny of gene is about as noble an intention you can have, because it’s about as difficult a one as you can have. Can you imagine that, repudiating the tyranny of the gene? You’d have to change your hair color, your eyes. But in the book he’s reborn, he’s resurrected. He’s saved by marriage and destroyed at the same time, he has repudiated the tyranny of his genes.”

J.D. Landis Today

There does seem to be a little bit of John Chambers in J.D. Landis — or vice-versa. He admits that “There are times when I find myself falling into a certain formality of sentence structure like Johnny’s,” although he quickly qualifies this statement by calling Clara’s voice equally his own. And like Chambers, Landis may make frequent use of obscure words like “malapert” and “stichomythia” in his book, but he seems to regard simpler words much more suspiciously. He gets particularly flummoxed by the straightforward question “What are you doing these days?”

“What am I doing?” he replies, as if enunciating the most general of verbs is a much more difficult task than sounding a sophisticated lingual construction from Finnegans Wake. “I’m raising my children. I walk my kids to school every day. I’m studying the piano.” He’s also become an accomplished writer of children’s fiction, with several well-known adolescent titles for girls published under pseudonyms, including The Sisters Impossible, Daddy’s Girl, and most recently The Band Never Dances.

“The problem with children’s books is that there’s always adults between you and your readers,” says Landis. “A huge figure in children’s publishing told me that children’s poetry was a dead issue. He was basing that on the fact that sales figures for children’s poetry were going down. But I figure that if somebody tells you that you can’t do something, you should want to do it anyway. When somebody tells you there’s no market for something, that’s the time to strike.”

OnlineHost: Critics’ Choice is delighted to welcome best-selling author Michael Chabon to Center Stage this evening.

OnlineHost: Michael Chabon is the 33-year-old author of Mysteries of Pittsburgh (12 weeks on the NY Times Bestseller list), A Model World, and most recently, Wonder Boys (out right now from Villard Books).

OnlineHost: Welcome Mr. Chabon!

Chabon: Good evening. Thank you for coming. I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have.

CSEmcee5: And welcome Dave!

Edelman: Hi there — I’m the Online Editor for Critics’ Choice. We’ll get to your questions soon… I’m going to start off with a few questions first. Michael, I’ve read that you were working on another book before Wonder Boys… which you decided to set aside. Can you tell as a little bit about this other book?

Chabon: Sure. I worked for a little over five years on a book called Fountain City. It was very complicated and ill-conceived and in the end I decided to abandon it. It was very hard to do this, but I guess it worked out.

Edelman: How does Wonder Boys relate to your troubles with this aborted second novel? Since Wonder Boys is about writers that fail to complete their works?

Chabon: Well, it tells the story of a writer named Grady Tripp who is even more lost in his unfinished book than I ever was. But I definitely gave Grady some of my own anguished feelings about that book I couldn’t finish.

Edelman: Wonder Boys paints a very cynical picture of writers… Do you share this cynical view? Do you feel that writers have an important role in society?

Chabon: Do you really think it’s cynical? I suppose so. It’s more a function of Grady’s own spoilt romanticism — “all romantics meet the same fate” — than my own.

Edelman: Okay, now we’re going to take some questions from the audience.

CSEmcee5: Let’s take an audience question now.

Question: Are there any plans for a sequel to _Mysteries of Pittsburg_?

Chabon: No, I don’t ever plan to go back to any of those characters. But who knows?

Question: Mr. Chabon, I was wondering if you would comment on PITTSBURG. Art’s experiments with homosexuality come at a time before the AIDS scare. Have you considered how/if you would have to change things to write the same story today?

Chabon: Well, I definitely agree that that’s a story that belongs to another time. I can’t even imagine telling it now. It would all be different. Darker, I suppose.

Question: I read that PITTSBURG started out a your Master’s thesis. Did you go to graduate school to work on your writing, or did you/do you intend to teach?

Chabon: I went to the MFA program at UC Irvine in order to find the time and the financial and moral support I thought I was going to need to start my career as a writer. I was very lucky in that I found all 3.

Question: Are you from Pennsylvania? Is this area your “Faulkner’s Mississippi”? (Or even John Waters’ B-more, where I’m from)?

Chabon: No, I’m not really from PA. My dad moved to Pgh. when I was 12, and I spent my summers and holidays there. Then I went to Pitt. I never intended to write more than one book set there, but somehow or other I found my way back in this new book.

Comment: In your books, people are very nonchalant about scenes that are most unconventional. Similar to what Pauline Kael described as Divine’s (John Waters actor) “What the Hell Quality.” I like this very much about your characters.

Chabon: Thank you. I have always been impressed by people who display this quality. I’ve never actually noticed, frankly, that my own preference had made its way into my portrayal of my characters…

Question: Your style in WB seems so much more “adult” than M of P. How have you grown in these few years?

Chabon: Thanks, again. I was 22 when I started MOP. Now I’m 32. Those ten years have taken me all over the country and through many personal difficulties… I guess inevitably I must have grown up. This, I suppose, has emerged in my prose style, which I think is less concerned than formerly with pyrotechnics and showing my chops.

Question: How close was Grady’s “Wonder Boys” book with your ‘baseball’ book?

Chabon: There was no resemblance except for their common unmanageability.

Question: What’s your writing process like when it comes to short stories? I imagine it’s very different from working on a novel.

Chabon: The process is the same, really. I sit down in my chair, turn on the machine, and worry. The difference is that with a short story it’s all over much sooner.

Question: Why did you publish your e-mail address in WONDER BOYS? I appreciate the addition and the response you sent when I mailed you, but isn’t it a risk?

Chabon: The only risk is being swamped, and finding that it takes up hours of your time answering everyone. This is, in fact, exactly what has happened!

Question: your writing is literary and accessible at the same time, like ‘great gatsby’. was it an influence?

Chabon: Gatsby was definitely an influence on my first book, most importantly in its theme of self-invention and self-exaggeration, and in Fitzgerald’s use of one summer as a structure for the book

Question: Do you still write short stories? Your “chops” is really what attracted a lot of us to you in the first place, through the New Yorker. Loved the Nathan stories. Do you still write these characters?

Chabon: Yes, I still write short stories. I had one in the N’yer last fall — “Househunting.” As for my chops I feel that I still possess them — I just don’t feel as much of a need to show them off. Nathan may return one day, but I don’t have any plans for the near future.

Question: How many different languages is Wonder Boys being translated into?

Chabon: Wonder Boys is going to be translated into Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Dutch…maybe a few more

Question: Is there a possibility that “Mysteries” will be a movie?

Chabon: Well, every so often someone comes along and sniffs around the book, but nothing ever comes of it… the rights belong to me still…

Question: Was MOP expected to be such a big hit? Considering the theme of bisexuality, I would think the publishers would be wary of presenting it to the mainstream.

Chabon: It’s much more frightening to Hollywood than to New York as a theme… I don’t think there was much wariness at all.

Question: There seems to be an abundance of great readable fiction out there right now — Rule of the Bone, Independence Day, The Information and, of course, WB, immediately come to mind. Are you optimistic about the future of quality fiction in America?

Chabon: I agree with your optimistic assessment and might add the names of Ethan Canin, Lorrie Moore, Michael Cunningham, Jane Smiley…

Comment: About “showing your chops” — I used to think of M of P as a very “innocent” style, but upon re-reading realized that there was much more to it. WB seems freer, more natural.

Chabon: Thank you. I think my style has grown somewhat less precious. I hope so.

Question: Do you find the cultural fragmentation of the last 10 years has made it more difficult to write novels about Americans? Is it more difficult to make characterizations three-dimensional?

Chabon: I don’t, I confess, give a whole lot of thought to cultural fragmentation when I write. I probably should.

Question: Have any of your books been recorded on audio, and if so with what publisher

Chabon: Yes, as a matter of fact, there is an excellent audio version of WB out from Brilliance Audio.

Question: Michael I’ve always wanted to meet an author who has written something meaningful to me. Thanks. Can you describe process for writing a novel?

Chabon: In three lines…! Well, I begin with an image, usually, or a vague feeling of some kind — a longing for a place, a person a time… then I try to figure out who my characters might be…what kind of people I associate with the above-mentioned feeling or longing… Once I have my characters I try to find a narrator, and then let my narrator help me find a way into a story…only when I’ve got about forty to fifty pages do I sit down a make an outline. Then I try to outline very carefully.

Question: When you write, are you conscious of who you are writing for

Chabon: I have an ideal reader, I suppose. Someone a lot like me.

Question: you’ve spoken somewhat self-deprecatingly about “mysteries,” about showing your chops and calling your style “precious.” are you at all embarrassed by that book? (I hope not, because it influenced me tremendously).

Chabon: I think, from what I’ve read, that most writers are a little bit embarrassed by their first efforts… Imagine if somebody dug up something you did ten years ago and showed it to you…

Question: How much time to you spend devising and or constructing plot before you start writing?

Chabon: As I said, I never have a plot at the beginning.

Question: When reading for pleasure, what do you read

Chabon: Some of the writers I mentioned before, but mostly dead writers… I’m always trying to fill in the holes in my literary education. I also love to read history…

Question: The reason I asked about cultural fragmentation is that the cacophony of “types” in WB seem as though, often, they shouldn’t get along or even have a common vernacular. I especially like the transvestite who breezes through. But I find it stagy at times

Chabon: Interesting point… but I’m not aware of any great effort involved on my part in bringing these disparate people together. It just happens. Maybe fragmentation is a good thing… or maybe it’s something that’s been going on since the beginning of time.

Question: Are you planning on doing any more TV appearances? i.e. Tom Snyder

Chabon: I’m just sitting around waiting for Dave to call…

Question: why not ditch the narrator and let the characters tell the story?

Chabon: Well, there’s no rule that says your narrator can’t be a character, and in fact in both my books this is the case… They’re narrated in the first person by a main character…

Question: What’s a typical day for you? Do you write every day?

Chabon: I write Sun-Thu, 10PM to 3AM. The rest of my time I try to spend with my wife and new baby daughter..

Question: Do you think it is possible for a straight person to write a realistic portrayal of a gay person?

Chabon: Do you? I must, or else I’m just fooling myself…gay writers have been writing straights for years…centuries…

Question: Do you ever think about writing about home, Columbia, MD, “the planned community?”

Chabon: I have fictionalized Columbia in my Nathan Shapiro stories…see what you think!

Question: in both “mysteries” and “wonder boys” you’ve had parents who died a not particularly pleasant death. does this have any parallels to your own life?

Chabon: No. It’s probably laziness on my part. Kill off a parent and you have one less character to worry about.

Question: Did you ever read the Pitt News review of your book?

Chabon: I don’t know if I saw it or not…I don’t think so…

Question: Thanks for your previous answer. How much of you is in your characters and do you feel you can write effectively about someone completely different than you (for ex a lesbian woman of color from Jamaica)?

Chabon: A lesbian woman of color from Jamaica would be tough. It would involve research. but I think that yes, I could do it.

Edelman: Michael, do you feel any generational identity with other Gen X writers? Ex. Doug Coupland, Ethan Canin

Chabon: Of course… as people, more than as writers, though… I don’t really see any common literary thread running through all the writers my age.

Question: Have you found that living in LA has at all altered the tone of your work?

Chabon: Not that I’m aware of.

Edelman: What are you working on now, Michael?

Chabon: Belying my last reply… I’m working on an original screenplay. But it’s almost done, and as soon as it is, I plan to start work on a new novel.

Question: Speaking of your wife and daughter, many of us were surprised to read of them on the “Wonder Boys” cover, assuming your were gay from “Mysteries.” Is this a common reaction?

Chabon: Yes. And, given Mysteries, not a surprising one, perhaps. We do tend to think in categories.

Edelman: Michael, you attended a writing program… Do you feel that these programs help writers? Is writing a skill that can be taught?

Chabon: They help first and foremost in that they give a new writer time, encouragement, and financial support when it’s most crucial…and the company of other new writers is extremely valuable and helpful.

Question: Michael, how much time do you spend reading fiction? what are some of your all time favorite novels?

Chabon: I don’t get to read nearly as much as I would like… only on the weekends or on vacation… Favorite novels: All the King’s Men, Love in the Time of Cholera, Lolita, Remembrance of Things Past, Revolutionary Road, The Age of Innocence, Sentimental Education….

CSEmcee5: All good things must come to an end. Unfortunately our time with author Michael Chabon has drawn to a close. We thank him for spending time here with us tonight.

Chabon: Goodbye, everyone… thanks for coming. The questions were good ones.

Edelman: Thanks for joining us here tonight, Michael…

Chabon: It was a lot of fun!

Edelman: I’d just like to remind people that the log of this chat will be posted online

CSEmcee5: And thank you audience for your insightful comments and questions!

Chabon: Bye!

CSEmcee5: Good night to all!

Q: Did you know all those words, or did you spend a lot of time with a dictionary?

The character knows the words. They’re only mine by extension.

Q: Is his voice your writing voice?

There are times when I find myself falling into a certain formality of sentence structure like his. I would call her voice equally mine. The creation of voice is something that happens beyond one’s own voice.

Q: I saw in your book a conscious division of the world into two dichotomous views — Clara is an extrovert while Johnny is introspective, Johnny uses words while Clara uses language…

No. I wasn’t, thank goodness, writing with that in mind. I didn’t want to create a dialectic of any kind. Certainly in a book that’s so limited in its characters — there’s only two — if I was going to do a dialectic it would have seemed to be too schematic in a way. I wanted them to be in love. That was my goal, in a certain sense, for them to be in love. Whether anyone else feels they’re in love or approves of them being in love I didn’t really care. I would hate to write a book where one character is the mind and the other is the heart, you know something like that.

All you have here are two voices, so you don’t have mine. There is no narrator who’s overseeing this business. He may have an impression of her that’s wrong, or she may have an impression of him that’s wrong. It’s not that they’re not to be trusted as narrators, because I don’t like that either — you know, that kind of writing where the narrator is always lying. But they’re a couple. I was very interested in writing about marriage. And this is the couple I have ended up with in a way, and I’m very happy with their relationship personally. But that’s just my feeling. It wouldn’t bother me at all to find people who don’t feel they belong together. Certainly there have been many readers who can’t stand him.

Q: He is a very cold person.

Well, I don’t know. He’s absolutely devoted to her, he’s very tender and caring for her. The question is, to what extent is intellect — and I’m not asking this in the book, I’m not trying to say that this is what the book is asking; and anyway I don’t have the answers, all I have is more questions — why do we assume that a person very much of the mind is cold or not passionate? He certainly becomes quite passionate and quite a connoisseur of her body. He’s quite attracted to her, as she is to him.

Again, I don’t see him as cold. He’s withdrawn, certainly. But I think almost everybody’s withdrawn, certainly. I don’t hold to the theory that man is a social animal, that we desire to go out and communicate with others. I think he’s a solitary animal. I think deep down inside we’re all very solitary. He’s a very natural man, and it’s natural wanting to be by yourself. I think his retreat into silence is very natural. It’s not always a secure thing to be silent. Communication is obviously very difficult for so many of us in a way, in very mundane ways. If you spend time listening to people talk and see them struggling to talk, to communicate — but he’s definitely withdrawn. You can see that he had a sort of normal life before he went into silence, you remember the thing with the coin. Everything lost its meaning for him. You’re never silent, there’s always this interior voice in your head, it’s never complete silence.

Q: I wanted to throw out what I thought were some of the themes of the book. First: the book is about the two characters’ search for permanence in a world where everything is transient. Johnny’s striving to overcome this feeling that he got when looking at the coin, you know, “truth is nothing,” and Clara gives him the permanence and grounding that he’s looking for.

The permanence in a way, what they’re both looking for, he more than she, is permanence of passion. He never had anything like this before. He’d had sex only once before, and this whole life — and it’s very much life — It’s like that thing where she describes after much prodding her first orgasm to him. And he says, did you feel guilty? And she says yes. And he says, for what? For not understanding how beautiful life is. And he says, Sex? And she says, No, life. Sex is life, and they’re very much combined in this book. Within this room that they live in, sex is life. And what he’s trying to figure out is how to maintain passion together.

It’s a very practical sort of thing in a way. People who are together a long time are frightened of losing it. That’s the permanence he’s looking for. There’s nothing symbolic that I intend. The everlastingness, because he doesn’t believe in an afterlife, is his passion for a woman. Which he’s found through her. And that’s what he’s struggling for is to find a way to maintain this. That’s the permanence. He’s a failed artist in a certain way, not that he practiced. Because he wouldn’t see a musician as an artist, someone who plays other people’s music. He talks about Bach, he says if you try and approach that kind of genius you’re doomed. But in this other area, he’s transcendent. In passion.

Q: And when Clara announces that she’s pregnant at the end, that’s an immortality in a way. It’s an act of creation of their love.

To me, it’s a story element.

Q: Maybe I’m trying to think about this book too symbolically. It doesn’t seem that you think about it that way.

I wrote it. At least I wasn’t cursed with thinking about it. Besides, I’m very open to any kind of interpretations people can find. The idea of him having a child is in there from the beginning. He very much didn’t like himself, he didn’t like himself as a child. He didn’t exactly see the way his parents were raising him. He never wanted to have children. There’s that Nietzsche quote — he realized he was only going to justify himself by becoming a better father than his was. In the first comic sex scene, you know the one with the condoms and all, he says he doesn’t want to replicate himself on earth, because he doesn’t like what he is. But the issue of children has been throughout the book. It’s been a theme, it’s there.

What he doesn’t know is she’s taking birth control pills. He’s so naive, he’s kind of waiting for something to happen. He wants to have a child, but he never quite stops to think about what’s happening, why she’s never gotten pregnant even though they’ve been screwing. Why is she taking the pill? It’s not that she doesn’t want to have a child, she doesn’t want to share it with him. I don’t want to have a child, I don’t want to share my husband with anybody. It’s something that is happening to him. Aside from the fact that a child is what he calls a resurrection… since the book from my point of view very much concerns marrige as a concept and is a celebration of it, and he celebrates it, he sees it as the only resurrection there is, which is the creation of a new being by strangers. The creation of blood. When you’re born and you have parents and sisters and cousins and grandparents, you’re blood relations. But the only way you create blood relations is with strangers. He lives with a religious faith. The baby is in a sense that, but I wouldn’t want people — the baby is just a baby that’s coming.

Q: Can you explain what’s happened with the Chinese guy at the end? I have to confess that I didn’t understand why he’s come back to life, or if that was just a dream.

I’d just prefer to leave it that way.

Q: I wanted to bring up what I saw were a few influences in the book. One particular quote reminded me a lot of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and after I caught that I found myself seeing a lot of the book in those terms.

That’s you. There aren’t any Whitman references in the book. I haven’t actually read Whitman since I was in college. If you look at the names that are actually mentioned, If you look at the names that are mentioned, they would be incorporated in some way… Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf. There’s no literary subtext in the sense that it’s meant to imitate, mock, or use other writers in some other way. There are references throughout because of the way he talks. She’s different, but she’s well-read. I didn’t want her to be a dummy. To the extent that she wasn’t going to be an intellectual, I didn’t want her to be some sort of — you know, the way they used to use whores in old movies, bringing joy and life to the dull intellectual. She’s a reader of fiction, and he can’t deal with that. But he’s not a fiction reader. She’s always quoting fiction to him. She had that affair with a professor, and he gave him some very quintessential American writers, Walker Percy.

Were there any more references you saw?

Q: Well, one which I thought that if he wasn’t an influence, there certainly were similarities was Nicholson Baker’s Vox.

I think he’s great with language and does many things that I couldn’t do. I don’t know when Vox was published, but this wasn’t an attempt to take Vox to a higher or lower level. I was already working on this book at that point, especially in my mind. I haven’t read his latest, but it’s my understanding that he was unfairly maligned.

The shadow of Dostoevsky hangs over the novel a bit, there are a couple of explicit or veiled references. He says “I’m an underground man, but I’m buried in the sky.” He mentions Crime and Punishment. One of the more important ones is where he says “I repudiate the tyranny of the gene.” It reminded me of something in my memory of Dostoevsky, because I haven’t read him in years, it came out of a version of what a mad genius would say. To repudiate the tyranny of gene is about as noble an intention you can have, because it’s about as difficult a one as you can have. Can you imagine that, repudiate the tyranny of the gene? You’d have to change your hair color, your eyes. But in the book he’s reborn, he’s resurrected. He’s saved by marriage and destroyed at the same, he’s repudiated the tyranny of his genes. Let’s leave it at that….

One thing about this book is that it is written, if you know what I mean. Sentences come to a conclusion for a specific purpose. That seems to be going without saying. Even somebody as obsessed as he is knows that there are rhythms in life, it’s not all in one level. Anyone who’s as interested in music as he is would know that anyway. There’s balances and tradeoffs and that’s something he expresses.

Q: Tell me something about your background in publishing, what you’ve done and writers that you’ve edited.

It’s only my whole life. I was an editor essentially for my whole regular working life. I entered publishing in 1965 or ‘66 — I can’t remember which. I went to Morrow in early ‘67, stayed until ‘91, that’s almost 25 years. I began as an editor and remained an editor, but also became an executive and administrator, whatever terrible things that can happen to you as time goes by and you get older. That was my work, publishing, discovering writers. My greatest joys and accomplishments were discovering new writers. It’s not necessarily a easy thing to make one’s way doing that. That’s sort of what I did.

Q: Who are some of the well-known writers that you’ve worked with?

That brings up my feeling about that kind of work and the culture. The best writers are often not known. I could name writers to you and you would say, who’s that. I resist and resent it when anybody’s known simply because they have a connection to those that are known by themselves. Being known by many or being known generally is no distinction whatsoever. Anytime someone is asked what did I do and we name people who are known, we’re feeding this ridiculous idea that there’s something special about celebrity. I resist answering that question because I don’t have to answer it anymore. Every editor, no matter how successful, is scrounging for the next new book, the next new hot thing. There’s great insecurity in that kind of life, where you’re living off of other people’s work. When you’re pushing yourself, which is what others must do — I’m talking here about acquiring editors, not the kinds of editors that read and correct people’s manuscripts — you go out and you’re either talking to people and you say “I do this person” and “I do that person,” and those are the ones who are known because they’re in your circle of friends.

Q: I think that sort of sentiment would really appeal to City Paper readers, because there’s a great resistance among readers of the paper to name brands.

Many people have differing attitudes about this, but often that’s just related to what status they happen to be in. I worked with many popular authors and enjoyed it very much. Many of them who get hammered by the critics believe that a writer is as good as a writer’s audience. That’s how they defend their place in the world. If you get hammered enough critically, it’s very hard to avoid coming forward with such a statement. “People love my work, millions read me, therefore I must be good.” Then again, people who don’t sell at all justify their own obscurity by saying that obscurity is better.

Q: I’ve always been pretty cynical of those who say that they don’t care at all about the public’s view of their work.

When you’re actually producing something for the public, it’s very hard to maintain a single standard, really. It’s easy to be mistrustful of everybody’s attitude in a certain way. The admiration for sales in this culture, for numbers, for things of that nature, is in many ways deplorable. It relates to nothing except itself. The number of readers that a writer has is no reflection on the work itself. Now the number of intelligent readers that grasp the work at hand and truly absorb it or understand it is a blessing to an artist, to find people who really enter into the work who could sit down at a moment’s notice and discuss it with the writer, often more intelligently than the writer can. Often the writer is the last person to talk to.

Q: Why do you think that is?

First because you get sick of your stuff. I don’t know why. You can’t experience it innocently. When I was an editor, I would resist reading works in progress — you know, some would send in their whole finished book and others would send in partial manuscripts. I had a guy who would send in a book page by page. You’re innocent only once when you experience a work. When you’re an editor and you’re expected as editors are these days to contribute to the actual aesthetic of the book these days, change it, be involved in the changes, you’re supposed to experience the work as a reader would. You’re supposed to sit down and read it when it’s done. If you read it piece by piece, you never get that experience. The writer who’s written one word at a time is going to have the greatest distance from his work. Then again, a writer’s just going to defend what he’s written anyway.

But that doesn’t answer your original question. There were far-out people who readers of your paper would know. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I did fiction, I did non-fiction, I did poetry. I was Jacqueline Susann’s editor. She was great! She was wonderful, she was a gas. She was quite good at what she did. There are things to be learned from these popular novelists. “Serious literature” can learn a great deal from the popular literature, because popular literature is often just great literature simplified. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her memoirs about how, when she was having a love affair with Jean-Paul Sartre, they would go on these long vacations and read only detective novels. I can’t read detective novels, you know, whodunits. But if you read stuff like that, you can learn stuff from it. Often these people are masters of plot and suspense and timing. Jacqueline Susann wrote a book where she killed off her male lead character in a plane crash in the middle of the book. That’s a very courageous thing to do, characters take a lot of energy to create. That’s an interesting thing. Tolstoy would be reading that sort of thing and say Gee! I think I’ll kill off one of my characters. Popular novels are very transparent and you can see what’s going on inside of them.

You could do a whole Ph.D. on the withholding of information in fiction. But you have a narrative, and the writer no matter what he says is aware of something that is going to happen later. Of course some writers don’t say that, they claim that they don’t know where they’re headed. But of course they have some idea. They’re withholding what they know. You’re giving up what you’re withholding it as you go along, and how you do that tells how you write.

I did pop novels. I did an author named Richard Powers, we did his first two or three books. One of the most gifted writers I ever did was an American in Central America, R. M. Koster, he wrote the Tinieblan Trilogy, about a made-up Central American country called Tinieblas. Those of us who did editing for a while have great secret passions, and secrets, wonderful writers who haven’t been great celebrities. Powers has won the McCarthy Prize, and Tinieblas was nominated for the National Book Award. I did The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. I’ve done feminist books, left-wing books, The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone.

I was publishing at the time that the counterculture was emerging. And I was a young editor and interested in these things. I did books on communes when we thought we’d all end up living there and stayed on a commune while editing a book. I did those things. It was a vastly interesting time, far more than our own time. If you look at issues in our time, if you look at today you don’t see young readers arguing over issues in books today. You won’t see young people arguing so much about, say, The Bell Curve. And young readers are the best readers. Can you think of any big abortion books, for instance? I did a lot of black writers, Leroi Jones before he changed his name. Books on race relations, revolution. It was a wonderful time to be publishing non-fiction, issue-oriented books. And now I really don’t see young people getting involved and arguing over serious books these days.

. . .

This book was created on a manual typewriter. Then I got a computer, Bob Persig took me out, because he’s been involved with computers since the 50s, since before people really knew about these things, he took me out to shop and told me to buy this Macintosh. I had been very resistent because I enjoyed my manual typewriter. This book was written on that and revised on the computer, and I’m not ashamed to say I loved it. As a publisher, I noticed that as computers began to become phased in, books became a lot longer. When you’re a publisher, you have to deal with size of the books. I am virtually certain that books are longer than they were before. I know that when I got into publishing, the average novel was either 224 or 256 pages. It was a rare book that went over 296.

Q: John Barth has said that when you type on a computer, you see how pretty your words look all neatly lined up on the screen and you get psyched into thinking you’ve written something wonderful, even if you haven’t.

You get past to the point that you realize your words are a piece of shit.

Revising is where it’s great, because you don’t have to change a whole page to change a few words. You used to start retyping a whole page and you’d end up making more and more corrections as you retyped. If I only zero in on a couple of words in a line and the rest of the page justifies on the computer screen, I don’t have to type the whole thing over again. That was how I figured it, but I was wrong. I know I revised more with this machine than I would have otherwise. I wouldn’t have been able to do all the revisions….

There will be people who will always write on pencil and paper. It will be rediscovered. Just like smoking will come back.

Q: So what are you doing these days? What have you been doing since you left Morrow? I know you’ve been working on this book.

What else? I’m raising my children, I walk my children to school every day. I’m studying the piano. I worked very hard on this book. Books are very hard things. The first word and the first sentence are very easy. Every word you write imprisons you in certain ways, restricts what follows. My idea of the perfect novel is the novel that ends on a certain word because that’s the only word you could use, it’s been narrowed down to that. I’m studying the piano, my son and I are studying the piano together, because I’m probably going to write about a musician next in an adult book. I used to be a musician as a kid, I made my first money playing in a band.

Q: Tell me about some of your other published books.

Most of my books have been children’s books. I have a futile ambition to write humorous narrative poems for children. I’ve created a character named Strangely Strangely. Most of my writing recently has been working on my Strangely Strangely poems.

Others: The Sisters Impossible (Knopf), a book from the late ’70s about two sisters in ballet. The sequel was called Love’s Detective. They were quirky books about girls from girls’ points of view — I thought that would be safer. I did a number of kids’ books. Daddy’s Girl was another. The latest was The Band Never Dances, about a girl drummer in a rock band, it was up for the California Young Readers’ Medal, but it didn’t win. That’s the problem with children’s books, is that there’s always adults between you and your readers.

All mine have been novels, no pictures. Mostly young adult, some for younger. It’s much different and more restrictive than writing for adults. When you write for adults, at least no one say “make it for 42-47 year olds.” Good writing bursts through these artificial boundaries anyway.

A huge figure in children’s publishing told me that children’s poetry was a dead issue. He was basing that on the fact that sales figures for children’s poetry were going down. Children adore rhyme. I just wrote this whole novel about words. When somebody tells you there’s no market for something, that’s the time to strike. It’s like the stock market, when everyone says the market’s falling apart, that’s the time to make money. Somebody says you can’t do something, you should want to do it.

It’s the kind of first paragraph that makes your jaw hit the floor with an audible clunk, a paragraph that sends the more timid browser at Waldenbooks scurrying out the door in a hurry:

Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar’s own figuring, hardly human at all. His was the largest penis ever seen on a white man in that prison or any of the others in which Lamar had spent so much of his adult life. It was a monster, a snake, a ropey, veiny thing that hardly looked at all like what it was but rather like some form of rubber tubing.

It’s also the first paragraph of Dirty White Boys, the sixth novel from Stephen Hunter. Yes, that Stephen Hunter, the curmudgeonly Baltimore Sun film critic whose off-beat reviews adorn the paper’s pages every week. The Stephen Hunter whose very name causes movie screening patrons to flee from the conspicuously taped-off row of seats.

But there are more sides to Hunter than meets the eye. In addition to being Mobtown’s best-known film fanatic, Hunter is also one of the publishing industry’s best-kept secrets, a thriller writer who has sold two million novels and quietly earned a reputation as a gritty, adrenaline-inducing storyteller. Random House shelled out big bucks for Dirty White Boys in the hopes that the bloody Fugitive-esque thriller will propel Hunter to the ranks of a Tom Clancy or a Robert Ludlum.

And, irony of ironies, Hollywood is interested.

“It puts me in a very awkward position,” Hunter admitted in an interview last month. “Hollywood is not built to make good work. If good work does happen, it’s not only an act of integrity and professionalism, it’s an act of genuine heroism. Every step of the way, people are saying ‘you can’t do this’ and ‘you can’t do that.’ You’re dealing with a bunch of assholes who want nothing more than to see their thumbprints on the product.”

Dirty White Boys: A Discussion of Family Values

So how good is the book that’s earned stellar advance reviews and caught the interest of some of Hollywood’s hottest properties?

On the surface, Dirty White Boys tells a tale that’s seen a thousand incarnations on the big screen over the past decade: depraved badass Lamar Pye escapes from prison, and cool trooper Bud Pewtie makes it his mission to track him down. We have a prison catfight, a shootout at a tattoo parlor in the dead of night, the inevitable one-on-one brawl to the finish.

But talk about timing. Not only does Dirty White Boys appeal to the same audiences that are flocking to see The Fugitive and Speed and all of their big screen clones, it also features at its core a discussion of family values that would seem at home on the floor of the Republican-controlled House or Senate.

“From the outside, the Pewtie family looks like a paradigm of middle class American virtue and Bud looks like an ideal father figure, while the Pye clan looks like this troglodyte group of sub-human mutants,” says Hunter. “But as the book goes along you start to understand that in some odd way, Lamar Pye is a better exemplar of ‘family values’ than Bud Pewtie is.”

This role reversal is the central irony of Dirty White Boys. Model citizen Bud regularly betrays his family by sneaking into bed with his partner’s wife Holly, while sadistic killer Lamar stays unflinchingly loyal to the gang of misfits who have helped him escape from prison and avoid the law. The Pewties live a life of bored disinterest and stony silences at dinnertime, while Lamar and his three cohorts stand firm together in the face of a massive police manhunt.

So when all the action culminates with a showdown in the woods, there’s more than just two lives at stake. “It has a real mystic quality, like two high priests fighting to be the head of a cult of manhood,” says Hunter.

Despite the apparent sermonizing, Hunter claims that what he’s after isn’t a rehash of Dan Quayleisms, but simply a sense of empathy and believability.

“It’s an acknowledgement of a fact of life, that even the most sacred and profane monsters like Pye have human needs,” he says. “In fact, it’s their human needs that make them compelling figures. Lamar would not be an interesting character if he was a sheer force of violence and evil. People wouldn’t care about him. The book as a mechanism wouldn’t work — meaning that it wouldn’t be publishable — if he wasn’t interesting in a variety of other ways.

“Lamar Pye is prison-trained and psychopathic, but still he’s extremely intelligent. He’s got a tactical mind, he’s good at figuring things out. But as I continued writing the book, I understood that that wasn’t enough. I began to wonder where he came from, what created him. I began to look for provisional graces in him.”

Thus Dirty White Boys messes with our conceptions of good and evil by making us feel the occasional pang of sympathy for a man who will taunt and then murder a truck driver simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Thwarting Expectations

Hunter likes thwarting readers’ expectations. His last novel, Point of Impact, performed a similar trick by choosing as its hero the most unlikely protagonist possible: a reclusive gun nut living in backwoods Arkansas. Persuaded by a shadowy military group to help thwart a presidential assassin, former Vietnam sharpshooter Bob Lee Swagger unwittingly ends up becoming the assassin’s fall guy — and the most hunted man in America. After all, reasons the too-quick-to-crucify media, who would believe that there’s a clandestine conspiracy behind an assassination attempt on the president when you’ve got a gun-crazy Vietnam vet on the loose?

“It’s probably the only book in history that has gotten rave reviews from both the New York Times Book Review and the Green Berets,” Hunter quips.

Besides lodging Hunter on the national bestseller lists, Point of Impact brought out another side of the film critic most Baltimoreans know little about: his passion for guns, which he both collects and shoots regularly. Whereas most authors would be content to write “he pulled out his gun,” Hunter often pays more attention to his descriptions of firearms than to his descriptions of people, as in this passage from Impact:

[The gun] had a heavy varmint barrel which almost neutralized vibration when he fired, though Bob had since replaced the original barrel with a stainless steel one from Hart, which he’d then finished with Teflon so the whole piece had the appearance of old pewter. The barrel, action and even the screws were bedded in Devcon aluminum into a black fiberglas and Kevlar stock. The screws were torqued through aluminum pilars, tightened to sixty pounds.

Got that?

Hunter’s passion for firearms doesn’t stop him from maintaining a liberal ideology, however, a contradiction that he seems to relish. “It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true,” he says. “I grew up to worship Adlai Stevenson and the progressive tendencies in the Democratic Party, and to some extent I still do…. I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said that the mark of a great mind is that you can embrace two opposing philosophies.”

“You Have to Go with Your Strengths”

So despite the affinity for packing heat Hunter’s characters share with their creator, the stoic John Wayne types that populate his fiction are largely creations based on a very different mindset than his own. “As a novelist, there are certain types I can bring to life, and there are certain types I can’t,” he says. “If you’re going to write a novel and be enmeshed in one project for years, you have to go with your strengths.

“I suppose if you commit long sections of prose to words on paper, just by the natural law of psychological osmosis you bleed certain portions of your psyche into your characters. But I don’t consciously model anyone on myself. The books aren’t about me and about how darned wonderful and sensitive and underappreciated I am. They’re rigorous exercises in disciplined imagination in which I figure out what someone else’s life would be like.”

Occasionally, however, Hunter’s imagination falls short of the mark and becomes prey to many of the thriller clichés that typically dog male-oriented fiction. One is a tendency to slip into hokey ultra-macho mode. “I got man’s work to do!” yells Pewtie to his lover Holly at one point in Dirty White Boys. Point of Impact’s Bob Lee Swagger has a similar Marlboro moment when contemplating the dangers of leaving the seclusion of his Arkansas home for the outside world: “He’d have no part of that, no thank you. No women, no liquor, never again. Only rifles and duty.”

Certainly if Hunter patterned his novels after his own life, there would be fewer grim loners stalking through the fields with high-powered rifles and more family men sitting at their desks typing. Aside from two years in the Army, Hunter has been plugging quietly away at the Sun for over twenty years, both as book review editor and (since 1982) as film critic.

It was during his stint as book review editor that Hunter published his first novel, The Master Sniper (1980), a thriller which brought him “more money than I thought existed in the world at the time.” Eager to expand on his success, however, Hunter instead fell into a sophomore slump with his next two works, The Second Saladin (1982) (“Talk about timing — that was a book about the Kurds ten years too early”) and The Spanish Gambit (1985) (“I was trying to be the young George Orwell”).

By that point, a despondent Hunter realized that he had squandered whatever momentum the success of The Master Sniper had given him in the publishing world. Careerwise, another mediocre book from either the critical or commercial perspective would be the kiss of death. It was then that inspiration hit in the form of a mountain and a book about tunnel warfare in Vietnam. “Suddenly, in a quarter of a nanosecond I had every single detail of The Day Before Midnight,” says Hunter.

From the Bestseller List to Premiere Magazine

This sudden flash of inspiration single-handedly resuscitated Hunter’s career as a novelist. Midnight, a taut, believable thriller about a battle to recapture a mountain nuclear missile silo, has over 800,000 copies in print. (One of the Special Forces teams attempts to penetrate into the missile silo through a series of underground tunnels; thus the Vietnam influence.) From there came the equally successful Point of Impact, the new novel Dirty White Boys, and now the calling cards from Hollywood.

Still, it’s a long way from the bestseller list to the cover of Premiere magazine. Hunter has sold all three of his last books to Hollywood and has yet to see a single minute on celluloid. The film version of the Cold War-oriented Day Before Midnight died a sudden death with the falling of the Berlin Wall, while Point of Impact has been stalled at the scripting stage.

“I actually left the Sun at one point to take a leave of absence to work on those scripts, which is why they’re so fucked up,” admits Hunter candidly. “I’ve discovered that as a screenwriter, I’m not exactly Robert Bolt.”

Dirty White Boys, however, caught the attention of director Joseph Ruben (Sleeping With the Enemy, The Good Son), and 20th Century Fox quickly snatched film rights for him. “Dirty White Boys is in very good shape,” Hunter says enthusiastically. “The script is very, very professional — they got about 80% of the book.”

Still, treatment for the screen has involved more than a few changes, many of which Hunter takes with a resigned sigh. The character of Ruta Beth, the twisted serial killer fanatic that takes Lamar’s gang in, has been significantly changed: “In my book, she’s sort of a mutant, a real unattractive woman with a dark secret,” says Hunter. “In the film, she’s a chick.”

But who can better appreciate the concessions one has to make to attain big studio attention than a film critic that’s always been cynical about Tinseltown? “I have to admire the screenwriters’ professionalism because they know what it takes to get a movie made,” he says. “I don’t.”

Even if Hunter never makes it onto the big screen, he’s still hoping to have a lasting impact on Hollywood in a different way: through a book-length anthology of his movie reviews forthcoming from Baltimore-based Bancroft Press.

“I have to say that I’ve really given my adulthood to the Sun,” he said. “It would satisfy me immensely to see a physical object called a book come out of all of that.”

Q: I wanted to start with this quote that I heard about you, and I wish I could remember where I heard it, that you were “a liberal and a gun man at the same time.”

It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true.

I was raised in the liberal tradition, I’m from an academic family in Chicago, my father was a professor at Northwestern, I grew up to worship Aldai Stevenson and the progressive tendencies in the Democratic party, and to some extent I still do. But for some reason, I don’t know how, I don’t know where, I picked up this affinity for firearms. I enjoy firearms a great deal, I enjoy shooting, I don’t want to stress the guns that I own too much because I don’t want any burglars sneaking into my house some night. If you’ve read the books, you’ll see that guns and the gun culture are very important to my imagination.

I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said that the mark of a great mind is that you can embrace two opposing philosophies. I’m a great deal to the left of the NRA, but a great deal to the right of many of my colleagues because of my gun philosophy.

Q: Has this caused you any problems?

It’s never really caused any problems. We’re all so busy putting out a newspaper, we never really have any time to sit in the lounge and chat about it.

Q: What do you think about gun control?

I’m not crazy about gun control, because it doesn’t seem to equate to crime control. At the same time, I’m not crazy about 14-year-old boys carrying 9mm pistols in their lunch boxes.

There seems to be some evidence that the way to approach criminally misused guns is to attack criminally misowned guns. The approach of attacking the tiny percentage of misused guns. By focusing on illegally carried guns — it’s the illegally carried guns that cause havoc and violence in our society — we can be much more effective, particularly in the light of our steadily disappearing base of resources.

Q: So what would you recommend?

I’m not a gun control expert, and I’m not really prepared to have a discussion on gun control. One thing I’ve read about is how the Kansas City police created a gun squad to go after illegally carried guns on the street, and people who purposefully go out to find the suppliers who go around giving kids guns. That seems to have had some success.

Metal detectors also prevent guns from being carried in a specific environment. There are very few murders committed at airports, for instance. I don’t see a problem with extending these principles.

Point of Impact did something that’s really never been done before in that it refused to demonize or marginalize gun owners. It’s the only book in history that has gotten rave reviews from both the New York Times Book Review section and Green Beret Sniper Team 556 of the Special Forces.

One of the secret pleasures of that book was taking someone who is America’s furthest exile — the rural gun nut — and making him a hero.

Q: You seem to have a lot of empathy for those types of people.

As a novelist, there are certain types I can bring to life. And there are certain types I can’t — I haven’t had a great deal of success bringing women to life, for instance. I couldn’t do a particularly good job bringing a corporate lawyer to life. I doubt I could even do a good job with a movie critic living on the Eastern seaboard. However, I do have an empathy for strong, stoic military types like Bob Lee Swagger and if one is going to write a novel and be enmeshed in one project for months, and in certain situations for years, you have to go with your strengths.

Guns are much more important to Swagger than to Bud. He’s different from the standard police officer in that he doesn’t just see guns as a hunk of metal that helps him do his job, he’s aware of guns.

Q: What similarities do you share with people like your heros?

Virtually none. One of the pleasures of doing these things is immersing yourself in a different mindset. The creative writer’s first gift is the gift of empathy. He tries very hard to create from the whole cloth a different mindset, a different set of reflexes, a different set of prejudices. The books generally succeed to the degree that that’s successful. I suppose if you commit long sections of prose to words on paper, just by the natural law of psychological osmosis, you bleed certain portions of your psyche into your characters. I don’t consciously model anyone on myself. The books aren’t about me and about how darned wonderful and sensitive and underappreciated I am. They’re rigorous exercises in disciplined imagination in which I figure out what someone else’s life would be like.

Q: One thing I do imagine you would find a similarity with is your heroes’ preoccupation with family, especially in Dirty White Boys. What I liked about Dirty White Boys was this irony that there’s two families, one a group of criminals and the other a cop’s, and in many ways the criminal family is the better example.

Dirty White Boys is constructed around a principle irony, that from the outside Bud’s family looks like a paradigm of middle class American virtue and he looks like an ideal father figure, while the Pye clan looks like this troglodyte group of sub-human mutants. Some reviewers seem to have gotten this, and some haven’t. But as the book goes along you start to understand that in some odd way, Lamar Pye is a better exemplar of family values than Bud Pewtie is. In some degree, old Bud learns that too.

Q: It, in fact, helps Bud to solve his own problems in the book.

You try not to make these things little cartoons or Dan Quayle speeches or something like that. If there’s some flavors, some odors available to the perceptive reader under the overarching energies of the plot, that is indeed pleasant. It seems to make the books more believable, the characters more believable. It’s very difficult and boring to write about paragons. The more human the face, the more provocative the text.

Q: You say that you’re not into writing Dan Quayle speeches. It does seem to me, though, that Dirty White Boys does project at some level a certain philosophy about family values.

What it seems to be is an acknowledgement of a fact of life, that even the most sacred and profane monsters like Pye have human needs. In fact, it’s their human needs that make them compelling figures. Lamar is not an interesting character if he’s sheer force, violence and evil. People don’t care about him. The book as a mechanism won’t work — meaning that it won’t be publishable — if he’s not interesting in a variety of other ways. The book began as this image I had of this titanic, earthy man. If I were to define someone that scares me, it would be Pye. Prison-trained, psychopathic, but still he’s extremely intelligent — he’s got a tactical mind, good at figuring small things out. He knew how to break down systems, he knew how to escape from places, he knew how to fight, he knew how to terrorize opponents. As I continued with the book, I understood that that wasn’t enough. I began to wonder where he came from, what created him. I began to look for provisional graces in him. I’m not suggesting that Lamar is a victim and that he deserves two years of, of —

Q: Babysitting?

Yeah, and afterwards deserves a copy job at the Baltimore Sun. He lives by certain principles and must accept the consequences of these principles, one of which is a bullet in the brain.

Creating him is only an interesting process for me if he is a whole man. Lamar is to armed robbers what Ted Williams is to baseball players. Think how boring a book about Ted Williams would be if it was just about his hitting. If you’re to believe in a character in a story, you need information. You need to see him in his best moments and his worst moments. That rather than any formal decision to deliver this sermon on family values formed Lamar Pye.

Q: This preoccupation with crime and family values has made the book very timely. I mean, it’s coming out right when these topics are hot and the Republicans have taken over the House and the Senate.

Curiously enough, none of that was in the original idea or the outline. I’ll tell you about my timing. I wrote a book about the Kurds ten years too early.

Q: Which book was that?

The Second Saladin. That shows you about my timing. In many ways that was a flawed book anyway, and that’s probably why it went straight into el tanko.

Q: Tell me a little bit about your publishing history, about how you went from these first two books to Point of Impact and now this one, major bestsellers.

Well, the first book, The Master Sniper, was quite successful for a first novel. It earned me more money than I thought existed in the world. Still not enough to do more than go to Europe and buy some neat shoes and a burbury raincoat with. I was really excited and thought I was poised on a major career. My second book didn’t quite work, a bitter work for some reason, about people fighting this war in some place nobody had ever heard of back then. It didn’t quite work. I then wrote a book about the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Gambit, which was a fucking killer — it took me years to write the damn thing, I made a plot mistake that cost me a year. This was in my British period when I came to work in a tweed jacket and tie every day of the week, even in the middle of July. I was trying to be the young George Orwell. The book was a pastiche of Homage to Catalonia and Brideshead Revisited with a little For Whom the Bell Tolls thrown in. I was in my high pitch of British imagination. That book was a commercial failure, but it got really good reviews. At that point, my career was going nowhere and I’d squandered whatever momentum I had from my first book. I couldn’t just write another so-so book, another publishable book but nothing spectacular.

So I’ll never forget, I was driving with my wife in the car to Dayton, Ohio — the Shangri-La of the Midwest, Dayton — and I’d just read a book called The Tunnels of Cu Chi about tunnelling in Vietnam. The idea of men fighting these most hideous battles underground in these cramped spaces really captured my imagination. And then I saw a mountain and I thought about a rocket silo. I was inflamed with special operations at the time. In a quarter of a nano-second, I had every single detail of Day Before Midnight. The next day, I went to a bookstore and bought everything they had on nuclear warfare. Writing that book was such fun, and it was sold for quite a bit of money. Halfway through it, I signed a blind contract for a second book to be invented later.

Q: Which was Point of Impact.

Point of Impact was one of the few books where I basically changed the fundamental theory of the book at the three-quarter mark. It took me ten drafts to get the fucking thing right.

It started out as a novel specifically about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was explicitly clear that the Ramdyne team was the same team that hit JFK.

Q: There’s still a hint of that in there.

What remains is just a whiff of that, which I like. But the original didn’t work. At page 100, it stopped being a novel and became an essay for another 75 pages, which raised a whole bunch of questions about the Kennedy assassination. The book went on for another 500 fucking pages. Then the last 50 pages were another essay answering the questions that were in that other 50 pages. I knew that wouldn’t work, and a very patient, good editor finally nudged, cajoled, soothed, licked, caressed — I’m sure you can think of a better word — me to see that that just wasn’t working. One of the problems was with the villain. In order to be who he was, he had to have two separate elements. Eventually I had to jettison all but the basest hint of the Kennedy assassination and split the enemy into Raymond Schreck and — Hugh something-or-other, I can’t even remember his name anymore. I was surprised how well it worked once we got to that point. It turned out to be an extremely successful book — about a million in print, same with Day Before Midnight. I still get two-three letters a week about Point of Impact, I used to get midnight calls. The thing is, I made a couple of technical mistakes in the book.

Q: Were they angry?

No, not really. Oh, there were a couple of letters from real pedants. But I came to review the mistakes with good humor, because it let me meet and talk to literally hundreds of people.

After that book, I was exhausted. I was in a very dark mood, a survivor’s bleakness that doesn’t have much flavor to it. I wanted to write a book that’s not nearly as plot complex, not as thrilleresque, a much purer simpler story that was geographically united in a single locale with four or five vivid characters. I knew it would be in a small town. One of the things that I liked about Point of Impact was that, unlike thrillers that are set in Paris and Canton and places like that, most of the action took place in rural Arkansas.

I would not want to make my living as a farmer, I wanted to write about a life that I knew nothing about. I wanted it to be really tough, to have some values. Suddenly, somehow, who knows how, I came up with Dirty White Boys.

Q: I wanted to talk a little bit about the film versions of your novels and what shape they’re in. It must put you in a very interesting position to see your books going to Hollywood.

It puts me in a very awkward position is what it does. I’ve actually had three movie sales, for Day Before Midnight, Point of Impact, and Dirty White Boys. I actually left the Sun at one point to take a leave of absence to work on them, which is why they’re so fucked up. I’ve discovered that as a screenwriter, I’m not exactly Robert Bolt. But I’ve actually done things most movie screenwriters haven’t done — I sat in on the meetings and so forth.

Q: So how are the movies going?

The Day Before Midnight is dead because the Cold War is basically over, the Russians had to fucking end it. Point of Impact has gone through a jillion writers, and it’s on its second studio. I don’t keep too up on these things. My last contact with the West Coast is that they had a very good writer make a draft, but there were certain things he didn’t get. He didn’t know which end of the barrel the bullet came out of, he was a very cosmopolitan sort of guy. So they put in a kickass guy that had actually pulled the trigger once or twice, and he went a little too far. He’s now trying to rework his reworking to tone the whole thing down. So who knows if we’ll ever see a movie made.

Dirty White Boys is in very good shape. My Hollywood agent says it’s in very good shape. Very, very professional script written by two guys whose names I can’t remember. They really wrote a good script. They got about 80% of the book. Some of the changes they made, I didn’t particularly appreciate, but I understood that they had to be done. For instance, in my book, Ruta Beth, the woman who takes in Lamar Pye, is a real twisted mutant with a dark secret, she’s an unattractive woman with dark undertones. In the movie, she’s a chick.

Q: She’s a starlet.

Right. And while I’d rather see a movie with my Ruta Beth, I know that that will help the movie get made. Another change, my climax was a very hard, bitter to the death fight between two men in a glade of trees, it has a real mystic quality, like two high priests fighting to be the head of a cult of manhood. They turned it into a Hollywood thing where there’s a wheat field and all these wheat thrashing machines running around. What happens is that Pye is stabbed with a stalk of wheat or corn or something, and with this thing sticking out of his throat he tumbles into the path of a thrasher and is chewed to a pulp.

I have to admire these guys’ professionalism because they know what it takes to get a movie made. I don’t. One thing they really got correctly is a sense of place. It looks like they actually went out to Oklahoma. Just as a read, it’s a very good read.

Q: I see where it says that Joseph Ruben bought it.

Yeah, Joe Ruben bought it. I can tell you that as money goes, it was not a huge sale as a movie. We took the bad deal on the basis that the most important thing is to get a movie made that will really stir up interest in my work.

Q: Have they come up with any big stars to look at it?

One big star has read it and expressed some interest.

Q: Can you say who?

[Unfortunately, the "big star" Mr. Hunter mentioned here is still off-the-record.]

Q: So that’s definitely good news. Has seeing your movie get made changed your attitude towards Hollywood? Not that you were enamored with the whole thing in the first place.

Right. It’s made me more cynical, I’m even more gimlet-eyed now than I was before. I’m more cynical about the usual Hollywood crap, and more extraordinarily impressed that some really good work comes out of that town. The place is not built to make good work. If good work comes out, it’s not only an act of integrity and professionalism, it’s an act of genuine heroism. Every act of the way, people are saying “you can’t do this” and “you can’t do that.” You’re dealing with a bunch assholes who want nothing more than to see their thumbprints on the product. When I see people making stuff against the grain, I’m really impressed.

Q: Now tell me a little bit about your journalistic career. I know that before you were the film critic at the Sun, you were the books editor.

From ‘74 through ‘82 I was the book review editor. But it was much different then, because it was an editorial job. The book industry is much less intense than the film business. I virtually knew then and still now know nobody in New York. It’s done entirely in the mail and sometimes on the phone. The most awkward thing I had to do was find a reviewer for my own novel. Eventually what I ended up doing was giving it to a colleague of mine to find a reviewer. My colleague found Jonathan Yardley’s wife here in Washington, and she reviewed it for the Sun. She actually said some bad things about it.

One thing I’ll never forget is that I wrote to Peter Benchley. I had reviewed Jaws years back when I had been a jealous little obnoxious punk, and I said some really nasty things in that review that I regretted. I still think it was a bad book, but I don’t think it’s the paragon of evil I had before. So I wrote to Peter Benchley and I said “I wrote this review of your book three or four years ago that even now I admit was pretty nasty. Anyway I seem to be publishing a book. If you want to review it, I can promise you that I won’t edit your remarks at all.” He very graciously wrote back and said, “thanks, but it would make me feel awkward and I’ll pass.”

I’ve never been actively involved in reviewing for the Sun. I’ve never really gotten very good reviews there. I always walk away when it comes to my books getting reviewed.

I must confess I have cheated this one particular time. The woman who reviewed it for the Sun misspelled Lamar’s name as “Lemar” with an “e” instead of an “a”. I vacillated over whether I should tell someone or not. It was my loyalty as a Sun employee vs. — well, who knows what. Eventually I told them and they fixed it. I discovered, though, that she sold the same review to the Boston Herald, and they spelled Lamar’s name wrong there. How could she make that mistake? That name was on every fucking page of the manuscript.

Tim O’Brien wants to set the record straight: he is not a Vietnam writer.

“It’s like calling Toni Morrison a black writer or Joseph Conrad an ocean writer or Shakespeare a royalty writer,” says O’Brien on the phone in early October from Massachusetts, where he is poised on the verge of a massive publicity barrage for his highly anticipated new novel, In the Lake of the Woods. “I don’t write about bombs and bullets, I write about the human heart. It’s just the subject matter that was given to me.

“If I were to tag In the Lake of the Woods,” says O’Brien in his characteristic shy mumble, “I’d call it a love story.”

A love story? It seems difficult to believe, given that O’Brien’s two most famous books, the mystical Going After Cacciato and its counterpart, The Things They Carried, both won critical praise for their vivid depictions of soldiers humping through the Asian subcontinent. Not to mention that his first book, the nonfictional If I Die in a Combat Zone, detailed the author’s own experiences as a gun-toting grunt in Vietnam.

Of course, there’s still a good deal of Vietnam in Tim O’Brien’s new book. The novel’s protagonist, Minnesota politician John Wade, has just suffered a landslide defeat in the U.S. Senate elections because of ninth inning revelations that he participated in the My Lai civilian massacre led by Lieutenant William Calley in 1968. In the wake of this humiliating defeat, John and wife Kathy retreat to a friend’s cabin, far from the intrusive eyes of the public. A few days later, Kathy inexplicably vanishes.

“You usually think a love story is about kisses and roses, but sometimes people do bad things for love,” said O’Brien. “My guy goes to war for love, he spies for love, he guards his secrets for love…. But we all do bad things for love. Every single one of us have things we won’t tell and secrets we’ll guard.”

John Wade’s secrets are paramount to the root question of the novel — what happened to Kathy Wade? This question soon sprouts into a tangled ravine of shadows and mysterious possibilities. Did Kathy leave her husband because she was disgusted at his failure, or abhorred at his keeping his participation in My Lai from her for all these years? Did Wade finally succumb to the spooky skeletons in his psychological attic and murder her? Or did she simply set out on a midnight boating trip and lose herself in the winding tributaries leading from their vacation home into Canada?

“Evidence Is Not Truth. It Is Only Evident.”

Despite the plotline, O’Brien is no thriller writer, and In the Lake of the Woods is no “Columbo” episode. It’s no secret that the disappearance of Kathy Wade remains a mystery with no solution to the end. The novel itself is a patchwork of suppositions and hypotheses by a would-be Sherlock Holmes who has become obsessed with the case. “I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence,” states the nameless author in one of his revealing footnotes. “Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.”

As O’Brien chronicles the relationship of John and Kathy Wade, he provides evidence aplenty for any scenario the reader might conjecture. Wade, a loner whose serious lack of self-confidence stems partly from rejection by an alcoholic father, has constructed his entire life on the soft clay of deceit and manipulation. Hooked as a youngster on the innocent empowerment fantasies of being a parlor magician, Wade soon becomes in earnest a manipulative sorcerer intent on controlling his life and environment. It is only when he experiences stunning political defeat and loses his wife does he realize the breadth of his true impotence.

Of course, while this in-depth character exploration excites many in the highbrow literary world, other critics have taken O’Brien to task for spoiling a perfectly good mystery novel. Why can’t we just figure out whodunnit?

“Once a mystery has been solved, it’s not a mystery anymore,” retorts O’Brien. “You say, ‘Oh, Jack did it to Jane in the dining room with the candlestick,’ and then you put down the book and forget about it. What we remember in life is what we don’t know. Amelia Earhart, for instance. If they found her body in a cornfield in Iowa, we’d say okay, it’s over. That’s what keeps the Kennedy case alive, too — the mystery.”

The mystery of In the Lake of the Woods is so dense that not even O’Brien really knows what happened to Kathy Wade. “My sister went for the killing theory,” he claims. “My brother thinks she got lost. My dad says the two of them planned it together….

“My feeling is that John Wade didn’t kill her. But that’s just what I think. As an author, I just have these hypotheses, I’m sort of neutral. But as a reader, I have my own opinion. I think she just got in the boat one day and got lost.

“That’s how life really works, at least from my point of view.”

An Auspicious Debut

Interestingly enough, however, Tim O’Brien’s life has been largely devoid of the types of mysteries that haunt Wade. His tour of duty in the Vietnam War was about as routine as any in that war could be. O’Brien told the Boston Globe in 1990 that “in my normal life I don’t think about Vietnam, I don’t dream about Vietnam.”

Few writers have had a debut onto the literary scene as auspicious as O’Brien’s. After the autographical If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973) and his modest first novel, Northern Lights (1975), O’Brien astonished book watchers by ambushing the National Book Award with his third work, Going After Cacciato (1978) — besting two critical and popular Goliaths, John Irving’s The World According to Garp and the posthumous collection The Stories of John Cheever.

Even more amazing was that a novel with the simple power and resonance of Cacciato had gone virtually unnoticed up to that point. The book chronicles a squad of Vietnam foot soldiers in pursuit of a deserter, the clueless Cacciato, who on a whim decides to pick up and hike to Paris on foot. In 400 pages of unadorned prose that melds Ernest Hemingway with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, O’Brien manages to capture all the insanity, mysticism, confusion, and surreality that was the Vietnam experience.

Listen to O’Brien sing in Cacciato about what we learned in Vietnam, with a voice as blunt and clear as a tribal storyteller doling out primitive truth around the fire:

Even the lessons were commonplace. It hurts to be shot. Dead men are heavy. Don’t seek trouble, it’ll find you soon enough. You hear the shot that gets you…. These were hard lessons, true, but they were lessons of ignorance; ignorant men, trite truths. What remained was simple event. The facts, the physical things. A war like any other war. No new messages. Stories that began and ended without transition. No developing drama or tension or direction. No order.

After winning the NBA, the critics caught on fast, ladling praise after praise on O’Brien and setting Cacciato on the sacred war fiction shelf alongside Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

Deconstructing the Stories of Vietnam

Heady with the rush of fame, O’Brien followed up with a domestic novel about a nuclear war-obsessed Baby Boomer, The Nuclear Age (1985). Awkward in tone and theme, the book was a conspicuous failure, not to mention further from the front lines of Nam than anything else O’Brien had written.

Readers and reviewers were more than pleased with The Things They Carried (1990), which gave many cause to change their minds about Cacciato being the best work of fiction on the Vietnam War. A series of interconnected tales, some autobiographical and some fictional, The Things They Carried probes the same scars as Cacciato, but less obliquely.

The book also amplified O’Brien’s interest in deconstructing not only the stories we tell about Vietnam, but how and why we tell them. In one passage, for example, he analyzes the archetypal story about the soldier who jumps on a live grenade to save his comrades’ lives. Did this ever really happen? According to O’Brien, the veracity of such a story is beside the point.

You’d feel cheated if it never happened [he writes]. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen — and maybe it did, anything’s possible — even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

O’Brien had actually begun writing another book earlier than The Things They Carried, a novel centering around a Vietnam vet tormented by the ghosts of Vietnam whose wife one day up and vanishes. The book that would eventually become In the Lake of the Woods, however, would take several more years of mental wrestling before O’Brien could return to it and finish.

“I had to put [the book] aside for a while, mostly because of this business about the ending,” claims O’Brien. “I knew some reviewers wouldn’t like the idea of leaving the mystery unsolved at the end, so I figured I’d try to change it around sometime later. But then I realized that this is just what had to be.”

In the Lake of the Woods

The lack of definitive answers in In the Lake of the Woods gives O’Brien license to continue his experimentation with the nature of narrative. Given that the book is supposed to be an exploration of alternatives by a fictional author obsessed with the Wade case, none of the narrative is really “true” at all. Epistemologically, the author’s story holds the same relation to truth as, say, Don DeLillo’s hypothetical vision of the Kennedy assassination in Libra or any journalist’s take on the O.J. Simpson murder case.

(Incidentally, O’Brien says the similarities between the O.J. Simpson case and In the Lake of the Woods hadn’t occurred to him. “I’m not sure whether O.J. had big secrets or not,” says O’Brien offhandedly. “I tend to doubt it. But you never know. Maybe he’ll confess or something.”)

O’Brien’s point is that we respond to the unknown by synthesizing an explanation for it; in essence, we make up stories. He ingeniously displays the human capacity for connecting the dots throughout several chapters of collected quotes and items of evidence gathered by the diligent fictional author. Simply by placing attributed statements by certain characters in sequence, we begin to draw a picture in our heads of the people who might make these statements and judge the witnesses by their merits and biases — all of which, of course, are imaginary.

As much as In the Lake of the Woods is a story about love and the imagination, however, O’Brien also uses the book as a launch pad for some of his disgruntlements about the Vietnam War, and the My Lai episode in particular.

Although O’Brien himself has always stated that his time hunting the woods for Charlie did not leave him with the debilitating nightmares and psychological problems that plague other vets, he admits to still being troubled about the issues raised by Lieutenant William Calley’s slaughter at the My Lai village. (O’Brien’s unit actually pulled security at the village during the official investigation into the massacre.)

“It makes me angry that only one person was convicted for My Lai, and that was Lieutenant Calley,” says O’Brien. “Soldiers who testified that they killed twenty people were never prosecuted. What really bugs me is that of the 150 or so people who were there, the American public only remembers Calley’s name. But what about the rest of them? Those people are still all around us. What are they telling their wives and children? Are they guarding their secrets, too?”

O’Brien realizes, of course, that talk of Vietnam vets as crazed killers puts him on dangerous turf. “I do empathize with those soldiers, I understand what they went through. But it’s like Hitler — you can explain him, but that doesn’t mean you can justify him.

“I tried in the book to carefully show the circumstances that led up to [the massacre]: men dying, anger, traps going off, everything. But my own unit, we went through the same things they went through. We saw land mines and snipers and deaths. But we never crossed the line between rage and homicide. Murder’s murder, and I’ve always felt the same.”

The Real John Wades

So what does O’Brien think an actual veteran who was at the My Lai massacre would think of In the Lake of the Woods? Would the real John Wades want to read about John Wade?

“They’d wish this book weren’t published, they’d wish the whole thing would go away, be forgotten,” says O’Brien. “And it practically has. This is all basically a footnote to the Vietnam War now. The 25th anniversary [of the massacre] recently passed without any mention in the press. If there was any, I sure didn’t see it. I think the American public views My Lai as an aberration — you know, brutality’s just a part of war and atrocities are going to happen.

“Unfortunately,” he concludes, “that doesn’t justify it.”

But for the fictional John Wade and his real life counterparts, justification is what life is all about. Because in Tim O’Brien’s world, when you stop believing the stories you tell yourself, chaos sets in.

“What is important, the author believes,” O’Brien notes wryly in the disclaimer of The Nuclear Age, “is not what happened, but what could have happened, and, in some cases, should have happened.”

Q: Do you see any similarities in your book to the O.J. Simpson case?

I hadn’t really thought about it at all. I started the book six years ago, more than that, eight years ago. I don’t know whether he did it or not. My book is basically sort of a story of the effects of deceit on love. How secrecy and hiding things can lead to real collapse. I’m not sure whether O.J. had big secrets or not. I tend to doubt it. But you never know, maybe he’ll confess or something.

My feeling is that my guy didn’t kill her. That’s my own opinion. As a reader, I have my own opinion. As an author, I just have these hypotheses. As an author, I’m sort of neutral. As a person, I just think she got in the boat one day and got lost. But that’s just my opinion. You can have your own opinion.

I think that’s the way life usually operates. I wanted to write a real mystery, as opposed to a mystery that’s solved, and then it’s not a mystery anymore. Once you know who done it, you say ‘Jack did it to Jane in the dining room with the candlestick,’ and then you put down the book and forget about it. What we remember in life is what we don’t know. Amelia Earhart, for instance. If they found her body in a cornfield in Iowa, we’d say okay, it’s over. I think that’s what keeps the Kennedy case alive is the mystery. Of course there’s the greater mysteries the book’s about, the mysteries of love. How much do people love us? What do they really feel about us? You live with someone for twenty years and you never really know.

Q: The evidence section provides “solid evidence” about what happened, but we still make inferences from it.

If you offer various hypotheses about what might have happened, you want to have some sort of evidence that the reader can use. Everyone can have a different interpretation. My sister went for the killing, my brother thinks they got lost. My dad says they ran off together. That’s my whole family right there. I guess that’s what I want. I want a reader to — mystery frustrates us on one hand when we get to the end, but on the other hand it’s fascinating. We’re fascinated by the Kennedy thing. That’s how life works, at least from my point of view.

Q: A reviewer in the Washington Post criticized you for “loving the telling more than the tale” and not taking responsibility for the book’s ending.

I haven’t read that review. Responsibility is we don’t know. I took more responsibility than other writers. You don’t have to give readers answers.

Q: Your publisher seems to be packaging the novel as a “literary thriller.”

That happens to all our books. Somebody has to tag it. That’s how it got tagged in Vanity Fair, and then Harper’s just followed suit. It’s really about magic and about marriage and about love and Vietnam, a hell of a lot more than just a thriller. People say that it’s a literary thriller, but you’d have to dispense with three-quarters of the book. If I were to tag it, I’d call it a love story. You usually think a love story is about kisses and roses, but sometimes people do bad things for love. My guy goes to war for love, he spies for love, he guards his secret for love, all these are bad things he’s doing. We all do bad things for love. Every single one of us, things we won’t tell and secrets we’ll guard. That’s how I’d tag it, as a love story.

Q: How much of the My Lai testimony is real?

All of it. Richardson is made up, the rest of the testimony is real. He was the only one that mentioned Sorcerer. He’s also made up, of course.

Q: Have you talked to anyone who was at My Lai?

I was there at My Lai myself as a soldier, about a month after it all happened. Not at the massacre. Just by chance. I knew the area really intimately. I was there when the story broke, my unit pulled security when they did investigation, you know, pulling the whole village apart and scanning for land mines and everything.

Q: What did you think about it at the time?

I thought it was murder, the same thing I think today. It makes me angry that so many people got off, the charges were dropped, people got off on technicalities, only one person was convicted. That was Lieutenant Calley. People who testified that they killed 20 people, they were never prosecuted. What really bugs me is that of all the people who were there, about 150 or so, the American public only remembers Calley’s name. But what about the rest of them? Those people are still among us, all over, maybe even some in Baltimore, what are they telling their wives and children? Are they guarding their secrets, too?

Q: What would someone who was at My Lai think after reading this book?

They’d wish this book weren’t published, wish the whole thing would go away, be forgotten. And it practically has. This is all basically a footnote to the Vietnam War now. The 25th anniversary recently passed without any mention in the press. If there was any, I sure didn’t see it. I think the American public views it as an aberration, you know, brutality’s just a part of war and atrocities are going to happen. Unfortunately, that doesn’t justify it.

Q: It’s interesting that you say that, because I thought your book shows a lot of sympathy for these people. Do you have empathy for these soldiers?

I understand what they went through. It’s like Hitler. You can explain it. It doesn’t mean you can justify it. I tried in the book to carefully show the circumstances that led up to it, the men dying, anger and everything. My own unit, we went through the same things they went through, land mines and snipers and deaths, but we didn’t cross the line between rage and homicide.

Murder’s murder, and I’ve always felt the same. I had a piece in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday on the cover, I think it was the October 2nd issue, that explains a lot of my feelings about this. You should read it.

Q: What do you think about our attitude today towards use of the military? In Haiti and Somalia, we do everything on tenterhooks largely because of what happened in Vietnam.

I think it’s a good idea to be pretty careful about the military. America is not the policeman of the universe, we can’t just appoint ourselves as cops. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that if a government wants us to intervene that we shouldn’t. I think we should be very cautious and intelligent about it, not just sort of slap leather. After Vietnam, there was a sense of impotence that swept across the nation and entered into our psyches. We had been the Lone Ranger for so many years, and now we were unmasked. We’ve wanted to pump iron for so many years, show that we’re tough guys, you know, go into Grenada and go into Panama and go into Iraq and kick ass. The Vietnam syndrome.

Q: Don’t you think that’s largely over?

I don’t think it’s over, I think it’s built into the political psyche of the nation. After WWII, we were the fastest guns and the biggest guns. Now after Vietnam we found ourselves beaten by a third world nation, one of the most impoverished countries in the world.

Q: I read somewhere that you said that you felt guilty about not dodging the draft.

Given that I was opposed to the war, the bravest thing to do was to go to jail or go to Canada. Just say no. I went to the war for the same reasons Wade did. I didn’t want to feel rejected by my hometown and by my family. I went anyway, which was the wrong thing to do. Like Wade, I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I knew were wrong just to be liked. That’s why I made him a politician. Part of what drives politicians is to be loved. Politicians are looking for love and approval and affection. That drives them at least as much as anything else.

Q: What about political figures that did dodge the draft, and it ended up hurting their careers? I’m thinking about Bill Clinton and Dan Quayle.

The problem is that they didn’t follow through. Clinton should’ve said, I didn’t believe in the war and I didn’t go and that was the right thing to do. The war was unpopular in this country anyway. Instead he kind of pussyfooted with the issue, he didn’t say I did the right thing, fuck you.

Q: Why did it take you so long to write this book?

I started it in ‘85, wrote for two years until the end of ‘87, maybe into ‘88. Then I put it aside for a while and wrote The Things They Carried. It was mostly this business about the ending. I knew some reviewers wouldn’t like the idea of having a mystery at the end, of leaving it unsolved, so I put the book aside and figured I’ll try to change it around sometime later. But I realized that this is just what had to be. I figured what’s the point of making hypotheses and talk about mystery just to solve it in the end? What’s the point of it? So I gathered my courage for two years to write a book that wasn’t solved in the end. I knew I would get nailed in some places. But there’s a review coming out this Sunday in the Times Book Review, they’re leading off with it, and it’s a really good one. You just hope you don’t get nailed in the big places. I knew it was a huge risk.

I know it’s a weird and unusual book, but talking to you now, I’m proud of it. It has to be unusual, otherwise people will just read it and forget it. What we remember are the unusual things.

Q: Your publisher is really giving this book an impressive launch.

Yes, they are. That’s why it bugs me a little about the thriller bit. The book seems to me to be about the things a guy does for love, just as it bothers me that my other books were tagged as Vietnam books.

Q: Why does that bother you?

The Things They Carried, that takes place 25 years after the War, if it was just a Vietnam book you’d have to take out half of it. It’s like calling Toni Morrison a black writer or Conrad an ocean writer or Shakespeare a royalty writer. Your subject matter is given to you. I don’t write about bombs and bullets, I write about the human heart. Conrad’s novels aren’t about oceans and ships and things, they’re about human beings. There’s that tendency to tag things in this culture, and the artist has to resist the tag.

Q: Thanks and good luck. You’ll be in Washington in a couple weeks…

I’ll be everywhere in a couple of weeks.

Q: That’s about it.

Thanks for a good interview. I’m not really good at these types of things, I’m really a shy kind of guy.

Nicholson Baker thinks he’s in trouble.

Before I can fire off my first question to him (“All of your novels are concerned with the minutiae of life that we usually don’t notice during the course of everyday living. Can you comment on this unique point of view of the world?”), he’s on the defensive.

“Reviewers are taking The Fermata as a personal affront,” Baker proclaims anxiously in his halting yet amiable tone of voice. “‘We liked this Nicholson Baker, we trusted him, how could he do this to us?’ It’s a controversial book, I knew it would make some people hate me, and it’s no fun to be hated.

“What I wanted to show was that I can write about a person who is not exactly like me, who is not always nice, and I can lend him my voice if I want to. John Banville can do it. Just because I wrote three books with nice narrators, why should I be denied that opportunity?”

There’s a long pause, the first of many I will hear throughout the interview. You can almost hear Baker switching mental gears over the phone, backtracking, wondering bewilderedly where his mental perambulations have led him. I’m sitting at my desk, scrolling like mad up and down my neatly typed screen of questions for something relevant to interject.

Baker beats me to the punch, but it’s not a question that he asks me. “You hated the book.”

I admit to him that I enjoyed it.

“Oh! What a relief!” he exclaims, and I picture him visibly relaxing in his chair, muscles untensing, taking off his glasses to rub overtired eyes.

The Fermata: A Whirlwind of Controversy

Nicholson Baker has reason to be wary. His fifth book, The Fermata, has just been published to a whirlwind of controversy. Reviews, on the whole, have not been positive (a first for Baker), and readers of all gender, race, and creed have declared The Fermata a dangerous novel, an untouchable. Baker claims that in Great Britain, the only book to receive more column inches this year in the media has been Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography.

So what’s all the fuss about?

The Fermata pretends to be the autobiography of an office temp who has the ability to stop time with the snap of his fingers. (The title refers to a musical symbol, sometimes called a “bird’s eye”, which signals an indefinite pause on the attached note.) Arno Strine (the temp) uses his powers to perverse ends: while the world remains poised between moments like one of his office dictation tapes in pause mode, Strine likes to undress women and masturbate to their nude bodies.

The Fermata is no American Psycho, however. Strine is less a Jack the Ripper than a sexually charged Huck Finn, using his gift to play pranks on unsuspecting women with the innocence and curiosity of a child. He places a vibrating sexual aid on a woman reading on the subway; he writes a dirty story and places it where a sunbather will find and read it; he sneaks into a woman’s house, hides in her hamper, and watches her masturbate. Alongside Strine’s raging libido is an industrial-sized guilt complex that inspires him to analyze why he does what he does, leading to sex-driven confessions the likes of which haven’t been seen since Portnoy stopped complaining.

Unfortunately, Baker protests, critics have mistaken The Fermata for an attack on women or, worse, a “position paper on how men ought to behave.” Random House has contributed to the feeding frenzy by shipping the book to retailers bound in a clear plastic band, giving readers the perverse feeling that they must undress the book to read it.

“Of course it’s wrong to stop time and take off women’s clothes,” says Baker. “But Arno’s drawn to it, and he hasn’t really figured it all out yet…. [The Fermata]’s supposed to be a comic novel, and in order for comedy to work, the normal consequences of things has to be interrupted.

“The book has kind of riveted people and angered them, which I didn’t want to do. I hate to make people angry. I really wanted to delight and instruct just as Aristotle said that a writer ought to do…. I was also trying to keep myself intellectually and comically and sexually entertained.” Baker pauses again, then throws out in mock-hippie drawl, “I wanted to have some fun, man.”

From The Mezzanine to Vox

Nicholson Baker first gained the attention of the literary world with The Mezzanine, a 133-page chronicle of a man’s ride up an escalator, which remains the author’s best work to date. The Mezzanine introduced Baker’s penchant for examining the world down to its most ludicrously small detail, taking nothing for granted. It’s an odyssey through the world of staplers, shoelaces, and bathroom towel dispensers that betrays a childish awe at the complex daily routines of life. A typical Bakerean ode to the little world runs as follows in one of the novel’s abundant footnotes:

Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber.

Baker spun the disappointing Room Temperature out of the same thread, an entire novel that takes place in the twenty minutes a man feeds his baby daughter a bottle.

Curiously enough, Baker describes his highly praised tendency for exaggerated narrative digression as a problem of technique. “I want to describe something in a paragraph, and it turns out that I have more to say about that thing than a paragraph can comfortably accommodate,” he explains. “Normally I have to stop myself, tell myself that I’ve said all I want to about the flotational characteristics of a straw, even though there’s more I could say…. In The Mezzanine, I used the footnote as a way to encapsulate more stuff that the reader could take in at will or skip over.”

1991’s U and I charted a new course for Baker’s work: scandalously frank self-examination. The book details Baker’s real-life obsession with literary giant John Updike, his fears about his own writing capabilities, and the sometimes minuscule ways in which Updike’s writing has altered the course of his life. He plunks his own petty jealousies down on paper without qualms — a childish simper about Updike inviting Tim O’Brien (Going After Cacciato) and not him to go golfing comes to mind. In another quintessential U and I moment, Baker casually admits that he has never been able to masturbate to orgasm while reading Updike’s more prurient passages.

If U and I was greeted with a shower of accolades for the whimsical young author, his next novel — the slim, sultrily packaged Vox — was received by a thunderstorm of controversy. Consisting entirely of a telephone conversation on an adult party line, Vox starts from the traditional phone sex pick-up line (“What are you wearing?”) and jets through erotic fantasies, intimate reminiscences, and mutual masturbation before it’s through.

“Vox was a nice book, an egalitarian book where the woman had as much to say as the man,” Baker says. “But there were certain things left over, and I felt there was much more to be said. After I finished Vox, I felt brave enough to write about things I wouldn’t have written about before.

“There’s a fated progression of books inside writers, and there isn’t an awful lot that negative and positive reviews can do to change that. When I finished Vox, the only book I could write was The Fermata.”

A Microscopic Eye for Details

Despite its science fiction premise, The Fermata isn’t much of a thematic stretch for Baker. With its microscopic eye for details — one particularly Mezzanine-esque passage in the novel ponders about the minute differences between seeing a woman’s breasts nude and seeing them through a brassiere with x-ray vision — The Fermata is as much a writer’s fantasy as a pornographer’s fantasy. Baker describes the book’s premise as an extension of the footnotes in The Mezzanine; Strine’s powers allow Baker to create literary time-outs without disrupting the natural flow of events.

Despite the book’s boundless carnal energy, however, it’s certainly not sexuality that provides The Fermata with its fascination power. Baker’s erotic vignettes are only mildly arousing and certainly not groundbreaking — the most explicit section deals with a ménage a trois between a woman, her gardener, and his girlfriend, complete with vibrating appliances, golden showers, and the ever-handy garden hose.

What makes The Fermata such an absorbing read is Baker’s constantly overflowing inventory of ideas and perspectives. When Arno halts the flow of time while driving on the freeway, for instance, we strain with the narrator as he tries to open the car door against a solid mass of time-frozen wind molecules; we hear the womb-like hush of a world where sound waves have halted in mid-air. When Baker picks an idea, he doesn’t paint it in broad strokes, he meticulously etches it down to the finest detail. (One detail the author seems to forget is that in a world where time stands still, Arno wouldn’t feel heat — the sensation of hot pavement wouldn’t be able to travel into his feet.)

Outside of Strine’s chronological powers, it’s also striking how much of The Fermata actually isn’t pure invention.

Arno Strine, Baker claims, “is a very exaggerated, very selectively filtered part of my fourteen-year-old self.” He also shares characteristics with the adult Baker, who did indeed once type dictation tapes as a temp in the Boston area. (Unlike Strine, Baker went on to a number of other white collar jobs, and even worked for a while on Wall Street.)

Baker also says that many of Strine’s sexual escapades are not entirely of his creation, but suggestions from friends and associates. “This is not entirely a product of my own feverish sexual imagination,” Baker tells me, deadpan. “Some of it is a product of other people’s feverish sexual imaginations.”

“It’s a Book That Nice Guys Like”

But there have been those who aren’t willing to consign any of The Fermata to the realm of the imagination — even the book’s premise. It’s a tribute to the visceral power of Baker’s prose that he has received more than one query asking if he can indeed stop time. (He insists that he cannot.) But will some readers’ inability to make that distinction between fantasy and reality cause problems? Will the country be plagued by would-be Arno Strines forcibly stripping women in public places?

“There’s a huge gulf between thinking about something and doing it,” Baker says. “…I don’t think this particular book could inspire anyone to do anything bad because it’s based on an impossibility. Besides, they couldn’t do anything too horrible under the inspiration of my narrator, since he’s so reluctant to do anything horrible.

“The Fermata does what the novel can do: it takes a situation that can’t be true in reality and assumes that it can be true…. I think [my novel] is pretty benign as far as influencing people to do bad things. It seems to click most with people who are in person polite, not prone to acts of violence and crime. It’s a book that nice guys like.”

But even if Baker feels like The Fermata isn’t about to turn couch potatoes into sex-starved ghouls, don’t look for him to be discussing sexual techniques on the radio with Dr. Ruth Westheimer. “The excitement of sex thrives on forbiddenness,” he says. “Without some sense of scandal and resistance to [sexuality], the whole thing can become just a little bit too healthy, too open.”

To those who find The Fermata offensive, Baker’s bottom line is this: “There’s absolutely no reason why anyone should finish this book if it’s making him or her unhappy.” He refers to the reaction of a woman in the book who’s had the cassette tape in her car stereo switched with a lascivious tape of Arno’s creation: “I think they should do exactly what she did: fling the tape out the window.”

Moving On

Those who have been distressed by the libidinous turn Baker’s novels have taken recently can be comforted that he’s decided to move on to other topics. “I’m kind of pleased with these two books, but I really feel that for the time being this is all I have in inventory to say about sex…. Not all of it is entirely pleasant. But at least it’s been put in book form. I’m happy about that, and I can get along with writing about medieval shipping or horticulture or delicate familial sensibilities and whatever.”

The Fermata is not Nicholson Baker’s best book. But in the literary market of freeze-dried sexuality and half-baked interaction between the sexes, it’s an eye-opening dose of fresh ideas and images about how we live our erotic lives.

Q: What kind of reaction have people had to The Fermata so far?

Reviewers are taking [The Fermata] as a personal affront — we liked this Nicholson Baker, we trusted him, how could he do this to us? It’s a controversial book, I knew it would make some people hate me, and it’s no fun to be hated — I’m not enjoying that part of it. But some people seem to understand what I was about, which was I wanted to do something mildly exaggerated and funny and exuberant and strange. I wanted to pull out all the stops and really write a frolicsome little exercise in self-destruction.

Q: Self-destruction?

That’s what it’s turning out to be. I wrote these two books with nice narrators [The Mezzanine and Room Temperature]. And this narrator is not. And yet he sounds like the earlier narrators. What I wanted to show was that if I want to, I can write about a person who is not exactly like me, who is not nice always, and I can lend him my voice if I want to. Why shouldn’t I have the right to do that? John Banville can do it. Just because I wrote three books with nice narrators, why should I be denied that opportunity?

You hated the book.

Q: No, I liked it.

Oh! What a relief! I just never know. It happens with every book. The most unexpected people like this book, women in their late 50s, lesbians and bisexuals — and then there are people who I would’ve thought would’ve gone for it who detest it. There was this guy in England who never let on that he really liked the early books, and he was disturbed by it. The only thing that really makes me unhappy about this whole process is that I’m having to become in my dealings with the world a warier and more reserved person. In my books, I’ve always volunteered every embarrassing tidbit that seemed relevant. Now it seems they’re all being used against me. If I mention that I have psoriasis of the penis, there’s a thing in Esquire that starts “Nicholson Baker has psoriasis of the penis.” As a point of fact, I don’t have it. If the fact checker had called me first, they wouldn’t have printed it.

The only book that’s gotten more column inches in England this year than The Fermata is Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography. It’s kind of riveted people and angered them, which I didn’t want to do. I hate to make people angry, I really wanted to delight and instruct just as Aristotle said that a writer ought to do.

Q: Are you going out on a book tour for this book?

I’ve been trying not to do a book tour. We have this three-month old son and I just really don’t want to go away and do ten-day tours and readings. Instead of having the publisher’s person set these things up, it’s me at the telephone with these little notes on the calendar.

Q: All of your novels are concerned with the minutiae of life, with things that we usually don’t notice during the course of everyday living. Why is that?

The problem I seem to have is I want to describe something in a paragraph, and it turns out that I have more to say about that thing than a paragraph can accommodate. In The Mezzanine, I used the footnote as a way to encapsulate more stuff that the reader could take in at will. Footnotes are voluntary, you can drop down to them or not. I’ve been wrestling with this problem of too much to say for years. I think the sci-fi premise of The Fermata is another way of coming to grips with that problem. The hero can stop time and think about whatever it is he wants to think about for as long as he wants. In the same way that if I’m riding up an escalator in The Mezzanine, I can think about the handrail at length or something.

The Fermata is lurid and very sexual because Arno is that kind of a guy, it’s very much a writer’s fantasy where you can stop time and if you see something interesting about the world, you can stop time and write about it. Don’t you want to be able to write it down? It would be ideal for interviews. If I said something interesting, and if we didn’t have this tape recorder, you could just snap your finger and write it all out. There’s this awful moment where you know what you want to ask, but you can’t quite think of the next thing to ask is. If you could just stop time and ask the question…

Q: I think it’s interesting that you describe your writing style as a problem.

I think it’s an asset and a problem at the same time. The temptation is just to go on and on. Normally I’ve had to stop myself, decide I’ve said all I want about the flotational characteristics of a straw. Stop! I’m interested in unpromising things, like straws — or like sex…

Q: How have women been reacting to this novel?

This woman from England who came to interview me and had some reservations still treated me fairly and doesn’t treat me like a wacko. In the past my ideal reader has been a woman. Women in general are better readers than men. My wife is a better reader than I am, she reads 19th century novels, she really gets submerged in the novel. This one, though, seems to make many women angry. I guess a man would be an ideal reader for this book. Men seem to be much less troubled than women. They think it’s funny, and it arouses them. If you want to call it pornography, sure, but there’s more than that.

Q: Do you have an opinion of how Arno makes use of his powers? Do you approve or disapprove of him, or is the question irrelevant?

I don’t know that Arno subscribes to his own philosophies. He avoids coming up with a code of ethics because it’s totally indefensible. Of course it’s wrong to stop time and take off women’s clothes. But he’s drawn to it, he hasn’t really figured it all out. In writing his autobiography, he sees where his errors of self-justification lie. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between me and Arno. I have to take responsibility for the book, and I do, I’m proud of the book. The character came out of my own mind. He is a very exaggerated, very selectively filtered of a part of my 14-year-old self. He’s kind of a pathetic guy in some ways, but not always pathetic. I think I see more to like in him — of course I have to like him, and having spent some time with him, he has limits. What I did was ask people, what would you do? And of course I changed what they said a little bit, but I wanted to include their reactions in the book. Some of things were really things that people said to me. This is not entirely a product of my own feverish sexual imaginations. Some of it is a part of other people’s feverish sexual imaginations.

Q: If you had Arno’s powers, would you do some of the things that he did?

There’s a huge gulf between thinking about something and doing it. The only thing that’s troublesome about the reaction to the book is it seems as people are treating it as a position paper on how men ought to behave, when really it’s a physically impossible fantasy of one man who has himself some doubts about the moral advisability of what he’s doing. I live here monogamously with my wife, I am willing to entertain those thoughts because they seem to allow for the treatment of certain themes about men look at women. It’s doing what the novel can do, taking a situation that can’t be true in reality and assuming it can be true. What if people really could undress people with their eyes? I think it’s a somewhat thought-provoking work.

Some women who’ve responded to the book say, I wouldn’t take off men’s clothes. At least, it wouldn’t be the top on my list. I might do it later on down the line. They’re saying that Arno is this terrible racist, but themselves they say to me, of course I’d do it here and there. The book seems to be angering people because of its failure of emphasis. The women readers who are offended think they would never do it. They say they’d drop into other people’s apartments and snoop around. This is a very anarchic and yet oddly non-violent power, because it allows you to do these wicked things without distressing anyone. If Arno knew that he could go around being an exhibitionist and by some fluke would never be punished for it, he wouldn’t do it because the women who saw him would be unhappy. He doesn’t want to make people unhappy. It’s almost as if it doesn’t happen, because it’s in so small a chink of time.

That’s why he doesn’t get punished in the end. My wife liked the book, but she was disappointed that he didn’t get his comeuppance. He loses his powers, but he isn’t left in some prison cell shivering. Even though we panted along with the narrator all the way through, we’re going to get it in the end. But this guy doesn’t, because this particular power makes it possible for him to escape detection.

The whole thing is a sort of fairy tale, it’s sort of impossible. When you’re in the book, you accept what’s going on. I have to talk about the moral dimension because I’ve been being attacked for having written an offensive book. But for a reader who isn’t troubled by it — it’s supposed to be a comic novel, and I think when I’ve taken a glance at it, I have written one. In order for comedy to work, the normal consequences of things have to be interrupted. If it’s physical comedy, if people fall off cliffs, they don’t die. It’s a world where you don’t pay the price. I was trying to keep myself intellectually and comically and sexually entertained. I wanted to have some fun, man. I wanted the book to be fun. I give up.

Q: Do you think that Vox or The Fermata could ever incite someone to commit sexual harassment or assault?

They couldn’t do something too horrible under the inspiration of my narrator, since he’s so reluctant to do anything horrible. The books and movies that I worry about are the ones that really do have graphic rape scenes and stuff. I think mine is pretty benign as far as influencing people to do bad things. It seems to click most with people who are in person polite, not prone to acts of violence and crime — it’s a book that nice guys like. And it doesn’t seem to make them into bad guys.

I saw [the movie based on the Michael Crichton novel] Rising Sun for some silly reason. Now there is a movie that’s disturbing. There’s a woman who’s being choked and fucked at the same time, and you see it repeatedly. If I were the producer of that movie, I would have responsibility. I think it would be silly to pretend that movies and videos don’t have some influence over our lives. I don’t think this particular book could inspire anyone to do anything bad because it’s based on an impossibility. That’s what makes it okay, I think, that it is impossible. It’s a kind of strange fairy tale. In the same way Grimm’s fairy tales involve awful things, but we know when we’re in that universe that things are different.

Clearly I broke some taboo that was unthinkable. I committed an unthinkable crime in not honoring that convention, because the fact that Arno is not in a prison cell really irritates some people. Other people say what is so bad about it? This guy who was an Oxford don said, I think he’s a nice guy, and I don’t see what the trouble is here. He doesn’t do anything bad. I’ve never written a book that’s gotten so much intense disagreement. I think people are actually arguing over this book. That makes me sad, because I didn’t want to create strife. I don’t want to trigger divorce — the man says what’s the big deal, and the woman says this is horrible.

This is one of the irreconcilable differences between men and women, and it seems interesting to me that some of these images can inhabit the brain of a person who isn’t pathological. These thoughts are more characteristic of men’s minds than men want to admit, maybe. It’s not a book that represents my own personality because it’s so completely sexual. It was written in a mood that was lit by powerful sexual floodlamps, so it’s not that I’m saying that men are this way. But why don’t we add this particular information to all the other pieces we have so we can come out with the richer understanding of the human lives of human beings?

Q: Would you say that you write about “the interior lives” of people?

The present outside world doesn’t have much meaning, but my narrators are usually filled with thoughts about the outside world that they remember, or some piece of it that’s going through their minds. They’re not solipsistic in terms of always thinking about themselves. The narrator of The Mezzanine is glad to think about the history of the stapler. U and I is the most solipsistic of my books, but even there there’s this other center around which I’m thinking. While we’re writing books, we don’t think about the messy desk and piles of books and whatever, we concentrate on what we’re describing. Their inner lives are usually about the outer world thought about more thoroughly.

Q: I read somewhere that you actually were an office temp like Arno for a while.

I was a temp. I spent several years in Boston working in these big companies. And it was fascinating working in an office situation. I also have done white-collar jobs, I’ve worked on Wall Street and been a technical analyst. I really liked typing people’s tapes, and I typed the tapes for people like John Silver, the president of Boston University. It is as if you are entering their consciousness, more so than if you read their letters. Because you hear them hesitate. To be turning that into coherent words on the screen. I wanted to catch the texture as an office worker.

A woman that I talked to — she was bisexual — said she wanted to be Arno. And the frozen universe is a pretty lonely place. But maybe the book was attempting to show ways in which it could be less lonely than you think. When he finally gets Joyce into the Fold, he’s exhausted and he takes a nap next to her. It’s kind of companionable, to catch up on some sleep.

Q: Have you finished exploring sexuality for the time being? Will there be more books like Vox and The Fermata?

I’m finished, I’m done with it, it’s over, I’m kind of pleased with these two books, but I really feel that for the time being this is all I have in inventory to say about sex. Vox was a nice egalitarian book, where the woman had as much to say as the man, and it was an entirely consenting situation. But there were certain things left over, and I felt there was much more to be said. Well, I’ve said that. Not all of it is entirely pleasant. But at least it’s been put in book form. I’m happy about that, and I can get along with writing about whatever. Medieval shipping or horticulture or delicate familial sensibilities and whatever. I’m working on essays now that are not about sex at all.

That’s not to say that these books are the last word. This subject, it’s so awful when it’s written about badly. So much of the way we talk about sex is in this fossilized vocabulary and these cliches like the women’s magazine cliches and the porn cliches and the frat boy cliches. Nonetheless, it’s — it’s like sunsets or trees. Trees are still interesting, even though every great landscape painter has painted a tree, there’s still a lot of “treeness” left for painters to capture. For the time being, I’ve painted these two trees, and I’m going to go on.

Q: Vox received a lot of media hype and sold more than any of your other books. Did you feel pressure to one-up yourself while writing The Fermata? Would you have chosen the subject you did if Vox hadn’t been so controversial and successful?

The Fermata was the only book I could write. I think The Fermata — it has hurt my career to have written The Fermata. With a whole group of readers that I would like to be on good terms. When I finished Vox, the only book I could write was The Fermata. After I finished Vox, I felt maybe braver, brave enough to write about things I wouldn’t have written about before. There’s a fated progression of books inside writers, and there isn’t an awful lot that negative and positive reviews could do to change that. It would have been nice to have able to write a book about hotel maintenance after Vox, because people like my mother-in-law would prefer — they could defend one sex book by saying, he got that out of that system, but two books seem like it’s more of an interest than it should be.

There is a way in which the reaction to Vox influenced me in writing The Fermata. It made me freer. I got many good reviews, but a number of vicious reviews. I was a fairly thin-skinned person, and I take reviews seriously, and I had some strange fantasy that I could make everyone happy, and everyone would like me. When you write books like Vox, you suddenly realize you can’t make everyone happy. You have to make yourself happy. It sounds stupid, but it’s true. The fact that I was slammed around a bit in Vox and treated badly by some critics toughened me up and made me able to just sit down and write exactly the book I wanted to write.

Q: Do you think society has an unhealthy attitude towards sexuality? Would you like to see less sexual repression in society?

I wish men didn’t make women unhappy so often, and weren’t always getting ridiculous divorces and things. I wish that we were politer and less interested in sport killing and things like that. I wish men were better readers. That goes for me too, I wish I were a better reader.

I don’t think there’s too much repression in these things. The excitement of sex thrives on forbiddenness. Without some sense of scandal and of there being a resistance to nudity, the whole thing can become just a little bit too healthy, too open. I sometimes get the feeling reading those sexual advice columns where anything goes that the correspondents are all part of this delightfully permissive stew — it doesn’t work for me. These things have to be heartfelt, they have to be somewhat difficult to attain.

I don’t know what it’s like over there in Baltimore — raiding [Baltimore's notorious red-light district] The Block seems tiresome. If you raid them and shut them down in place, they’ll just pop up in another. If you’re asking whether I think that women should be harassed and put in jail for being prostitutes, of course not. I don’t think that porn movies should be harassed either. I think they should be ridiculed if they’re bad, and if they’re stupid, you should use the stop button and stop watching them. Distributors are having to cut them down and release bowdlerized versions of them. Censorship doesn’t have a lot to do in my life. The anti-porn industry isn’t interested in words; what really troubles them is that film footage that is graphically sexual. I don’t understand it, actually. It doesn’t cramp my own style too much.

There’s absolutely no reason why anyone should finish this book if it’s making him or her unhappy. I think that the response that the character had, the woman who flung the tape out the window, I think that’s exactly what they should do. What I do when I’m bored by a book, I just stop reading. There are so many thousands of books out there, there just doesn’t seem to be any point to reading books that aren’t worth living.

When 18-year-old Sharron Corley arrived back in the troubled New York ghetto of Brownsville after four months in Riker’s Island prison, his trials had hardly begun. He needed to reclaim his belongings from the house of his ex-girlfriend Chantal, who recently bore (and lost) his first child. He needed to find out his standing at high school, which he abandoned without notice after a sentence for armed theft. But most importantly, he had to reestablish his “props,” or proper respect, in the neighborhood by showing up the punk who’d been beating his sister, Shawanda.

The scene was typical Brownsville: another squabble for honor, another scuffle over who could act the toughest and still maintain his foothold at the top of the mountain. Shawanda’s boyfriend made veiled threats to fetch his “oowop,” or Uzi, to deal with Sharron. But Sharron, amateur singer/actor and member of the LoLifes gang, knew the game better, and he called the punk’s bluff. “Dude be doin’ mad foul deeds,” he declared. “I ain’t jumpin’ in no jetstream, ’cause he owns a oowop. See him get busy with it.”

Journalist and inner-city schoolteacher Greg Donaldson, who followed Sharron around for a year to research his new book The Ville, discovered that such scenes of Sylvester Stallonesque bravado are the norm, not the exception, in the predominantly black ghetto of Brownsville, New York. He spent over a year in a neighborhood where stepping on someone’s foot at a street corner warrants death, where there was a shooting at school the same day Mayor David Dinkins came to speak about violence, where “boosting” your first designer sweater from Macy’s is like hitting your first home run in Little League.

A Year in Brownsville

The Ville, a chronology of a year in Brownsville seen through the eyes of its inhabitants, is an attempt by Donaldson to deflate some of the stereotypes perpetuated about inner city life. In an era where dialogues on crime and illiteracy often highlight a racially insensitive “us vs. them” approach, Donaldson has descended into the midst of the ‘hood only to find that the kids on the streets of Brownsville are not all murderers and drug abusers. Teenagers like Sharron Corley are players in a large and complex drama about respect and survival, a drama with a solid foundation in the American Dream.

“It’s not that the kids don’t listen to us,” Donaldson says, “it’s that they do. Even these little drug dealers, they’re ambitious entrepreneurs, they’re trying to make something of themselves. And they’re doing it in a way that’s not legal, but so what? Everything they see around them isn’t legal, either. They know that a lot of the fortunes in this country are built on bootlegging and other kinds of things. They know that you don’t go to jail if you’ve got influence.”

If any middle-aged white guy could break through the cultural roadblock that separates the races and understand the toughness of the inner city, it’s Donaldson. With a tall, basketball-ready frame and a face that looks like it’s been chiselled rather than developed, Donaldson speaks with the streetwise inflection of a New York City cop. You would hardly suspect by looking at him that he’s a graduate of Brown University and a respected journalist who’s been published in the likes of the New York Times, New York Newsday, and the Village Voice.

Yet Donaldson talks tough about stereotypes, especially when it comes to the residents of the ghetto. “When writing a book like this, you’ve got a responsibility to the African-American community not to stigmatize them further,” he says. “They’ve suffered from all kinds of stereotyping and stigmatizing. On the other hand, it’s important to let people know just how bad things have gotten in these areas.”

Debunking the Myths of the Inner City

One of the characteristics that makes The Ville so dynamic a portrayal of low-income black life is its insistence on telling the story the way it is. While Donaldson makes no apologies for youths like The Ville’s Born Son who turn to drug kingpinning, he also gives a sympathetic ear to the police who often rely on physical intimidation tactics in an effort to keep safe. He spent over a year profiling gang member Sharron Corley and housing cop Gary Lemite, tagging along with the former through school and gang life, and running with the latter on assignment, often shadowing him into the middle of gunfire. It’s a strategy that provides no-bullshit eyewitness journalism, without the syrupy glaze the major media put on inner city events.

In the process, Donaldson debunks many of the myths about urban blight that prevent society from finding effective solutions, such as:

• Inner-city black kids are all hooked on drugs. Not so, claims Donaldson. “Only one in five drug addicts is black, and most of them are not young,” he states, citing an oft-quoted statistic from William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged. “These kids, they’re ambitious, they’re alive, they’re healthy, they’re physically vibrant, their minds are active…. A lot of these families are pulled down by one person who’s lost it or become addicted to drugs. So instead of people fighting their way up and out of this neighborhood and bringing others with them, the opposite occurs. Good people get pulled down by people who are more in extremis.”

• Low-income blacks resent and dislike white people. Donaldson found very little evidence of a distrust or hatred towards whites among the residents of Brownsville, largely due to the fact that whites just aren’t around. “Racism’s beside the point in an all-black neighborhood. It’s my opinion that the black community is not nearly as racist as the white community or even black middle-class communities. They can’t indulge that kind of thing. If they meet somebody, and that person is a good person, they have to take advantage of it.”

• The cops are lazy, ineffectual, and corrupt. The housing officer co-protagonist of The Ville, Gary Lemite, spends more time in motion during the book than he does remain stationary. PSA 2, the community housing police station in Brownsville, is filled with energetic go-getters who are just as concerned with their “props” as the gang kids.”I never saw a cop take a penny, and I never heard of it,” Donaldson says of the Brownsville authorities. “So they aren’t corrupt. Racism is rampant, I have to say that. But they are hard-working and they have their good aspects. The bad aspect is the police officers have no vision whatsoever. It’s kind of like America in general. They refuse to understand.”

• The police don’t have the firepower or the manpower to deal with the kids. As several police officers explain in The Ville, there are a proliferation of guns on the streets, but few of the gang members know how to use them properly. It’s not uncommon for youths to shoot themselves in the foot by accident, and rarely do they have the training to actually hit a moving target.As for manpower, Donaldson claims, “they have so many police officers in that two or three square mile area of Brownsville East New York, you almost can’t turn around without seeing some kind of police car. And there’s robberies and killings and murders going on every corner, as soon as they turn around.”

“You Can’t Always Be Everything You Want to Be”

So what do you do in places like Brownsville? What do you do with an entire generation of African-Americans that, far from denying the American Dream, live out its darkest impulses every day? What do you do with kids that have invested in the message of Reagan and Rambo, using semi-automatic weapons as collateral? How do you get a passel of kids and killers to start looking beyond their struggle for props?

First, says Donaldson, you have to reexamine the ideological batteries that power them.

“I think the United States has to start thinking about some of the things that we congratulate ourselves on so much — free enterprise, unbridled individualism, all these things,” Donaldson says. “They’re not working in terms of these areas like Brownsville, and these areas are affecting our entire society…. You’ve got to start talking about community. You can’t always be everything you want to be. You can’t know no bounds. Everybody can’t shoot for the top. The top is not for everyone.”

Donaldson bristles at the conservative backlash blowing through the country which claims that left-wing answers to poverty and crime have not worked. Donaldson claims that such “failures” as the education-instead-of-imprisonment philosophy have never really been tried in America.

The first step to turning the ghetto around is meaningful employment, says Donaldson, employment that’s not of the janitorial or gardening variety. “A white can get a job as a fireman or a policeman with a high school diploma and make $50,000 easy. Happens all the time. Why don’t the African-Americans in these areas have these jobs? They should have their fair percentage of them, but they don’t. Instead you’ll find the mythologizing of these kids’ inability to work…. It’s not lazy to stand in the doorway for eight, nine, ten hours a day selling drugs. Not to romanticize it, but it’s an incredibly difficult and dangerous and hard thing to do.”

Of course, without any economic opportunity, the motivation for performance in education drops dramatically. Inner city black youths end up running the treadmill of gangs, props, and reps to maintain a sense of dignity. “Would you go to school bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with your books when you’re walking the gauntlet between the LoLifes and the Young Guns and the other groups who are looking out for a victim?” the author asks. “No, you dress just like the rest of them. And after a while, you start acting like them, too, to protect yourself.” From there, it’s the Brownsville Shuffle: fear, unemployment, young death or imprisonment.

This vicious cycle has become so much a part of inner-city life that prison has lost its punitive value, according to Donaldson. Being packed off to Riker’s Island isn’t punishment, it’s just another part of life — a segment of the well-trod path that everyone must walk down. “In middle-class communities, you have an uncle or a cousin or a brother in the business, and you get a job — or you know somebody that went to a certain college, so you go there,” Donaldson explains. “In this community, you have an uncle or a cousin or a brother or a member of your crew or gang who’s in jail. So you have connections when you’re in jail. The way is eased for you only in that direction. So when you slide in that direction, it’s almost like it’s fated.”

Gun Control

Another key issue in the battle to recover the inner cities, says Donaldson, is gun control. Strict gun control — “the stricter the better,” he claims.

“There’s no reason for anyone to need a handgun, except for police officers…. Handguns are almost never used in a successful personal defense. Statistics from gun control groups show that it’s very rare for someone to pull a gun and shoot anybody but himself or a loved one. There are many more accidents than there are successful defenses. A very large percentage of the guns these kids have are stolen from people who have them legally…. It’s a vicious circle, because one of the reasons people have guns in the first place is because they’re afraid of these kids.”

And yet, despite all this, Donaldson has felt the urge for protection, too. “It’s frightfully dangerous to be around [Brownsville] without one,” he says. “That’s why a lot of people have them. I came this close to getting one myself.” Donaldson holds two fingers a very short distance apart.

But Donaldson did survive, even in this toughest of neighborhoods, packing little more than adrenaline. He cites media misinformation for hyping up violence as a necessary measure in everyday life, and has some tough retorts for those who would label him a liberal whiner without any scientific data to back him up.

“What the media does is constantly show that violence is correct. They constantly portray very rare situations in real life where violent reaction would be appropriate, and they show them over and over again. And that justifies the keeping of weapons….

“As for proof? Anytime you want anyone to do something in this society, you advertise. You want somebody to buy something, you advertise. You want somebody to vote for you, you advertise. So clearly there’s a link between advertising and behavior, or portrayal and behavior. It’s self-evident. You show the handsomest, most attractive guy you can find with a huge gun, shooting people with a smile on his face in a cold-blooded manner. And then you’re surprised when you have adolescents, the most impressionable people in this society, carrying around huge guns and shooting people with smiles on their faces?”

Crime and Punishment in the Media

A scant 48 hours after this interview, crime and punishment had become the media topic of the hour. A national conference of mayors and police chiefs met with President Clinton to demand more stringent gun control and heightened police vigilance. A disgruntled black man opened fire on a subway train full of passengers. The Surgeon General announced that she was in favor of studying the legalization of drugs.

Sharron Corley has also recently gotten his big break: a starring role in a Spike Lee production called New Jersey Drive. The audition was a result of the youth’s picture on the front of the Village Voice, which published excerpts from The Ville.

“Sharron has this idea that you become an instant star. I was trying to tell him that it’s really about hard work and deferred gratification and all these things,” Donaldson chuckles. “But these recent occurrences in his life where he has an agent in New York and an agent in Hollywood, they’ve kind of disproved my theory. So it’s a little confusing to us both, and I don’t know how it’s actually going to work out.”

Yet Donaldson is wary of calling too much attention to Sharron’s sudden stardom when most of the young man’s friends are still facing death everyday in the ghetto. Donaldson remains firm in his assessment of the problems and unflinching in his proposed solutions. “The time for basing things on color codes and things is finished. We’re under too much duress for this in our society. We have to find the truth, and we have to act upon it.”