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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
So you felt liberated by not having to write something commercial?
But I've never worried about that.
No one would ever call "Atonement" a deliberately or obviously commercial book.
It just turned out to have sold lots of copies. As now, has "Saturday."
There's nothing you can do to stop it.
No, nothing I can do. Except maybe to attempt a commercial book. That would probably screw things up.
Both books have a questioning of literature in them, "Atonement" in a way that's fundamental to the novel, but with Perowne you have someone who's simply immune to literature.
He plugs his way through his daughter's reading list. It's much more playful, but you're right it's a continuation. Briony Tallis [in "Atonement"] was obsessive about literature. As Perowne's character was emerging, it seemed like it would be nice to have someone who really has to force his way through "Anna Karenina."
One of the privileges of writing novels is to give characters views that you have fleetingly but that are too irresponsible for you ever to defend. You can give them to a character. His views on magical realism, I could never really ... I know there are some great novels in that vein. But still, I do have a streak of skepticism about it. So Henry Perowne could work this up for me on my behalf.
It also seems logical that a man who takes the material view of life would want the laws of physics respected in his novels. He wouldn't want characters just flying out of the room. I do think that the whole "Hundred Years of Solitude" succession of novels became tiresome.
Sometimes we don't have an affinity for certain literary modes. You might admire the peaks of it but not the foothills.
I've always had the sneaking suspicion that once you lift all the constraints and can do anything, as Perowne says, nothing you do really matters. If you don't have the constraints of the material world, if people can turn into a ketchup pot while you're talking to them, then what matters? Also, I think you lose psychological plausibility. But, obviously, "The Tin Drum" is a great novel, and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a fairly great one. I have higher standards for books like that.
What was it like to imagine yourself into the psyche of someone for whom novels, what you yourself write, are irrelevant? Was that a difficult leap?
No, not at all, it was sort of fun. Because whatever he says about literature, he's doomed to remain a character in a novel by me. There's no escape.
So his thoughts on literature don't come from some dark moment of the soul on your part, where you were lying in bed at night thinking, "What am I doing with my life?"
Actually, good point. During that year I was just describing after 9/11, I did have a period where I didn't want to read anything invented. I had a Gradgrindian sense that I didn't want these airy-fairy, wispy inventions. It was a passing mood. The times were too interesting for the novel, that was the sense. With my stash of remaining years shortening, I want to be seriously informed about the world. If I'm going to read about invented characters they've got to be really ... In some ways it might be better to forget the contemporary novel altogether. If you haven't already read "The Charterhouse of Parma" or "The Secret Agent" or "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Middlemarch," why not be reading those?
In other words, contemporary novelists do have a great burden laid upon them, which is what Henry James said the novelist's first duty is: to be interesting. Otherwise, why turn away from the shelf of nonfiction in our massive local bookstore, which is groaning with interesting books? I just read a book about the last 150 years of the Roman Republic about which I knew absolutely nothing. I read in awe and gratitude that someone had laid out all this information for me.
I like to feel that novelists are seriously dedicated to their art, which means doing a lot of reading and thinking about the novel. Sometimes it seems like writing novels has become a contemporary form of expression, expression of self. Much like being a Renaissance gentleman writing a sonnet. It's seen as a thing that anyone with a reasonable amount of education can do, and it's your duty as a citizen to write a half-dozen novels.
Do you think a lot of people see it that way?
Yes, I think self-hood, expression of the self, me, is what it's about. Now, when you're reading a master, when you're reading James, you do feel you're in the hands of someone who's given his life to this, and a colossal intelligence, and a highly informed intelligence. That's true of Conrad, too.
I read a lot of the beginnings of contemporary novels. I get sent hundreds of them. I always read the first 10 or 20 pages. Well, sometimes not 10, sometimes one and a half. It's rare that I feel that sense of being in good hands. It's almost impossible to find.
Did the Iraq war move in as a background while you were writing "Saturday"?
Yes, it took over. When I was planning, it was just a given. I abandoned myself to the idea that history would be supplying whatever was going on in the novel.
It was only when I'd written maybe 5,000 or 10,000 words, early in 2003, that the big march happened, and I suddenly saw that I could get everything into a day. Otherwise I was going to be locked into accounts of endless comings and goings at the U.N. and the perfidy of de Villepin and the unconvincing Colin Powell. In retrospect, now it all looks incredibly pointless and bureaucratic because you know where it's all going. Endless newspaper headlines about each tiny twist along the way. I was already despairing of that.
Perowne and his daughter Daisy have a heated argument about the war. He's friends with an Iraqi doctor who was tortured by the Saddam Hussein regime and he thinks the invasion might do some good. She agrees with the marchers. Did you write that conversation in the heat of the moment, or later?
No, by the time I wrote that, Iraq had been long invaded. I had to work very hard not to allow myself an inch of awareness from after the event.
